Thomas Cole's Intemperate Empire

Abstract

This article situates The Course of Empire (1836), a five-canvas cycle of landscape paintings by American artist Thomas Cole (1801–1848), within the discourse of physiology and temperance reform in the early nineteenth-century United States. Heretofore uninvestigated compositional and thematic resonances between The Course of Empire and Nathaniel Currier (1813–1888) and James Ives's (1824–1895) popular temperance print The Drunkard's Progress (1846) reveal how each charted terminal cases of unregulated consumption from the point of infection through the death of their respective subjects. The two scenes at the apex of these narratives, The Consummation of Empire and “A Confirmed Drunkard,” represent official diagnoses that mark precise moments when self-agency is irrevocably surrendered to objects of desire. They mark points of no return and initiate self-destruct sequences that cause the body and the body politic to fall to pieces.

Keywords:

• Temperance
• Sublime
• Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting
• Cole, Thomas (1801–1848), The Course of Empire (1836), The Drunkard's Progress (1846)

Acknowledgments

I am always thankful for the encouragement and camaraderie of my colleagues in the Art Department and elsewhere at Western Kentucky University. Research for this article was aided in part by a WKU New Faculty Research Grant in 2008. A long time ago, the sage advice of Sally Promey, Franklin Kelly, William Truettner, and Alan Wallach helped get this project off the ground. The author is especially indebted to Annemarie McAllister and the other organizers of and participants in the conference “Food and Drink: Their Social, Political and Cultural Histories,” at the University of Central Lancashire in the summer of 2011 for their astute questions, suggestions, and encouragement.

Notes

Reed's premature death in 1836 prevented Cole from installing his work according to these plans.

The term “picturesque” was used by authors such as William Gilpin (1724–1804) and Edmund Burke to describe bounded, elegant, cultivated landscapes that engender a sense of security and well-being in their beholders. The “Claudian” mode refers to the art of landscape painter Claude Lorrain (1600–1682) who often set his tranquil scenes in classical antiquity. Literature scholar Martha Banta traces some of the same patterns I explore here in the cultural history of the United States from 1850 to 1900. Weaving together articles published in the Atlantic Monthly and The Crayon in the 1850s, Banta notes that artistic styles were thought to progress from “the raw primitivism of the pre-Giotto generations,” peaking with Fra Angelico's classicism, and then devolving into Baroque extravagance, typified by the sculpture of Gian Lorenzo Bernini. See Banta, “Raw, Ripe, Rot: Nineteenth-Century Pathologies of the American Aesthetic,” American Literary History 17, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 675. If evaluated according to Banta's rubric, and read from bottom to top, Cole's The Course of Empire traced the threat posed upon classical, pastoral, and healthy repose by sublime, baroque, and incendiary action.

Charles Caldwell, “Thoughts on the Pathology, Prevention, and Treatment of Intemperance, as a Form of Mental Derangement,” Transylvania Journal of Medicine and the Associate Sciences 5, no. 3 (July–September 1832): 322.

O. S. Fowler, Temperance Founded on Phrenology and Physiology (New York: Fowler's and Wells's Phrenological Cabinet, 1846), 27. Emphasis in original.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods (1854), available online at Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm. On the relationship of Justus Liebig's ideas about combustion and human body heat, see Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic: The Language of Health and the Culture of Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 63.

For an historical analysis of the evolution of stepped arch settings in prints that dealt with human life spans, see Christa Pieska, “The European Origins of Four Pennsylvania German Broadsheet Themes,” Der Reggeboge 23, no. 1(Journal of the Pennsylvania German Society, 1989): 6–31.

Brief analyses of The Drunkard's Progress can be found in Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 118; and John W. Crowley, Drunkard's Progress: Narratives of Addiction, Despair, and Recovery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 1–2.

For an excellent account of the antebellum era, including the Panic of 1837, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). For an alternative theory regarding the role that the scarcity of hard currency may have played in the panic, see Peter L. Rousseau, “Jacksonian Monetary Policy, Specie Flows, and the Panic of 1837,” Journal of Economic History 62, no. 2 (June 2002): 457–88.

For the relation between Cole's Consummation of Empire and period prints that lampooned Andrew Jackson, see Angela Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory,” Prospects 14 (1989): 65–92. The most thorough examination to date of Cole's life and work within the context of antebellum American culture and politics remains William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape Into History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994).

