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"The whole landscape, wich, seen by a favouring light, and in a genial temperature, had been found so lovely, appeared now like some pictured allegory of life, in wich objects were arrayed in their harshest but truest colours, and without the relief of any shadowing ... the bold and rocky mountains were too distinct in their barreness, and the eye even sought relief, in vain, by attempting to pierce the illimitable void of heaven, wich was shut to its gaze, by the dusky sheet of ragged and driving vapour." Enraptured descriptions of nature such as this one can be found in the pages of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, in which the author found in the wild American landscape the ideal setting for this heroic story of Native American Indians during the Colonial period. In the year that the book was published, 1826, Thomas Cole painted a number of Landscapes with the Last of the Mohicans in which he depicted a new vision of the American landscape, inspired by his trip to the White Mountains in New Hampshire.
The Landscapes with the Last of the Mohicans are a precedent to the new elevated landscape style which Cole aimed to deploy in paintings such as Expulsion. Moon and Firelight in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Landscape was no longer merely descriptive but had become a vehicle for expressing religious and moral meanings and for representing man's vulnerability in the face of nature and God's powers over this nature. Expulsion. Moon and Firelight is also linked to two biblical paintings which Cole exhibited in 1828 in the National Academy of Design in New York and, as Franklin Kelly (1994) has shown, changed the course of his career as a painter: Paradise (location unknown until recently, now in the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth), and The Expulsion from Paradise (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
In the Expulsion in Boston Adam and Eve, expelled from Paradise, are crossing a rocky bridge towards a natural world of mad and chaotic appearance. Cole took his inspiration for the rocky bridge which divides Paradise from this world of wild and chaotic nature from a rock in the White Mountains known as "The Bridge of Fear" which had caught his attention during a visit to that region and which appears in numerous drawings in the sketchbook which he used in the year prior to the execution of the painting. In Paradise, a representation of the world prior to the Fall, the composition is dominated by an idyllic landscape which no man had ever seen before.
In the present painting the figures of Adam and Eve as well as the Paradise which they are forced to leave have been omitted. The landscape and the elements of creation-the stone bridge, the waterfall, the volcano and the moon-are the only protagonists here. As Barbara Novak (1986) has pointed out in her study of the painting, Cole divides the composition symmetrically using the cross formed by the horizontal of the bridge and the vertical of the water from the waterfall, while at the same time he establishes a symbolic play of contrasts between the moonlight and the daylight, the fire from the volcano and the water, the earth and the air, emphasising the conventions of the Sublime.
In contrast to the Boston Expulsion, by eliminating the figures of Adam and Eve, the stone bridge, instead of being the route to expulsion, becomes the road to Paradise. We are only separated from the Garden of Eden by a door surrounded by dark rocks leading to a brilliantly lit focal point representing hope which Cole emphasises, perhaps through his conviction that "We are still in Paradise: the wall which separates us from the garden is that of our own ignorance and stupidity."
Paloma Alarcó
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