Thanks very much. Two introductions. That's just an embarrassment of riches.
And I will add my thanks to the things that have already been given.
I won't introduce myself again and thereby make a third introduction.
But being that it's the first of such occasions, I do want to extend my thanks to those who have really been my tenure here at Oxford.
So enriching and enjoyable, beginning with the history of art department here.
Absolutely excellent colleagues, fantastic students who've just done everything to welcome me and make this real ideal to academic home.
I'd also like to thank Wister College, who invited me to be a visiting fellow while I am here.
And as you can see from your walk to the auditorium, Wister is an exquisitely beautiful place and I have the distinct pleasure of living in college.
So I get to enjoy it every single day. And it will be it'll be very difficult to leave.
I leave with a heavy heart. And last but not least, I would like to thank my funder's the Terra Foundation for American Art, as Craig intimated.
A really remarkable organisation based in Chicago and Paris whose generosity has really been responsible for a transformation in the field.
There's no other word for it through its commitment to supporting the exploration of the art of the United States through grants and
fellowships and sponsor professorships like the one that I have and educational programmes in Europe and I think starting now in Asia.
So I can think of no other word to describe the terabit vital and its impact, for which, again, I am very, very grateful.
The Turner Foundation, I will say, is a kind of commercial for America's cool.
But it isn't the cherry. The backer of the America's Cool Modernism exhibition,
which is currently on view at the Ashmolean and includes treasures of modern art never before seen in Britain.
And I encourage all of you to see it if you have not already. So before we get into the subject for today and indeed for this series as a whole,
I thought I might take a moment to make a few remarks about American art and
why it is an exciting and compelling field in which to think as a scholar.
The American artist Andrew Wyeth once said, Talking art bores me and I hate to let.
I hate to get caught painting. I have such ah, strong romantic fantasy about things, and that's what I paint.
If you don't back up your dreams with truth, you have a very round shouldered art.
You see. I don't say, well, now I'm going to go out and paint something.
To hell with that characteristically unpolished wife's words.
Give us much to think about in answering the question of what is American art like the United States itself.
It's a paradox. It was born from the rationality and empiricism of the age of enlightenment.
But quick to render such self-evident truths unstable.
It was powerfully invested in admiring nature as a source of divine regeneration.
But at the same time, practical, pragmatic in terms of the role or it could play in the life of its practitioners and viewers.
American art can be suspicious of refinement. It's tough.
It cannot be round shouldered. But that does not or not always equate to a lack of subtlety or seriousness.
And as we see again in Wyatts example, it captures both the light of the working day and the undulating lace fringe on a diaphanous street.
I'm frequently asked and more frequently than one might think.
What makes American art an important enough field within art history to distinguish it from European art?
Indeed, American art is a recent field of study and one of the fastest growing.
Owing to its tremendous, inclusive city,
it's a field that has been and in many ways will be marked by its original position as a fringe field with an institutional disadvantage.
In the shadow of the importance of European art history.
But in places, American art history came to be known for its development of a promiscuous methodology.
American art history is, for instance,
unusually receptive to taking quite seriously the advent of print and popular culture into the vernacular culture in the form of furniture,
tools, inventions and technology. It's also, I think, very special in its interdisciplinarity and borrowing, especially from literature.
It has benefited greatly from a broad interest in ethnic sub specialisation and the desire to problematise the singular notion of American identity.
And recently with thanks to the Terra Foundation. It is aspired to make borders appear as different and arbitrary that what it
is to be American lacks permanent footing on the continent of North America.
The tension between location and dislocation newly animates questions about Americanism and its transnational dimensions.
I gave this lecture series, the title, The Body of a Nation to capture the sense of a body without a border.
These four presumptions are connected by their consideration of how bodies figure in American art history,
in the curious resistance of America to cohere in the various bodily symbols attached to it.
In fact, the idea of an American body was troubled right from the start.
Colonial white Americans knew themselves as Europeans who black the body, the body represented by the King of England,
which represented an intangible God and a cohesive empire ramping up to the revolution.
Human dismemberment was a powerful visual for the American separation from Britain when confronted with the task of uniting the colonies.
