1 00:00:00,660 --> 00:00:05,490 Thanks very much. Two introductions. That's just an embarrassment of riches. 2 00:00:05,490 --> 00:00:10,860 And I will add my thanks to the things that have already been given. 3 00:00:10,860 --> 00:00:14,310 I won't introduce myself again and thereby make a third introduction. 4 00:00:14,310 --> 00:00:21,300 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. 5 00:00:21,300 --> 00:00:27,750 So enriching and enjoyable, beginning with the history of art department here. 6 00:00:27,750 --> 00:00:35,910 Absolutely excellent colleagues, fantastic students who've just done everything to welcome me and make this real ideal to academic home. 7 00:00:35,910 --> 00:00:40,890 I'd also like to thank Wister College, who invited me to be a visiting fellow while I am here. 8 00:00:40,890 --> 00:00:50,580 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. 9 00:00:50,580 --> 00:00:56,730 So I get to enjoy it every single day. And it will be it'll be very difficult to leave. 10 00:00:56,730 --> 00:01:05,420 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. 11 00:01:05,420 --> 00:01:16,980 A really remarkable organisation based in Chicago and Paris whose generosity has really been responsible for a transformation in the field. 12 00:01:16,980 --> 00:01:23,940 There's no other word for it through its commitment to supporting the exploration of the art of the United States through grants and 13 00:01:23,940 --> 00:01:34,120 fellowships and sponsor professorships like the one that I have and educational programmes in Europe and I think starting now in Asia. 14 00:01:34,120 --> 00:01:42,700 So I can think of no other word to describe the terabit vital and its impact, for which, again, I am very, very grateful. 15 00:01:42,700 --> 00:01:47,430 The Turner Foundation, I will say, is a kind of commercial for America's cool. 16 00:01:47,430 --> 00:01:50,640 But it isn't the cherry. The backer of the America's Cool Modernism exhibition, 17 00:01:50,640 --> 00:01:57,420 which is currently on view at the Ashmolean and includes treasures of modern art never before seen in Britain. 18 00:01:57,420 --> 00:02:06,660 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, 19 00:02:06,660 --> 00:02:10,980 I thought I might take a moment to make a few remarks about American art and 20 00:02:10,980 --> 00:02:18,860 why it is an exciting and compelling field in which to think as a scholar. 21 00:02:18,860 --> 00:02:25,880 The American artist Andrew Wyeth once said, Talking art bores me and I hate to let. 22 00:02:25,880 --> 00:02:33,830 I hate to get caught painting. I have such ah, strong romantic fantasy about things, and that's what I paint. 23 00:02:33,830 --> 00:02:39,500 If you don't back up your dreams with truth, you have a very round shouldered art. 24 00:02:39,500 --> 00:02:43,760 You see. I don't say, well, now I'm going to go out and paint something. 25 00:02:43,760 --> 00:02:49,250 To hell with that characteristically unpolished wife's words. 26 00:02:49,250 --> 00:02:56,450 Give us much to think about in answering the question of what is American art like the United States itself. 27 00:02:56,450 --> 00:03:03,230 It's a paradox. It was born from the rationality and empiricism of the age of enlightenment. 28 00:03:03,230 --> 00:03:08,330 But quick to render such self-evident truths unstable. 29 00:03:08,330 --> 00:03:15,590 It was powerfully invested in admiring nature as a source of divine regeneration. 30 00:03:15,590 --> 00:03:24,680 But at the same time, practical, pragmatic in terms of the role or it could play in the life of its practitioners and viewers. 31 00:03:24,680 --> 00:03:29,600 American art can be suspicious of refinement. It's tough. 32 00:03:29,600 --> 00:03:38,310 It cannot be round shouldered. But that does not or not always equate to a lack of subtlety or seriousness. 33 00:03:38,310 --> 00:03:49,550 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. 34 00:03:49,550 --> 00:03:53,120 I'm frequently asked and more frequently than one might think. 35 00:03:53,120 --> 00:04:00,890 What makes American art an important enough field within art history to distinguish it from European art? 36 00:04:00,890 --> 00:04:06,770 Indeed, American art is a recent field of study and one of the fastest growing. 37 00:04:06,770 --> 00:04:10,310 Owing to its tremendous, inclusive city, 38 00:04:10,310 --> 00:04:19,550 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. 39 00:04:19,550 --> 00:04:23,750 In the shadow of the importance of European art history. 40 00:04:23,750 --> 00:04:31,550 But in places, American art history came to be known for its development of a promiscuous methodology. 41 00:04:31,550 --> 00:04:33,320 American art history is, for instance, 42 00:04:33,320 --> 00:04:43,220 unusually receptive to taking quite seriously the advent of print and popular culture into the vernacular culture in the form of furniture, 43 00:04:43,220 --> 00:04:54,050 tools, inventions and technology. It's also, I think, very special in its interdisciplinarity and borrowing, especially from literature. 44 00:04:54,050 --> 00:05:07,490 It has benefited greatly from a broad interest in ethnic sub specialisation and the desire to problematise the singular notion of American identity. 45 00:05:07,490 --> 00:05:16,740 And recently with thanks to the Terra Foundation. It is aspired to make borders appear as different and arbitrary that what it 46 00:05:16,740 --> 00:05:22,200 is to be American lacks permanent footing on the continent of North America. 47 00:05:22,200 --> 00:05:33,910 The tension between location and dislocation newly animates questions about Americanism and its transnational dimensions. 48 00:05:33,910 --> 00:05:41,710 I gave this lecture series, the title, The Body of a Nation to capture the sense of a body without a border. 49 00:05:41,710 --> 00:05:49,000 These four presumptions are connected by their consideration of how bodies figure in American art history, 50 00:05:49,000 --> 00:05:56,650 in the curious resistance of America to cohere in the various bodily symbols attached to it. 51 00:05:56,650 --> 00:06:02,410 In fact, the idea of an American body was troubled right from the start. 52 00:06:02,410 --> 00:06:10,210 Colonial white Americans knew themselves as Europeans who black the body, the body represented by the King of England, 53 00:06:10,210 --> 00:06:16,330 which represented an intangible God and a cohesive empire ramping up to the revolution. 