The Course of Empire, Destruction

A city is being torn apart. Soldiers pour across a bridge that is already crumbling, ships burn in the harbor, smoke swallows the marble colonnades, and a woman in white leaps from the broken span into the water below. Towering over it all is a headless statue of a warrior, shield raised against a blow that will never come. Thomas Cole painted this in 1836 as the fourth of five canvases in his series The Course of Empire, and the whole set shows the same patch of land across centuries. If you spot the odd boulder-topped peak in the far distance, that is the landmark Cole repeated in every painting so viewers would know they were looking at one place, not five.

Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, a group of American landscape painters, and he was not shy about his message here. The five pictures trace a wilderness becoming a shepherd's valley, then a glittering marble capital, then this, and finally empty ruins overgrown with vines. He was reading Byron and worrying about his own country, which in the 1830s was expanding fast and full of confidence. The series was bought by the New York merchant Luman Reed, who died before it was finished. Whether you take it as a warning or just as a very loud disaster scene, the scale of the thing is hard to ignore, and the warrior statue, modeled on a famous ancient sculpture, makes the point with no subtlety whatsoever: the defenders of this city are already beyond saving.