The Course of Empire: The Savage State by Thomas Cole

The Course of Empire: The Savage State by Thomas Cole: Introduction

A hunter pursues a stag beneath a sky still unsettled by storm. Across the water, morning light breaks through; above the wooded slopes rises a mountain crowned by an enormous boulder. Thomas Cole’s The Savage State, painted around 1834, opens his five-part history of an imaginary civilisation with a landscape that feels larger and more powerful than its inhabitants. It is the first painting in The Course of Empire, now in the collection of New York Historical. ^[1]

The scene is already inhabited, organised and creative. Its people hunt together, make shelters and canoes, and gather around a fire. Cole’s historical title names a stage in a nineteenth-century theory of social development; it is not an objective description of Indigenous peoples. Looking closely reveals both the force of his imagined beginning and the assumptions through which he constructed it. The picture establishes the setting, natural rhythms and human activities that the later paintings will transform. ^[2]

At a Glance

• ArtistThomas Cole (1801–1848)
• Full titleThe Course of Empire: The Savage State
• Dateca. 1834
• MediumOil on canvas
• Dimensions99.7 × 160.7 cm, unframed
• CollectionNew York Historical
• Accession1858.1
• Place in the seriesFirst of five paintings
• SignatureT. Cole, on a rock at the lower right ^[1]

Contents

1. Introduction
2. Morning in a world of storm and movement
3. Hunters, animals and the beginnings of cooperation
4. The mountain that outlasts the action
5. From A Wild Scene to the finished canvas
6. What Cole meant by the first stage
7. Reading the historical title today
8. The change into the Pastoral State

Morning in a world of storm and movement

The first impression is one of instability. Dark clouds, rough terrain and a damaged tree in the foreground create a setting in which neither the weather nor the ground offers easy reassurance. The rising sun does not illuminate everything equally. Parts of the distance open into light while much of the nearer landscape remains shadowed. Cole makes morning a gradual emergence rather than a sudden transformation: the day has begun, but darkness still occupies the scene. The museum identifies sunrise, while Tim Barringer’s catalogue entry notes the pink clouds, rising mist and early spring foliage. ^{[1] [2]}

These details give the opening its particular character. Spring and dawn suggest beginnings, yet the painting contains pursuit and danger rather than an untouched paradise. Fresh leaves coexist with broken wood. Light over the water offers distance and possibility, but the hunting action keeps attention on the demands of immediate survival. The landscape therefore introduces a young world without suggesting that youth means complete innocence. Its energy is physical: animals flee, people move, clouds gather or disperse.

The storm is especially important to the painting’s scale. The figures perform identifiable tasks, but they do so within a system of mountains, water and weather that they have scarcely altered. Their actions occupy small portions of an expansive canvas. The contrast does not erase their presence; instead, it makes their limited command over the setting visible. Nature supplies both the conditions of life and the forces that threaten it.

Barringer connects the rough scenery and rolling clouds with the example of Salvator Rosa, the seventeenth-century painter whose rocky, wooded landscapes offered a model of dramatic wildness. Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque likewise identifies Rosa’s influence in the agitated trees and storm effects, while seeing the underlying organisation of space throughout the cycle as indebted to Claude Lorrain. These are compatible observations: the scene’s turbulent appearance rests within a carefully constructed view across successive distances. Its wildness is a pictorial achievement, assembled and ordered by an artist. ^{[4] [5]}

Hunters, animals and the beginnings of cooperation

The foreground hunter gives the broad landscape a concentrated point of action. Dressed in animal skins, he has shot an arrow into a leaping stag. Farther away, hunters and dogs pursue deer towards a precipice. The museum’s description draws attention to both encounters, making clear that hunting is more than a solitary incident inserted for atmosphere. It is the principal activity by which Cole defines this opening society. ^[1]

The repetition changes how the viewer reads the foreground figure. Seen alone, he might appear as an isolated individual confronting nature. The distant chase places him within a community whose members share the work of obtaining food. Cole’s own explanation, reproduced in the 2018 catalogue, stresses people joining together for mutual assistance in hunting. Social life is present from the beginning, before farming, elaborate architecture or large-scale commerce appears. ^[2]

There is nevertheless no softening of the hunt’s consequences. The stag is both an animal in motion and a creature under attack. The distant precipice turns another pursuit into a scene of confinement. Dogs, people and prey create an unequal contest within the apparently boundless landscape. That tension prevents the picture from becoming a simple image of freedom: the wilderness is expansive, but the lives unfolding within it remain constrained by hunger and vulnerability.