54 00:06:16,330 --> 00:06:25,900 Human dismemberment was a powerful visual for the American separation from Britain when confronted with the task of uniting the colonies. 55 00:06:25,900 --> 00:06:33,640 Human imagery failed in such representation because it had regal connotations as just one example. 56 00:06:33,640 --> 00:06:42,700 Benjamin Franklin tentatively represented America as a serpent, grossly secular, unadorned and detached. 57 00:06:42,700 --> 00:06:47,200 But the human body. Its pleasure. Pain. Triumph. 58 00:06:47,200 --> 00:07:03,210 Bondage. Freedom. Defeat and sickness, and especially its distance from our attachment to the body of a nation has been in question ever since. 59 00:07:03,210 --> 00:07:10,080 Time calls destruction was painted in 36. It is a scene of chaos and slaughter. 60 00:07:10,080 --> 00:07:16,200 The gleaming white neoclassical buildings suggest that once a once great civilisation, 61 00:07:16,200 --> 00:07:23,160 replete with temples, government and banks, its stunning architecture hugs the coastline. 62 00:07:23,160 --> 00:07:31,150 Evidence of the importance of a maritime economy from which it derived apparently great and enviable wealth. 63 00:07:31,150 --> 00:07:39,390 The promontory, the central part of the composition, rises above the city, solid and craggy and lush with nature. 64 00:07:39,390 --> 00:07:49,110 It might provide a refuge for those fortunate to escape the fatal clash below its stability and parameter amplitude contrast. 65 00:07:49,110 --> 00:07:54,510 The overloaded suspension bridge sagging with the weight of bodies and horses who will 66 00:07:54,510 --> 00:08:01,350 inevitably be cast into the tempestuous harbour once the source of such great pride. 67 00:08:01,350 --> 00:08:06,930 But now there is no economic order on the sea, just wind and smoke. 68 00:08:06,930 --> 00:08:12,870 The great statues of their gods have been beheaded, blind to the carnage, unwilling, 69 00:08:12,870 --> 00:08:19,050 unable to save even the innocents from the demonic thirst for blood and blood. 70 00:08:19,050 --> 00:08:29,130 It must be mentioned, is spectacularly everywhere. The focal point of this human tragedy is the figure at the bottom centre. 71 00:08:29,130 --> 00:08:38,070 The figure closest to the viewer, illuminated by a shard of light and purple framed by the Marble Arch of the bridge. 72 00:08:38,070 --> 00:08:43,770 Pursued by a kindergarten, she looks over her shoulder and narrowly escapes murder by the means. 73 00:08:43,770 --> 00:08:49,050 Most grim, her own self-destruction, her suicide. 74 00:08:49,050 --> 00:08:56,730 Of all the ways to represent the pathos of the human condition. Suicide is surely the most desperate. 75 00:08:56,730 --> 00:09:02,790 In what follows, I will explore the image of suicide in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, 76 00:09:02,790 --> 00:09:11,610 whose meaning and culture legibility pertained pretty closely to the suicides of enslaved African and African-Americans. 77 00:09:11,610 --> 00:09:22,920 Cole, who is the most storeyed of American landscape painters, the so-called father of the Hudson River school, was not an outspoken abolitionist. 78 00:09:22,920 --> 00:09:33,300 He was, however, as you might already be able to tell a moralist who warned against the dangers of a decadent civilisation. 79 00:09:33,300 --> 00:09:39,360 We may never really discern. Cole's private attitudes towards race. 80 00:09:39,360 --> 00:09:44,430 Most likely, he was in step with his contemporaries who were white Americans in New England. 81 00:09:44,430 --> 00:09:50,850 But the fact that he would hinge his spectacular masterpiece on the figure of suicide suggests the 82 00:09:50,850 --> 00:09:58,590 emotional texture and political complexity of slavery brought to the character of antebellum America, 83 00:09:58,590 --> 00:10:02,190 both North and South. 84 00:10:02,190 --> 00:10:13,530 What I see haunting coal's destruction is this a highly public and greatly sensationalised instance of suicide in the 19th century, 85 00:10:13,530 --> 00:10:22,350 known as Addas leap in the silence of the earliest morning hours of the 19th of December 1815, 86 00:10:22,350 --> 00:10:27,120 Elizabeth Blake, the wife of the Washington, D.C. area, James Blake, 87 00:10:27,120 --> 00:10:34,500 was awakened suddenly by the sound of a crash and a whale rousing her husband, who was a physician. 88 00:10:34,500 --> 00:10:41,510 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. 89 00:10:41,510 --> 00:10:49,410 Hannah, who had defenestrated from an attic window. The fall had broken both of her arms and shattered her spine. 90 00:10:49,410 --> 00:11:01,500 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. 91 00:11:01,500 --> 00:11:09,750 Anna's story, while exceptional for the publicity it generated, was also depressingly common. 92 00:11:09,750 --> 00:11:20,220 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. 93 00:11:20,220 --> 00:11:31,860 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. 94 00:11:31,860 --> 00:11:34,830 This was technically against the law. 95 00:11:34,830 --> 00:11:43,710 After an 18 hour wait, federal ordinance prohibited both the importation of slaves from Africa and also the interstate slave trade, 96 00:11:43,710 --> 00:11:47,280 such as from Maryland to Georgia. 97 00:11:47,280 --> 00:11:57,210 However, the explosion of American Colt cotton cultivation, which served a flourishing machine powered textile industry in Great Britain, 98 00:11:57,210 --> 00:12:05,670 drove the demand for more slaves, which were in short supply to work on Southern cotton plantations. 99 00:12:05,670 --> 00:12:14,880 Mary's Tavern was one amongst many corrupt businesses that illegally held slaves to be sold under subterfuge across state lines. 100 00:12:14,880 --> 00:12:21,150 Suicides at millers were not unknown. There we are again. 101 00:12:21,150 --> 00:12:29,730 Before Atah, another enslaved woman, had sliced open her own throat rather than live with the humiliation and depravity of slavery. 102 00:12:29,730 --> 00:12:41,220 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. 103 00:12:41,220 --> 00:12:53,070 Harvesting cotton to work in the cotton fields meant exhausting long days in unbearable late summer heat and the constant fear of the whip. 104 00:12:53,070 --> 00:13:01,290 As you can see from this stereographic photograph, the overseer mounted on horseback, monitored every movement. 