Thomas Cole: Campania and The Course of Empire

Deborah P. Butler

Thomas Cole came to Italy in 1831, as many of us do, to connect with America’s cultural past and to mature as an artist. During his first visit he stayed in Florence, Rome and the Naples area, accomplishing both of his goals. His trip to the area of Campania was important enough that he returned for a second trip in 1841 to renew his acquaintance with this verdant and fiery land.

Cole retained his youthful memories of European art and wished to secure a basis for the development, paradoxically, of a truly "American style" of painting. He was not alone in this. Other figures of the American art scene in New York were in the process of formulating an American aesthetic. It already seemed clear, with the growth of the Hudson River Valley School, that this aesthetic clearly would be based upon landscape rather than history painting. Fueled by the work of Turner and Constable, the fire of romanticism burned in the younger American artists like Cole. He embraced the pantheist view of his poetic inspiration, Wordsworth and the romantic idealism of Byron. Like his contemporaries, Cole believed that nature herself could be as moral a subject and as spiritual as any classical scene based on Livy or Ovid. America’s future lay not in the European cultural hegemony, but in her lush wilderness. As in England, however, this American wilderness was already in danger of being obliterated by industrialization and development. Cole decried this over and over in his letters and poems while he held onto the sublime and beautiful in nature in his paintings.

When Cole departed for Europe he was a new star on the American sky. His work had only a few years before been "discovered" by the aging history painter John Trumbull and the playwright William Dunlap. The latter published reviews that were enthusiastic and pushed Cole’s financial situation to a height he enjoyed for the rest of his creative life. Now that he had the funds, he was ready to return to Europe (he had been born in England, coming to the United States at the age of 17 with his parents and siblings) to rediscover his artistic language. At this departure he received a caution from that scion of learning and lifelong friend, William Cullen Bryant, in the form of a poem:

Cole landed in England on the first leg of his trip. He became acquainted with notables of the London art scene as Turner (whose art he admired but whom he disliked personally) and Constable (who befriended and sketched with him). Largely he felt ignored by the London art critics, a blow to a young man who was a smash hit in his adopted homeland. He felt his paintings were "skied" or hung too high in the annual exhibitions. After writing several morose letters home to his friends and family, Cole left first for Paris. He found the paintings in the Louvre mostly disappointing and "cold", though he was awed by the landscapes of Lorrain. He pushed on to Italy. Settling in Florence, he found himself at home. He not only had plenty of contact with other European and American artists, he also studied figure drawing while in Florence, a skill he badly needed. His painting "The Dead Abel", completed during this time, clearly shows he was an apt pupil, though the figure lies on the ground looking more a languorous landscape than a classically inspired nude.

While he lived in Florence, Cole took several sketching trips to satisfy his love of nature and executed the large number of commissions he had received from the United States. One of the most productive periods of his life came after his trip to Campania, the land around the Bays of Pozzuoli and Naples. After visiting the towns of Pozzuoli and Baia, he proceeded to Naples. He climbed the slopes of Vesuvius and even risked his life during a cholera epidemic to travel as far south as mosquito-infested Paestum to see the three glorious Greek temples. After spending a horrid night in a rude hut, Cole and his party did some sketches of the temples that became the basis for a painting drenched in sunlight.

What was the effect of Campania upon Cole, specifically? One has to keep in mind what he would have seen while he was there. Campania, especially Naples and the Campi Flegri, was the focus of his stay. It was not the hottest tourist destination on the Italian coast but he lingered there long enough to be taken in by its unique qualities. In the Campi Flegri he encountered a rich site for Roman ruins. Pozzuoli and, especially Baia, were once centers for Roman holidays where the emperors and the illustrious poet Vergil had all built sumptuous villas. There are also here over seventeen volcanic craters, and many smoking fumeroles. This area has long been believed to contain both the entrance to Hades (or Hell in a Christian world) and the Elysian fields. There were also thermal baths built around the heated springs prized for healing. Cole must have visited the Solfataro volcano and seen the Monte Nuovo, a small mount which rose up in one single night during the sixteenth century. At Baia he visited the ruins of the villas of the Caesars. The so-called Temple of Venus (actually a Roman bath) and other tiered villas and baths were astonishing to him.

In Pozzuoli Cole saw the ruined Temple of Serapis (Actually not a temple at all, but a Roman market, or macellum). With only three of its original columns still standing and (at that time partially immersed in water), this structure had struck the curiosity of many in the early nineteenth century before Cole. In the early nineteenth century many artists and writers (and their patrons) were interested in the new science of geology. Charles Lyell had published his seminal work Principles of Geology in London in 1830 while Cole was there. Lyell had also visited Pozzuoli and seen on the standing columns the effect of bradyseism, or the rise and fall of the oceans over many centuries. It was evidenced by the scars of lithodomic animals that had marred the surfaces of the columns in a clear fashion. This bradyseism had in fact caused much of the older Roman city to be submerged below the sea.

