The Course of Empire, Desolation

A single Corinthian column still stands, wrapped in ivy, and a heron has built its nest on the capital where an emperor's architects once carved acanthus leaves. This is the fifth and final scene in Thomas Cole's series The Course of Empire, painted between 1833 and 1836. The same bay appears in all five pictures, always with that distinctive boulder-topped crag on the horizon, but the city that filled the view two paintings earlier has been burned, sacked, and abandoned. The moon rises over broken arches and a drowned colonnade, and not one human figure remains.

Cole, an English-born painter who became the founder of the Hudson River School, built the series as a warning. Each canvas marks a different hour of the same day and a different stage of civilization: savage wilderness at dawn, pastoral life in morning, imperial glory at noon, violent collapse in the afternoon, and finally this moonlit silence. He was thinking of Rome, and of Byron's lines about empires rising and falling, but he was also thinking about the young United States and its appetite for expansion. His patron, the New York merchant Luman Reed, commissioned the five paintings but died in 1836 before he could see them hung together. The detail worth catching is the vegetation: it climbs the column, blankets the ruins, and quietly reverses everything the builders did.