All language subtitles for S01E01 - Looking for Paradise

af Afrikaans
ak Akan
sq Albanian
am Amharic
ar Arabic
hy Armenian
az Azerbaijani
eu Basque
be Belarusian
bem Bemba
bn Bengali
bh Bihari
bs Bosnian
br Breton
bg Bulgarian
km Cambodian
ca Catalan
ceb Cebuano
chr Cherokee
ny Chichewa
zh-CN Chinese (Simplified)
zh-TW Chinese (Traditional)
co Corsican
hr Croatian
cs Czech
da Danish
nl Dutch
en English
eo Esperanto
et Estonian
ee Ewe
fo Faroese
tl Filipino
fi Finnish
fr French
fy Frisian
gaa Ga
gl Galician
ka Georgian
de German
el Greek
gn Guarani
gu Gujarati
ht Haitian Creole
ha Hausa
haw Hawaiian
iw Hebrew
hi Hindi
hmn Hmong
hu Hungarian
is Icelandic
ig Igbo
id Indonesian
ia Interlingua
ga Irish
it Italian
ja Japanese
jw Javanese
kn Kannada
kk Kazakh
rw Kinyarwanda
rn Kirundi
kg Kongo
ko Korean
kri Krio (Sierra Leone)
ku Kurdish
ckb Kurdish (Soranî)
ky Kyrgyz
lo Laothian
la Latin
lv Latvian
ln Lingala
lt Lithuanian
loz Lozi
lg Luganda
ach Luo
lb Luxembourgish
mk Macedonian
mg Malagasy
ms Malay
ml Malayalam
mt Maltese
mi Maori
mr Marathi
mfe Mauritian Creole
mo Moldavian
mn Mongolian
my Myanmar (Burmese)
sr-ME Montenegrin
ne Nepali
pcm Nigerian Pidgin
nso Northern Sotho
no Norwegian
nn Norwegian (Nynorsk)
oc Occitan
or Oriya
om Oromo
ps Pashto
fa Persian
pl Polish
pt-BR Portuguese (Brazil)
pt Portuguese (Portugal)
pa Punjabi
qu Quechua
ro Romanian
rm Romansh
nyn Runyakitara
ru Russian
sm Samoan
gd Scots Gaelic
sr Serbian
sh Serbo-Croatian
st Sesotho
tn Setswana
crs Seychellois Creole
sn Shona
sd Sindhi
si Sinhalese
sk Slovak
sl Slovenian
so Somali
es Spanish Download
es-419 Spanish (Latin American)
su Sundanese
sw Swahili
sv Swedish
tg Tajik
ta Tamil
tt Tatar
te Telugu
th Thai
ti Tigrinya
to Tonga
lua Tshiluba
tum Tumbuka
tr Turkish
tk Turkmen
tw Twi
ug Uighur
uk Ukrainian
ur Urdu
uz Uzbek
vi Vietnamese
cy Welsh
wo Wolof
xh Xhosa
yi Yiddish
yo Yoruba
zu Zulu
Would you like to inspect the original subtitles? These are the user uploaded subtitles that are being translated: 1 00:00:12,700 --> 00:00:17,540 America, the land of the endless horizon. 2 00:00:17,540 --> 00:00:19,180 In the human imagination, 3 00:00:19,180 --> 00:00:21,180 it's always been a place of new beginnings 4 00:00:21,180 --> 00:00:23,420 and limitless opportunity. 5 00:00:23,420 --> 00:00:28,540 A frontier to be discovered, overcome and settled. 6 00:00:28,540 --> 00:00:32,580 And every step of that journey has been traced through art. 7 00:00:37,260 --> 00:00:41,340 The story of American art is as epic as the story of America itself. 8 00:00:44,980 --> 00:00:49,460 In this series, I'll follow the trail left by America's artists, 9 00:00:49,460 --> 00:00:53,300 from the clash between man and nature, 10 00:00:53,300 --> 00:00:57,980 to the clashes of different cultures and different ideas. 11 00:00:59,420 --> 00:01:03,660 I'll be exploring the many ways in which the modern world 12 00:01:03,660 --> 00:01:06,380 was shaped and structured here in America. 13 00:01:09,540 --> 00:01:12,580 Because this is about America as an idea, 14 00:01:12,580 --> 00:01:15,860 reproduced and sold through images. 15 00:01:15,860 --> 00:01:19,820 The images that helped to forge the American dream, 16 00:01:19,820 --> 00:01:21,980 yet also mirrored the truths beneath. 17 00:01:23,980 --> 00:01:27,660 And ultimately, it's the story of America's struggle 18 00:01:27,660 --> 00:01:31,100 to find a sense of identity and a sense of direction 19 00:01:31,100 --> 00:01:34,140 in the increasingly fragmented, uncertain 20 00:01:34,140 --> 00:01:37,740 and image-saturated world of the 21st century. 21 00:02:02,580 --> 00:02:06,860 People have lived in America for thousands of years, 22 00:02:06,860 --> 00:02:11,060 yet to the white Europeans who first came exploring in the 16th century, 23 00:02:11,060 --> 00:02:14,140 it seemed almost virgin territory, 24 00:02:14,140 --> 00:02:16,380 a barely-occupied wilderness 25 00:02:16,380 --> 00:02:19,140 that promised the chance of a better life. 26 00:02:22,980 --> 00:02:25,900 The first Englishmen who set foot on this stretch of coast 27 00:02:25,900 --> 00:02:28,100 were looking for a new Eden. 28 00:02:29,460 --> 00:02:33,020 And to promote that idea to others back home, 29 00:02:33,020 --> 00:02:35,260 they would use the power of art. 30 00:02:40,860 --> 00:02:47,860 In the summer of 1585, John White arrived here in Chesapeake Bay. 31 00:02:47,860 --> 00:02:51,380 He was the official artist on an expedition sponsored 32 00:02:51,380 --> 00:02:55,780 by none other than the enterprising Sir Walter Raleigh himself. 33 00:02:55,780 --> 00:02:58,620 Its aim was straightforward - 34 00:02:58,620 --> 00:03:04,140 observe the lie of the land, study the local flora and fauna, 35 00:03:04,140 --> 00:03:08,180 the natural resources, and then report back. 36 00:03:08,180 --> 00:03:12,260 Now, because the would-be colonisers didn't know quite what to expect, 37 00:03:12,260 --> 00:03:16,300 they went ashore in leather jerkins and full suits of armour. 38 00:03:16,300 --> 00:03:18,500 It was July! The heat was sweltering. 39 00:03:18,500 --> 00:03:20,980 What a bizarre sight they must have made, 40 00:03:20,980 --> 00:03:24,060 this whole troop of sweaty Elizabethans, 41 00:03:24,060 --> 00:03:27,860 clanking and clambering their way into the forests 42 00:03:27,860 --> 00:03:29,660 of what's now Virginia. 43 00:03:29,660 --> 00:03:35,300 In fact, the local people turned out to be friendly at first, 44 00:03:35,300 --> 00:03:39,820 and over the coming weeks John White made a whole series 45 00:03:39,820 --> 00:03:42,500 of breathtakingly vivid, 46 00:03:42,500 --> 00:03:46,460 deeply poignant watercolours of the Native American Indian. 47 00:03:51,700 --> 00:03:54,900 "Every man was attired in the strangest fashion," 48 00:03:54,900 --> 00:03:57,740 wrote one of White's companions. 