The Course of Empire: Destruction

1836

Oil on canvas, 99.7 × 161.3 cm. New-York Historical Society, New York

Invaders storm a grand classical city as fires burn and its people flee. It is the fourth stage in a five-picture cycle about how an empire rises and falls.

Commissioned in 1833 by the merchant Luman Reed for his home gallery; the full series was shown in New York in 1836.
Look at the headless giant statue of a warrior, which replaces the goddess that stood there in the previous canvas.
Cole carved his signature, unusually large, into a broken pedestal inside the scene.
Cole took the cycle's title from a 1729 poem by Bishop George Berkeley and its motto from Byron's Childe Harold. The Society also suggests echoes of John Martin's disaster scenes and of New York's Great Fire of 1835.
Reed died before it was finished; his collection later passed to the Society in 1858.

Image: Wikimedia Commons · Public domain (PD-Art)