Exhibition Proposal: The Sublime in the Collapse of Time

In Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757, he defined the sublime as an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling. In landscape paintings, the sublime conveys a sense of horror through its otherworldliness that threatens the very existence of mankind with the overwhelming power of the natural world. The sheer scale of nature exposes the audience to a risk of life outside the orderly human society and evokes a sense of fear as if one is left alone in the wilderness. However, the immediate visual effect is only one way to achieve the potent emotion of the sublime stoked by terror. Beyond the vortex in sea storms and the blasted trees in the mountain, the threat of nature is presented in the passage of time. While a scenery may look calming and beautiful on canvas, it contains details that inspire the viewer to wonder about its past and future.

The landscape poses a pressing question to its contemporaries in the nineteenth century: what is the relationship between men and nature? It was a unique time in history when industrial modernity was captured in its formation. The upsetting effect of the sublime may not result from nature itself but human activities that disturb the tranquility of an idyllic world. The nineteenth century was also a historical moment defined by the rise of America and the fall of the British Empire. The emerging social cycle theory interpreted the course of civilizations as a life cycle in which different stages of development would repeat itself over time. This theory implies that although men could conquer nature at the height of a nation, the glory was only temporary. The destruction of the empire is its inevitable fate, only a question of time. The unsettling power of the sublime thus comes from the inexorable doom of mankind to lose it all in the decline to desolation. Time has elevated nature to a level higher than human, as it is long-lasting regardless of the presence or absence of civilization.

This unique historical moment is condensed in Thomas Cole’s paintings through his deep dislike of industrialization and modernization, as well as his personal experience in both Britain and America. Born in England in 1801, Cole moved to the U.S. with his family at the age of sixteen. At twenty-eight, he returned to England as a rather established landscape painter to learn from the great masters. In conversation with his contemporaries J.M.W Turner and John Constable, Cole was able to combine the British heritage of the sublime with the novelty of American wilderness.

Thomas Cole. Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828

Even before his actual European journey, Cole had long taken the British landscape tradition as a part of his mental equipment. In 1828, after the successful debut in New York, he decided to create a “higher style”[1] through historical landscape. Though depicting imaginary scenes with biblical and mythological roots as in history paintings, this is a style where the landscape plays a dominant role and the figures are reduced to a small scale. Correspondingly, the viewers are compelled to shrink themselves psychologically, look through the eyes of those tiny figures and get overwhelmed by the engulfing power of nature. At the same time, the feeling of having one’s life at stake is evoked by the tragic narratives such as the Fall of Man. The grim landscape is a backdrop that intensifies the sense of inescapability from fate and men’s powerlessness in the wilderness.

In Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Cole drew from John Martin’s Adam and Eve Driven Out of the Paradisefor the biblical catastrophe. In both paintings, Adam and Eve are running away from the dagger-like rays of light from Eden into a dreadful apocalypse. On top of the British visual precedent, Cole strengthens the sense of threat by placing the two figures on a cracked stone bridge above an abyss. The figures, in similar postures but smaller in size, are pushed back by the blasted trees as repoussoir in the foreground. At the same time, Cole divides the canvas in half to depict the glamorous Eden on the right, in sharp contrast to the menacing scene on the left. This composition pushes the viewer to face the glorious past upfront, and in response, grieve for the loss of mankind in the present and feel uneasy for the unpredictable future Adam and Eve are rushing into. It’s a terrifying future characterized by the weathered trees, ferocious vultures and exploding volcano, obliterating the sky with ashes and smoke.

Beyond the otherworldly landscape, features of history painting also contribute to embody the sublime in this painting. The entire course of human history is articulated from the right to left and condensed into one canvas. Time has collapsed in this one moment of expulsion. The spikes of light are in the same direction as time, shining from the past to the future. No matter how nostalgic one is of the idealized past, as indicated by Adam’s posture of looking back, the current of time is irreversible. Adam and Eve, representative of mankind, have no choice but to leave the paradise flooded with light and lushness and enter into an unknown future full of bleakness and danger. The past is marked by perpetuity, for even the waterfall to the right would flow back in a swirl. The present and the future, on the other hand, is charged with torment and turmoil. It is thus the fast-forwarded time in this painting that emphasizes the powerlessness of human who are obliged to conform to their fate and the overwhelming force of nature that ravages their future. In other words, it is the passing of time that has deprived human of power and threatened their lives, encapsulating the sublime.