105 00:13:01,290 --> 00:13:09,750 Slaves were severely chastised if they did not bring in the same amount of cotton or more than the previous day. 106 00:13:09,750 --> 00:13:19,320 But what did suicide mean conceptually? Within late 18th and early 19th century European and American society in general, 107 00:13:19,320 --> 00:13:26,760 suicide was considered a sin and a crime, essentially self murder, according to the church. 108 00:13:26,760 --> 00:13:31,740 The despair of life was something meant to be endured and not escaped. 109 00:13:31,740 --> 00:13:37,620 Victims of suicide might be denied certain liturgical rites, or it may have been interpreted. 110 00:13:37,620 --> 00:13:47,550 Right out of shame, under English law, suicide was a felony against the crown because it robbed the monarch of a subject empathetically. 111 00:13:47,550 --> 00:13:53,520 It's interesting to know that suicide was decriminalised here in the United Kingdom only in 1961. 112 00:13:53,520 --> 00:13:58,410 So quite recently, by the time of the American Revolution, however, 113 00:13:58,410 --> 00:14:04,470 local jurisdictions began to turn against felony verdicts in suicide cases in favour of 114 00:14:04,470 --> 00:14:10,380 something called non compos mentis or of an unsound mind in the legal system today. 115 00:14:10,380 --> 00:14:13,500 This is known as temporary insanity. 116 00:14:13,500 --> 00:14:22,680 The American statesman Thomas Jefferson recognised the role of emotional distress and mental illness that would lead someone to take their own life, 117 00:14:22,680 --> 00:14:32,970 including the enslaved. Jefferson, as a notorious slave holder in Virginia, would know something of the subject. 118 00:14:32,970 --> 00:14:41,070 As horrifying as it sounds today, slave suicide was fairly commonplace in the early American republic in 1883. 119 00:14:41,070 --> 00:14:48,690 St. Simons Island, Georgia, was the site of one of the largest mass suicides of slaves there. 120 00:14:48,690 --> 00:14:53,430 Seventy five Igbo captives from Nigeria organised a revolt. 121 00:14:53,430 --> 00:15:01,920 A bold aboard the slave ship York killed their captors, grounded the ship and drowned themselves in the sea, 122 00:15:01,920 --> 00:15:08,640 enslaved people of the bar and Assante Origin also understood suicide as an honourable death. 123 00:15:08,640 --> 00:15:17,070 In response to captivity, conversely to enslavers, self-destruction was one of the most grievous offences. 124 00:15:17,070 --> 00:15:25,590 A slave could commit it robbed the enslaver of property and needed to be avoided at all costs. 125 00:15:25,590 --> 00:15:32,820 If a slave had killed himself, slave owners might force living slaves to decapitate, dismember or gibbet. 126 00:15:32,820 --> 00:15:42,000 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. 127 00:15:42,000 --> 00:15:48,120 Taking the larger view. Slave suicide implicitly toppled the hierarchy of slavery. 128 00:15:48,120 --> 00:15:58,020 It was the ultimate act of subjective resistance against a system that regarded the enslaved of having no personhood. 129 00:15:58,020 --> 00:16:08,440 In 1915, abolitionism was just starting to take root in America's more enlightened quarters, and asleep became the symbol of the oppression, 130 00:16:08,440 --> 00:16:20,310 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. 131 00:16:20,310 --> 00:16:28,310 Moved by the tragedy and indeed the perversity of the visible slave trade and slave labour in the capital city, 132 00:16:28,310 --> 00:16:34,440 pouring out to interview Anna along with other enslaved persons. 133 00:16:34,440 --> 00:16:42,470 And these accounts were published in the portraiture of domestic slavery in the United States. 134 00:16:42,470 --> 00:16:47,400 Wentworth asked Anna why she attempted to take her own life. 135 00:16:47,400 --> 00:16:54,120 She replied. They brought me away with two of my children and wouldn't let me see my husband. 136 00:16:54,120 --> 00:17:00,150 I was so confused and distracted. I didn't know what I was about. 137 00:17:00,150 --> 00:17:07,740 The fear of breakneck conditions in the Deep South was only one part of the story. 138 00:17:07,740 --> 00:17:17,190 Tory's report attributed and his suicide attempt to another one of the most terrorising fact facts of chattel slavery, 139 00:17:17,190 --> 00:17:21,900 which was the alienation of wives and husbands and parents from children, 140 00:17:21,900 --> 00:17:29,280 and one of the likeliest punishments to occur because slaves were understood as merely property. 141 00:17:29,280 --> 00:17:33,840 And without a free will, they were not permitted legally to marry, 142 00:17:33,840 --> 00:17:40,080 even though many did enter into unrecognised unions celebrated as broomstick weddings. 143 00:17:40,080 --> 00:17:51,240 As you can see from this 1899 engraving, slaves also had children, which were also understood as the property of the enslaver. 144 00:17:51,240 --> 00:17:59,010 And I told Terry that she and her husband had two daughters, that Anna said she was confused and distracted. 145 00:17:59,010 --> 00:18:05,250 After separation from her husband proved to white and abolitionists who were gaining 146 00:18:05,250 --> 00:18:12,330 momentum in the north that slaves suicide was not a result of sinful self-indulgence, 147 00:18:12,330 --> 00:18:21,150 but rather that the trauma of enslavement took men and women out of their right minds non compos mentis. 148 00:18:21,150 --> 00:18:27,870 Additionally, by Lincoln and as temporary insanity to the separation from her family, 149 00:18:27,870 --> 00:18:38,220 she became a paragon of feminine virtue and her suicide attempt thus redeemed as constantly moral. 150 00:18:38,220 --> 00:18:43,740 To bring us back into the realm of the visual now Atari's, it was illustrated by an engraving of a. 151 00:18:43,740 --> 00:18:50,950 Leap by Alexander Reiter, a Philadelphia illustrator. By all means, it's a very stiff rendering. 152 00:18:50,950 --> 00:18:56,160 Notwithstanding writer's image worked within the emerging abolitionist. 153 00:18:56,160 --> 00:19:01,710 Visual codes aim to drum up the sympathies of its white readership. 154 00:19:01,710 --> 00:19:12,510 The only figure in the composition we perceive is isolation and therefore her separation from her husband as a key part of the narrative. 155 00:19:12,510 --> 00:19:21,900 Her muslin dress has an open neckline, revealing her DeCola Tage, suggesting her vulnerability to this systemic rape of female slaves. 156 00:19:21,900 --> 00:19:25,950 That was a known part of coercing them into submission. 157 00:19:25,950 --> 00:19:34,110 But its gleaming whiteness, set against the nocturnal darkness of the scene, maintains her essential virtue. 