Barringer identifies a classical source for the bowman’s pose in the ancient sculpture traditionally known as the Borghese Gladiator. That connection gives the hunter a dignity borrowed from European art, even though his clothing and equipment suggest a much earlier way of life. The figure is consequently a constructed ancestor rather than a documentary portrait. Cole combines a recognisable artistic model with the activities required by his historical scheme. ^[2]

The classical association also complicates the contrast between this beginning and the later empire. A related sculptural form returns as the enormous headless statue in Destruction. The living hunter’s purposeful bodily action can thus be compared with a broken monument in the collapsing city. Barringer develops the connection between these forms. The resemblance does not make the hunter an identifiable future ruler, but it helps connect bodily strength, monumental display and violence across the cycle. ^[2]

The mountain that outlasts the action

The great mountain is the painting’s most useful landmark. Its summit carries an immense boulder whose unusual shape makes it easy to recognise when the surrounding landscape changes. Barringer describes the peak as fictional: this is a deliberately invented setting, rather than a view that can be assigned to a particular American mountain. The same landmark recurs through the subsequent scenes. ^[2]

In this first canvas, it rises above a landscape in which trees and terrain remain dominant. Its bulk makes the hunters look small, while its elevated position draws the eye away from their immediate struggle. We can follow the chase, then look upwards and recognise an entirely different scale of existence. The action of a moment and the persistence of a mountain are brought into the same view.

The boulder supplies continuity without making the five paintings identical. Cole changes viewpoints and the prominence of the landscape as human occupation develops. Recognising the peak is therefore more useful than trying to match every foreground feature from one canvas to the next. It allows the viewer to understand that the inhabited world has changed around a continuing natural structure. The museum describes this mountain as the anchor of the cycle’s narrative. ^[1]

It also modifies the meaning of the title. The people belong to the first stage of Cole’s historical sequence, but the mountain is not itself at a primitive stage. It already possesses the solidity that later wealth and architecture cannot confer. The painting’s beginning concerns a particular human history, not the beginning of nature. That distinction becomes more powerful when buildings eventually occupy much of the view and, later still, survive only as ruins.

From A Wild Scene to the finished canvas

Cole did not invent this composition in a single attempt. Its immediate predecessor was A Wild Scene, painted in 1831–32 and now in the Baltimore Museum of Art. That work brought together a looming mountain, troubled sky and hunting figures. It was an early attempt at the opening subject of the projected cycle, made before Luman Reed’s commission enabled Cole to carry out the five paintings. The owning museum records that Cole executed the completed series in narrative order and had finished The Savage State by 1834. ^[1]

Barringer’s comparison makes the revision more specific. In A Wild Scene, remembered New England forest forms coexist with European artistic influences, including an Italianate umbrella pine. Barringer finds those elements less successfully integrated than in the later canvas. His assessment of The Savage State emphasises its greater unity: the rough landscape and dark clouds now work together as a more convincing whole. The development was therefore one of composition and coordination, not merely the addition of narrative details. ^[4]

A small oil study for The Savage State, around 1834, survives at Princeton University Art Museum. The 2018 catalogue identifies it as oil on paper laid down on canvas, measuring approximately 16 × 26 cm. It includes a figure running from left to right near the position eventually occupied in the finished composition. In the large canvas, the catalogue also records a visible trace of a changed, larger huntsman beside the leaping stag. This pentimento preserves evidence that Cole reconsidered the human action while developing the picture. ^[2]

The study and alteration help explain the balance the finished work had to achieve. The hunter needed to be legible within a much larger wilderness, yet a figure too prominent could disturb the landscape’s authority. Cole’s revisions concern that relationship between narrative and setting. The catalogue describes the small studies for the cycle as relatively late compositional works, used chiefly to establish light, shade and colour. They should not automatically be treated as sketches made outdoors before the scene itself. ^[6]

Watch: Thomas Cole

Choose a film to explore the artist’s work, its interpretation and its wider setting.

Thomas Cole: Painting the American Landscape (remastered audio)

Thomas Cole National Historic Site

An introduction to Cole’s landscapes and artistic ambitions.

Watch on YouTube

▶01 · WatchPainting the American landscapeThomas Cole National Historic Site▶02 · WatchEden to EmpireThe National Gallery

What Cole meant by the first stage

Cole supplied a written explanation to accompany the completed series. In his journal entry of 29 October 1836, he recorded having written a descriptive catalogue, alongside his relief that the paintings had pleased viewers more than he had feared. The text mattered because the sequence asked its audience to recognise relationships extending beyond the visible events in any one canvas. ^[7]

For the opening picture, his explanation connected dawn and spring with the emergence of social life. The hunters’ cooperation represented its earliest organisation; huts and canoes represented the beginnings of practical making. Singing and dancing offered the beginnings of music and poetry. The museum’s account preserves these distinctions, showing that Cole did not imagine this stage as a complete absence of culture. ^[1]

The gathering around a fire at the far right is therefore an important counterpart to the chase. It shifts attention from obtaining food to shared expression. Shelters indicate a settled gathering place, however modest, while collective movement indicates activity beyond individual survival. The picture contains several kinds of human behaviour at once. Its historical argument depends on distinguishing their early forms from the elaborate institutions and arts of the later city.