Cole must have known of Lyell’s work and he sketched the three columns standing in water, the lithodomic markings clearly indicated, a work reminiscent of the frontispiece engraving of Lyell’s book. Lyell’s findings had changed the concept of time from historical to geological. It was this theory which later would so profoundly inspire Darwin. As for its effect upon Cole, good evidence is a sketch, Ruins, or the Effects of Time, in which classical columns and pyramids are half submerged and march toward the horizon. (Figure 1).

The significance of Cole’s acquaintance with this new view of geology should not be underestimated as it was to profoundly affect his later work, especially the series Course of Empire, done for Luman Reed’s new gallery in New York a few years after Cole’s Italian experience. As Bedell points out, geology was not the subject of his art, but it was a means to an artistic and intellectual end.

The genesis of Cole’s most magnificent series of paintings had grown earlier in him, probably in 1828 or 1829. He wanted to create a new kind of "historical landscape" based upon a civilization yet undetermined in subject. For the artist, history painting had the highest moral purpose in art. Cole felt that landscape without some moral and spiritual purpose was mere record. In a letter, he said, "I do not feel I am a mere leaf painter. I have higher conceptions than a mere combination of inanimate, uninformed nature" (qtd. in Noble 195). He clearly did not want to depict a particular society, but to create a society as an amalgam of history itself. The influences on him are legion, but surely Turner’s Dido Building Carthage and the sunlit Arcadian pastorals of Claude Lorrain were important in the formation of the series.

It was particularly as a result of his visit to Baia and Pozzuoli that Cole was struck with two phenomena: first, the remains of the lives of the Caesars and their reign spread before him in ruins partly submerged under the sea and, second, the scientific conclusions evidenced by the natural effects upon the ruins he saw. Of course, one must also admit he was impressed by the sheer beauty of the place. In the case of Roman history, after viewing the ruins of the imperial villas at Baia, Cole settled easily upon the Roman Empire as the symbol of his ideas concerning the cycle of history that he proceeding inevitably in the United States. In America, Jacksonian expansionism and greed disgusted him. At Baia, the ruins of Augustan and Claudian villas crowd together and spill down the hill to the sea (much of Baia is also submerged.) The pleasure domes of the Caesars here seemed to Cole to represent the transitory quality of luxuria, or wantonness. (It was in the bay before this resort that Nero had engineered the murder of his mother Agrippina. The effect of time, so definitively depicted in his sketch made here, was inexorable but paralleled the cyclical effect of pomp, greed and war upon a civilization. It appears to be here at Baia and Pozzuoli that Cole found the moral precepts and geological energies that infuse his Course of Empire series.

Once he returned to the United States Cole got the opportunity he longed for. Luman Reed, a wealthy grocer and friend, commissioned Cole to do a series of paintings for his New York mansion. A grouping of Cole’s paintings would not only give him pleasure, but would be a kind of private exhibition gallery that would enhance his status in the City. Cole wrote to him indicating his plans: It would be "the History of a Natural Scene, as well as of the Epitome of Man." (qtd. Parry 132). Fresh from his Italian experience, Cole must have been delighted to have a go at painting some classical landscapes. He certainly did choose a scene typical of Campania, a bay with a large promontory in the background. Cole specifically wanted a geological formation that would remain as the constant, unifying factor among all the paintings of the series. Typical of Cole’s ideas concerning landscape being processed through the artistic imagination, he did not choose any of the hills or mountains around Campania, but instead created a mountain more closely related to his beloved Adirondacks. In a letter quoted in Sears, Cole indicated he had found what he was searching for during a trip to Schroon Mountain, (today known as Mount Hoffman) (86). The promontory is topped with a "rocking stone," something not typical of volcanic geology but absolutely normal in an area carved by glaciers, such as the mountains and valleys of the Adirondacks and the Catskills. It took Cole’s expansive and overlapping imagination to drape the mountains of New York with ruins.

The first painting in the series, The Savage State, (Fig. 2) sets the stage with its early dawn setting, a scene of promise and beginning. The rude tee-pee huts and the rough canoes exemplify the struggle of nascent man with nature. A prominent hunter, dressed in skins, is in the foreground chasing the deer he has just struck with his arrow.

The deer is falling, but will return in later paintings of the series. The mountain in the background is nearly overwhelmed by the storm (the sublime) which threatens the puny humans with their flimsy shelters.

In The Arcadian or Pastoral State (Fig. 3) mankind has begun to establish the arts and learning. A child draws in the dirt while a female figure approaches him with a skein of wool in her hand symbolizing the homely arts. A dozing old man represents the birth of philosophy while on the far central right, youths and maidens dance. A ship is being built on the shore and a shepherd watches his herd graze. The sky is calm and a midmorning light softly illuminates the mountain behind. The scene is quiet, filled with women and children suggesting an innocent and moral time.