158 00:19:34,110 --> 00:19:41,570 Additionally, the two cypress trees in the background bear strong historical connexions to cemetery hedges, 159 00:19:41,570 --> 00:19:47,440 leading the sense of and as Christianity intact. 160 00:19:47,440 --> 00:19:56,890 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, 161 00:19:56,890 --> 00:20:04,480 which at the same time sentimentalised and politicised the tragedies experienced by the enslaved. 162 00:20:04,480 --> 00:20:11,290 One result is that the trope of slave suicide became significantly gendered. 163 00:20:11,290 --> 00:20:18,040 The image of the self-destructive male slave, which was already a part abolitionist rhetoric, 164 00:20:18,040 --> 00:20:28,270 was most rendered in terms plasticised gesture, finding ultimate human freedom through agency over death. 165 00:20:28,270 --> 00:20:36,400 The instrument of male self murder was the dagger which had an established visual precedent in the suicide of Cato. 166 00:20:36,400 --> 00:20:43,300 The younger, as we see in show loopholes interpretation from 16 46. 167 00:20:43,300 --> 00:20:54,850 By contrast, the representation of Anna's leap seemed to lack such intentionality, separated from her husband and her male protectors. 168 00:20:54,850 --> 00:21:04,540 We were led to believe that Anna sought death by defending outrating as a response speculatively to an intense pursuit of her sexual innocence. 169 00:21:04,540 --> 00:21:12,070 Such imagery tugged at the heartstrings of white male abolitionists who felt persuaded to protect DNA 170 00:21:12,070 --> 00:21:21,190 as much as white women who sympathise with Anna's debilitating loss of family stability cognitively. 171 00:21:21,190 --> 00:21:28,450 The many accounts and interviews of Anna generations after her suicide attempt did not recount 172 00:21:28,450 --> 00:21:34,060 her own valiance prosecution of the United States government in the federal court system, 173 00:21:34,060 --> 00:21:44,140 which earned her freedom. In 1832, instead, abolitionists focussed on the heart wrenching story of the extreme suffering she withstood, 174 00:21:44,140 --> 00:21:49,750 which led her into insanity and asleep and not, and his freedom thus be fit. 175 00:21:49,750 --> 00:21:57,280 The intense emotional appeals needed to justify the end of slavery to whites. 176 00:21:57,280 --> 00:22:03,790 Thus, we have two images of suicide. One in white and one in black. 177 00:22:03,790 --> 00:22:08,890 One a painting highlighting a woman under duress, fleeing into the burning sea. 178 00:22:08,890 --> 00:22:17,500 And one an enslaved woman separated from her spouse and sold into the known horror of failed slavery in the Deep South, 179 00:22:17,500 --> 00:22:21,490 who leapt from the attic window of a Washington tavern. 180 00:22:21,490 --> 00:22:29,290 And now, with these images in mind, we return to Thomas Cole, America's pre-eminent landscape painter, 181 00:22:29,290 --> 00:22:35,350 a moralist who infused art with an eye to the land and world economies. 182 00:22:35,350 --> 00:22:46,150 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. 183 00:22:46,150 --> 00:22:50,830 On the archive alone, we may not know about Cole's opinion of slavery, 184 00:22:50,830 --> 00:22:56,500 but we know beyond any doubt his experience with the existences of Labour calling us. 185 00:22:56,500 --> 00:23:04,450 Born in Lancashire in 1881, the son of religious dissenters in a town called Bolton the Moors, 186 00:23:04,450 --> 00:23:09,070 Lancashire, then, as now, is a place of great geographical diversity, 187 00:23:09,070 --> 00:23:11,740 ranging from areas of spectacular wilderness, 188 00:23:11,740 --> 00:23:21,130 immense meadows and mud marshes to windswept plains to the port cities embracing the powdery and craggy coastline of the Irish Sea. 189 00:23:21,130 --> 00:23:28,330 Lancashire was also a vital place for English wealth production in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, 190 00:23:28,330 --> 00:23:33,790 owing especially to a steep increase in the manufacture of cotton textiles. 191 00:23:33,790 --> 00:23:40,690 The maritime city of Liverpool. Not now, but historically understood to be situated in Lancashire. 192 00:23:40,690 --> 00:23:43,300 Dominated in the transatlantic trade, 193 00:23:43,300 --> 00:23:53,530 including the slave trade owing to its access via roads and inland waterways to lucrative merchandise traded in North America and Africa. 194 00:23:53,530 --> 00:23:59,740 Cloth from Lancashire and Yorkshire and guns from Birmingham. 195 00:23:59,740 --> 00:24:03,490 In contrast to the urbane coast, 196 00:24:03,490 --> 00:24:15,490 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. 197 00:24:15,490 --> 00:24:22,410 Factories belch smoke and the water was polluted. Public sanitation an afterthought. 198 00:24:22,410 --> 00:24:27,520 English landscape has captured the compromises of this industrialisation. 199 00:24:27,520 --> 00:24:30,090 Up to Rothenberg's Colebrook Dale by night of 18, 200 00:24:30,090 --> 00:24:38,860 no one illustrates the infernal feel of a Shropshire town which had for some time been at the forefront of smelting, 201 00:24:38,860 --> 00:24:45,810 was the home of the coal fired blast furnace. In this dramatic painting, the viewer gets the sense of the extreme. 202 00:24:45,810 --> 00:24:55,710 Disruption and perhaps of industrial work. The round the clock toil and its concomitant toll on countryside life. 203 00:24:55,710 --> 00:25:00,320 Similarly, we get an idea of life in Bolton through Leeds 1816. 204 00:25:00,320 --> 00:25:07,920 I picture the great GMW Turner, an artist who would later have a profound impact on coal. 205 00:25:07,920 --> 00:25:14,100 Although Leeds is in Yorkshire, it was connected by a turnpike road to where coal lived in Chorley. 206 00:25:14,100 --> 00:25:25,770 As an adolescent here, the English moors are unsettling with me, punctuated by smokestacks releasing their filth into a hazy, bluish sky. 207 00:25:25,770 --> 00:25:34,110 In addition to its cost to the environment, there were human costs as well. Increased automation rendered the skilled workforce redundant. 208 00:25:34,110 --> 00:25:40,880 By the opening decade of the 19th century, domestic spinning was replaced by machine spinning, 209 00:25:40,880 --> 00:25:47,760 throwing an entire generation of textile workers into unemployment and poverty. 