The Course of Empire, The Savage State

Dawn is breaking through a clearing storm, and down in the shadows a hunter wrapped in animal skins is chasing a deer across the rocks. Smoke rises from a cluster of conical huts near the water, where tiny figures dance in a ring around a fire. This is wilderness before cities, and Thomas Cole painted it in 1834 as the opening chapter of a five-part story called The Course of Empire, commissioned by the New York merchant Luman Reed.

The trick of the series is that every one of the five paintings shows the exact same valley from the exact same spot. Keep an eye on the rocky peak with the boulder perched on top, just left of center: it reappears in each canvas as the landscape fills with shepherds, then marble temples and crowds, then fire and invading armies, then empty ruins under a rising moon. Cole, the English-born painter who got the Hudson River School going, was worried about where his adopted country was heading under Andrew Jackson, and he borrowed his moral from Byron's line about first freedom, then glory, then wealth, vice, and barbarism. Whether you buy the argument or not, the painting works as weather: wet air, torn clouds, and a sun that has not yet decided how the day will go.