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Course: The Seeing America Project > Unit 3
Lesson 2: 1700-1870- The triangle trade and the colonial table, sugar, tea, and slavery
- Celebrating American enterprise: William Sidney Mount, Bargaining for a Horse
- Dreaming big, Thomas Cole paints 4,500 years of architectural history in The Architect's Dream
- Inventing America, Colt's Experimental Pocket Pistol
- Heroes of modern surgery: Eakins' Dr. Gross and Dr. Agnew
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Dreaming big, Thomas Cole paints 4,500 years of architectural history in The Architect's Dream
Thomas Cole's painting, "The Architect's Dream," is a unique blend of architectural styles from different eras. The painting, rejected by its original commissioner, Ithiel Town, showcases Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Gothic elements. Cole's work reflects the 19th-century view of these styles as ideal, and presents a fantastical history of Western architecture. Created by Smarthistory.
Want to join the conversation?
- The carved bust shown to give us an impression of Ithiel Town does not resume the painted dreaming architect in the picture. That's fine. But did Ithiel Town EVER look like that pictured person?(1 vote)
Video transcript
(piano music) - [Lawrence] We're at
the Toledo Museum of Art. Standing in front of a large
painting by Thomas Cole. This is The Architect's Dream. It was painted in 1840 and America had never
seen anything like it. We see the capital of a
great classical column and impossibly, on top of that, laid out as if he were a classical figure, this young man, clearly an architect, holding a drawing in his
hand, lying on books, lying on knowledge itself. - [Steven] He's holding a floor plan of a Roman or Greek temple with his eyes shut, he's imaging the past and therefore thinking about
what he as an architect can do in the future. And just below and one
reads, Painted by T. Cole for I. Town, Arch, abbreviation
for Architect, 1840. - [William] Ithiel Town
asked Cole to paint for him a landscape of ancient Athens but Cole clearly deviated. - [Steven] And Ithiel Town
therefore rejected this painting. He wanted a landscape with Athens in it and instead, Cole paints this menagerie of architectural styles over millennia and Town is quoted as
saying "He liked the mixture "of different ages and styles
in the same imaginary picture" but nonetheless, he rejected the painting, he didn't fully pay for it. It ended up back with Cole and
it stayed in the Cole family until the Toledo Museum
of Art acquired it. Town wanted an identifiable landscape. - [William] What Cole does give us is a fantastical history
of the great architecture of the Western tradition. - [Steven] Egyptian pyramid with Egyptian temple in the background, obelisks in front of it and
then in the middle ground, a Doric Greek temple
with a pilastered wall leading to an Ionic Greek temple above which rests the Roman Tempietto, the round temple we see with Corinthian columns and the Roman aqueduct behind it and of course, there's even more. - [William] But all rendered
on a gargantuan scale. You can see these tiny human figures. This is a scale that even the
brilliance of Roman engineers would never achieve. I think to understand this painting, it's important to understand
how these architectural styles were understood in the 19th century. The Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman styles were considered to be
ideal, perfect architecture that we in the modern world
could only hope to re-achieve. And it's interesting to me that cole has separated
that great tradition from the Gothic by the body of water. This is the side of the
painting that we're on. This is closer to our historical moment and yet it's in shadow. It's not the height of man's achievement as the classical had been seen. But despite that, there is
some light that comes through and it comes through those
stained glass windows. And that is the
spirituality of the Gothic. - [Steven] And Cole is including that because Town worked in that style as well. It's important also to
have an awareness that the fantasy we're looking at is even accentuated by
these framing arches with curtains pulled back. This is a stage set. - [William] And even as
that figure may represent Ithiel Town's fantasy, of course ultimately, it's the artist. Although America had never
seen a painting like this, this painting is not
coming out of thin area. There was a tradition in Europe
of architectural fantasy. - [Steven] Cole who was born in England traveled back to Europe on two occasions and on these trips he
saw great works of art by Claude Lorrain, the
17th century French artist. He saw a paintings of the
contemporary artist Turner and so he was influenced
by what they had done in a fantasy modality, allegorical landscapes
commenting on human history and human civilization and this is an artist to
then would paint such series as the course of empire and here in our painting in
the Toledo Museum of Art, he's encapsulating in one large canvas an exploration of the
past and Ithiel Town, even though he didn't like the painting, we have it today as this
architect and as Cole are musing about the future. (piano music)