The World in a Glass

Thomas Cole did not paint a giant drinking glass because he was thirsty. He painted it because he wanted to flex his weirdest imaginative muscles and let the art world know he was bored of painting regular trees. It was 1833. The American wilderness was the big selling point for landscape painters. But Cole sat down without a single commission and decided to invent an entire living ecosystem inside a massive stone goblet.

The physical painting is tiny. It measures just under twenty inches high. Yet it completely defies traditional scale. The massive stem of the goblet acts like a mountain trunk covered in moss and the tiny ruins of a forgotten giant civilization. Boats sail calmly on the rim of the cup. Water spills over the edge into a vast abyss. It is a world built by titans but inhabited by absolute specks.

When Cole showed the oil on canvas at the National Academy of Design in New York people were baffled. They probably still are. Scholars argue to this day about whether it represents the World Tree or some deep cut into Norse mythology. Cole never bothered to explain it. He just dropped this weird mythological bomb into the middle of his career and walked away. It survives as a pure burst of surrealism decades before anyone knew what that word meant. Cole was painting the ruins of a forgotten cosmos while everyone else was just painting the Hudson River.

References

Parry, Ellwood C. The Art of Thomas Cole Ambition and Imagination. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988.

Powell, Earl A. Thomas Cole. New York, Harry N. Abrams, 1990.