ABSTRACT
In her discussion of this well-known allegorical series by Thomas Cole, Angela Miller challenges the notion that American landscape painting in the nineteenth century functioned as a transparent (and therefore neutral) symbol of national identity. Based on evidence in the artist’s diaries and letters, Miller characterizes Cole as an anti-democratic conservative with strongly held political convictions that are manifest in his paintings. The Course of Empire is thus understood in terms of the shifting political and social realities of the Jacksonian era, and Cole’s personal anxiety about the consequences of America’s transformation from an idealistic republic to an empire posing as a populist democracy.
Exemplifying the interdisciplinary focus of recent scholarship on American art, Miller draws on a myriad of sources, from political cartoons to literature, in her reconstruction of the unstable cultural moment that this series embodies. When analyzed in light of the artist’s perception of contemporary political events, The Course of Empire emerges as a timely parable foretelling the dangers of reckless expansionism and the triumph in America of raw ambition and crude materialism, all of which Cole and his like-minded peers associated with the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
