Art History Project || Starting in 1833 Thomas Cole spent 3 years creating The Course of Empire, a series of five paintings describing the arc of human culture from ‘savage wilderness’ through high civilization and its inevitable destruction. The 1830s were an optimistic time in America. The Erie canal had been completed, and the first US locomotive was making its first trips. Industrialization, baby. Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire was a warning against the pride of empire building, and showcased the dreamy idealization of the pastoral life. In newspaper advertisements for his series, Cole quoted Canto IV of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:
There is the moral of all human tales;
‘Tis but the same rehearsal of the past.
First freedom and then Glory – when that fails,
Wealth, vice, corruption – barbarism at last.
And History, with all her volumes vast,
Hath but one page…
The Course of Empire 1: The Savage State
The Course of Empire 2: The Pastoral State
The Course of Empire 3: The Consummation of Empire
The Course of Empire 4: Destruction
The Course of Empire 5: Desolation
https://youtu.be/jMySF1nkN8o?si=Xriv-g1u3l-huaK9
Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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