210 00:25:47,760 --> 00:25:56,620 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, 211 00:25:56,620 --> 00:26:07,890 was in a state of complete and utter crisis, and it became the site of the most extreme clashes between unemployed workers and authorities. 212 00:26:07,890 --> 00:26:16,390 It was not generationally the case that working people in Britain took action against their employers because they feared violent retribution. 213 00:26:16,390 --> 00:26:25,810 But the severity of the problem contributed to the growing Luddite rebellion organised under the fictional character of Ned Ludd, 214 00:26:25,810 --> 00:26:32,260 who sought to disrupt the industry by breaking looms and setting fire to the mills. 215 00:26:32,260 --> 00:26:41,110 In 1812, eight rioters wilfully smashed the steam powered looms at Westhoven Mill in Bolton before setting it alight. 216 00:26:41,110 --> 00:26:51,670 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. 217 00:26:51,670 --> 00:26:58,720 And the whole incident was so extreme that manufacturers bypassed Bolton for an entire generation. 218 00:26:58,720 --> 00:27:04,810 The presumably conservative caricaturists here intended to humiliate Ned Lud by putting 219 00:27:04,810 --> 00:27:10,510 him in a dress made of the typical Kalikow fabric produced by Lancashire Mills. 220 00:27:10,510 --> 00:27:19,980 But as of some, as some have noted, this does hardly to make him seem weak or diminutive at all. 221 00:27:19,980 --> 00:27:27,460 His father was ambitious but unlucky. He tried and failed to make his fortune in Bolton. 222 00:27:27,460 --> 00:27:31,930 Then in Chorley, then in Liverpool and then in America. 223 00:27:31,930 --> 00:27:42,160 The Cole family, having emigrated in 1818, arriving first in Philadelphia and then settling inland in the town of Steubenville, Ohio. 224 00:27:42,160 --> 00:27:51,130 Amidst the volatility of his father's business ventures, the younger Cole worked consistently and showed considerable promise as an artist. 225 00:27:51,130 --> 00:27:58,120 He worked as a Kalikow designer in Chali. Later, he apprenticed as an engraver in Liverpool, 226 00:27:58,120 --> 00:28:08,320 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, 227 00:28:08,320 --> 00:28:16,720 which many, many scholars have noted filtered through to calls later and bolder approach to the American landscape. 228 00:28:16,720 --> 00:28:22,900 Still quite young, but with some experience, he worked as an engravers assistant in Philadelphia, 229 00:28:22,900 --> 00:28:27,640 where he remained when his parents and sisters moved to Ohio. 230 00:28:27,640 --> 00:28:35,260 It is unknown whether such a young man would have known Alexander writer, the illustrator Tery employed to illustrate and his leap. 231 00:28:35,260 --> 00:28:44,020 But it is likely Cole's decision to momentarily separate from his family symbolises the moment in every young 232 00:28:44,020 --> 00:28:51,670 man's life when he seeks to be independent from his father's reputation or lack thereof in pursuit of his own. 233 00:28:51,670 --> 00:28:59,650 I do not think Cole's work was particularly inspiring to him as an engraver, as engraving itself could be highly tedious. 234 00:28:59,650 --> 00:29:09,400 But the conversation about art in Philadelphia and New York in the early 19th century increasingly took on the flavour of an exciting sort. 235 00:29:09,400 --> 00:29:17,830 A younger generation of American artists began to turn away from the customary portrait in history, painting genres to explore landscapes, 236 00:29:17,830 --> 00:29:24,040 the North American landscape presumptively unexplored and magical views of mountains and forests, 237 00:29:24,040 --> 00:29:31,990 waterfalls that they did believed did not rival, but rather surpassed that of any other place. 238 00:29:31,990 --> 00:29:41,920 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. 239 00:29:41,920 --> 00:29:50,080 He arrived in New York City in 1825, and I'm tempted to say here and the rest is history. 240 00:29:50,080 --> 00:29:56,080 Kahn found tremendous success in New York, a city that was basking in its economic prosperity. 241 00:29:56,080 --> 00:30:04,630 After the opening of the Erie Canal, which connected it via waterway to the agriculturally rich Midwest and eastward to the globe, 242 00:30:04,630 --> 00:30:12,940 taking special interest in the dramatic views in the Catskill Mountain range just a short distance up the Hudson River from Manhattan. 243 00:30:12,940 --> 00:30:19,090 Cole specialised in landscape painting that not only depicted the exquisite American wilderness, 244 00:30:19,090 --> 00:30:28,150 but also told a story in the stunning Catskill Falls called Dramatised the features of the landscape. 245 00:30:28,150 --> 00:30:37,570 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, 246 00:30:37,570 --> 00:30:42,070 one that affords a powerful panoramic vision of American nature, 247 00:30:42,070 --> 00:30:49,990 an operatic gesture that lends itself to the loftier symbolism of the divine in New York. 248 00:30:49,990 --> 00:30:58,060 Cole redressed his father's failures by cultivating a wealthy clientele comprised of the city's elder Dutch trading class. 249 00:30:58,060 --> 00:31:05,200 These are patriotic landowners who intuitively responded to calls aggrandisement of their dominion. 250 00:31:05,200 --> 00:31:15,100 He did so in one way by achieving impressive scale in canvases that were appropriately easel sized, saleable commodities. 251 00:31:15,100 --> 00:31:20,180 Jewel. Like objects for display, an elegant drawing rooms. 252 00:31:20,180 --> 00:31:26,660 His clientele favourite views that call strategically evacuated if human presence particularly angled 253 00:31:26,660 --> 00:31:33,410 away from the energetic encroachment of industry that was creeping into America's rural New England. 254 00:31:33,410 --> 00:31:40,370 The count canals and turnpikes that began to link factories to towns and towns to cities. 255 00:31:40,370 --> 00:31:46,190 America was eaten in cold and cold and kneelers mind's eye. 256 00:31:46,190 --> 00:31:52,700 But the flood was yet to come. America was industrialising and quickly. 257 00:31:52,700 --> 00:32:00,140 This was all too familiar to young coal from Bolton L'Amour's enriched by his success in New York. 258 00:32:00,140 --> 00:32:03,110 He set out for London, Paris and Italy. 259 00:32:03,110 --> 00:32:11,300 Perfectly natural voyage for any American artists seeking to improve his and by studying with a sophisticated and established elite, 260 00:32:11,300 --> 00:32:14,870 as well as from the works of old masters. 