The exhibit begins and ends with showstoppers that do more than capture that 19th-century fervor for nature. They give today’s viewers pause to consider where we have come as a society since the Hudson River School painters dreamed their glorious dreams.
Cole’s magnificent five-painting series “The Course of Empire’’ fills the first gallery. Collector Luman Reed commissioned the artist to paint the series in 1833, and over the next three years Cole developed a vast, intricate narrative framed by the landscape, notably a rugged cliff face in the distance, which remains throughout the rise and fall of Cole’s empire.
The New York staging of the exhibit presented the series clustered in a salon style, but PEM’s in-house curator Sam Scott hangs them more cinematically, side by side around the gallery, the better to give viewers a sense of time passing as the sun rises and sets over this mythical empire.
It proceeds from “The Course of Empire: The Savage State,’’ in which men in animal furs hunt for their food in a woodsy wilderness beneath a roiling sky, to the more placid “The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State,’’ which represents the moment in American history in which Cole painted it. The scene is mostly rural, with a shepherd tending sheep, and youths engaged in music-making and dancing.
Cole drew on his own European tour, taken from 1829 to 1832, for the rest of the series, which brings us from the bright, teeming “The Course of Empire: The Consummation of Empire,’’ with its Romanesque architecture, to a chaotic, fiery “The Course of Empire: Destruction.’’ A mossy, overgrown scene in “The Course of Empire: Desolation’’ follows. It’s impossible to look upon this intricately composed, operatically executed series without reflecting on where we are today in the course of the American empire.
