A Grand ‘Voyage of Life,’ Guarded by an Angel

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The New York Sun

Few cities, if any, are as rich as New York in the works of Thomas Cole, one of the founding fathers of the Hudson River School. His “Course of Empire” series is the jewel in the crown of the New-York Historical Society, which owns a dozen other landscapes by the artist, and two of his best-loved works, “The Oxbow” and “The Titan’s Goblet,” are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Still, the arrival of his famed four-part series, “The Voyage of Life,” at Hirschl & Adler Gallery, must be viewed as something of an event.

These paintings come to us from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, N.Y. To be sure, they make up only a small part of the exhibition, which boasts, in addition to some fine antique furniture, dozens of paintings made by American masters from the Federalist era to Abstract Expressionism. Among these are a stilllife of a steak by Raphaelle Peale, a sunset by Frederic Edwin Church, and an industrial landscape by Charles Demuth.

But the stars of the show are the four paintings that constitute “The Voyage of Life.” In its homespun iconography, the narrative thrust of this series (1839–40) could not be simpler: In each of the four scenes, the same human figure moves along a river through ever changing landscapes. As he passes to adulthood and old age from infancy and youth, he is guided by a guardian angel.

Like so many painters of the Hudson River School, America’s first real indigenous art movement, Cole (1801–48), a British-born Ohioan, felt and thought in terms of landscape. Both the vicissitudes of history and the development of the soul of man expressed themselves to him in the language of mountains and plains, trees and lakes, and the shifting glories of the weather. Unlike the “Course of Empire” series, however, the landscapes in the “Voyage of Life” are never marked by any trace of human inhabitation. Furthermore, they display a distinctly mystical enhancement that suggests the influence of such Victorian contemporaries as John Martin and Samuel Palmer.

The foremost inspiration for Cole’s landscapes was, as he himself proudly acknowledged, Claude Lorrain, a great French master of the 17th century. In the year he spent in Rome, Cole even managed to occupy the very studio in which the French artist had worked one and a half centuries earlier. From Claude he learned the trick of flanking his landscapes with repoussoirs to the right and left foreground of his canvases, while the perspective receded between them into vague infinity. It was also Claude who inspired Cole to fill the unspoiled terrain of the North American continent, the bends of the Hudson and the crags of the Catskills, with the Virgilian echoes of the Roman Campagna.

In the first of Cole’s “Voyage of Life” paintings, “Childhood,” the vessel has just issued from the dark and rugged cave of birth. A white-robed angel, with his blinding halo, stands at the back of the golden barque, while the newborn lifts his infant arms toward the radiant day beckoning at the right of the canvas.

In “Youth,” happiness is most extravagantly on display. Along verdurous and sun-dappled banks the fairhaired young man journeys toward a crystalline palace suspended before him in the airy distance. But these youthful dreams, with all their ideals, give way in the third scene, “Manhood,” to a fairly hellish landscape of caves and cataracts in which the blossoming trees of “Youth” have become a blasted stump in the right foreground.

The darkest image of all, however, is “Old Age,”whose now wizened voyager passes at last from the river into the open sea, the sea, we imagine, of eternity. But it is also the most hopeful image, as an angelic light pours down from heaven through a rift in the clouds, promising redemption and salvation in the end.

We can accept as given that few people today will look at these paintings without feeling amused, in ways Cole never intended, at his heavy-handed Episcopalian pieties and his confidence in the consoling authority of the church. When he writes, about the third painting, “Manhood,” that the “upward and imploring look of the voyager shows his dependence on a Superior Power and that Faith saves him from the destruction that seems inevitable,” we hear how 19th-century America talked to itself.

Such is not the language we use today, surely not in the art world. And yet, is it not possible that, ultimately, we say the same things? Surely our words are different and our sentiments are different and our references are not to scripture but to Baudrillard and Freud. And yet, at the highest levels of generality, I submit that our discourse is not so different from Cole’s. Boilerplate, after all, is boilerplate. Beyond that is the artistic achievement itself, in this context, Cole’s compositional skill, his passages of painterly bravura, and that antiquated charm, born of a pure heart, that manages to transcend both.

Until December 29 (21 E. 70th St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-535-8810).


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