Human imagery failed in such representation because it had regal connotations as just one example.
Benjamin Franklin tentatively represented America as a serpent, grossly secular, unadorned and detached.
But the human body. Its pleasure. Pain. Triumph.
Bondage. Freedom. Defeat and sickness, and especially its distance from our attachment to the body of a nation has been in question ever since.
Time calls destruction was painted in 36. It is a scene of chaos and slaughter.
The gleaming white neoclassical buildings suggest that once a once great civilisation,
replete with temples, government and banks, its stunning architecture hugs the coastline.
Evidence of the importance of a maritime economy from which it derived apparently great and enviable wealth.
The promontory, the central part of the composition, rises above the city, solid and craggy and lush with nature.
It might provide a refuge for those fortunate to escape the fatal clash below its stability and parameter amplitude contrast.
The overloaded suspension bridge sagging with the weight of bodies and horses who will
inevitably be cast into the tempestuous harbour once the source of such great pride.
But now there is no economic order on the sea, just wind and smoke.
The great statues of their gods have been beheaded, blind to the carnage, unwilling,
unable to save even the innocents from the demonic thirst for blood and blood.
It must be mentioned, is spectacularly everywhere. The focal point of this human tragedy is the figure at the bottom centre.
The figure closest to the viewer, illuminated by a shard of light and purple framed by the Marble Arch of the bridge.
Pursued by a kindergarten, she looks over her shoulder and narrowly escapes murder by the means.
Most grim, her own self-destruction, her suicide.
Of all the ways to represent the pathos of the human condition. Suicide is surely the most desperate.
In what follows, I will explore the image of suicide in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
whose meaning and culture legibility pertained pretty closely to the suicides of enslaved African and African-Americans.
Cole, who is the most storeyed of American landscape painters, the so-called father of the Hudson River school, was not an outspoken abolitionist.
He was, however, as you might already be able to tell a moralist who warned against the dangers of a decadent civilisation.
We may never really discern. Cole's private attitudes towards race.
Most likely, he was in step with his contemporaries who were white Americans in New England.
But the fact that he would hinge his spectacular masterpiece on the figure of suicide suggests the
emotional texture and political complexity of slavery brought to the character of antebellum America,
both North and South.
What I see haunting coal's destruction is this a highly public and greatly sensationalised instance of suicide in the 19th century,
known as Addas leap in the silence of the earliest morning hours of the 19th of December 1815,
Elizabeth Blake, the wife of the Washington, D.C. area, James Blake,
was awakened suddenly by the sound of a crash and a whale rousing her husband, who was a physician.
They rushed out into the street to see what was the matter, and they found the body of a black woman who later identified herself.
Hannah, who had defenestrated from an attic window. The fall had broken both of her arms and shattered her spine.
But she had survived. The building from which Anna had jumped was Miller's Tavern, a site known for holding enslaved African-Americans awaiting sale.
Anna's story, while exceptional for the publicity it generated, was also depressingly common.
Born into slavery in Maryland, Anna worked for her enslaver until he succumbed to debt, at which point she was sold to another owner within Maryland.
When that enslaver also succumb to debt and I was sent to Washington to be sold as a car full of slaves destined for Georgia in the Deep South.
This was technically against the law.
After an 18 hour wait, federal ordinance prohibited both the importation of slaves from Africa and also the interstate slave trade,
such as from Maryland to Georgia.
However, the explosion of American Colt cotton cultivation, which served a flourishing machine powered textile industry in Great Britain,
drove the demand for more slaves, which were in short supply to work on Southern cotton plantations.
Mary's Tavern was one amongst many corrupt businesses that illegally held slaves to be sold under subterfuge across state lines.
Suicides at millers were not unknown. There we are again.
Before Atah, another enslaved woman, had sliced open her own throat rather than live with the humiliation and depravity of slavery.
To be sent to Georgia was any way a fate like death, as it was understood that these enslaved men, women and children alike would be forced to work.
Harvesting cotton to work in the cotton fields meant exhausting long days in unbearable late summer heat and the constant fear of the whip.
As you can see from this stereographic photograph, the overseer mounted on horseback, monitored every movement.
