Word: luman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...true and specifically American picturesqueness out of rocks, gorges, sunsets, trees and distant Indians. He is taken up by the plutocrats of his day, some with long patrician roots, like Stephen van Rensselaer III, America's biggest landlord, and others more recently arrived, like the grocery millionaire Luman Reed. Old money wanted to show that taste was not a monopoly of Europeans. New money hoped to prove that it too had refinement and a stake in forming the national image...
...moral opinion is a subtext in Cole's landscapes, it is the essence of his big historical-didactic cycles, notably The Course of Empire, five large allegorical paintings of the rise and fall of an imaginary state -- by implication, America -- that he did for Luman Reed at the then immense price of $5,000. It was meant, he said, to show "the natural changes of Landscape and those effected by Man in his progress from Barbarism to Civilization -- to the state of Luxury -- to the vicious state or state of Destruction etc." He stirred in all manner of different cultures...