49 00:04:01,260 --> 00:04:04,060 "They dance, sing, 50 00:04:04,060 --> 00:04:08,300 "and use the strangest gestures that they can possibly devise." 51 00:04:10,380 --> 00:04:14,580 White's paintings captured the compelling exoticism of the people, 52 00:04:14,580 --> 00:04:16,660 the animals and the fruit, 53 00:04:16,660 --> 00:04:20,300 with a brilliant, wide-eyed sense of wonder. 54 00:04:29,740 --> 00:04:33,260 And you can see why White truly believed that he'd found himself 55 00:04:33,260 --> 00:04:35,300 in a kind of paradise on Earth. 56 00:04:40,900 --> 00:04:44,660 White used his pictures as advertisements 57 00:04:44,660 --> 00:04:47,780 and recruited more than 100 English settlers, 58 00:04:47,780 --> 00:04:50,140 including his own daughter and son-in-law, 59 00:04:50,140 --> 00:04:51,940 to create a colony here. 60 00:04:57,660 --> 00:05:01,540 But the reality of life turned out to be rather less idyllic 61 00:05:01,540 --> 00:05:03,540 than White's pictures. 62 00:05:03,540 --> 00:05:06,620 The ill-prepared settlers had brought no livestock. 63 00:05:06,620 --> 00:05:11,300 They planted their crops too late, and harvest failed. 64 00:05:11,300 --> 00:05:14,340 Most ominously, an attempt to go fishing 65 00:05:14,340 --> 00:05:17,540 turned into a violent skirmish with a local tribe. 66 00:05:20,020 --> 00:05:25,300 By late 1587, things had gone very, very badly wrong. 67 00:05:25,300 --> 00:05:27,620 The Indians had turned outright hostile, 68 00:05:27,620 --> 00:05:31,340 and the colony was fast running out of food and supplies. 69 00:05:31,340 --> 00:05:37,060 So White decided that he had to get back to England to bring help. 70 00:05:40,540 --> 00:05:44,340 When he did finally manage to get back to the site of the colony, 71 00:05:44,340 --> 00:05:48,460 more than two years had passed. 72 00:05:48,460 --> 00:05:52,100 And he found absolutely nothing here. 73 00:05:52,100 --> 00:05:56,980 No sign of his daughter, his son-in-law, his granddaughter. 74 00:05:56,980 --> 00:05:59,820 The whole colony had entirely disappeared, 75 00:05:59,820 --> 00:06:03,300 and no-one knows to this day just what happened to it. 76 00:06:09,180 --> 00:06:13,620 White's hopes of founding the first English colony in America 77 00:06:13,620 --> 00:06:15,220 were dashed forever. 78 00:06:17,220 --> 00:06:21,540 His beautiful images had turned out to be little more than empty promises. 79 00:06:35,100 --> 00:06:37,820 But others were not deterred. 80 00:06:37,820 --> 00:06:42,900 The prospect of a new continent with virgin land was simply irresistible. 81 00:06:42,900 --> 00:06:46,580 European explorers grabbed whatever they could 82 00:06:46,580 --> 00:06:48,940 in a ferocious scramble for territory. 83 00:06:50,900 --> 00:06:55,500 English traders established Virginia in 1607. 84 00:06:58,740 --> 00:07:01,060 Meanwhile the French, Spanish and Dutch 85 00:07:01,060 --> 00:07:04,900 all greedily claimed their own territories elsewhere. 86 00:07:08,700 --> 00:07:12,940 But the New World was also a magnet for breakaway religious groups, 87 00:07:12,940 --> 00:07:15,980 each hoping to build their own New Jerusalem. 88 00:07:17,940 --> 00:07:21,460 Like the English Pilgrims who arrived in 1620, 89 00:07:21,460 --> 00:07:24,340 and the Puritans, who soon followed. 90 00:07:24,340 --> 00:07:27,740 America in the 17th century was both a land of opportunity, 91 00:07:27,740 --> 00:07:30,220 and a place of refuge. 92 00:07:36,900 --> 00:07:39,700 In the heart of present-day Massachusetts 93 00:07:39,700 --> 00:07:42,220 is the Worcester Art Museum. 94 00:07:42,220 --> 00:07:45,860 Inside are two portraits by an unknown artist 95 00:07:45,860 --> 00:07:49,300 that bring us face to face with the kind of people 96 00:07:49,300 --> 00:07:52,340 who chose the New World over the Old. 97 00:07:55,380 --> 00:08:00,060 I'd like to introduce you to Mr and Mrs Freake. 98 00:08:00,060 --> 00:08:02,100 These are, we think, 99 00:08:02,100 --> 00:08:07,340 among the very first paintings of settlers in America, 100 00:08:07,340 --> 00:08:10,860 so when we look at them, we're looking at the very DNA 101 00:08:10,860 --> 00:08:14,940 both of modern American civilisation and of American art. 102 00:08:14,940 --> 00:08:17,820 So who were they? 103 00:08:17,820 --> 00:08:23,020 John Freake was a Puritan, an attorney and a merchant, 104 00:08:23,020 --> 00:08:28,100 who settled in Boston in 1658 105 00:08:28,100 --> 00:08:30,340 and, as his portrait shows us, 106 00:08:30,340 --> 00:08:34,340 he did very well for himself and he was rather proud of it. 107 00:08:34,340 --> 00:08:36,820 Look at this elaborate lace collar, 108 00:08:36,820 --> 00:08:41,540 and with his left hand, he flourishes the jewel 109 00:08:41,540 --> 00:08:44,340 that is the symbol of his prosperity. 110 00:08:44,340 --> 00:08:50,020 It's a picture that rather punctures the preconception of the Puritan 111 00:08:50,020 --> 00:08:54,740 as a joyless individual who's embarrassed by material prosperity. 112 00:08:54,740 --> 00:08:57,180 Puritans in America were nothing like that. 113 00:08:57,180 --> 00:09:01,380 If they did well, they saw it as a mark of God's providence. 114 00:09:01,380 --> 00:09:03,060 And that pleasure in doing well 115 00:09:03,060 --> 00:09:05,700 is something that still survives in America today. 116 00:09:05,700 --> 00:09:09,020 There's no need to be ashamed of having got on. 117 00:09:10,380 --> 00:09:13,220 If we move to Mrs Freake, 118 00:09:13,220 --> 00:09:17,060 which is actually my favourite of these two pictures, 119 00:09:17,060 --> 00:09:19,380 what a wonderfully vivid image it is. 120 00:09:19,380 --> 00:09:22,940 Like her husband, Mrs Freake is very proud of the fact 121 00:09:22,940 --> 00:09:24,620 that they've done well. 122 00:09:24,620 --> 00:09:29,700 She, too, has got a very elaborate lace collar, 123 00:09:29,700 --> 00:09:33,820 she's wearing her jewels, she's definitely in her Sunday best. 124 00:09:33,820 --> 00:09:36,620 But what is she most proud of? 125 00:09:36,620 --> 00:09:40,380 She's most proud of her little girl, 126 00:09:40,380 --> 00:09:42,940 and we know this from an X-ray, 127 00:09:42,940 --> 00:09:45,100 because X-rays show that, originally, 128 00:09:45,100 --> 00:09:47,300 she was depicted merely holding a book, 129 00:09:47,300 --> 00:09:49,700 but then she gave birth to her little girl, 130 00:09:49,700 --> 00:09:51,580 called the artist back in, 131 00:09:51,580 --> 00:09:54,740 and insisted that he depicted Mary on her lap. 132 00:09:56,180 --> 00:09:59,940 Now what does that child stand for, what's going on in this picture? 133 00:09:59,940 --> 00:10:03,380 Well, I think the child stands for the future. 134 00:10:03,380 --> 00:10:07,660 This child stands for the fact that these people 135 00:10:07,660 --> 00:10:11,260 and their descendents are here to stay. 136 00:10:17,820 --> 00:10:21,060 During the first few centuries of colonisation, 137 00:10:21,060 --> 00:10:23,860 American art was predominantly Protestant 138 00:10:23,860 --> 00:10:26,500 and inescapably provincial. 139 00:10:28,180 --> 00:10:31,020 It was the art of the second-rate portrait, 140 00:10:31,020 --> 00:10:34,900 the not-quite-van Dyck, the nearly-Gainsborough. 141 00:10:34,900 --> 00:10:39,020 Although these are still poignant records of their sitters' status 142 00:10:39,020 --> 00:10:40,700 and ambitions. 143 00:10:41,940 --> 00:10:44,820 These are the people who brought to America their dreams 144 00:10:44,820 --> 00:10:47,340 of a spiritual utopia. 145 00:10:47,340 --> 00:10:51,340 But they also unwittingly brought something else - 146 00:10:51,340 --> 00:10:53,500 deadly diseases that would prove fatal 147 00:10:53,500 --> 00:10:55,300 to the local Indian population. 148 00:11:12,220 --> 00:11:17,460 Decimated by terrifying European illnesses like smallpox and measles, 149 00:11:17,460 --> 00:11:20,940 the Native Americans abandoned great swathes of land, 150 00:11:20,940 --> 00:11:24,860 which the new settlers quickly claimed as their own. 151 00:11:26,060 --> 00:11:29,340 An unintentional genocide through germs 152 00:11:29,340 --> 00:11:33,340 soon became colonial practice through the power of the gun. 153 00:11:33,340 --> 00:11:36,540 And so the frontier was rolled out. 154 00:11:39,660 --> 00:11:44,740 In California alone, there were once 200 distinct Indian groups, 155 00:11:44,740 --> 00:11:48,940 speaking more than 100 different languages. 156 00:11:51,220 --> 00:11:54,580 Now, so many of those cultures that had extended across the continent 157 00:11:54,580 --> 00:11:58,460 exist only as fragments in museums. 158 00:11:59,540 --> 00:12:03,220 They're the shattered pieces of a broken puzzle 159 00:12:03,220 --> 00:12:05,580 that can never be put back together. 160 00:12:09,900 --> 00:12:13,940 I think the very phrase "Native American culture" 161 00:12:13,940 --> 00:12:15,420 is inherently misleading 162 00:12:15,420 --> 00:12:17,940 because it suggests we're talking about one thing 163 00:12:17,940 --> 00:12:20,900 but we're not, we're talking about a hundred, 164 00:12:20,900 --> 00:12:24,540 a thousand different civilisations, cultures, societies, 165 00:12:24,540 --> 00:12:27,060 interlocking across a vast continent, 166 00:12:27,060 --> 00:12:31,060 each one with its own complicated, subtle history. 167 00:12:31,060 --> 00:12:35,380 Here, we're looking at the last remains 168 00:12:35,380 --> 00:12:40,780 of one of around 100 societies that lived in the Midwest, 169 00:12:40,780 --> 00:12:42,820 around the area of the Mississippi, 170 00:12:42,820 --> 00:12:46,300 at the time that we now call the Renaissance. 171 00:12:46,300 --> 00:12:50,780 What can we say about them on the basis of these relics? 172 00:12:50,780 --> 00:12:54,980 Well, they had a very sophisticated, settled society. 173 00:12:54,980 --> 00:12:57,220 They weren't nomads. 174 00:12:57,220 --> 00:12:59,580 They were proud and warlike. 175 00:12:59,580 --> 00:13:02,100 It's thought that this terracotta head 176 00:13:02,100 --> 00:13:05,940 represents a captive taken in battle. 177 00:13:07,020 --> 00:13:09,020 They had their own myths and legends, 178 00:13:09,020 --> 00:13:13,300 their own mythical creatures, in this case the frog. 179 00:13:13,300 --> 00:13:18,380 They seem to have regarded the frog as the image of a cosmic traveller, 180 00:13:18,380 --> 00:13:23,420 moving from one realm to another, from water to land. 181 00:13:23,420 --> 00:13:26,300 But the rest is really a mystery. 182 00:13:26,300 --> 00:13:29,420 Look at those maskettes, as they're called, 183 00:13:29,420 --> 00:13:32,980 these extraordinary, staring little faces 184 00:13:32,980 --> 00:13:35,660 with their elongated Pinocchio noses. 185 00:13:35,660 --> 00:13:39,700 Nobody knows what they represent. Nobody knows what they meant. 186 00:13:41,740 --> 00:13:46,540 And there's the thing, because when you destroy an entire civilisation, 187 00:13:46,540 --> 00:13:48,460 an entire set of civilisations, 188 00:13:48,460 --> 00:13:53,140 you also destroy the possibility of writing its history. 189 00:14:07,340 --> 00:14:10,980 The official history of colonised America 190 00:14:10,980 --> 00:14:12,980 would be a selectively-edited account 191 00:14:12,980 --> 00:14:15,140 that gloried in the building 192 00:14:15,140 --> 00:14:17,900 of gleaming new cities like Philadelphia 193 00:14:17,900 --> 00:14:21,260 but conveniently ignored the grim reality 194 00:14:21,260 --> 00:14:23,900 of how it was all actually done. 195 00:14:25,020 --> 00:14:27,620 One of the functions of art in America, then, 196 00:14:27,620 --> 00:14:29,700 was to be part of a cover-up, 197 00:14:29,700 --> 00:14:34,380 and the chief cover-up artist was a painter called Benjamin West. 198 00:14:36,580 --> 00:14:41,180 Benjamin West was America's first internationally-famous artist. 199 00:14:41,180 --> 00:14:43,820 He was born here in Pennsylvania, a Quaker, 200 00:14:43,820 --> 00:14:46,980 and he circulated the legend that when he was a child, 201 00:14:46,980 --> 00:14:49,340 Native American Indians taught him to paint, 202 00:14:49,340 --> 00:14:51,420 taught him how to grind pigments. 203 00:14:51,420 --> 00:14:54,500 But while he liked to play on his exotic origins, 204 00:14:54,500 --> 00:14:57,260 he was, in fact, a thoroughly modern American, 205 00:14:57,260 --> 00:15:00,340 a brilliant salesman of his own reputation, 206 00:15:00,340 --> 00:15:04,380 and he invented a new kind of storytelling art, 207 00:15:04,380 --> 00:15:07,020 one that would be profoundly useful to those 208 00:15:07,020 --> 00:15:10,060 who would forge the future of this nation. 209 00:15:16,140 --> 00:15:18,020 The Pennsylvania Academy 210 00:15:18,020 --> 00:15:21,740 is the oldest picture gallery in the United States. 211 00:15:21,740 --> 00:15:26,740 Within it is one of Benjamin West's most celebrated works, 212 00:15:26,740 --> 00:15:29,580 a fine example of his main invention, 213 00:15:29,580 --> 00:15:31,380 the modern history painting. 214 00:15:33,260 --> 00:15:38,380 Yet it's also a picture that pulses with the energy of a dark secret. 215 00:15:46,060 --> 00:15:49,140 Penn's Treaty With The Indians was created, 216 00:15:49,140 --> 00:15:53,180 quite literally, in order to frame history, 217 00:15:53,180 --> 00:15:57,260 in particular, the history of the settlement of Pennsylvania 218 00:15:57,260 --> 00:16:00,460 and the foundation of its capital city, Philadelphia, 219 00:16:00,460 --> 00:16:06,980 to frame those histories as dignified, orderly, just, 220 00:16:06,980 --> 00:16:10,260 compassionate and tolerant. 221 00:16:10,260 --> 00:16:15,820 On the left, we've got William Penn, the founder of Philadelphia, 222 00:16:15,820 --> 00:16:19,860 and he's presenting the Indians with a treaty. 223 00:16:19,860 --> 00:16:22,020 And on this side of the picture, 224 00:16:22,020 --> 00:16:25,900 he's depicted the Native American Indians as a group. 225 00:16:25,900 --> 00:16:28,620 West said the subject of his painting 226 00:16:28,620 --> 00:16:31,900 was the civilisation of the savage. 227 00:16:33,740 --> 00:16:37,820 How does he represent this notion that they're going to be civilised? 228 00:16:38,900 --> 00:16:43,060 Interestingly, he relegates the treaty to shadow, 229 00:16:43,060 --> 00:16:46,820 and what he casts into light 230 00:16:46,820 --> 00:16:49,220 is this bolt of white cloth, 231 00:16:49,220 --> 00:16:52,220 held by the generic figure of the trader. 232 00:16:53,900 --> 00:16:58,060 It's an image that exactly, exactly recalls 233 00:16:58,060 --> 00:17:01,460 the adoration of the shepherds at the birth of Christ. 234 00:17:04,260 --> 00:17:08,060 This is the sanitised version of American history, 235 00:17:08,060 --> 00:17:10,620 that the god of free trade 236 00:17:10,620 --> 00:17:13,380 transformed noble savages into civilised men, 237 00:17:13,380 --> 00:17:16,420 effortlessly absorbing them into the republic. 238 00:17:19,100 --> 00:17:22,100 The painting soon became THE classic image 239 00:17:22,100 --> 00:17:25,180 of the bloodless colonisation of America, 240 00:17:25,180 --> 00:17:28,420 but it's propaganda, a blatant lie. 241 00:17:30,700 --> 00:17:34,900 William Penn may indeed have looked kindly on the local tribes, 242 00:17:34,900 --> 00:17:37,100 but by the time this picture was commissioned, 243 00:17:37,100 --> 00:17:39,980 some 50 years after his death, 244 00:17:39,980 --> 00:17:44,980 the colonists and the Native Indians were locked in a bitter war. 245 00:17:47,220 --> 00:17:50,580 This was a war marked on the British side 246 00:17:50,580 --> 00:17:53,420 by all kinds of appalling skulduggery. 247 00:17:53,420 --> 00:17:58,900 On one occasion in 1763, during supposed negotiations for peace, 248 00:17:58,900 --> 00:18:03,180 the British representative handed to the Indians 249 00:18:03,180 --> 00:18:08,660 a pile of blankets that they'd taken from their own smallpox hospital. 250 00:18:08,660 --> 00:18:12,060 This was an early example of germ warfare 251 00:18:12,060 --> 00:18:14,140 and it proved horribly effective, 252 00:18:14,140 --> 00:18:18,220 and it certainly gives a really unpleasant twist, 253 00:18:18,220 --> 00:18:22,420 an ironic twist, to that bolt of white cloth 254 00:18:22,420 --> 00:18:24,660 in the centre of West's painting. 255 00:18:42,780 --> 00:18:47,700 Even as they trampled over the Indians in the name of progress, 256 00:18:47,700 --> 00:18:52,380 colonists in America felt that they themselves were being abused 257 00:18:52,380 --> 00:18:56,340 by their Imperial masters back in Britain. 258 00:18:57,340 --> 00:18:59,820 The 13 North American colonies 259 00:18:59,820 --> 00:19:02,020 traded with the rest of the British Empire 260 00:19:02,020 --> 00:19:03,940 through thriving ports like Boston. 261 00:19:05,020 --> 00:19:09,540 But they quickly became frustrated with the harsh terms of trade 262 00:19:09,540 --> 00:19:11,420 being imposed on them. 263 00:19:11,420 --> 00:19:14,420 The trouble began when the British 264 00:19:14,420 --> 00:19:17,100 put the squeeze on their American subjects, 265 00:19:17,100 --> 00:19:20,900 principally by raising tax on imported goods. 266 00:19:20,900 --> 00:19:24,820 In particular, they had a monopoly on the import of tea, 267 00:19:24,820 --> 00:19:28,500 for the privilege of purchasing which Americans were now forced 268 00:19:28,500 --> 00:19:32,900 to pay an increasingly exorbitant level of import duty. 269 00:19:32,900 --> 00:19:36,500 Things came to a head in 1773, 270 00:19:36,500 --> 00:19:40,860 when a group of some 60 Bostonians came down to the docks, 271 00:19:40,860 --> 00:19:44,940 seized an entire consignment of tea from a ship belonging to 272 00:19:44,940 --> 00:19:48,980 the British East India Company, and hurled it into the water. 273 00:19:48,980 --> 00:19:51,820 The Boston Tea Party, as it came to be known, 274 00:19:51,820 --> 00:19:55,860 was copied in other cities across the Eastern seaboard. 275 00:19:55,860 --> 00:19:58,060 The British response was ruthless. 276 00:19:58,060 --> 00:20:02,220 They passed a bill declaring the port of Boston itself closed. 277 00:20:02,220 --> 00:20:04,660 And as George Washington famously said, 278 00:20:04,660 --> 00:20:08,460 "The cause of Boston is now the cause of America." 279 00:20:08,460 --> 00:20:10,980 What had begun as an act of rebellion 280 00:20:10,980 --> 00:20:13,380 had become all-out revolution. 281 00:20:16,980 --> 00:20:21,220 The story was told in cheap, hand-coloured prints and engravings. 282 00:20:23,340 --> 00:20:25,540 The first battle between the British troops 283 00:20:25,540 --> 00:20:30,540 and the American revolutionaries took place at Lexington in 1775. 284 00:20:30,540 --> 00:20:33,660 Through six years of bloody conflict, 285 00:20:33,660 --> 00:20:37,500 the rebels, with the help of England's old enemy, the French, 286 00:20:37,500 --> 00:20:39,500 gradually gained the upper hand. 287 00:20:40,540 --> 00:20:43,660 In 1781, General George Washington 288 00:20:43,660 --> 00:20:47,500 secured the decisive American victory at Yorktown. 289 00:20:47,500 --> 00:20:51,180 A young, provincial nation had won its liberty. 290 00:20:56,620 --> 00:20:58,860 Now, America's founding fathers 291 00:20:58,860 --> 00:21:02,100 needed a capital worthy of the noble aspirations 292 00:21:02,100 --> 00:21:04,540 laid out in their Declaration of Independence. 293 00:21:08,980 --> 00:21:12,900 And so they chose to build a new Rome. 294 00:21:22,700 --> 00:21:25,260 The decision to make the neoclassical style 295 00:21:25,260 --> 00:21:28,260 THE style of government in Washington, in America, 296 00:21:28,260 --> 00:21:30,220 was loaded with significance. 297 00:21:30,220 --> 00:21:33,980 It said this new republic is a democracy. 298 00:21:33,980 --> 00:21:40,300 It's based on the principles of order, clarity, rationality, purity. 299 00:21:40,300 --> 00:21:43,020 But as well as expressing the supposed values 300 00:21:43,020 --> 00:21:44,780 of Ancient Greece and Rome, 301 00:21:44,780 --> 00:21:48,020 I think a building such as this also looks forward, 302 00:21:48,020 --> 00:21:53,100 because what's truly new about it is its enormous, monumental scale, 303 00:21:53,100 --> 00:21:57,580 and I think what that expresses is the founding fathers' sense 304 00:21:57,580 --> 00:22:01,020 of the scale of the task that lies ahead of them. 305 00:22:01,020 --> 00:22:05,700 The shaping of this vast continent into a single nation. 306 00:22:05,700 --> 00:22:10,980 And I also think its scale expresses a hope, a proud hope, 307 00:22:10,980 --> 00:22:17,260 that perhaps this new republic, this America, may turn out to be 308 00:22:17,260 --> 00:22:20,900 one of the greatest civilisations the world has ever known. 309 00:22:27,020 --> 00:22:30,340 As well as creating an architectural legacy, 310 00:22:30,340 --> 00:22:31,900 America's founding fathers 311 00:22:31,900 --> 00:22:34,940 wanted a pictorial tribute to the birth of their nation, 312 00:22:34,940 --> 00:22:38,740 to be installed inside the grandest of their new government buildings, 313 00:22:38,740 --> 00:22:40,060 the Capitol. 314 00:22:42,860 --> 00:22:46,140 They turned to an artist called John Trumbull, 315 00:22:46,140 --> 00:22:51,060 an adequate portrait painter who struggled to rise to this challenge. 316 00:22:53,220 --> 00:22:57,900 And what you see here is the familiar language of portraiture, 317 00:22:57,900 --> 00:23:03,940 applied rather uneasily and stiffly to grand historical narrative. 318 00:23:06,220 --> 00:23:09,460 Perhaps I should whisper it in these august precincts, 319 00:23:09,460 --> 00:23:11,300 but John Trumbull, 320 00:23:11,300 --> 00:23:16,100 whose principle works decorate the rotunda of the Capitol, 321 00:23:16,100 --> 00:23:22,180 was quite possibly the single most boring painter 322 00:23:22,180 --> 00:23:24,780 in the entire history of American art. 323 00:23:24,780 --> 00:23:26,540 What's he done here? 324 00:23:26,540 --> 00:23:30,980 He's taken one, two, three, four events 325 00:23:30,980 --> 00:23:35,220 at the centre of the American War of Independence 326 00:23:35,220 --> 00:23:37,300 and turned them into nothing more 327 00:23:37,300 --> 00:23:41,940 than a sequence of stultifyingly dull group portraits. 328 00:23:41,940 --> 00:23:44,820 The Declaration of Independence, 329 00:23:44,820 --> 00:23:49,260 depicted with all the panache and excitement of a school photograph. 330 00:23:49,260 --> 00:23:51,900 The surrender at the Battle of Saratoga, 331 00:23:51,900 --> 00:23:57,580 depicted as an encounter between two groups of utterly bored generals 332 00:23:57,580 --> 00:23:59,500 and their hangers-on. 333 00:23:59,500 --> 00:24:03,700 Trumbull was profoundly incapable of depicting action, 334 00:24:03,700 --> 00:24:06,700 so when he painted war, he didn't actually paint the battle, 335 00:24:06,700 --> 00:24:08,180 he painted the surrender. 336 00:24:08,180 --> 00:24:11,620 Here, we've got the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, 337 00:24:11,620 --> 00:24:17,100 depicted as an encounter between two rows of tin soldiers. 338 00:24:17,100 --> 00:24:20,900 And, finally, another school photograph, 339 00:24:20,900 --> 00:24:24,020 George Washington handing in his commission 340 00:24:24,020 --> 00:24:27,620 so that he can become President of America. 341 00:24:27,620 --> 00:24:29,900 But in a funny way, 342 00:24:29,900 --> 00:24:34,340 by presenting history as this succession of dull friezes, 343 00:24:34,340 --> 00:24:38,020 by making history so boring, 344 00:24:38,020 --> 00:24:42,260 Trumbull also made it seem inevitable. 345 00:24:42,260 --> 00:24:46,780 This was destined to happen, 346 00:24:46,780 --> 00:24:50,420 and that sense of inevitability was carried on by other artists 347 00:24:50,420 --> 00:24:55,580 who work in this space, notably Constantino Brumidi, 348 00:24:55,580 --> 00:24:58,180 who, in the 1860s - he was an Italian painter - 349 00:24:58,180 --> 00:25:00,540 in the 1860s, completed this space 350 00:25:00,540 --> 00:25:03,380 with this truly absurd Baroque flourish of a fresco 351 00:25:03,380 --> 00:25:06,180 depicting the apotheosis of Washington. 352 00:25:06,180 --> 00:25:10,500 There he is in his purple toga, being wafted up to heaven. 353 00:25:11,740 --> 00:25:15,980 It's a true deep-pan pizza of a picture. 354 00:25:18,060 --> 00:25:24,620 But in a strange way, I think it is an apt topping to this space. 355 00:25:30,420 --> 00:25:32,620 For much of the 19th century, 356 00:25:32,620 --> 00:25:36,340 American artists would divide into two camps - 357 00:25:36,340 --> 00:25:39,620 those who supported government and all it stood for, 358 00:25:39,620 --> 00:25:42,980 and those who questioned it. 359 00:25:49,220 --> 00:25:52,580 Washington policy favoured unlimited westward expansion, 360 00:25:52,580 --> 00:25:57,020 towards a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. 361 00:26:05,300 --> 00:26:07,300 The myth of the conquest of the West 362 00:26:07,300 --> 00:26:10,540 is deeply engrained in America's national identity. 363 00:26:15,540 --> 00:26:19,380 And no painting depicts that myth more vividly 364 00:26:19,380 --> 00:26:24,420 than Emanuel Leutze's picture, Westward Ho, of 1865. 365 00:26:28,740 --> 00:26:32,700 Here are all the familiar elements of a thousand movies - 366 00:26:32,700 --> 00:26:35,020 the covered wagons, 367 00:26:35,020 --> 00:26:37,300 the plucky pioneers 368 00:26:37,300 --> 00:26:41,460 and, on the horizon, the Promised Land itself. 369 00:26:44,380 --> 00:26:47,460 But if you really want to see the pioneer spirit in art, 370 00:26:47,460 --> 00:26:50,820 you need to look elsewhere, 371 00:26:50,820 --> 00:26:56,940 to the work of a man who was himself a pioneer, John James Audubon. 372 00:26:56,940 --> 00:27:00,340 He celebrated the beauties of America's Promised Land, 373 00:27:00,340 --> 00:27:04,020 but also counted the cost of the push west. 374 00:27:06,380 --> 00:27:09,140 It's a heck of thing, isn't it? 375 00:27:09,140 --> 00:27:12,540 It's huge. It's the double-elephant folio. 376 00:27:12,540 --> 00:27:16,660 'Audubon's great work was an illustrated book, 377 00:27:16,660 --> 00:27:18,740 'which he began in 1827. 378 00:27:18,740 --> 00:27:21,740 'It's one of the masterpieces of world art, 379 00:27:21,740 --> 00:27:25,100 'The Birds Of America.' 380 00:27:25,100 --> 00:27:28,660 I'm curious to know, what is the very first bird? OK. 381 00:27:28,660 --> 00:27:33,020 I'm assuming it's going to be the American eagle. 382 00:27:33,020 --> 00:27:36,540 Au contraire! No? 383 00:27:36,540 --> 00:27:41,140 Oh, my God, is that beautiful? Wow! Wow! 384 00:27:41,140 --> 00:27:42,660 It's the turkey! 385 00:27:42,660 --> 00:27:46,900 Yeah. Audubon's first plate of Birds Of America 386 00:27:46,900 --> 00:27:49,140 was the wild turkey. 387 00:27:49,140 --> 00:27:50,980 It's a stunning big bird 388 00:27:50,980 --> 00:27:54,820 and of course, part of the reason for the double-elephant folio 389 00:27:54,820 --> 00:27:58,020 was so that he could do everything lifesize. 390 00:27:58,340 --> 00:28:00,340 That's beautifully detailed. 391 00:28:00,340 --> 00:28:03,380 You are yourself an artist as well as a scientist, aren't you, 392 00:28:03,380 --> 00:28:06,420 and a draughtsman? 393 00:28:06,420 --> 00:28:10,340 When you look at Audubon, what excites you? 394 00:28:10,340 --> 00:28:14,300 What makes him a great ornithological artist? 395 00:28:14,300 --> 00:28:17,220 Boy! Well, up until this time, 396 00:28:17,220 --> 00:28:23,700 birds were portrayed in a very static, scientific way... 397 00:28:23,700 --> 00:28:26,740 ..without the vivaciousness 398 00:28:26,740 --> 00:28:31,580 of them actually alive in their natural habitat. 399 00:28:31,580 --> 00:28:32,820 That's what Audubon did. 400 00:28:32,820 --> 00:28:35,900 This bird, it looks like it's ready to walk right off the page. 401 00:28:35,900 --> 00:28:38,940 In fact it's going to, it's not even looking where it's going. 402 00:28:38,940 --> 00:28:41,780 (LAUGHS) I was going to say, it's got attitude. 403 00:28:41,780 --> 00:28:43,860 This turkey is so human. 404 00:28:43,860 --> 00:28:46,780 How many times have you walked through the woods 405 00:28:46,780 --> 00:28:48,060 or down the sidewalk 406 00:28:48,060 --> 00:28:52,460 or to the coffee shop and you've just been striding along 407 00:28:52,460 --> 00:28:55,380 and you're looking back over your shoulder 408 00:28:55,380 --> 00:28:57,620 to see who might be looking at you 409 00:28:57,620 --> 00:28:59,060 and who's recognised you? 410 00:28:59,060 --> 00:29:02,620 This is a sort of turkey on Broadway, checking somebody out. 411 00:29:02,620 --> 00:29:04,700 Yes! He's got a wonderful, beady eye! 412 00:29:05,820 --> 00:29:07,780 Can we look at some more, please? 413 00:29:07,780 --> 00:29:13,220 Sure, OK, We'll turn deeper into volume one. 414 00:29:13,220 --> 00:29:15,460 And thank you for assisting me. 415 00:29:15,460 --> 00:29:18,020 You tell me, I need to put my hand...? 416 00:29:18,020 --> 00:29:22,780 Yes. And don't touch the image of course. No, no. I won't. That's it. 417 00:29:22,780 --> 00:29:25,340 And then, just let it... 418 00:29:26,580 --> 00:29:29,420 ..fall. Oh, what a contrast. 419 00:29:29,420 --> 00:29:30,540 Bewick's Wren. 420 00:29:32,900 --> 00:29:34,980 It's lovely, isn't it? What is that? 421 00:29:34,980 --> 00:29:37,420 Fragile, cautious little creature, 422 00:29:37,420 --> 00:29:40,300 looking around to see if anyone's watching. 423 00:29:40,300 --> 00:29:44,940 I like the way detail is just like, flipped up, 424 00:29:44,940 --> 00:29:47,100 the movement of it. 425 00:29:47,100 --> 00:29:50,300 He does look like he's ready to take off. 426 00:29:50,300 --> 00:29:53,740 He almost wants to have the bird like a wildlife filmmaker would, 427 00:29:53,740 --> 00:29:56,100 actually caught in life. 428 00:29:56,100 --> 00:29:57,340 Exactly. 429 00:29:57,340 --> 00:30:01,540 And you've just nailed it, really, because these birds are alive. 430 00:30:02,780 --> 00:30:04,420 That bird is alive. I mean... 431 00:30:05,580 --> 00:30:07,700 ..you flip a page and you think, 432 00:30:07,700 --> 00:30:10,020 "God, can we contain it in the book?" 433 00:30:10,020 --> 00:30:12,140 Is it going to get away from us? 434 00:30:12,140 --> 00:30:14,540 (LAUGHS) Like that's going to fly away! 435 00:30:14,540 --> 00:30:16,780 We'd better flip the page before it gets away. 436 00:30:16,780 --> 00:30:18,260 Where are we going to go next? 437 00:30:22,140 --> 00:30:25,540 Just concentrate for this bit. Yes, OK, we're OK. 438 00:30:27,220 --> 00:30:30,780 The Ruffed Grouse. That's another spectacular one. 439 00:30:30,780 --> 00:30:33,260 I mean, I guess the big question is, 440 00:30:33,260 --> 00:30:37,140 what do you think was the driving ambition behind it all? 441 00:30:37,140 --> 00:30:43,220 Is it that he wants to record every single bird in America? 442 00:30:43,220 --> 00:30:45,060 That was his obsession. 443 00:30:45,060 --> 00:30:48,540 He travelled all over the United States, he went out west, 444 00:30:48,540 --> 00:30:51,420 he went all the way down south to Florida, Louisiana, 445 00:30:51,420 --> 00:30:59,580 he was an early, true, in the sense of the American...frontier, 446 00:30:59,580 --> 00:31:04,620 an adventurer, a frontiersman, an outdoorsman. 447 00:31:05,860 --> 00:31:09,460 His mission was to take trip after trip, 448 00:31:09,460 --> 00:31:13,660 to discover these birds and paint every damn one of them. 449 00:31:15,740 --> 00:31:18,220 Whoa, that is stunning. 450 00:31:19,580 --> 00:31:21,380 That is absolutely stunning. 451 00:31:22,620 --> 00:31:23,860 I love this one. 452 00:31:23,860 --> 00:31:25,220 He's looking right at you. 453 00:31:25,220 --> 00:31:26,500 Looking straight at me. 454 00:31:26,500 --> 00:31:31,180 It's the only parakeet that occurred in North America. 455 00:31:31,180 --> 00:31:35,740 This is an example of a bird that went extinct. 456 00:31:35,740 --> 00:31:42,140 Farmers viewed them as a pest and these did get shot in large numbers. 457 00:31:42,140 --> 00:31:44,580 And Audubon used this phrase, which is shocking, 458 00:31:44,580 --> 00:31:48,260 but he talked about the murderous white man 459 00:31:48,260 --> 00:31:51,900 and how everything was getting pushed westward. 460 00:31:51,900 --> 00:31:57,660 The birds, the mammals, nature itself, you know, 461 00:31:57,660 --> 00:32:02,060 our idea was we have to control it, we have to own it, 462 00:32:02,060 --> 00:32:05,860 we have to fight it into submission, we have to grow crops. 463 00:32:05,860 --> 00:32:08,780 So in his imagination the march, 464 00:32:08,780 --> 00:32:12,980 the onward march of civilisation west, also represents... 465 00:32:12,980 --> 00:32:16,380 It also represented a fleeing from the murderous white man. 466 00:32:19,020 --> 00:32:20,420 WHISTLING 467 00:32:21,980 --> 00:32:25,460 As settlers fanned out across the Continent, 468 00:32:25,460 --> 00:32:27,860 they transformed the land. 469 00:32:27,860 --> 00:32:32,580 To the south were great plantations made possible through the import 470 00:32:32,580 --> 00:32:35,140 of hundreds of thousands of African slaves. 471 00:32:37,180 --> 00:32:41,220 To the north sprang up industrialised cities and factories. 472 00:32:43,300 --> 00:32:46,180 And as the frontier pushed west towards the sea, 473 00:32:46,180 --> 00:32:48,980 so in its wake followed the machine 474 00:32:48,980 --> 00:32:53,220 that did most to change the face of 19th-century America, 475 00:32:53,220 --> 00:32:54,620 the train. 476 00:33:00,500 --> 00:33:04,180 The pace at which the railway network expanded in the US 477 00:33:04,180 --> 00:33:05,740 was truly staggering. 478 00:33:05,740 --> 00:33:11,740 Between 1828 and 1840, they laid some 3,300 miles of track here. 479 00:33:11,740 --> 00:33:15,820 That's twice as much track as existed in the whole of Europe. 480 00:33:15,820 --> 00:33:18,380 Of course, the railway companies billed this 481 00:33:18,380 --> 00:33:20,660 as the inevitable march of progress, 482 00:33:20,660 --> 00:33:23,300 but many other people regarded it with alarm, 483 00:33:23,300 --> 00:33:27,580 in particular, the writer Henry David Thoreau counted the human cost 484 00:33:27,580 --> 00:33:31,780 of constructing these networks of iron. 485 00:33:31,780 --> 00:33:37,500 He wrote, "We do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us. 486 00:33:37,500 --> 00:33:40,540 "Did you ever think what these sleepers are 487 00:33:40,540 --> 00:33:42,860 "that underlie the railroad? 488 00:33:42,860 --> 00:33:48,060 "Each one is a man, an Irishman or a Yankee man. 489 00:33:48,060 --> 00:33:50,260 "The rails are laid on them 490 00:33:50,260 --> 00:33:54,980 "and they are covered with sand and the cars run smoothly over them. 491 00:33:54,980 --> 00:33:58,020 "They are sound sleepers, I assure you." 492 00:34:13,060 --> 00:34:17,540 The people who suffered most at the hands of the advancing white man 493 00:34:17,540 --> 00:34:21,140 were, of course, the Native Americans. 494 00:34:22,620 --> 00:34:23,820 By the 1820s, 495 00:34:23,820 --> 00:34:27,540 the last vestiges of the great Indian nations of the Northeast, 496 00:34:27,540 --> 00:34:29,500 the Iroquois and the Mohicans, 497 00:34:29,500 --> 00:34:32,380 had been corralled into remote reservations 498 00:34:32,380 --> 00:34:34,540 where they faced an uncertain future. 