Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory

Abstract

Thomas Cole (1801–48), is best known for his role in placing the landscape genre in America on a secure artistic and intellectual foundation. Associating the beginnings of landscape art with the concurrent appearance of popular democracy, scholars have generally assumed that Cole shared the cultural and nationalistic premises of the native landscape school that developed under this influence. Other inaccurate assessments have followed, in particular the belief that Cole's political sympathies were democratic. To take this for granted, however, is to overlook not only the anti-Jacksonian sentiment that Cole occasionally vented in his journals and letters, but also the veiled political and topical content of his wellknown cycle, The Course of Empire. This neglect of the political content of Cole's art is part of a broader tendency to approach American landscape art as a genre lacking social or political content, as a transparent reflection of nature's central role in national culture. The reappraisal of such assumptions begins with Cole, whose ideological challenge to the next generation of painters was made in the language of landscape. This challenge will be considered briefly in my conclusion.

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