Slaves were severely chastised if they did not bring in the same amount of cotton or more than the previous day.
But what did suicide mean conceptually? Within late 18th and early 19th century European and American society in general,
suicide was considered a sin and a crime, essentially self murder, according to the church.
The despair of life was something meant to be endured and not escaped.
Victims of suicide might be denied certain liturgical rites, or it may have been interpreted.
Right out of shame, under English law, suicide was a felony against the crown because it robbed the monarch of a subject empathetically.
It's interesting to know that suicide was decriminalised here in the United Kingdom only in 1961.
So quite recently, by the time of the American Revolution, however,
local jurisdictions began to turn against felony verdicts in suicide cases in favour of
something called non compos mentis or of an unsound mind in the legal system today.
This is known as temporary insanity.
The American statesman Thomas Jefferson recognised the role of emotional distress and mental illness that would lead someone to take their own life,
including the enslaved. Jefferson, as a notorious slave holder in Virginia, would know something of the subject.
As horrifying as it sounds today, slave suicide was fairly commonplace in the early American republic in 1883.
St. Simons Island, Georgia, was the site of one of the largest mass suicides of slaves there.
Seventy five Igbo captives from Nigeria organised a revolt.
A bold aboard the slave ship York killed their captors, grounded the ship and drowned themselves in the sea,
enslaved people of the bar and Assante Origin also understood suicide as an honourable death.
In response to captivity, conversely to enslavers, self-destruction was one of the most grievous offences.
A slave could commit it robbed the enslaver of property and needed to be avoided at all costs.
If a slave had killed himself, slave owners might force living slaves to decapitate, dismember or gibbet.
That is, to cover the body of the deceased in pitch and rivet it into an iron cage for display in order to deter others from the attempt.
Taking the larger view. Slave suicide implicitly toppled the hierarchy of slavery.
It was the ultimate act of subjective resistance against a system that regarded the enslaved of having no personhood.
In 1915, abolitionism was just starting to take root in America's more enlightened quarters, and asleep became the symbol of the oppression,
poverty and a rallying point abolition, large in part to Jesse Tauri, a young Medick who had been touring Washington around the time of the incident.
Moved by the tragedy and indeed the perversity of the visible slave trade and slave labour in the capital city,
pouring out to interview Anna along with other enslaved persons.
And these accounts were published in the portraiture of domestic slavery in the United States.
Wentworth asked Anna why she attempted to take her own life.
She replied. They brought me away with two of my children and wouldn't let me see my husband.
I was so confused and distracted. I didn't know what I was about.
The fear of breakneck conditions in the Deep South was only one part of the story.
Tory's report attributed and his suicide attempt to another one of the most terrorising fact facts of chattel slavery,
which was the alienation of wives and husbands and parents from children,
and one of the likeliest punishments to occur because slaves were understood as merely property.
And without a free will, they were not permitted legally to marry,
even though many did enter into unrecognised unions celebrated as broomstick weddings.
As you can see from this 1899 engraving, slaves also had children, which were also understood as the property of the enslaver.
And I told Terry that she and her husband had two daughters, that Anna said she was confused and distracted.
After separation from her husband proved to white and abolitionists who were gaining
momentum in the north that slaves suicide was not a result of sinful self-indulgence,
but rather that the trauma of enslavement took men and women out of their right minds non compos mentis.
Additionally, by Lincoln and as temporary insanity to the separation from her family,
she became a paragon of feminine virtue and her suicide attempt thus redeemed as constantly moral.
To bring us back into the realm of the visual now Atari's, it was illustrated by an engraving of a.
Leap by Alexander Reiter, a Philadelphia illustrator. By all means, it's a very stiff rendering.
Notwithstanding writer's image worked within the emerging abolitionist.
Visual codes aim to drum up the sympathies of its white readership.
The only figure in the composition we perceive is isolation and therefore her separation from her husband as a key part of the narrative.
Her muslin dress has an open neckline, revealing her DeCola Tage, suggesting her vulnerability to this systemic rape of female slaves.
That was a known part of coercing them into submission.
