Thomas Cole: The Pre and Post-Lapsarian Depictions of Religion and Environment

While the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden appears to be a simple biblical scene representing the fall of man, it is in fact Thomas Cole expressing his belief that the environment is being destroyed by the progression of humanity. He uses religious symbolisms of Adam and Eve and the dichotomy of two worlds as a vehicle for his ideas.

Thomas Cole arranged the landscape to read clearly from right to left, from start to finish, or east to west. He chose this arrangement to show his skepticism of westward expansion in the 19th century. On the right side, the lush green meadow and bright colors are dominant in the composition. This pre-lapsarian world references a time before the fall of man from innocence. On the left, the dark colors and shattered tree make up parts of the post-lapsarian world. Which refers to a period of time that occurs after the fall of man. The unspoiled world is centered around ideas of purity, innocence, and fertility. As the chaotic side is broken down into concepts of pollution, violence, and barrenness.

Thomas Cole maintained hope for a collaborative existence between the human and natural worlds, rather than humanity imposing a tyrannical or dominating force over nature. At the same time, Cole understood that a harmonious relationship is not so easily achieved.

In his early years, Thomas Cole developed a strong aversion to major technological advancements. In 1801 he was born in Bolton-le-Moors, a small Lancashire town in England. This time coincided with the first phase of the Industrial Revolution that followed the Napoleonic Wars in the early 19^th century (1803-1815) (1). While a majority of the middle class prospered, Cole’s whole family suffered; due to his father’s severe and repetitive failures as a businessman. Thomas Cole’s first-hand experience of the less prosperous side of the Industrial Revolution led him to develop a powerful antipathy towards these kinds of movements. Art Historian, Alan Wallach states that Thomas Cole had a deep understanding of, “the pressures, upheavals, and dislocations imposed upon traditional communities” (2). As a result of the Industrial Revolution in England, Cole and his family were forced to become migrants to the United States.

Upon his arrival to the United States, Cole was enchanted by the vibrant American scenery; an appreciation that later influenced his religious beliefs. He was struck by the beauty of the mountains, the skies, and the forests, describing what he saw as, “the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness.” (3)

Though Thomas Cole’s religious origins were in the Episcopal church. He found inspiration for his artwork through his faith and the awe in the environment, asserting the idea in his Essay on American Scenery that, “the wilderness is yet a fitting place to speak of God.”[iii] The appreciation he had for nature evolved from; admiration for the beauty found in the natural world to another religious view. His belief in Natural religion was understood in the 19^th century as an argument that the existence of God is based on a set of observed natural facts.” (4) A duality of faith in the Christian religion and Natural Religion had a profound influence on the philosophies that structured Thomas Cole’s artwork. A combination of his religious beliefs is shown in Expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Three years before the painting, Thomas Cole completed his travels around the New York and New England regions (5). He studied the different landscapes while creating sketches and paintings to advance his artistic abilities. Cole was not a supporter of America’s quest for westward expansion; as he believed movements that searched to expand human societies generally destroyed nature’s beauty in the processes. In his Essay on American Scenery, published in 1836, Thomas Cole describes movements like Westward Expansion and the Industrial Revolution as, “ravages of the axe” (6). The ideas portrayed in his Essay will be revisited in later analysis.

In his extensive travels, Thomas Cole witnessed technological onslaughts that were occurring in the United States. He ventured up the banks of the Hudson River and witnessed the completion of the extension of the Erie Canal. The first canal in the United States to connect western waterways to the Atlantic Ocean. The following Autumn, Cole took a steamship up the new canal on the Hudson River, to the Catskill Mountains of New York State. Although he detested the movement that created the Erie Canal he still gave in to the advancements that humanity was making. At the expense of nature, humanity had once again created a technological device to grow; further advancing Westward Expansion with the invention of the steamship. The figures of Adam and Eve in Cole’s painting, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden represent humanity at the start of its progression in the natural world.

The first religious allegory is depicted through Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. In the book of Genesis, God created the first man and woman in existence and commanded them, not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve disobeyed God’s orders by eating the fruit and were then banished from the Garden of Eden for eternity. To the left of the gateway, Adam and Eve are pictured walking away from Eden, minimized within the composition.

Their posture defeated and disgraced by the virtue of their actions. Thomas Cole understands that with any advancement there is some form of cost that accompanies it, just as he noticed with the extension of the Erie Canal. From his Essay, he states, “the knowledge of the principles on which nature works, can be applied, and our dwelling-places made fitting for refined and intellectual beings” (7). As Adam and Eve forge ahead to the outer world, they take with them knowledge of the good and the evil, at the cost of their innocence and relationship with God. Thomas Cole also cautions within his allegory that if man and nature’s relationship is not soon adjusted, the world will become a desolate place.

The landscape of the Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is split between two contrasting worlds. Each positive idea expressed in the pre-lapsarian world is met with an opposing force from the Garden of Eden’s antithesis. The concepts are revealed through the contrasts between; purity and pollution, innocence and violence, and fertile and barren.

The mountains that stand throughout the background on the right side of the canvas symbolize purity. The snow-covered mountains farthest back in the composition, are a perfect representation of the wholesome structures of the White Mountains of New Hampshire. Cole describes the mountains as, “a union of the picturesque, the sublime, and the magnificent; there the bare peaks of granite, broken and desolate, cradle the clouds” (8). In the painting, the peaks of the mountains reach up and blend into the swell of the clouds in the sky before they meet the forest floor.

The second string of mountains, in front of the White Mountains, mirror New York’s Catskill Mountain range. In his essay, Cole describes the Catskill mountains as “not broken into abrupt angles like the most picturesque mountains of Italy, they have varied, undulating, and exceedingly beautiful outlines” (9). They are flanked by other, distant, peaks of a more earthen, flat, bunch of mountains with varied forms and shapes to them. There is a unique difference between the flatter plane at the top of their peaks and a more rounded top in their structures. The depictions of two effervescent and pure mountain ranges contrast with the erupting volcano in the outer realm.