Cole also inscribed his own name on a rock at the lower right. The signature belongs to the landscape’s material surface rather than to a monument or architectural plinth. The museum includes signatures among the symbolic systems that develop across the cycle. Here, the artist’s name enters a world dominated by natural forms, an appropriately restrained presence at the beginning of a sequence concerned with increasingly conspicuous human alteration. ^[1]

Reading the historical title today

The word in Cole’s title carries the assumptions of a hierarchical account of civilisation. Societies were imagined as moving from hunting through agriculture to urban wealth, with non-European peoples frequently treated as evidence of humanity’s earlier stages. Barringer places the painting within that intellectual history, including the nineteenth-century study then called ethnology. Retaining the historical title does not require accepting those categories as accurate descriptions of living cultures. ^[2]

The huts and canoes can suggest Indigenous North American life, but they do not establish a named community or a particular historical place. Barringer argues that Cole borrowed objects associated with Indigenous peoples to represent imagined European ancestors. He also proposes a possible architectural source for the conical shelters in William Chambers’s eighteenth-century treatise. The picture draws together different kinds of evidence and artistic convention rather than documenting a community observed by Cole. ^[2]

This is consequential for the way we understand its wilderness. A landscape occupied by hunters, boatmakers and people gathering around a fire is neither empty nor untouched by human knowledge. Cole’s system nevertheless measures development through the increasingly visible transformation of the land. The canvas shows a functioning society while positioning it at the lowest rung of a historical sequence. The people’s activities deserve attention independently of that ranking.

Barringer’s broader interpretation identifies a contradiction: Cole criticises empire’s destructive effects while using categories and representations shaped by imperial culture. His imaginary beginning leaves out the contemporary struggles and displacement of Indigenous peoples in the United States. That reading is a scholarly account of the painting’s omissions and assumptions, rather than a claim that it illustrates one particular removal or territorial conflict. It allows admiration for Cole’s achievement to coexist with scrutiny of the historical vision he made persuasive. ^[4]

The change into the Pastoral State

The next canvas, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, makes the first picture’s choices easier to recognise. The mountain remains, but the atmosphere becomes more even and the land more visibly cultivated. Shepherds and a ploughman replace hunting as the principal means of subsistence. Buildings, boats and a stone religious structure mark a more extensive human occupation of the setting. ^[2]

The transition also develops activities already present in The Savage State. The distant gathering around a fire finds a counterpart in pastoral dancing and music. Simple watercraft lead towards shipbuilding and trade. Practical shelters lead towards more conspicuous architecture. What changes is the scale, refinement and organisation of these activities, rather than their sudden appearance out of nothing. Cole’s first stage supplies the elements from which his second stage grows.

Yet the comparison is not simply between danger and happiness. Barringer notes that the blasted trees of the opening give way to a cut stump in the pastoral canvas. Damage caused by natural forces acquires a human counterpart as cultivation spreads. The first scene’s threatened deer also matter at the far end of the sequence: in Desolation, deer inhabit the ruined landscape without human hunters. The contrast makes the animals participants in the cycle’s changing relations between people and nature. ^[2]

Viewed alone, The Savage State is an imposing hunting landscape with an intricately organised distance. Viewed within the cycle, it becomes a store of visual memories: the mountain, morning light, deer, shelters and communal activity return in altered forms or acquire meaning through their absence. Cole’s achievement is to make this opening compelling before its consequences are known. The pursuit holds the eye now; the permanent mountain and the small beginnings of social life prepare it to recognise what happens next.

Frequently Asked Questions

References

1. New York Historical, The Course of Empire: The Savage State, object record, accession 1858.1; metadata, interpretation, description and provenance.
2. Tim Barringer, catalogue entries for The Savage State and The Arcadian or Pastoral State, and comparison with Desolation, in Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 206–209, 213–215, 217 (PDF pp. 210–213, 217–219, 221).
3. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser and Tim Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings (2018). Career context and artwork/study metadata: catalogue entries 10–66 and chronology, PDF pp. 137–231 and 249–262; related Barringer essay passages, PDF pp. 23–66.
4. Tim Barringer, “Thomas Cole’s Atlantic Crossings”, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, pp. 50–56 (PDF pp. 54–60).
5. Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, “The Exaltation of American Landscape Painting”, in John K. Howat et al., American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987, pp. 28–30 (PDF pp. 47–49).
6. Tim Barringer, catalogue introduction to The Course of Empire, in Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, 2018, p. 205 (PDF p. 209).
7. Thomas Cole, journal, 29 October 1836, in Thomas Cole’s Journal, 1834–1848, transcription published by the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, PDF p. 24.
8. Franklin Kelly et al., American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part I (National Gallery of Art, 1996). Cole catalogue and both Voyage of Life sets, PDF pp. 91–124.
9. National Gallery of Art, Study for The Mountain Ford (1846), accession 2015.19.772. Collection record and open-access image.
10. National Gallery of Art, Tree Trunks (1825–1840), accession 2015.19.607. Collection metadata and open-access image.
11. Splash image source.

    Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Savage State, ca. 1834. Oil on canvas, 99.7 × 160.7 cm. New York Historical, gift of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858 (1858.1).