The Voyage of Life, Childhood

A golden boat glides out of a dark cave into morning light, carrying a baby who reaches toward the flowers ahead while a winged guardian steers from the stern. This is the first of four paintings Thomas Cole made called The Voyage of Life, each one following the same traveler down the same river at a different age. The figurehead on the prow is worth spotting: a small angel holding an hourglass, a reminder that the clock is already running even in this happiest scene. Everything here is easy going. The water is smooth, the banks are thick with blossoms, and the stream curves out of sight without a single rock in the way.

Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, the group of American painters who treated wild landscape as a subject worthy of grand ambition. He finished the original series in 1840 for a wealthy banker, but when the patron died, his family shut the paintings away from public view. Frustrated, Cole simply painted the whole set again while living in Rome in 1842, which is why two versions exist. The series became wildly popular in engraved form, hanging in parlors across nineteenth century America as a sort of visual sermon about the stages of a life. Seen on its own, Childhood is the sunniest chapter of a story that gets considerably rougher before it ends.