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Art of the Americas to World War I
Course: Art of the Americas to World War I > Unit 7
Lesson 2: Romanticism in the United States- Allston, Elijah in the Desert
- Wilderness, settlement, and American identity
- Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
- Thomas Cole, The Oxbow
- Thomas Cole, The Oxbow
- Cole's The Oxbow
- Hicks' The Peaceable Kingdom as Pennsylvania parable
- Catlin, The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas
- It's not only about the American Revolution, Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware
- Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware
- Jasper Francis Cropsey, Mount Jefferson, Pinkham Notch, White Mountains
- Picturing Spanish conquest in an era of U.S. expansion
- Revisiting a frozen sea
- Envisioning Manifest Destiny, Leutze's Westward the Course of Empire
- The painting that inspired a National Park
- Church, Niagara and Heart of the Andes
- Science, religion, and politics, Church's Cotopaxi
- Lane, Owl's Head, Penobscot Bay, Maine
- Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite, and the battle for National Parks
- A dream of Italy: Black artists and travel in the nineteenth century
- Romanticism in the United States
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Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden
Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828, oil on canvas, 100.96 x 138.43 cm / 39-3/4 x 54-1/2 inches (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- There were no ancient cultures here? I don't know about that.(5 votes)
- There was a wealth of culture and knowledge in the native peoples of the Americas. But I think they mean the new European settlers had no ancient culture here. They didn't see any of the native people as the same as them and largely ignored their culture. A shame, really.(7 votes)
- Could it be that Cole used the vulcan on the upper left to depict the upper part of a skull?
It looks like the areas to the left and right of the lava fountain represent the eye sockets and the vulcan itself looks like the nose. If the dark clouds surounding that part of the picture are seen as a hood, then the whole looks like death is looking down at the first humans.(4 votes)- There is not much right or wrong in painting. It is quite possible that it is supposed to add to the scene in that way. A very good observation, I did not see it until you mentioned it.(2 votes)
- Why are Adam and Eve so small? Wouldn't you want to grasp right away what this painting is about instead of viewing the landscape and wondering?(1 vote)
- I think it was explained quite well in the video. The painting is less about the people expelled, or about the expulsion itself, than about the contrast between the paradise from which they went and the wilderness into which they entered.(5 votes)
- Is culture part of most paintings?(2 votes)
- Indeed it is. The "arts" is even a synonym for culture. If you look at art now and take a step back in history to, say, the medieval times, art has changed tremendously because the culture has changed.(1 vote)
- When we refer to the "hierarchy of art" according to the Academy in Europe...what are we talking about? In other words...why would I care if I made a still life or landscape and it was considered "low" on the scale? Would it fetch lower prices? Would it not be exhibited at the finest art salons?(1 vote)
- I'm not sure if such a hierarchy still exists to the same extent in Europe now as it did in the time period that the video discusses, but I think the idea of a hierarchy in art stems from the Renaissance European belief that paintings with a religious, historical, mythological or literary theme served a 'higher purpose' and were therefore more worthy of academic praise than genre, landscape or still life which were largely seen as pure decoration.
By the 1800s though, it was basically snobbery loosely justified by tradition.(2 votes)
- How does Thomas Cole do it all?(1 vote)
- Why is this called Romanticism?(1 vote)
- The following information may or may not be correct:
http://www.conservapedia.com/Romanticism
The term "Romanticism" was coined because it originated in European regions of the "Romance Languages", namely French, Spanish and Italian. German and British Romanticism followed soon after. Other countries such as America and Canada also had Romantic art movements. Romanticism is contrasted with Neo-Classicism, a movement that preceded it.(1 vote)
- Who made the painting "The Scream"?(0 votes)
- There's actually an article about "The Scream" coming up in this section on Khan Academy:
http://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/becoming-modern/symbolism/a/munch-the-scream
The artist was Edvard Munch.(2 votes)
Video transcript
DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We're in the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. We're looking at a
really early Thomas Cole. This is the
"Expulsion from Eden." DR. BETH HARRIS: Normally when
we think about that subject, we might think about images
from the Italian Renaissance, like Masaccio's "Expulsion
from the Garden of Eden" or the "Expulsion"
by Michelangelo on the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel. Those are paintings of Adam
and Eve, of the two figures. But Cole has transformed this
into a landscape painting. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We can
barely find Adam and Eve. It takes us a moment, in part
because they're so small. But he has given us this
over-the-top operatic treatment that starkly contrasts
the garden that is Eden, God's paradise, with
the terror of the wilderness beyond. I read this painting from right
to left instead of from left to right. I begin in the brighter Eden. And Cole has given us
this fantastic vista. We can see these
crystalline mountains that reach up to Heaven
and then slope down to these lovely glades
and a tropical paradise. And as we move towards
the foreground, we can just make out
two swans in a pool. DR. BETH HARRIS: We
even see waterfalls down those purplish mountains. And this whole area of
Eden is flooded with light. And everything seems
verdant and lush. But that's contrasted
with the left side of the painting, where we see
Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden. And we feel a blast of
light that expels them from the Garden of
Eden that obviously represents a divine force. Nature is much bleaker. Trees have been struck by
lightning and ravaged by time. The colors are
browns, and there's sharp contrasts
of light and dark. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
You can actually see a storm in the sky
that frames a volcano. Adam holds his hand
up to this forehead. Eve clutches at his hand. They know they're
in deep trouble. And as if to make
that point even more clearly, in the lower
left, we see a wild animal that's felled a deer
and is protecting it against an approaching vulture. This new culture, this
new American nation, did not have what Europe had. It did not have ancient ruins. It did not have
ancient cultures. But at the beginning
of the 19th century, philosophers, and
writers, and painters began to recognize that its
wilderness was, in a sense, its great heritage. DR. BETH HARRIS: That's
right, but American painters knew that landscape
was a low kind of art in the hierarchy established
by the academies in Europe. They knew that landscape
was looked down on. And one way that you
could ennoble a landscape and raise it up
to a higher level, to the level of a
history painting, was to make it the setting
for heroic human endeavor for biblical stories. And that's exactly
what Cole has done. American artists are always
wanting to be taken seriously. But because of the artistic
situation in America, they're often forced
to paint subjects that their clients
want, which are not the noblest subjects-- simple
landscapes and portraits. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So
this painting in some ways might have been a challenge
to its American public, who were used to more
prosaic images. And here, Cole is attempting
something more ambitious. DR. BETH HARRIS: Cole wants
to be a serious painter. And he can't do that by
simply painting the Catskills, as he's going to later do. He returns again and again to
these more serious subjects, "The Voyage of Life,"
"The Course of Empire." DR. STEVEN ZUCKER:
But all stories that can be enacted
in the landscape.