A Brief Popular Account of All the Financial Panics and Commercial Revulsions in the United States, from 1690 to 1857 by Members of the New York Press (New York: J. C. Haney, 1857), 13 [emphasis in original].

A Brief Popular Account of All the Financial Panics, 11.

Peter De Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 12.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 2nd ed. (1759; London: Penguin Books, 1998), 101.

Caldwell, Thoughts, 337–38.

For an excellent analysis of the pervasiveness of these narratives, see Burbick, Healing the Republic.

Alexander Hamilton, “The Federalist, Number IX,” in John C. Hamilton, ed., The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States (Washington: Regnery Publishing, 1998), 97.

Daniel Drake, A Discourse on Intemperance (Cincinnati: Looker & Reynolds, 1828), 11.

Drake, A Discourse, 11.

Thomas Cole, “An Essay on American Scenery,” in Marshall Tymn, ed., Thomas Cole: The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches (St. Paul, MN: John Colet Press, 1982), 6.

Jean-Baptiste Say, Catechism of Political Economy, or, Familiar Conversations on the Manner in which Wealth is Produced, Distributed, and Consumed in Society, John Richter, trans. (1803; Philadelphia: M. Carey & Son, 1817).

This impressive list, dated December 1839, indexes the titles of one year of reading as recalled by the artist. As a representative sample, it more than justifies assumptions made here and in prior scholarship that Cole was well aware of, if not well versed in, most major works of fiction, poetry, history, and aesthetics that would have been available to him. Cole Papers, Box 5, Folder 3, New York State Library, Albany, NY.

“The Pleasures of the Imagination” was also the title of a 1744 poem by the British author and physician Mark Akenside. I owe my understanding of both of these works to John Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1997).

Joseph Addison, “On the Pleasures of the Imagination,” Spectator 411 (June 11, 1712): 123–24; quoted in Paul Guyer, Values of Beauty: Essays in Modern Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22.

Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 4th ed. (London: Luke Hansard & Sons, 1808), 137.

Knight, An Analytical Inquiry, 137–38.

Edward C. Delavan to Thomas Cole, December 3, 1832, Archives of American Art. (Delavan's letter responds to an un-located letter written to him by Cole.) Delavan gave many lectures on the dangers of alcoholism by utilizing four lithographed plates made by Dr. Thomas Sewell of the successive stages of drunkenness and its effects on the lining of the human stomach. These can be seen in Sewell, The Pathology of Drunkenness, or the Physical Effects of Alcoholic Drinks with Drawings of the Drunkard's Stomach (Albany: C. VanBenthuysen, 1841).

On Ward's abstinence, evangelism, and reformist stance, see Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” in Reading American Art, Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, eds. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 100–1.

Ellwood C. Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989), 170.

Malthus did not account in his calculations for the ability of advancements in agricultural technology and genetic hybridization to make up the difference.

Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1st ed. (1798), drawn from the e-text available at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4239/4239-h/4239-h.htm.

Herman Merivale, “Senior on Political Economy,” Edinburgh Review 66 (October 1837): 87; quoted in Pat Moloney, “Savages in the Scottish Enlightenment's History of Desire,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, no. 3 (2005): 246.

William Godwin, Thoughts on Man (n.p.); quoted in Moloney, “Savages,” 247.

Moloney, “Savages,” 257. I owe much to Moloney's arguments regarding the thermometric rhetoric of the Scottish Enlightenment.

See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Jennifer Roberts has aligned the palpable timelessness in Cole's Desolation with John Lloyd Stephens's mistreatment of the historically unconscious natives he encountered in the Yucatan Peninsula in the early nineteenth century. See Jennifer Roberts, Mirror-Travels: Robert Smithson and History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 94. For a further exploration of the connections between moral and physical thermometers, political economy, and a reading of the column in Cole's Desolation as an extinguished candle that resonates with candle imagery in the emblem books of Francis Quarles, see Guy Jordan, “The Aesthetics of Intoxication in Antebellum American Art and Culture” (PhD diss., University of Maryland, 2007).

Cole to Luman Reed, September 7, 1835, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Italics in original.

Henry David Thoreau, Walden, e-text available at Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm.