The Voyage of Life
| The Voyage of Life: Childhood | |
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| Artist | Thomas Cole |
| Year | 1842 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 133 cm × 198 cm (52 in × 78 in) |
| Location | National Gallery of Art |
| The Voyage of Life: Youth | |
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| Artist | Thomas Cole |
| Year | 1842 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 134 cm × 194 cm (53 in × 76 in) |
| Location | National Gallery of Art |
| The Voyage of Life: Manhood | |
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| Artist | Thomas Cole |
| Year | 1842 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 132.8 cm × 198.1 cm (52.3 in × 78.0 in) |
| Location | National Gallery of Art |
| The Voyage of Life: Old Age | |
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| Artist | Thomas Cole |
| Year | 1842 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 133.4 cm × 196.2 cm (52.5 in × 77.2 in) |
| Location | National Gallery of Art |
The Voyage of Life is a series of paintings created by Thomas Cole in 1842, representing an allegory of the four stages of human life: childhood, youth, manhood, and old age. The paintings depict a voyager who travels in a boat on a river through the mid-19th-century American wilderness. In each painting the voyager rides the boat on the River of Life accompanied by a guardian angel. The landscape, each reflecting one of the four seasons of the year, plays a major role in conveying the story. With each installment the boat's direction of travel is reversed from the previous picture. In childhood, the infant glides from a dark cave into a rich, green landscape. As a youth, the boy takes control of the boat and aims for a shining castle in the sky. In manhood, the adult relies on prayer and religious faith to sustain him through rough waters and a threatening landscape. Finally, the man becomes old and the angel guides him to heaven across the waters of eternity.
Thomas Cole is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century and was concerned with the realistic and detailed portrayal of nature but with a strong influence from Romanticism. This group of American landscape painters worked between about 1825 and 1870 and shared a sense of national pride as well as an interest in celebrating the unique natural beauty found in the United States. The wild, untamed nature found in America was viewed as its special character; Europe had ancient ruins, but America had the uncharted wilderness. As Cole's friend William Cullen Bryant sermonized in verse, so Cole sermonized in paint. Both men saw nature as God's work and as a refuge from the ugly materialism of cities. Cole clearly intended The Voyage of Life to be a didactic, moralizing series of paintings using the landscape as an allegory for religious faith.
Unlike Cole's first major series, The Course of Empire, which focused on the stages of civilization as a whole, The Voyage of Life series is a more personal, Christian allegory that interprets visually the journey of man through four stages of life: infancy, youth, manhood and old age. Done on commission, the finished works generated a disagreement with the owner about a public exhibition. In 1842, when Cole was in Rome, he did a second set of the series which on his return to America was shown to acclaim. The first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York, and the second set is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
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