company news about Thomas Cole-The Course of Empire The Consummation of Empire 1836

In the late 1820s, the young Thomas Cole quickly built a successful career as a painter of Hudson River landscapes, but he harbored ambitions of turning the landscape form to a larger purpose. As early as 1827 he conceived a cycle of paintings that would illustrate the rise and fall of a civilization, and a few years later he began sketching and developing his ideas.

The Consummation of Empire is one of a sequence of five paintings entitled The Course of Empire commissioned by Cole's patron Luman Reed, created between 1833 and 1836. Each painting in the series depicts the same landscape at a different stage of the rise and fall of an imaginary civilization. This middle painting in the series represents the apparent triumph of that civilization, a scene crammed with classical porticos, rotundas, and statuary, with a happy, colorful