The Voyage of Life, Youth

A young man stands in a gilded boat, one hand on the tiller, gazing up at a palace made of clouds. That shining castle is the whole point of the picture. It is ambition, imagination, the vague glorious future that every teenager believes is waiting just around the bend. Thomas Cole has quietly built a warning into the scene, though. The river the youth is actually sailing on swings off to the right and disappears behind the trees, nowhere near the floating palace he is steering toward. His guardian angel, who sat beside him in the boat when he was a child, has stepped ashore and now watches him go.

This is the second of four paintings in Cole's series The Voyage of Life, painted in 1842, which follows one soul from infancy to old age down a single river. Cole was the founder of the Hudson River School, the first real movement in American landscape painting, and he liked his scenery to carry a moral. He had already painted the series once, in 1840, for a banker named Samuel Ward, but Ward died and his family refused Cole access to the finished works, so Cole simply painted the whole thing again while living in Rome. Engravings of the series sold by the thousands and hung in American parlors for decades. The little golden figurehead on the prow of the boat is an angel holding an hourglass, a detail easy to miss and hard to forget once you have seen it.