The Course of Empire: Desolation

The neighborhood was well calculated to foster the reveries of a mind like mine. . . . I would throw myself, during the panting heats of a summer noon, under the shade of some wide-spreading tree, and muse and dream away the hours, in a state of mental intoxication. . . . There is a repose in our mighty forests, that gives full scope to the...

~FROM the mid eighteenth century on, Historicism pervaded architecture as thoroughly as it had the other arts. In fact, this new viewpoint has usually been pointed out more clearly in histories of architectureFor English-speaking readers the term has become familiar...

Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens were both New Jersey-born residents of Manhattan, wherefrom each embarked on a well-publicized excursion to the Yucatán Peninsula. One departed from New York on Monday, October 9, 1841, aboard the cargo ship Tennessee; the...

~In 1772, the architect William Chambers published a treatise entitled A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, dedicating it to his patron, George III. Chambers’s fanciful description of Chinese gardens was intended to serve as a critique of the work of Capability Brown and his...

This short imperative, declaimed by John Danforth in the Massachusetts Assembly chamber at the beginning of the eighteenth century, contains within its succinct formulation the sentiments constituting the foundation of the nineteenth-century American fascination with the Holy Land. “Israel,” understood as...

~IN THE COLLECTION of the Bronck Museum in Coxsackie, New York, is a battered wooden box the size and shape of a briefcase. It contains Thomas Cole’s (1801–1848) mineral collection (fig. 5), one of the many bits of evidence we have of his interest in geology. Measuring about twenty by eighteen inches, the box holds...

In the spring of 1833 America’s first “foreign correspondent” stood on the “lofty turrets” of the Tomb of Cecilia Metella and saw before him the original of “one of the finest landscapes ever painted” ...