261 00:32:14,870 --> 00:32:23,900 And what Cole saw in Europe enriched his vocabulary or form and found expression in his later paintings, especially destruction. 262 00:32:23,900 --> 00:32:37,040 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, 263 00:32:37,040 --> 00:32:44,120 not least of which was the backdrop of continued major political instability and labour unrest in 264 00:32:44,120 --> 00:32:53,600 Britain that eventually resulted in the controversial and largely imperfect Great Reform Act of 1832. 265 00:32:53,600 --> 00:33:00,920 In London, Cole took up residence at number four Grafton, way near the newly built Regent's Park, 266 00:33:00,920 --> 00:33:06,860 which symbolised London's role as the richest and most important imperial European capital. 267 00:33:06,860 --> 00:33:13,190 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? 268 00:33:13,190 --> 00:33:25,970 The artist that he met, he met artists that he admired, like John Martin and Turner, and developed an encouraging friendship with John Constable. 269 00:33:25,970 --> 00:33:35,060 It was especially John Martin's highly romantic dramatisations of biblical scenes evident in such works as The Evening of the Deluge. 270 00:33:35,060 --> 00:33:45,200 And those shows are his feast, which appealed to the millenarian aspect of Cole's religious upbringing. 271 00:33:45,200 --> 00:33:55,990 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. 272 00:33:55,990 --> 00:34:09,500 However, Cole recovered somewhat. He was very moved by the monuments of antiquity, absorbed equally by their impressiveness and their decay in all. 273 00:34:09,500 --> 00:34:15,500 Cole returned to the United States in 1832, grateful for what he saw, 274 00:34:15,500 --> 00:34:26,930 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, 275 00:34:26,930 --> 00:34:32,330 which was attendant to pecuniary anxieties. 276 00:34:32,330 --> 00:34:42,840 Cole's masterwork, The Course of Empire, was thought up in Britain, but it tells us as much or more about his American anxieties. 277 00:34:42,840 --> 00:34:52,080 To that end, the title itself is borrowed from George Barclays' 1726 poem versus on the prospect of planting parts and learning in America. 278 00:34:52,080 --> 00:34:58,890 The first line of which is the most cited Westword. The course of empire takes its way. 279 00:34:58,890 --> 00:35:09,090 There were five paintings the savage state, the Arcadian State, the consummation of empire, destruction and desolation. 280 00:35:09,090 --> 00:35:15,960 I will allow calls from words penned in his London sketch sketchbook of 1829 to animate us now. 281 00:35:15,960 --> 00:35:28,170 He says. A series of pictures illustrating the mutation of terrestrial things this cycle should commence with a picture of utter wilderness. 282 00:35:28,170 --> 00:35:36,120 The human figures should be savages, indicating in their occupations that their means of subsistence is the chase. 283 00:35:36,120 --> 00:35:39,750 The second picture should be a sunrise here and there. 284 00:35:39,750 --> 00:35:50,430 Groups of peasants in the field. The third picture should be a noon day, seeing a gorgeous city with piles of magnificent architecture. 285 00:35:50,430 --> 00:35:58,860 All that can be combined to show the fullness of prosperity, wealth and luxury. 286 00:35:58,860 --> 00:36:07,770 The fourth should be a stormy battle and the burning of the city with all the concomitant scenes of horror. 287 00:36:07,770 --> 00:36:13,190 The fifth should be a sunset. A scene of ruins, dilapidated temples. 288 00:36:13,190 --> 00:36:19,080 All of these scenes ought to have the same location ending in tragedy. 289 00:36:19,080 --> 00:36:22,920 The course of empire is a warning. 290 00:36:22,920 --> 00:36:34,350 The exacerbated tone, of course, of empire, however, did not immediately appeal to Cole's usual aristocratic New York clientele. 291 00:36:34,350 --> 00:36:42,690 Once eager to moralise against the din the dangers of industrialism, a value that Cole enthusiastically shared, 292 00:36:42,690 --> 00:36:49,860 the landed gentry found that indeed industrialisation enriched their investments. 293 00:36:49,860 --> 00:36:58,770 And this would have been especially true in the period of extraordinary wealth accumulation accumulation circa 1830, 294 00:36:58,770 --> 00:37:04,620 when Anglo American banking and trade was at an all time high. 295 00:37:04,620 --> 00:37:09,240 Motivated by the tremendous productivity of the British textile industry, 296 00:37:09,240 --> 00:37:15,810 America positioned itself to be the world's second meeting country in the production of cotton cloth, 297 00:37:15,810 --> 00:37:25,170 with factories pounding in cold, cherished rural New England, finding all other potential buyers ambivalent. 298 00:37:25,170 --> 00:37:29,310 The course of Empire found its patron in Mr Lumin read, 299 00:37:29,310 --> 00:37:38,010 a self-made businessman and social climber who sought out patronage as a mark of distinction in the eyes of New York society. 300 00:37:38,010 --> 00:37:46,770 Reed was more impressed by Cole's reputation than the themes and aesthetics of his extraordinary paintings. 301 00:37:46,770 --> 00:37:56,880 And at last, we come to slavery once more in the elaborate procession in the foreground of consummation. 302 00:37:56,880 --> 00:38:08,430 The third painting, called, includes several black figures, which he called in his diary captives on foot, well appointed and unchained. 303 00:38:08,430 --> 00:38:19,680 These enslaved Africans disavow rather than reinforce any realistic connexion to the misery to which chattel slavery pertains. 304 00:38:19,680 --> 00:38:30,120 Cole knew this. His own loss of patronage. When he returned from Europe was connected to financial speculation and surging cotton prices, 305 00:38:30,120 --> 00:38:36,630 which in turn over and down the interstate slave trade by 1836. 306 00:38:36,630 --> 00:38:40,800 However, his worst fears materialised. 307 00:38:40,800 --> 00:38:49,620 A food shortage in Britain destabilised London's hyperbolic lending to the American South, and the curtailments came fully into view. 308 00:38:49,620 --> 00:39:00,930 American cotton prices sank and slavery became a national flashpoint for the tragic, ongoing insanity of greed suggestively. 309 00:39:00,930 --> 00:39:06,780 One lone figure in the consummation parade holds her face in her hands, 310 00:39:06,780 --> 00:39:14,010 blinding herself as the marching slaves approach standing back from destruction. 