(piano music)
- [Lawrence] We're at
the Toledo Museum of Art.
Standing in front of a large
painting by Thomas Cole.
This is The Architect's Dream.
It was painted in 1840
and America had never
seen anything like it.
We see the capital of a
great classical column
and impossibly, on top of that, laid out
as if he were a classical figure,
this young man, clearly an architect,
holding a drawing in his
hand, lying on books,
lying on knowledge itself.
- [Steven] He's holding a floor plan
of a Roman or Greek temple
with his eyes shut, he's imaging the past
and therefore thinking about
what he as an architect
can do in the future.
And just below and one
reads, Painted by T. Cole
for I. Town, Arch, abbreviation
for Architect, 1840.
- [William] Ithiel Town
asked Cole to paint for him
a landscape of ancient Athens
but Cole clearly deviated.
- [Steven] And Ithiel Town
therefore rejected this painting.
He wanted a landscape with Athens in it
and instead, Cole paints this menagerie
of architectural styles over millennia
and Town is quoted as
saying "He liked the mixture
"of different ages and styles
in the same imaginary picture"
but nonetheless, he rejected the painting,
he didn't fully pay for it.
It ended up back with Cole and
it stayed in the Cole family
until the Toledo Museum
of Art acquired it.
Town wanted an identifiable landscape.
- [William] What Cole does give us
is a fantastical history
of the great architecture
of the Western tradition.
- [Steven] Egyptian pyramid
with Egyptian temple in the background,
obelisks in front of it and
then in the middle ground,
a Doric Greek temple
with a pilastered wall
leading to an Ionic Greek temple
above which rests the Roman Tempietto,
the round temple we see
with Corinthian columns
and the Roman aqueduct behind it
and of course, there's even more.
- [William] But all rendered
on a gargantuan scale.
You can see these tiny human figures.
This is a scale that even the
brilliance of Roman engineers
would never achieve.
I think to understand this painting,
it's important to understand
how these architectural styles
were understood in the 19th century.
The Egyptian, the Greek, the Roman styles
were considered to be
ideal, perfect architecture
that we in the modern world
could only hope to re-achieve.
And it's interesting to me
that cole has separated
that great tradition
from the Gothic by the body of water.
This is the side of the
painting that we're on.
This is closer to our historical moment
and yet it's in shadow.
It's not the height of man's achievement
as the classical had been seen.
But despite that, there is
some light that comes through
and it comes through those
stained glass windows.
And that is the
spirituality of the Gothic.
- [Steven] And Cole is including that
because Town worked in that style as well.
It's important also to
have an awareness that the
fantasy we're looking at
is even accentuated by
these framing arches
with curtains pulled back.
This is a stage set.
- [William] And even as
that figure may represent
Ithiel Town's fantasy,
of course ultimately, it's the artist.
Although America had never
seen a painting like this,
this painting is not
coming out of thin area.
There was a tradition in Europe
of architectural fantasy.
- [Steven] Cole who was born in England
traveled back to Europe on two occasions
and on these trips he
saw great works of art
by Claude Lorrain, the
17th century French artist.
He saw a paintings of the
contemporary artist Turner
and so he was influenced
by what they had done
in a fantasy modality,
allegorical landscapes
commenting on human history
and human civilization
and this is an artist to
then would paint such series
as the course of empire
and here in our painting in
the Toledo Museum of Art,
he's encapsulating in one large canvas
an exploration of the
past and Ithiel Town,
even though he didn't like the painting,
we have it today as this
architect and as Cole
are musing about the future.
(piano music)
