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National Gallery of Art

American Painting of the 19th and early 20th Centuries



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Thomas Cole (1801-1848) The Voyage of Life: Youth, 1842 Canvas, 1.343 x 1.949 (52 7/8 x 76 3/4 in.) Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund 1971.16.2

Despite his contemporary reputation as America's greatest landscape painter and the founder of the Hudson River School, Cole turned to literary, religious, and allegorical subjects whenever he could find a willing patron. He strongly believed that sequential treatment enhanced narrative themes, and during his illustrious career he created several multi-image series. The Voyage of Life, one of the most renown, is a four-part cycle that traces the travels of a heroic adventurer along the allegorical "River of Life." In the second picture of the series, the adolescent voyager has confidently assumed control of his destiny. No longer dependent upon his guardian angel, he boldly strives to reach an aerial castle that the artist considered emblematic of "the daydreams of youth and its aspirations for glory and fame." The traveler, consumed by his immediate desire, seems unaware of the dangers that await him. As he approaches his goal, the ever-more-turbulent stream deviates from its course and relentlessly carries him toward the next picture in the series, Manhood, where nature's fury, evil demons, and self-doubt will threaten his very existence. Only prayer, Cole suggests, can save the voyager from a dark and tragic fate.

As we follow Cole's "Everyman" from the innocence of childhood, to the flush of youthful overconfidence, through the trials and tribulations of middle age, to his triumphant salvation as the old man is subsumed in a burst of heavenly light, Cole's primary message seems to have been linked with the Christian doctrine of death and resurrection. Yet, as was the case with his 1836 series, The Course of Empire (New-York Historical Society), the artist also may have been equating the youthful voyager's circumstances to the current political situation in the United States, itself at an adolescent stage of its national development. Though his thinly-veiled symbolism, Cole may have painted and exhibited The Voyage of Life in an effort to warn the cavalier American public that their excessive technological development and unbridled westward expansion ultimately would have tragic consequences for both man and nature.


Caution: testing below! (this stuff probably wont work!) Test a jpeg version .... or maybe download this