311 00:39:14,010 --> 00:39:20,550 The suicidal figure is one amongst hundreds or thousands. The general scene of overt despair. 312 00:39:20,550 --> 00:39:26,790 But how Cole wants us to see this isolated figure. By now, I think you already know. 313 00:39:26,790 --> 00:39:31,430 Taking the intimate view, her torso is surrounded by the sea. 314 00:39:31,430 --> 00:39:40,220 The boiling sea, the sea of imperial abundance, the sea that for coal was the place of passing from his history into his future. 315 00:39:40,220 --> 00:39:47,000 The sea across which the course of empire made its way surrounded by impending danger. 316 00:39:47,000 --> 00:39:56,900 She's the embodiment of suicide, non compos mentis, perhaps too convenient a metaphor for feminine innocence in danger, 317 00:39:56,900 --> 00:40:05,960 but a compelling metaphor for any of Cole's viewers who understood all of its implications and its moral ambiguities. 318 00:40:05,960 --> 00:40:15,320 She rises onto a marble ledge and inclines against the air like Anna and enslaved black woman who knew exactly what her future held, 319 00:40:15,320 --> 00:40:33,320 who stepped into a window frame in the silence of an early morning and jumped. 320 00:40:33,320 --> 00:40:42,290 Questions. And I should say that I'm not supposed to move around because of microphone things, so I won't. 321 00:40:42,290 --> 00:40:46,850 And then if you ask a question, I will repeat it for recording. 322 00:40:46,850 --> 00:41:09,270 So I open the score. Yes. 323 00:41:09,270 --> 00:41:43,490 Hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm hmm. 324 00:41:43,490 --> 00:41:50,330 Hmm, hmm. Yeah. 325 00:41:50,330 --> 00:41:59,570 Yeah. So the question is about Native American removal as another kind of comparative example for the idea, 326 00:41:59,570 --> 00:42:09,050 of course, of empire, and particularly with an eye toward a certain American artwork's vanderlyn. 327 00:42:09,050 --> 00:42:16,670 What was the example you mentioned? Oh, yeah. 328 00:42:16,670 --> 00:42:20,390 The Last of the Mohicans. Yes. Yes. Right. Yeah. 329 00:42:20,390 --> 00:42:33,620 Right. Yeah. Now, that's fine. There were no. Who did. Was right. 330 00:42:33,620 --> 00:42:38,870 But. Cora. 331 00:42:38,870 --> 00:42:51,080 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. 332 00:42:51,080 --> 00:43:08,160 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. 333 00:43:08,160 --> 00:43:23,580 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. 334 00:43:23,580 --> 00:43:25,590 And how how detailed do you get? 335 00:43:25,590 --> 00:43:37,200 But one of the things that one of the things about Andrew Jackson as a president was a kind of American version of utilitarianism, 336 00:43:37,200 --> 00:43:46,260 which had both political benefits and also a very deleterious consequences for both the institution of the 337 00:43:46,260 --> 00:43:52,500 state or the enslaved who were trapped in the institution of slavery and and also for Native Americans. 338 00:43:52,500 --> 00:43:57,470 And I think part of that was this idea of appealing to a white middle class. 339 00:43:57,470 --> 00:44:01,890 But at all costs or at any cost was really what was motivating that. 340 00:44:01,890 --> 00:44:05,340 And this, of course, this period coincides or you're absolutely right, 341 00:44:05,340 --> 00:44:15,120 with Indian removal and all sorts of other kinds of deeply, deeply problematic, deeply problematic things. 342 00:44:15,120 --> 00:44:27,750 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. 343 00:44:27,750 --> 00:44:37,920 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. 344 00:44:37,920 --> 00:44:45,510 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. 345 00:44:45,510 --> 00:44:48,120 But sentimental feelings about religion. 346 00:44:48,120 --> 00:44:56,430 And that makes him sort of an interesting, paradoxical, rich study to study because he all of that is kind of contained, 347 00:44:56,430 --> 00:45:03,620 contained therein and feeling as though I'm not answering your question. 348 00:45:03,620 --> 00:45:08,130 Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. 349 00:45:08,130 --> 00:45:24,140 How is that for the answer to the question. I agree. Yes. 350 00:45:24,140 --> 00:45:37,700 Ages and ages. 351 00:45:37,700 --> 00:45:46,960 Sorry, say the last part again. Oh, yes. 352 00:45:46,960 --> 00:45:53,630 Right. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 353 00:45:53,630 --> 00:45:58,010 Thank you. That's a great question. It's about the the part in the talk, 354 00:45:58,010 --> 00:46:07,640 which was about images of male suicide versus female suicide and more particularly as an agency over death and how perhaps the Haitian revolution, 355 00:46:07,640 --> 00:46:12,280 18 or for 18 to eight much earlier than OK. 356 00:46:12,280 --> 00:46:21,470 Yeah. So end of the 18th century factors into that, which is it does absolutely factor. 357 00:46:21,470 --> 00:46:28,610 And one of the things that happens in the South is from about the time of the turn 358 00:46:28,610 --> 00:46:37,070 of the century is that enslavers become profoundly anxious about slave rebellion. 359 00:46:37,070 --> 00:46:50,150 And so this also coincides with 1888, which is the moment when interstate slave trade is banned and also importation of slaves from Africa. 360 00:46:50,150 --> 00:46:58,530 And so the whole institution is kind of roiling from within. 361 00:46:58,530 --> 00:47:08,570 The enslavers became, from what I understand, more severe in their punishment in order to deter rebellion. 362 00:47:08,570 --> 00:47:12,260 So, for example, I'll be talking a little bit about this next week. 363 00:47:12,260 --> 00:47:19,070 So don't give away all the answers, but particularly as it turns on things like slave literacy, 364 00:47:19,070 --> 00:47:27,650 which had always been against the law but became especially fractious and contentious. 365 00:47:27,650 --> 00:47:32,720 After after the slave rebellions. And I would add that Denmark faces rebellion and all of those. 366 00:47:32,720 --> 00:47:47,240 So so really, I think that it's it is part of how the institution is grasping for legitimacy. 367 00:47:47,240 --> 00:47:56,510 How a moribund institution is grasping for legitimacy is borne out in the in the severity of how the slaves were driven. 368 00:47:56,510 --> 00:48:02,480 And it has massive consequences for for the enslaved. 369 00:48:02,480 --> 00:48:21,200 And what we know about. Deciding what to do. 370 00:48:21,200 --> 00:48:34,550 And I was uncomfortable with it. Yes, that's nice. 371 00:48:34,550 --> 00:48:39,010 Yeah, yeah. Right. 