But its gleaming whiteness, set against the nocturnal darkness of the scene, maintains her essential virtue.
Additionally, the two cypress trees in the background bear strong historical connexions to cemetery hedges,
leading the sense of and as Christianity intact.
And as image and story had a massive impact with a growing set of abolitionist troops circulating in the first half of the 19th century,
which at the same time sentimentalised and politicised the tragedies experienced by the enslaved.
One result is that the trope of slave suicide became significantly gendered.
The image of the self-destructive male slave, which was already a part abolitionist rhetoric,
was most rendered in terms plasticised gesture, finding ultimate human freedom through agency over death.
The instrument of male self murder was the dagger which had an established visual precedent in the suicide of Cato.
The younger, as we see in show loopholes interpretation from 16 46.
By contrast, the representation of Anna's leap seemed to lack such intentionality, separated from her husband and her male protectors.
We were led to believe that Anna sought death by defending outrating as a response speculatively to an intense pursuit of her sexual innocence.
Such imagery tugged at the heartstrings of white male abolitionists who felt persuaded to protect DNA
as much as white women who sympathise with Anna's debilitating loss of family stability cognitively.
The many accounts and interviews of Anna generations after her suicide attempt did not recount
her own valiance prosecution of the United States government in the federal court system,
which earned her freedom. In 1832, instead, abolitionists focussed on the heart wrenching story of the extreme suffering she withstood,
which led her into insanity and asleep and not, and his freedom thus be fit.
The intense emotional appeals needed to justify the end of slavery to whites.
Thus, we have two images of suicide. One in white and one in black.
One a painting highlighting a woman under duress, fleeing into the burning sea.
And one an enslaved woman separated from her spouse and sold into the known horror of failed slavery in the Deep South,
who leapt from the attic window of a Washington tavern.
And now, with these images in mind, we return to Thomas Cole, America's pre-eminent landscape painter,
a moralist who infused art with an eye to the land and world economies.
We hope to suggest that these two suicides, white and black, are of the same substance and belong, if you will, to the same body.
On the archive alone, we may not know about Cole's opinion of slavery,
but we know beyond any doubt his experience with the existences of Labour calling us.
Born in Lancashire in 1881, the son of religious dissenters in a town called Bolton the Moors,
Lancashire, then, as now, is a place of great geographical diversity,
ranging from areas of spectacular wilderness,
immense meadows and mud marshes to windswept plains to the port cities embracing the powdery and craggy coastline of the Irish Sea.
Lancashire was also a vital place for English wealth production in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
owing especially to a steep increase in the manufacture of cotton textiles.
The maritime city of Liverpool. Not now, but historically understood to be situated in Lancashire.
Dominated in the transatlantic trade,
including the slave trade owing to its access via roads and inland waterways to lucrative merchandise traded in North America and Africa.
Cloth from Lancashire and Yorkshire and guns from Birmingham.
In contrast to the urbane coast,
the Cole family eventual Bolton was by all accounts a grim place and an example of the costs of industrialisation for the livelihoods of its workers.
Factories belch smoke and the water was polluted. Public sanitation an afterthought.
English landscape has captured the compromises of this industrialisation.
Up to Rothenberg's Colebrook Dale by night of 18,
no one illustrates the infernal feel of a Shropshire town which had for some time been at the forefront of smelting,
was the home of the coal fired blast furnace. In this dramatic painting, the viewer gets the sense of the extreme.
Disruption and perhaps of industrial work. The round the clock toil and its concomitant toll on countryside life.
Similarly, we get an idea of life in Bolton through Leeds 1816.
I picture the great GMW Turner, an artist who would later have a profound impact on coal.
Although Leeds is in Yorkshire, it was connected by a turnpike road to where coal lived in Chorley.
As an adolescent here, the English moors are unsettling with me, punctuated by smokestacks releasing their filth into a hazy, bluish sky.
In addition to its cost to the environment, there were human costs as well. Increased automation rendered the skilled workforce redundant.
By the opening decade of the 19th century, domestic spinning was replaced by machine spinning,
throwing an entire generation of textile workers into unemployment and poverty.
These problems right here across the north of England and Lancashire in particular, Bolton, which was once held in renown for a skilled hand weaving,
was in a state of complete and utter crisis, and it became the site of the most extreme clashes between unemployed workers and authorities.
It was not generationally the case that working people in Britain took action against their employers because they feared violent retribution.
But the severity of the problem contributed to the growing Luddite rebellion organised under the fictional character of Ned Ludd,
who sought to disrupt the industry by breaking looms and setting fire to the mills.
In 1812, eight rioters wilfully smashed the steam powered looms at Westhoven Mill in Bolton before setting it alight.
As seen in the background of this cartoon. In the aftermath, four of the accused rioters were publicly hung and seven were transported to Australia.
And the whole incident was so extreme that manufacturers bypassed Bolton for an entire generation.
The presumably conservative caricaturists here intended to humiliate Ned Lud by putting
him in a dress made of the typical Kalikow fabric produced by Lancashire Mills.
But as of some, as some have noted, this does hardly to make him seem weak or diminutive at all.
His father was ambitious but unlucky. He tried and failed to make his fortune in Bolton.
Then in Chorley, then in Liverpool and then in America.
The Cole family, having emigrated in 1818, arriving first in Philadelphia and then settling inland in the town of Steubenville, Ohio.
Amidst the volatility of his father's business ventures, the younger Cole worked consistently and showed considerable promise as an artist.
He worked as a Kalikow designer in Chali. Later, he apprenticed as an engraver in Liverpool,
a type of practical artistic employment that no doubt exposed him to a wide range of British landscape art and the conventions of the picturesque,
which many, many scholars have noted filtered through to calls later and bolder approach to the American landscape.
Still quite young, but with some experience, he worked as an engravers assistant in Philadelphia,
where he remained when his parents and sisters moved to Ohio.
It is unknown whether such a young man would have known Alexander writer, the illustrator Tery employed to illustrate and his leap.
But it is likely Cole's decision to momentarily separate from his family symbolises the moment in every young
man's life when he seeks to be independent from his father's reputation or lack thereof in pursuit of his own.
I do not think Cole's work was particularly inspiring to him as an engraver, as engraving itself could be highly tedious.
But the conversation about art in Philadelphia and New York in the early 19th century increasingly took on the flavour of an exciting sort.
A younger generation of American artists began to turn away from the customary portrait in history, painting genres to explore landscapes,
the North American landscape presumptively unexplored and magical views of mountains and forests,
waterfalls that they did believed did not rival, but rather surpassed that of any other place.
Cole, drawn to nature, began to form an identity less as an engraver and more as an artist and finally seeking to come into his own.
He arrived in New York City in 1825, and I'm tempted to say here and the rest is history.
Kahn found tremendous success in New York, a city that was basking in its economic prosperity.
After the opening of the Erie Canal, which connected it via waterway to the agriculturally rich Midwest and eastward to the globe,
taking special interest in the dramatic views in the Catskill Mountain range just a short distance up the Hudson River from Manhattan.
Cole specialised in landscape painting that not only depicted the exquisite American wilderness,
but also told a story in the stunning Catskill Falls called Dramatised the features of the landscape.
He clung to the bold interplay of light and shadow, familiar to him from British, a picturesque painting but adopted a much higher point of view,
one that affords a powerful panoramic vision of American nature,
an operatic gesture that lends itself to the loftier symbolism of the divine in New York.
Cole redressed his father's failures by cultivating a wealthy clientele comprised of the city's elder Dutch trading class.
These are patriotic landowners who intuitively responded to calls aggrandisement of their dominion.
He did so in one way by achieving impressive scale in canvases that were appropriately easel sized, saleable commodities.
Jewel. Like objects for display, an elegant drawing rooms.
His clientele favourite views that call strategically evacuated if human presence particularly angled
away from the energetic encroachment of industry that was creeping into America's rural New England.
The count canals and turnpikes that began to link factories to towns and towns to cities.
America was eaten in cold and cold and kneelers mind's eye.
But the flood was yet to come. America was industrialising and quickly.
This was all too familiar to young coal from Bolton L'Amour's enriched by his success in New York.
He set out for London, Paris and Italy.
Perfectly natural voyage for any American artists seeking to improve his and by studying with a sophisticated and established elite,
as well as from the works of old masters.
And what Cole saw in Europe enriched his vocabulary or form and found expression in his later paintings, especially destruction.
And the Course of Empire series to which it belongs. Far from the idealised grand tour in his mind, calls was a problematic voyage on several fronts,
not least of which was the backdrop of continued major political instability and labour unrest in
Britain that eventually resulted in the controversial and largely imperfect Great Reform Act of 1832.
In London, Cole took up residence at number four Grafton, way near the newly built Regent's Park,
which symbolised London's role as the richest and most important imperial European capital.
By the way, don't go looking for a number for Grafton Way. It's like a Carphone Warehouse or something, so you can skip it, OK?
The artist that he met, he met artists that he admired, like John Martin and Turner, and developed an encouraging friendship with John Constable.
It was especially John Martin's highly romantic dramatisations of biblical scenes evident in such works as The Evening of the Deluge.
And those shows are his feast, which appealed to the millenarian aspect of Cole's religious upbringing.
He was disappointed when a cache of paintings did not achieve pride of place at the Royal Academy and failed to sell, continuing his travels in Italy.
However, Cole recovered somewhat. He was very moved by the monuments of antiquity, absorbed equally by their impressiveness and their decay in all.
Cole returned to the United States in 1832, grateful for what he saw,
but with a weird eye toward Old-World Empire that seemed less ready to understand him and with a renewed awareness of modern day political strife,
which was attendant to pecuniary anxieties.
Cole's masterwork, The Course of Empire, was thought up in Britain, but it tells us as much or more about his American anxieties.
To that end, the title itself is borrowed from George Barclays' 1726 poem versus on the prospect of planting parts and learning in America.
The first line of which is the most cited Westword. The course of empire takes its way.
There were five paintings the savage state, the Arcadian State, the consummation of empire, destruction and desolation.
I will allow calls from words penned in his London sketch sketchbook of 1829 to animate us now.
He says. A series of pictures illustrating the mutation of terrestrial things this cycle should commence with a picture of utter wilderness.
The human figures should be savages, indicating in their occupations that their means of subsistence is the chase.
The second picture should be a sunrise here and there.
Groups of peasants in the field. The third picture should be a noon day, seeing a gorgeous city with piles of magnificent architecture.
All that can be combined to show the fullness of prosperity, wealth and luxury.
The fourth should be a stormy battle and the burning of the city with all the concomitant scenes of horror.
The fifth should be a sunset. A scene of ruins, dilapidated temples.
All of these scenes ought to have the same location ending in tragedy.
The course of empire is a warning.
The exacerbated tone, of course, of empire, however, did not immediately appeal to Cole's usual aristocratic New York clientele.
Once eager to moralise against the din the dangers of industrialism, a value that Cole enthusiastically shared,
the landed gentry found that indeed industrialisation enriched their investments.
And this would have been especially true in the period of extraordinary wealth accumulation accumulation circa 1830,
when Anglo American banking and trade was at an all time high.
Motivated by the tremendous productivity of the British textile industry,
America positioned itself to be the world's second meeting country in the production of cotton cloth,
with factories pounding in cold, cherished rural New England, finding all other potential buyers ambivalent.
The course of Empire found its patron in Mr Lumin read,
a self-made businessman and social climber who sought out patronage as a mark of distinction in the eyes of New York society.
Reed was more impressed by Cole's reputation than the themes and aesthetics of his extraordinary paintings.
And at last, we come to slavery once more in the elaborate procession in the foreground of consummation.
The third painting, called, includes several black figures, which he called in his diary captives on foot, well appointed and unchained.
These enslaved Africans disavow rather than reinforce any realistic connexion to the misery to which chattel slavery pertains.
Cole knew this. His own loss of patronage. When he returned from Europe was connected to financial speculation and surging cotton prices,
which in turn over and down the interstate slave trade by 1836.
However, his worst fears materialised.
A food shortage in Britain destabilised London's hyperbolic lending to the American South, and the curtailments came fully into view.
American cotton prices sank and slavery became a national flashpoint for the tragic, ongoing insanity of greed suggestively.
One lone figure in the consummation parade holds her face in her hands,
blinding herself as the marching slaves approach standing back from destruction.
The suicidal figure is one amongst hundreds or thousands. The general scene of overt despair.
But how Cole wants us to see this isolated figure. By now, I think you already know.
Taking the intimate view, her torso is surrounded by the sea.
The boiling sea, the sea of imperial abundance, the sea that for coal was the place of passing from his history into his future.
The sea across which the course of empire made its way surrounded by impending danger.
She's the embodiment of suicide, non compos mentis, perhaps too convenient a metaphor for feminine innocence in danger,
but a compelling metaphor for any of Cole's viewers who understood all of its implications and its moral ambiguities.
She rises onto a marble ledge and inclines against the air like Anna and enslaved black woman who knew exactly what her future held,
who stepped into a window frame in the silence of an early morning and jumped.
Questions. And I should say that I'm not supposed to move around because of microphone things, so I won't.
And then if you ask a question, I will repeat it for recording.
So I open the score. Yes.
Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm.
Hmm, hmm. Yeah.
Yeah. So the question is about Native American removal as another kind of comparative example for the idea,
of course, of empire, and particularly with an eye toward a certain American artwork's vanderlyn.
What was the example you mentioned? Oh, yeah.
The Last of the Mohicans. Yes. Yes. Right. Yeah.
Right. Yeah. Now, that's fine. There were no. Who did. Was right.
But. Cora.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
Yes. Yes, I agree. I think that all of that is part of the extremely painful story of how The New Republic established its dominion in North America.
I guess taking a historical view, what I'd say is that I didn't mention Jacksonian Democracy sort of head on here because there's no time.
And how how detailed do you get?
But one of the things that one of the things about Andrew Jackson as a president was a kind of American version of utilitarianism,
which had both political benefits and also a very deleterious consequences for both the institution of the
state or the enslaved who were trapped in the institution of slavery and and also for Native Americans.
And I think part of that was this idea of appealing to a white middle class.
But at all costs or at any cost was really what was motivating that.
And this, of course, this period coincides or you're absolutely right,
with Indian removal and all sorts of other kinds of deeply, deeply problematic, deeply problematic things.
So I think, you know, from the from Cole's perspective, he he just he would have been Jacksonian ism, the kind of bombast of Jacksonian.
He hated it. I mean, he was you know, coal is also this tricky figure because in many ways quite conservative and appealed to a conservative elite.
But also, on the other hand, had these very deep set feelings about Labour and these very sentimental, although he wouldn't characterise it that way.
But sentimental feelings about religion.
And that makes him sort of an interesting, paradoxical, rich study to study because he all of that is kind of contained,
contained therein and feeling as though I'm not answering your question.
Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes.
How is that for the answer to the question. I agree. Yes.
Ages and ages.
Sorry, say the last part again. Oh, yes.
Right. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Thank you. That's a great question. It's about the the part in the talk,
which was about images of male suicide versus female suicide and more particularly as an agency over death and how perhaps the Haitian revolution,
18 or for 18 to eight much earlier than OK.
Yeah. So end of the 18th century factors into that, which is it does absolutely factor.
And one of the things that happens in the South is from about the time of the turn
of the century is that enslavers become profoundly anxious about slave rebellion.
And so this also coincides with 1888, which is the moment when interstate slave trade is banned and also importation of slaves from Africa.
And so the whole institution is kind of roiling from within.
The enslavers became, from what I understand, more severe in their punishment in order to deter rebellion.
So, for example, I'll be talking a little bit about this next week.
So don't give away all the answers, but particularly as it turns on things like slave literacy,
which had always been against the law but became especially fractious and contentious.
After after the slave rebellions. And I would add that Denmark faces rebellion and all of those.
So so really, I think that it's it is part of how the institution is grasping for legitimacy.
How a moribund institution is grasping for legitimacy is borne out in the in the severity of how the slaves were driven.
And it has massive consequences for for the enslaved.
And what we know about. Deciding what to do.
And I was uncomfortable with it. Yes, that's nice.