In the third painting, The Consummation of Empire, (Fig. 4) Cole is allowing himself to indulge the delights of a painter in sugar frosting architecture that cascades down the hill on the left and up on the right. The raised perspective looks upon the procession of an emperor on an elephant surrounded with retainers and followed by the senators as they crowd a decorated bridge and are about to pass between two inventive classical column groupings topped with the arms and spoils of war. On the right a colossal statue of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom looks down in the clear light of noon. On the left a large temple is topped with a pediment containing the image of Diana and her retinue with several deer. Now, instead of the hunted terrified deer of the first painting, this deer is mythologized and turned into artifice. On the lower right children fight over a toy boat, in training for the life of violence and intrigue that will plague their civilization. That Cole had in mind Jackson’s America can be of little doubt; even the promontory is covered with buildings as development and progress was already threatening the American wilderness.

The fourth canvas, Destruction, (Fig. 5) is the most disturbing. While the scene appears to be of a war scene, nature seems to get in on the act, a tempest whirling in the background, nearly obscuring the promontory. A massive broken sculpture of a warrior dominates the foreground, forcing us to view the carnage. A woman in the lower center is throwing herself from a building to escape the "fate worse than death" while another is being seized by her hair by a soldier. On the left a hooded woman mourns her dead male child. These images of the mourning and violated women and the broken sculpture have been used by artists ever since, for example Picasso in Guernica, but here Cole extracts a more obvious lesson from it all. This destruction is not only a sudden devastation but also a slow and inexorable process. The bridge has been broken much earlier, evidenced by the wooden makeshift structure attached to it (from which many figures are falling or threatening to collapse it. The buildings show the destruction of decades. An archer on the right takes aim at an unseen target. A man dressed much like the "savage" hunter from the first painting in the series in the right corner carries a torch. The scene is more of a final deathblow in a long process than a single historical incident. Cole found this painting difficult to execute. He wrote to his friend painter Asher Durand, "I have been engaged in sacking and burning a city and am well tired of such horrible work" (qtd. in Adams 3).

It must have been with a sense of relief that he painted the last in the series: Desolation (Fig. 6). There is a sense of calm with broken columns now being obliterated by nature restored. The sun floats in a pale sky like a moon. It seems to be early evening. The sea is also calm and languorous with little deer retuning to sip at the pool in the right corner. The most prominent feature is a column on which a stork, the symbol of birth and good fortune, has made her nest. A vine nearly covers it. The painting is completely devoid of humans. They appear neither in the flesh nor in stone. Even their works are yielding to the forces of nature. The mood is not, however, of regret or disaster, but of simple humility before the spiritual resilience of nature. The architecture is desolate, but nature is not. As he said in his letters from Italy written during his second trip:

The influence of Campania upon this series is strong, but certainly not exclusive. Cole was an artist who responded to many influences: to other artists, to literature, to his study of science, but primarily to his own experience and imagination. He believed that the artist was not required to paint nature as it appeared, but to see beyond the surface to the poetic and spiritual it contained. The sublime and the beautiful in nature in Cole’s mature work, as illustrated by this series, always transmuted to the "picturesque" by which he meant the kind of artistic creation that mirrored the divine. "There are spots on this earth, where the sublime and beautiful are united . . . when the lips are sealed in reverence, but the soul feels unutterably" (qtd. in Cooper 45).

Campania must surely have struck him as a land of lessons about life and death and the futility of man’s efforts when put up against the power of natural forces. A beautiful and fertile land with sparkling bays that bring much pleasure, Campania is also a land that is always on the edge of disaster. It is little wonder that the creative and prosperous inhabitants have learned to temper their Christian philosophies with a sense of "seize the day."

For Thomas Cole, that English-born but essentially Yankee painter, the ruins of Italy astonished him but he was able to place them within the larger picture of nature itself, that sublime and beautiful force revealing of the eternal spirit. In later paintings he would explore the sacred in more orthodox scenes. For now, still in his youth, Cole would be inspired by the beauties of Campania, and indulge in artistic musings on man’s deeds and futile efforts against the upheaval or subsidence of the earth itself.

Adams, Henry. "The American Land Inspired Cole:s Prescient Visions." Smithsonian. 25 (May 1994): 98-104.

Baigell, Matthew. Thomas Cole. NewYork: Watson-Guptil, 1981.

Bedell, Rebecca. "Thomas Cole and the Fashionable Science." The Huntingdon Library Quarterly. 59 (1998 [1997]): 349-78.

Cooper, James F. Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999.

Howat, John. American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School. New York:.Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1988.

Hughes, Robert. "The Sacred Mission." Time. Special Issue. (Spring 1997), 10-19.

Noble, Louis L. The Life and Works of Thomas Cole. Edited by Elliot S. Vesell. Cambridge: Black Dome Press. Bellknap Press at Harvard University Press, 1964 (reprinted 1994). Original published in 1853 by Cornish, Lamport and Co. New York: 1853.

Parry, E.C. The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.

Sears, Clara Endicott. Highlights Among the Hudson River Artists. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1947.

The Italian Presence in American Art: 1760-1860. Edited by Irma B. Jaffe. Fordham: Fordham University Press, 1989.

Thomas Cole: Landscape into History. Edited by William H. Truettner and and Alan Wallach. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.