Thomas Cole's five-painting series The Course of Empire, completed in 1836 and now in the New-York Historical Society, is the most ambitious, programmatically coherent, and theologically serious cycle of American landscape painting ever created. Commissioned by the New York merchant and art patron Luman Reed, it traces the life of an unnamed civilization from pastoral primitivism through agricultural settlement, imperial consummation, violent destruction, and final desolation - a visual argument for the biblical theology of history as moral arc tending inevitably toward divine judgment on pride and hubris.
The Biblical Programme
Cole, a committed evangelical Protestant who had been confirmed in the Episcopal Church and who kept extensive journals reflecting on his faith, structured the series around the biblical theology of empire's transience. The primary texts are Daniel 2:44 - 'in the time of those kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom that will never be destroyed, nor will it be left to another people. It will crush all those kingdoms and bring them to an end, but it will itself endure forever' - and Revelation 18:2 - 'Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great! She has become a dwelling for demons.' Isaiah 13:19-22 provides the specific imagery of Babylon's desolation ('owls will dwell there, jackals will fill her houses') that Cole translates into the final panel's ruined colonnades.
The Five Panels
The Savage State shows a wooded landscape with hunters pursuing game; a stormy morning light creates a mood of untamed energy. The Arcadian or Pastoral State replaces the hunters with farmers, the wild forest with cultivated fields; a shepherd pipes in the middle distance. The Consummation of Empire - the largest and most chromatically brilliant panel - shows the city at the height of its power: a gleaming classical city on a harbor, crowded with marble temples, triumphal arches, and celebrating crowds. The Destruction panel reverses the celebration: barbarian invaders pour across the bridge, the city burns, bodies fall into the harbor, and the marble columns topple. The Desolation panel shows the aftermath: a single ruined column stands in a marsh under a rising moon; herons nest in the fallen capitals; the city has returned to nature.
Cole's Critique of American Civilization
Cole was not painting ancient history. He was painting a warning directed at the United States of the 1830s - a young republic intoxicated by its territorial expansion, its economic growth, and the ideology of Manifest Destiny. Cole had emigrated from England in 1818 and brought with him the European tradition of the picturesque and sublime landscape, which he combined with an American Protestant evangelical conscience that took seriously the biblical warnings about national pride. The series asks, silently but insistently: which panel are we in? The Consummation or the Destruction?
Theological Significance
Psalm 127:1 - 'Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain' - is the theological foundation of Cole's critique: human civilization built without reference to divine sovereignty is inherently self-destroying. The absence of any redemptive figure or sacred building in the series is deliberate: Cole depicts a civilization that has forgotten, or never learned, the fear of the Lord. The final panel's desolation, paradoxically, is also the most spiritually peaceful image in the series: nature has reclaimed what pride built, the herons inherit the marble ruins, and the moon rises over the harbor with the indifferent serenity of a creation that outlasts every human empire.
Cole's Theological Critique of Manifest Destiny
The Course of Empire was painted in 1833-36, during Andrew Jackson's presidency and the period of aggressive westward expansion that defined American politics under the banner of Manifest Destiny. Cole was deeply troubled by what he saw: the reckless felling of forests, the displacement of Native peoples, the triumphalism of a young republic that had elevated commercial expansion into a divine mandate. His correspondence makes clear that the series was a deliberate rebuke to this ideology, grounded in his reading of the prophetic books of the Old Testament - Isaiah, Amos, Jeremiah - and in his conviction that the United States was following the same trajectory as every previous empire that had forgotten the fear of the Lord. Psalm 127:1 - 'Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain' - is the series' implicit epigraph. The terrifying beauty of the Destruction panel (1836) remains one of the most prescient images in American cultural history: a civilization consuming itself in the violence that its own pride generated, while the sunset of the Desolation panel sets over ruins that will outlast the civilization that built them by millennia.
Visiting
All five panels of The Course of Empire are in the New-York Historical Society in New York City (77th Street and Central Park West). The NYHS is one of the oldest cultural institutions in the United States and its collection of American art and history is essential to understanding the 19th-century cultural context of Cole's work. The Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York - Cole's studio and home - is a National Historic Landmark and the best place to understand the artist's life and creative process.