The Voyage of Life (Ages of Life)

Thomas Cole

Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Art

The Voyage of Life is Thomas Cole's celebrated four-painting allegorical series depicting the stages of human existence — Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age — in which a solitary voyager travels a symbolic River of Life accompanied by a guardian angel through dramatically changing American wilderness landscapes. Each canvas corresponds to a season of the year and a phase of spiritual development, progressing from the lush innocence of spring in Childhood to the austere, transcendent stillness of Old Age, where the battered voyager is guided toward heavenly light. Cole, born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire, England in 1801 and later emigrated to the United States, was the founder of the Hudson River School and the preeminent figure in American Romantic landscape painting; he intended the series as a didactic, moralizing allegory linking the landscape to Christian faith and the doctrine of death and resurrection. The second set of the series, completed in Rome in 1842, is held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and remains one of the most celebrated works of nineteenth-century American art.