The significance of time is thus twofold: it situates thedichotomized composition and biblical narrative in a unique historical moment and urges the viewer to look at the burgeoning industrial modernity through Cole’s eyes. This painting could be read as hiscritique to the rapid economic expansion in his time, voicing his opposition to the Jacksonian way of exploiting nature and destroying its Edenic beauty. In addition to the social and environmental commentary, this painting may be seen as Cole’s religious parable. Since the second of the expulsion, time has started passing with no going back.The waterfall runs through the rocks behind Adam and Eve and rushes straight into the abyss, unlike the swirl on the right that circulates water back to the paradise. Through the narration of the past from the right to left, Cole forebodes the progression of civilization into the future, a fatalist end cursed by man’s sinful greed to material benefit over the God-given nature.

Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire, Destruction, 1833-1836

This series of paintings denotes a new phase of Cole’s artistic life, after he embarked his journey to London, a major center for the production and patronage of contemporary art. Not only returning to his home country with his own past, he was also tracing back to the origins of the Western civilization. London was where Cole improved his artistic techniques, communicated with contemporary British painters, and learned from the great masters. As a result, he would be familiar with The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire and The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire by J.M.W Turner, especially after his visit to Turner’s private gallery in 1829[2]. Aware of Edward Gibbon’s theory in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Turner depicted the arc of history where the glamor of the new nation is precursory to the decline of the old empire. In The Course of Empire, Cole likely followed the same theory that traces the rise and fall of power in history in a life cycle. He carefully demonstrated the five stages of the process, each from an aerial perspective that encircles the mountain and its surroundings. Seeing all five paintings in one glimpse, the viewer travels through time and witnesses a civilization from its birth to death.

Although the title names no specific empire but suggests an imaginary city, the classical architecture in the paintings alludes to the Greco-Roman roots of the nineteenth-century viewer’s own culture. The viewer is thus no longer encouraged to take an outsider’s perspective to the destiny of a distant land, but to connect it with the reality and feel empathetic towards the tiny figures in the paintings with a sense of vulnerability. As time passes by, no one has the power to save the once glorious empire and could only watch it fall into desolation at the end. This series could be read as a parable at a time of the rise of America in the fall of Britain, and an attempt of Cole to incorporate the European heritage into his landscape paintings. He started to embody historical settings with architectural remains in nature, expanding from having the wilderness as the only subject as in his earlier works. In this series, Cole alternates his focus between nature and history. From the savage, pastoral and consummation states, architecture gradually takes over the space of nature; and in destruction and desolation states, nature reoccupies the land and reclaims its dominance. The long-lastingness and immutability of the natural power is thus evident in contrast to the transience of man. The sublime in nature is conveyed through time, reducing the presence and creation of human into its temporality and powerlessness. 

Though the allegorical nature of The Course of Empire and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden may sound similar, the messages they convey are significantly different in attitude. The expulsion has a religious core which limits its narrative to the inescapability of human from God’s power appeared as nature. The series on the empire, on the other hand, ends in a relatively more positive note. Because history proceeds in a cycle, the savage state would reemerge after the desolation, and a new rise would start after the fall. There is a blink of hope in the future of mankind, for man is not rushing into complete darkness after the expulsion but entering a cyclical movement and awaiting a chance of revival. The series is also optimistic because of the fact that it is only a warning. If America does not follow the path of Britain, draining all the natural gifts for monetary profit, the doomed end is not bound to happen, and the warning could stay as a warning and not turn into the reality.

John Constable, Cloud Study, 1821-1822

In addition to Turner, Cole also found his affinity with John Constable, who famously produced many open-air sketches of the sky. He described this exercise as “skying,” one that he never intended to exhibit to the public. Constable recorded the precise weather conditions, topographical orientation and time of day at the back of each sketch, which signifies the instantaneity of the moment he depicts. Nature is thus represented in its ephemeral occurrence instead of grandiose vista. The viewer is prompted to imagine the internal torments among the clouds and the momentary but drastic changes in the sky. It is the sublime on a small scale, for the spontaneity of nature is powerful on its own, free from any human interference in industrial expansion. It is also worth noting that each oil sketch is a result of Constable piecing many moments of his observation into one composition, for the clouds are in constant motion and no specific image could be captured in precision. Nature thus conveys a powerful emotion not only through its spontaneity and immediacy, but also its fluidity in change throughout time.

[1] Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings, P35

[2] In Cole’s letter to his Baltimore patron Robert Gilmor. Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings, P29