The Departure

A lord in gleaming armor rides out on a white horse, banner-bearers and attendants trailing behind him, bound for war on a bright morning. Thomas Cole painted this scene in 1837 for William Paterson Van Rensselaer, who wanted a pair of pictures for his Albany home. The castle on the hill, the ruined abbey arches by the river, the distant peak catching the light: none of it exists. Cole assembled an imaginary Europe out of the Italian and English scenery he had sketched on his travels, then populated it with a medieval story of his own invention.

The companion piece, called The Return, hangs beside it in Washington and tells the rest. Evening has fallen on the same valley, the sun is gone behind the hills, and the knight comes home on a bier carried by monks, laid to rest at the roadside cross that stands at the left edge of this painting. Cole had just finished his five-part series The Course of Empire, and he was still turning over the same idea: how quickly glory fades. The landscape here is doing the arguing, with the morning sun on one canvas and the dusk on the other. Cole is best known as the founder of the Hudson River School, the first real movement in American landscape painting, and even when he set his scenes in a made-up past, the land itself is what carries the meaning.