The Garden of Eden

Painted in 1828, The Garden of Eden belongs to Cole's first decade as the founding figure of the Hudson River School, a period when he was consolidating both his reputation and his ambition to use landscape as moral and spiritual argument. Cole had emigrated from England in 1818 and found in the American wilderness a subject that European painting had not yet claimed; by the mid-1820s he was exhibiting panoramic landscapes to considerable critical acclaim in New York. This work stands apart from his topographical wilderness scenes because it is overtly theological: Cole reaches beyond American geography into scriptural imagination, staging Genesis as a sublime and luminous panorama in the tradition of John Martin's apocalyptic visions, but without Martin's melodrama. The painting was exhibited at the National Academy of Design and helped establish Cole's reputation as a painter of ideas as much as places. It anticipates the grand allegorical cycle The Course of Empire (1833 to 1836) by showing Cole already willing to harness landscape to a narrative of civilizational meaning. The picture is now held by the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.