This week Benjamin Miller is joined by filmmaker Rachel Gould, better known on YouTube as the Art Tourist, to discuss Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire cycle of about 1834–1836. A watershed in the genre of landscape painting, Cole’s canvases use an allegory of empire—germination, prosperity, decline—to preach a cautionary tale about environmental and spiritual overreach. It was message delivered with earnest intent to the citizens of the young and ravenous American republic, and is hardly less relevant today.

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