The Voyage of Life, Manhood

The man in the little gilded boat has lost his rudder. Thomas Cole painted this as the third chapter of a four-part series called The Voyage of Life, and the story is easy to follow: a figure travels a river from infancy to old age. In Childhood the water is smooth, in Youth the dreamer steers toward a castle in the clouds. By Manhood the stream has turned into a torrent, the tiller has snapped off, and rocks wait downstream. The traveler has stopped looking ahead at all. He clasps his hands and looks up instead, while his guardian angel hovers in that pale break in the storm clouds, watching but not intervening, and unseen by him.

Cole packed the sky with more than weather. In the smoky shapes on the right he intended three demons, which he named as suicide, intemperance and murder, the temptations he thought a man faces in his hardest years. Yet past the gorge the river opens into a quiet ocean under a strip of gold light, a hint that the voyage ends calmly. Cole was born in England, moved to America as a teenager and became the founder of the Hudson River School, the first distinctly American landscape movement. He painted two complete sets of this series in the early 1840s, and engraved copies hung in countless American parlors for decades. Plenty of Victorian viewers found it moving; others found it a sermon in paint. Both reactions seem fair.