372 00:48:39,010 --> 00:48:48,100 Right. Yeah, I know. Thank you for the big questions about the cyclical the cyclical nature, of course, of empire. 373 00:48:48,100 --> 00:48:50,140 Later, he does another one called Voyage of Life, 374 00:48:50,140 --> 00:48:57,670 which was understood as a sort of cycle painting cycle series of paintings and how that fits in with dissenting. 375 00:48:57,670 --> 00:49:04,570 And it goes back to what we recall, millenarian ism. 376 00:49:04,570 --> 00:49:12,880 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. 377 00:49:12,880 --> 00:49:16,570 So the evening of the deluge, I didn't really go into detail here. 378 00:49:16,570 --> 00:49:28,870 But I think that you can see a lot of comparisons with it and certainly with Belshazzar Feast from from 379 00:49:28,870 --> 00:49:38,200 the Old Testament and the idea being that the world is totally corrupt and is going to go up in flames, 380 00:49:38,200 --> 00:49:41,050 but that nature will eventually come back. 381 00:49:41,050 --> 00:49:50,350 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. 382 00:49:50,350 --> 00:49:57,640 The enduring feature is the promontory. So it's it's here. 383 00:49:57,640 --> 00:50:03,630 And then pan and zoom in. It goes to the other side and then it's here in the background. 384 00:50:03,630 --> 00:50:07,370 It's similar here and also here. 385 00:50:07,370 --> 00:50:19,130 And notably, the column is being overtaken, literally overtaken by moths and like and and so nature is coming back to reclaim human civilisation. 386 00:50:19,130 --> 00:50:28,300 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, 387 00:50:28,300 --> 00:50:39,520 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. 388 00:50:39,520 --> 00:50:47,140 And so, yes, I think that his millenarian is the millenarian ism of Martin really influenced him. 389 00:50:47,140 --> 00:50:56,470 And that certainly as a religious dissenter, that was very much a part of his part of his world view. 390 00:50:56,470 --> 00:51:05,160 And and I think I think I need to think more about how coal positioned himself. 391 00:51:05,160 --> 00:51:15,130 These are the evangelical movements in America in the 1920s and 30s, which were not really like British dissenting, 392 00:51:15,130 --> 00:51:22,090 but were absolutely happening and were happening primarily in upstate New York where coal was working. 393 00:51:22,090 --> 00:51:29,450 And those groups, those evangelical groups in the 20s and 30s were highly abolitionist. 394 00:51:29,450 --> 00:51:37,040 And and that and that is something that I that I don't know but is a great point. 395 00:51:37,040 --> 00:51:53,060 Came to generation. Right. 396 00:51:53,060 --> 00:51:58,720 And then on top of that is in Canada right now. 397 00:51:58,720 --> 00:52:10,900 And so on, that 32. We Statue of Liberty at her by woman. 398 00:52:10,900 --> 00:52:21,000 And I like my personal heroes. 399 00:52:21,000 --> 00:52:27,780 I see a lot of kids with that email. 400 00:52:27,780 --> 00:52:41,260 You know, you see me now if you ask me if I see any way possible that such a severe infection. 401 00:52:41,260 --> 00:52:47,390 She also a male. Yes. 402 00:52:47,390 --> 00:52:52,360 Maybe read. 403 00:52:52,360 --> 00:53:02,560 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. 404 00:53:02,560 --> 00:53:06,160 And actually the reason I'm doing this is because I have a nice little picture of it right here. 405 00:53:06,160 --> 00:53:13,930 I just I'm not going crazy. Yes, that's that's a really that's a really beautiful reading. 406 00:53:13,930 --> 00:53:25,180 My intention here was just to sort of flag or alert people the ways to the ways in which abolition Nizam was gendered. 407 00:53:25,180 --> 00:53:41,920 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. 408 00:53:41,920 --> 00:53:46,620 You know, I have to I take your point very well, I would have to think a little bit more about it, 409 00:53:46,620 --> 00:53:59,000 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. 410 00:53:59,000 --> 00:54:05,590 You know, I think that is also a really interesting. 411 00:54:05,590 --> 00:54:11,320 Figure, because it's tiny, but it's definitely a woman. 412 00:54:11,320 --> 00:54:14,020 And I think, you know, and the gesture is ambiguous. 413 00:54:14,020 --> 00:54:22,450 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, 414 00:54:22,450 --> 00:54:30,130 whereas everyone else has their gaze kind of fixed on this victorious emperor who's returning from wherever. 415 00:54:30,130 --> 00:54:33,810 The other thing, too, is to pick up on the earlier comment. 416 00:54:33,810 --> 00:54:43,360 I looked very carefully at Martyn's painting of the deluge and a sort of tumultuous as it is, 417 00:54:43,360 --> 00:54:48,430 there's no figure which seems to be willing themselves into death. 418 00:54:48,430 --> 00:55:00,970 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. 419 00:55:00,970 --> 00:55:07,620 And why I why I chose to highlight it here. 420 00:55:07,620 --> 00:55:19,430 Do we have one more question? Yeah, good. 421 00:55:19,430 --> 00:55:37,980 Yes. Oh, the figure in desolation. 422 00:55:37,980 --> 00:55:51,350 Question is about the figure in desolation. Wow. 423 00:55:51,350 --> 00:55:55,250 Well, I can't find it right now. 424 00:55:55,250 --> 00:56:02,720 What I will say about it, though, is that there is a time when we think about figures. 425 00:56:02,720 --> 00:56:07,040 We're clearly here. It's not Native American figures. 426 00:56:07,040 --> 00:56:11,930 That would have been something that Cole was enthused about representing. 427 00:56:11,930 --> 00:56:19,880 Most likely because he saw paintings in London of Aboriginal Australian people in paintings. 428 00:56:19,880 --> 00:56:24,170 So he was kind of thinking about indigenous city there. 429 00:56:24,170 --> 00:56:33,530 And then for him in the Arcadian state, it's replaced by white figures who are engaged in the beginnings of civilisation. 430 00:56:33,530 --> 00:56:42,150 So quite clearly, there was a kind of interiority which he ascribed to to two native figures. 431 00:56:42,150 --> 00:56:56,860 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. 432 00:56:56,860 --> 00:57:02,350 Yes. Where would you like it by? 433 00:57:02,350 --> 00:57:08,660 OK. So I wanted to show I me be desolations. 434 00:57:08,660 --> 00:57:16,808 The attempt to find this guy. He just flat out.