Thomas Cole Had It Down
Among my favorite paintings at the National Gallery of Art are two of the four canvases that make up Thomas Cole's 1842 work, The Voyage of Life. These are housed in their own little rotunda of a gallery, No. 60, I believe, in the American artists section.
Cole was of the Hudson Valley School, those early-mid 1800s guys who painted lush landscapes lit by clear golden sunshine. He was a religious man and in his day, the end of mortal flesh was in plain sight, not behind nursing home and intensive-care-unit doors and hushed mouths.
Youth depicts a young man in a red dress setting out into the landscape in his little canoe with a golden-lanterned masthead. His guardian angel is seeing him off. It is an angel right out of Shall We GatherAtTheRiver/Where bright angel feet have trod, itself composed around 1840. The young man's destination is in the sky above the horizon: a cloud-built palace. Intended to represent the ideals and aspirations of youth, it looks like something out of the original Star Trek. If we look carefully, however, we see that the young man's watery path to the castle twist, turns and is obstructed by mountains.
Manhood finds the cloud-built palace gone like so much smoke, replaced by storm clouds near and the hellish light of a distant sunset. Our fellow is still in his red dress but he has now sprouted a beard. He is down on his knees, hands grasping each other in the prayer of the terrified. His angel is acting a bit stand-offish. Just ahead are rapids crashing through some pretty sharp-looking rocks.
Yes, except for the red dress, Cole had manhood down.
Copyright © 2004 by Neal J. Conway. All rights reserved.