The Course of Empire: The Savage State
Thomas Cole (c. 1834 (series 1834–1836))
Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire: The Savage State inaugurates his five-part cycle with a landscape ruled by <strong>wildness</strong> and <strong>origin</strong>. Dawn breaks at left as storm clouds rake a flat-topped crag, while a hunter looses an arrow, canoes cut the river, and smoke lifts from skin tents—signals of a society at the threshold of history <sup>[1]</sup><sup>[2]</sup><sup>[3]</sup>.
