Irrational Exuberance

Thomas Cole
The Course of the Empire: Consummation of the Empire
1836

I sort of doubt that the foreign-born but Jingoistic Cole realized, as a bright young painter in a bright young democracy (as yet, unaware of its own limitations and mounting crimes), that by revisiting Rome at its gauchest, he painted an American future of festooned numbing, gilded pleasure barges and fat (now gained and lost, gained and lost, oft repeated). Perhaps he imagined the English as he worked, or perhaps only the remote Ancients of the picture plane.

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