The Course of Empire, The Consummation

Marble has swallowed the shoreline. Thomas Cole painted this scene in 1836 as the third of five canvases called The Course of Empire, and it shows a civilization at its absolute peak: golden statues, crowded terraces, a scarlet-robed conqueror crossing a bridge in a triumphal procession while crowds throw flowers. The sun sits high at noon. Every surface that could hold a column, a trophy, or a vase seems to have one. Cole packed the picture so full that the eye has trouble settling, which may well have been the point.

The trick to the whole series is a single detail hiding in the distance, just behind the tall column with the figure on top. That jagged crag with a boulder balanced on its peak appears in all five paintings, the one thing that never changes while the bay below goes from wilderness to pasture to this city, then to burning ruin and finally to overgrown silence. Cole was born in England, settled in America, and watched his adopted country expand with an enthusiasm that worried him. He belonged to the Hudson River School, a group of American landscape painters, and he used their love of grand scenery to deliver a warning: empires that build like this tend not to last. The next canvas in the sequence shows this same harbor on fire.