In 1836, an English immigrant named Thomas Cole finished five paintings that show one civilization being born, growing rich, and burning to the ground. He called the series The Course of Empire. He painted it for a country that was 60 years old.
This month, on the July 4th weekend of the country's 250th birthday, two essays in Hyperallergic went back to Cole and the movement he started, the Hudson River School, and found what we tend to forget when these scenes show up on calendars: dread. Ed Simon read the paintings as an American apocalypse. Aruna D'Souza, in a companion piece on the Statue of Liberty, argued that the pictures America makes of itself are never neutral.
The Hudson River School was the first art movement born in the United States, active from roughly 1825 to 1875. Its wilderness scenes look like pure celebration. A lot of them are warnings.
The painter who was really painting anxiety
Start with the man who started it. Cole was born in Bolton, in the north of England, in 1801, and reached America in 1818 at seventeen. So the artist who taught the young country how to see its own wilderness was an immigrant who had barely seen it himself. In 1825 he took a steamboat up the Hudson and sketched the Catskills, among them Kaaterskill Falls, a two-drop cascade of 260 feet. That is taller than Niagara. Those sketches, worked into finished paintings, turned American landscape into a serious subject almost overnight.
The engine underneath all of it is an old idea called the sublime. The philosopher Edmund Burke had pinned it down in 1757: the astonishment, edged with terror, that a person feels in front of something vast and powerful. A 260-foot waterfall does that. So does a thunderhead swallowing a mountain. Cole wanted that feeling on the wall.
He also wanted to argue. In his 1836 "Essay on American Scenery" he praised the wildness of the land, then worried in plain words about "the ravages of the axe" already clearing it. You can watch him make that argument inside a single frame. The Oxbow, his 1836 view of the Connecticut River, splits down the middle: dark, storm-wrecked wilderness with shattered tree trunks on the left, tidy sunlit farmland on the right, and the river bending between them in the shape of a question mark. Down in the corner, tiny, Cole painted himself at his easel, turning to look back at you. On the far hillside, if you follow it, the forest has already been clear-cut into bald patches.
That is the whole movement in one canvas. Beauty and worry, holding hands.
Then he scaled the worry up to five canvases. The Course of Empire (1833 to 1836, now at the New-York Historical Society) follows one imaginary place through five stages: a savage wilderness, a calm pastoral valley, a gleaming marble city at its peak, that same city sacked and in flames, and finally silent ruins under a rising moon. A distinctive crag sits on the horizon of every panel, so you know it is the same spot each time. Only the people change, and then they vanish.
Cole even lifted his title from a hopeful line by Bishop George Berkeley, written in 1726: "Westward the course of empire takes its way," a prophecy that America would be the next great civilization. Cole borrowed the optimism and painted the collapse. It was a caution to a confident young republic in its boom years, that no empire, not even a promising one, gets to skip the last panel.
How the Hudson River School turned into an insult, then a flag
The name itself is a twist. "Hudson River School" is not what these painters called themselves. A critic in the 1870s coined it as a put-down, meaning provincial and behind the times, once fashionable taste had drifted toward softer French landscapes. One of the painters, Worthington Whittredge, shrugged and predicted the insult would flip into a badge of honor. It did.
By then the movement had a second generation, and its biggest star showed how fast a landscape can become a symbol. In 1861, days after Confederate guns fired on Fort Sumter and opened the Civil War, Frederic Church painted Our Banner in the Sky: the American flag built entirely out of weather. Red and amber sunset clouds for the stripes, a patch of star-flecked blue for the field, a bare tree for the pole, an eagle at the top. It was reprinted as a cheap color lithograph and sold by subscription to raise money for the families of Union soldiers. A wilderness painting had become patriotic wall art, and a fundraiser, in a matter of weeks.
The same nerve is still live. D'Souza's essay traces artists who turn the Statue of Liberty into protest, right up to Amy Sherald, who pulled her show from the Smithsonian last year after the museum reportedly balked at her painting of a Black trans woman posed as Liberty. The line runs straight back to Cole: an American landscape or monument is rarely an innocent picture. Somebody is always making a point with it.
So next time one of these golden valleys scrolls past, slow down and read it. Find the blasted tree or the fresh-cut stump, because one is almost always there. Notice how small the people are against the drop of a cliff. Check the far hills for a bare patch of felled forest. Cole put those details in on purpose, and once you catch them the picture stops being a postcard and starts being an argument. That is also why this kind of landscape wall art still holds a wall two centuries on. It was built to make you feel something big, and to leave you a little uneasy about it.
