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I NTRODUCT I ON T H E G R E AT O B J E C T Our scenery is the great object which attracts foreign tourists to our shores. No blind adherence to authority here checks the hand or chills the heart of the artist. H enry T . T uckerman , 1867

I n 1819, a young Englishman named Thomas Cole emigrated to the United States only five years after the Treaty of Ghent concluded the War of 1812 between Americans and his former countrymen. Sixteen years later, he had estab- lished himself as the premier painter of the American wilderness, and his work would affect the American way of seeing for half a century. Cole was not unaware of the disruptive effects of the Industrial Revolution in England, the devas- tating, politically inspired violence released by the toppling of the ancien régime in France, and the ensuing rampages of Napoleon I’s armies. If not actually conservative, he was certainly cau- tious in the spirit of the conservationist observing the decline of an ecosystem. The nineteenth-cen- tury painter, who today is generally recognized as holding the iconic status of having founded what

came to be called the Hudson River School, acknowl- edged urban life and industry as encroaching inevita- bilities. Cole’s beloved natural kingdom continues to recede from view, and, as he appeared to under- stand so acutely, it has come to occupy less and less space in the images made by successive gen- erations. He was perhaps prematurely nostalgic when he pondered that, as art eventually was taken out of nature, nature would be taken out of art. Cole’s painting had been a kind of prospecting after the sublime, and the America he found in the region of the Hudson River valley amply rewarded that pursuit. His technique, however, would require an aesthetic intelligence that could not permit anything like complete insulation from the European masters.

The Course of Empire: The Savage State T homas C ole . 1833; detail. New York Historical Society.

With windblown mist and smoke from the aboriginal encampment, Cole has enhanced an impression of menace in this landscape. A curling mass of clouds unfurls to reveal primitive humans scurrying in the emerald wilderness. A tree in the lower left mimics the mountain peak emerging from the fog.

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