The untrammeled vision: Thomas Cole and the dream of the Artist - paintings entitled The Architect's Dream and Dream of Arcadia

1. Cole's letter is dated March 20, 1838; see Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole (1853), ed. Elliot S. Vessell (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1964), 188.

2. Annie Storr, in a talk at the National Museum of American Art in the spring of 1990, suggested that Cole's inclusion of an architectural survey was a direct response to the frontispiece of Jacob Bigelow's Elements of Technology (Boston: Hilliar, Gray, Little and Wilkins, 1829). The frontispiece illustrates (in outline style) the relative sizes of many famous buildings from ancient to contemporary times.

3. Ellwood C. Parry III, "Thomas Cole's Imagination at Work in The Architect's Dream," American Art Journal 12 (Winter 1980): 42-54.

4. Perhaps Cole included the pyramid as a personal reference to his own earlier affiliation with the freemasons; see William R. Denslow, Ten Thousand Famous Freemasons, 1 (Richmond: Macoy Publishing & Masonic Supply Co., 1957), 235-36.

5. Town was also known as an architect who employed a broad range of other historical styles. He had designed the famous New Haven Green, which included buildings representing period styles from Greek and Gothic to Georgian.

6. William Cullen Bryant, A Funeral Oration Occasioned by the Death of Thomas Cole (New York: Appleton, 1848), 27-28.

7. Robert McNish provides different, more comic examples, such as the account of a man who applied a hot-water bottle to his feet when he went to bed and then dreamed of making a journey to the top of Mount Etna, only to discover that the heat of the ground was almost unbearable; Robert McNish, The Philosophy of Sleep (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1834), 54.

8. According to Noble, Cole designed and painted sets for a "Thespian Society" in Zanesville, Ohio, in February 1823; no description survives of the scenes he painted (Noble, The Life and Works, 21-22).

9. McNish, The Philosophy of Sleep, 84. E. T. A. Hoffman also wrote that the imagery of dreams often transcends both time and space. See Michael R. Katz, Dreams and the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Russian Fiction (London: University Press of New England, 1984), 8.

10. Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater, ed. Alethea Hayter (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 103-4. It was common for literary dream imagery to be set in vast architectural landscapes. For instance, another passage by De Quincey reads: "With the same power of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture proceed in dreams. In the early stage of my malady, the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds" (ibid., 106).

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne, New-England Magazine 9 (1835): 209; cited in Rita K. Gollin, Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Truth of Dreams (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 13. For other examples of writers and artists comparing the dream state to artistic creation, see Elizabeth Schneider, Coleridge, Opium and Kubla Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 67; and James Henry Rubin, "Endymion's Dream as a Myth of Romantic Inspiration," Art Quarterly, n.s. 1, no. 2 (1978): 47-84.