Dream of Arcadia
Not on view
Cole's idyllic landscape includes a temple and figures that evoke the classical past. The related oil painting (ca. 1838; Denver Art Museum) was acquired by the American Art-Union after the artist's death in 1848. The institution boasted nearly nineteen thousand subscribers at its height in 1849–50. For an annual fee of five dollars, subscriber-members received a large, finely engraved print and were entered in a year-end lottery that distributed artworks exhibited at the Art-Union's Free Gallery. Aimed at educating the public about contemporary American art, the organization's distribution network reached members in every state and helped to create a national market for landscapes, genre paintings and small bronze sculptures. The system flourished for a limited period, however, with no lottery taking place in 1851, the year that the Art-Union issued this work as part of a set of small engravings titled "Gallery of American Art, No. I."