Yeah, yeah. Right.
Right. Yeah, I know. Thank you for the big questions about the cyclical the cyclical nature, of course, of empire.
Later, he does another one called Voyage of Life,
which was understood as a sort of cycle painting cycle series of paintings and how that fits in with dissenting.
And it goes back to what we recall, millenarian ism.
Let's see. I don't like to go back too far. Maybe I do. But he was he was very moved by John Martin.
So the evening of the deluge, I didn't really go into detail here.
But I think that you can see a lot of comparisons with it and certainly with Belshazzar Feast from from
the Old Testament and the idea being that the world is totally corrupt and is going to go up in flames,
but that nature will eventually come back.
And that was the part about decay that was most the most important to coal, is that nature remained so in the course of empire.
The enduring feature is the promontory. So it's it's here.
And then pan and zoom in. It goes to the other side and then it's here in the background.
It's similar here and also here.
And notably, the column is being overtaken, literally overtaken by moths and like and and so nature is coming back to reclaim human civilisation.
And I think that that was that was in a way because coal felt so strongly about how God in nature or how God could be read through nature,
that this was, in a way, providence sort of washing everything away and starting a new a very sort of antediluvian post alluvium kind of idea.
And so, yes, I think that his millenarian is the millenarian ism of Martin really influenced him.
And that certainly as a religious dissenter, that was very much a part of his part of his world view.
And and I think I think I need to think more about how coal positioned himself.
These are the evangelical movements in America in the 1920s and 30s, which were not really like British dissenting,
but were absolutely happening and were happening primarily in upstate New York where coal was working.
And those groups, those evangelical groups in the 20s and 30s were highly abolitionist.
And and that and that is something that I that I don't know but is a great point.
Came to generation. Right.
And then on top of that is in Canada right now.
And so on, that 32. We Statue of Liberty at her by woman.
And I like my personal heroes.
I see a lot of kids with that email.
You know, you see me now if you ask me if I see any way possible that such a severe infection.
She also a male. Yes.
Maybe read.
Now that that does the the remark was about not just black and white, but also male female dichotomies and tensions which exist in the painting.
And actually the reason I'm doing this is because I have a nice little picture of it right here.
I just I'm not going crazy. Yes, that's that's a really that's a really beautiful reading.
My intention here was just to sort of flag or alert people the ways to the ways in which abolition Nizam was gendered.
I think that was my sort of goal and that it is that it no doubt intersects race and gender, no doubt intersect in in that and.
You know, I have to I take your point very well, I would have to think a little bit more about it,
but I always sort of was struck by how that detail of the woman in the victory parade, who's the one who's hiding her eyes.
You know, I think that is also a really interesting.
Figure, because it's tiny, but it's definitely a woman.
And I think, you know, and the gesture is ambiguous.
But I'm sort of reading it is some like she's covering her head or something's going on and she's the only one that really is doing that,
whereas everyone else has their gaze kind of fixed on this victorious emperor who's returning from wherever.
The other thing, too, is to pick up on the earlier comment.
I looked very carefully at Martyn's painting of the deluge and a sort of tumultuous as it is,
there's no figure which seems to be willing themselves into death.
Everyone is kind of clinging on for dear life. And this seems the this departure Cole's departure from this, I think is special in that way.
And why I why I chose to highlight it here.
Do we have one more question? Yeah, good.
Yes. Oh, the figure in desolation.
Question is about the figure in desolation. Wow.
Well, I can't find it right now.
What I will say about it, though, is that there is a time when we think about figures.
We're clearly here. It's not Native American figures.
That would have been something that Cole was enthused about representing.
Most likely because he saw paintings in London of Aboriginal Australian people in paintings.
So he was kind of thinking about indigenous city there.
And then for him in the Arcadian state, it's replaced by white figures who are engaged in the beginnings of civilisation.
So quite clearly, there was a kind of interiority which he ascribed to to two native figures.
And the reason why I say that is that would be interesting to know if we could find the figure here, what body that figure has and.
Yes. Where would you like it by?
OK. So I wanted to show I me be desolations.
The attempt to find this guy. He just flat out.