Cole. Thomas - The Voyage of Life: Childhood (1842)

Thomas Cole painted the first canvas of The Voyage of Life in 1842. He called it Childhood. Cole was thirty-nine years old and already staring down the abyss of his own mortality. He chose to begin his greatest allegorical series not with darkness but with an infant emerging from a cave into the pure bright light of a new world.

The baby sits in a golden boat shaped like a shell. An angelic guardian steers from behind with total authority. The flowers are perfect and the river is calm and the entire world is bathed in a warm impossible glow that only exists in the memory of things we have already lost.

Cole packed every inch of this canvas with purpose. He was not painting a pretty pastoral scene for wealthy patrons to hang above a fireplace. He was mapping the full arc of human existence from the cave of birth to the dark river of death. Childhood is the only canvas in the four part series where the guardian angel is still fully in control. From here on out the child will take the oar and steer toward his own inevitable disasters.

The series was reproduced in engravings and distributed across America. Millions of ordinary people who never set foot in a gallery saw these images. Cole built a mirror for the national soul. He started with this small and fragile boat in perfect light because he needed you to love what was about to be lost.

References

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

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

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