A good-looking, well-spoken young man at the art museum in Utica in upstate New York was studying with rapt interest the second in a series of four oil paintings, this one called ‘Youth’, all the work of the nineteenth-century Romantic landscape artist Thomas Cole. Watching him at an angle, a volunteer guide at the gallery was curious. Few young people, she knew, gave this painting or the three others in the series much of their attention; paintings of nature were not to their taste and they did not linger here. This visitor, however, did. She approached him and, sensing her presence, he turned, saw her uniform, and her name tag, ‘Cassie,’ smiled, and asked, “Do you know if Thomas Cole painted other allegorical scenes like these, or were the others strictly representational?”
“Mostly landscapes,” she replied, pleased to be asked. “He was the founder of the Hudson River school: Niagara Falls, Catskill Creek, for example. He was a committed Christian, a member of Catskill’s St. Luke’s Episcopalian Church, but you could look up his series of four paintings called ‘The Course of Empire’; like this ‘The Voyage of Life’ before you, each series tells a story, and both are allegorical, imparting life lessons to the viewer about–”
“Yes, preachy, moralistic lessons, no doubt!” The interruption came from behind. “They are crassly out of date, these dreadful Victorians, the man in that painting unable to stand on his own two feet, having to be ‘saved’ by an angel! An angel, of all things! Saccharine sentimentality! Angels aren’t real, Conrad; they’re fairy tale stuff. Now come along, your parents are waiting for you, and there’s lots more to see. Come along now.” The speaker, a formidably large woman in her fifties, wheeled a visibly embarrassed Conrad around by his shoulders, and with a stern glare at the guide, marched away from her with her prize, oblivious to his echoing protest, “They’re allegorical–they’re not meant to be realistic!”
Cassie used to teach art history, and she detested closed minds. On her break, she saw Conrad once more, hands in his pockets, trailing dolefully behind what she took to be his parents, reluctantly following the opinionated and overbearing woman who had interrupted them earlier, as she led them all, loudly and enthusiastically, into the Hall of Modern Art, “Ahh! Such colour, such brightness! What a relief!” Conrad caught Cassie’s eye, raised his hands slightly as if supplicating, and rolled his own eyes at her conspiratorially as he followed his new self-appointed guide into a chaos of abstract art. Cassie stifled her impulse to intervene.
This was not to be her last glimpse of Conrad that day. He was standing yet again, alone as before, in front of Cole’s ‘The Voyage of Life,’ mouth agape, staring fixedly at the fourth painting, entitled ‘Old Age.’ She started towards him, only to be stopped by her colleague Stefania, who had a question for her. When she had moved on, so had Conrad. Oh, dear. An opportunity lost, thought Cassie, who felt the loss keenly, as she never saw him again.
