The Course of Empire, The Arcadian or Pastoral State

Thomas Cole painted this in 1834 as the second chapter of a five part story called The Course of Empire, a series that follows one stretch of land from wilderness to ruin. This is the hopeful part. People have cleared fields, built boats, and raised a circle of stone columns on the hill where smoke from a sacrifice drifts upward. Shepherds tend flocks, a man plows, a woman spins thread by her door, and off to the right figures dance to a flute. The jagged peak with the boulder perched on top appears in all five paintings, Cole's way of reminding us that we are standing in the same spot each time while everything human around it changes.

Two small details carry the whole idea. Near the lower left an old man scratches a geometric diagram in the dirt with a stick, and a boy nearby draws a stick figure on a stone. Knowledge and art are just beginning. Cole, an English born painter who became the founder of the Hudson River School, meant this as a warning dressed up as a pretty landscape. The next canvas shows the same valley crammed with marble palaces, and the two after that show it burning and then abandoned. He was thinking partly about ancient Rome and partly about the young United States, which in the 1830s was expanding fast and feeling very sure of itself. His patron Luman Reed, a New York grocer turned art collector, paid for the whole set and died before he could see it hung.