499 00:34:38,620 --> 00:34:40,500 Against this backdrop, 500 00:34:40,500 --> 00:34:45,980 a little-known artist-frontiersman began an ambitious project - 501 00:34:45,980 --> 00:34:49,060 to make a record of America's vanishing tribes, 502 00:34:49,060 --> 00:34:52,420 much as Audubon recorded the country's birds. 503 00:34:55,140 --> 00:34:58,780 The result was a series of more than 500 paintings, 504 00:34:58,780 --> 00:35:01,580 produced over a period of almost 40 years, 505 00:35:01,580 --> 00:35:04,860 of which these are just a few. 506 00:35:10,500 --> 00:35:15,380 George Catlin, the man who preserved these solemn, 507 00:35:15,380 --> 00:35:18,500 beautiful, melancholy faces, 508 00:35:18,500 --> 00:35:21,060 was himself one of the great characters 509 00:35:21,060 --> 00:35:23,140 of 19th-century American art. 510 00:35:23,140 --> 00:35:26,580 He was an entrepreneur as well as a painter and, in fact, 511 00:35:26,580 --> 00:35:29,260 he went on tour with these pictures, 512 00:35:29,260 --> 00:35:32,740 indeed with some Native American Indians as well. 513 00:35:32,740 --> 00:35:34,220 He went to Europe. 514 00:35:34,220 --> 00:35:37,260 He introduced them to the kings of France and Belgium, 515 00:35:37,260 --> 00:35:40,020 even to Queen Victoria herself. 516 00:35:40,020 --> 00:35:42,460 But it would be wrong to think of him 517 00:35:42,460 --> 00:35:44,980 as a mere opportunist, a showman. 518 00:35:44,980 --> 00:35:48,660 He wasn't like that. He cared about these people every bit as deeply 519 00:35:48,660 --> 00:35:53,180 as Audubon cared about the birds of America, 520 00:35:53,180 --> 00:35:58,300 because he fears they're a race on the point of extinction. 521 00:35:58,300 --> 00:36:02,300 That fact distresses him very deeply, because to Catlin, 522 00:36:02,300 --> 00:36:06,620 these are the noblest surviving people in the whole world. 523 00:36:06,620 --> 00:36:11,700 It might seem strange to us, but he sees them as the descendants 524 00:36:11,700 --> 00:36:17,340 of the Ancient Greeks, people of nobility, simplicity and purity. 525 00:36:20,220 --> 00:36:23,260 But purity and simplicity were no match for the forces 526 00:36:23,260 --> 00:36:27,140 of hard-headed expansionism and naked greed. 527 00:36:28,860 --> 00:36:32,220 To the decision-makers in government, 528 00:36:32,220 --> 00:36:35,100 the Indians were simply an impediment 529 00:36:35,100 --> 00:36:37,700 to the spread of American society. 530 00:36:39,100 --> 00:36:42,740 In 1830, President Andrew Jackson's administration 531 00:36:42,740 --> 00:36:46,020 passed the Indian Removal Act. 532 00:36:46,020 --> 00:36:51,100 It amounted to the ethnic cleansing of the eastern United States. 533 00:36:56,660 --> 00:37:01,020 Some American artists feared the vanishing of Indian culture 534 00:37:01,020 --> 00:37:02,540 was just the start. 535 00:37:02,540 --> 00:37:06,700 That soon, the American landscape itself would be obliterated. 536 00:37:13,260 --> 00:37:17,860 This is Kaaterskill Falls in upstate New York 537 00:37:17,860 --> 00:37:21,260 and it was a favourite subject of Thomas Cole, 538 00:37:21,260 --> 00:37:25,580 unquestionably the greatest American landscape painter 539 00:37:25,580 --> 00:37:27,060 of the 19th century. 540 00:37:28,860 --> 00:37:33,780 Cole was born in 1801 in Bolton in the north of England, 541 00:37:33,780 --> 00:37:36,580 a place of dark, satanic mills, 542 00:37:36,580 --> 00:37:40,020 and he'd trained as an engraver at a textile designers. 543 00:37:44,220 --> 00:37:47,380 His family emigrated to Ohio when Cole was 17, 544 00:37:47,380 --> 00:37:50,740 and from the moment he first began to explore 545 00:37:50,740 --> 00:37:52,460 the eastern United States, 546 00:37:52,460 --> 00:37:57,060 at the age of 22, he decided to devote his life to recording 547 00:37:57,060 --> 00:37:59,620 the epic wilderness he found around him, 548 00:37:59,620 --> 00:38:02,780 here in the Catskill Mountains. 549 00:38:18,780 --> 00:38:21,860 Thomas Cole loved this spot and he came here often. 550 00:38:21,860 --> 00:38:24,340 Making the pilgrimage to this place 551 00:38:24,340 --> 00:38:29,020 feels very much like travelling to the source of his imagination. 552 00:38:29,020 --> 00:38:35,900 This is wild, untamed, grand, sublime American nature, in the raw. 553 00:38:35,900 --> 00:38:39,140 Now the waterfall was a very important symbol to Cole. 554 00:38:39,140 --> 00:38:42,340 What it stood for was the purity of nature 555 00:38:42,340 --> 00:38:45,820 as opposed to the polluted waters of the rivers 556 00:38:45,820 --> 00:38:49,260 running through America's new rash of cities. 557 00:38:50,620 --> 00:38:54,820 I also think his eye was drawn to that grand rock formation, 558 00:38:54,820 --> 00:38:58,860 rather like a cathedral, which seems to lead the eye upwards, 559 00:38:58,860 --> 00:39:01,980 towards the sky, perhaps towards God. 560 00:39:23,020 --> 00:39:27,460 This vividly evocative painting of Kaaterskill Falls from 1826 561 00:39:27,460 --> 00:39:29,460 is perhaps Cole's finest. 562 00:39:31,580 --> 00:39:34,180 But it's also a picture full of disquiet. 563 00:39:35,620 --> 00:39:37,820 There are black skies overhead. 564 00:39:41,460 --> 00:39:44,940 And in the river below, the remains of a blasted tree. 565 00:39:46,780 --> 00:39:50,420 Cole was aware that the sublime beauty of American nature 566 00:39:50,420 --> 00:39:51,620 was under threat. 567 00:39:54,100 --> 00:39:59,380 And he has placed, on the edge of the falls, a lone Indian. 568 00:39:59,380 --> 00:40:03,020 He stands for everything that is fast disappearing. 569 00:40:03,020 --> 00:40:05,860 He is, to borrow a phrase from Cole's friend, 570 00:40:05,860 --> 00:40:08,540 the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, 571 00:40:08,540 --> 00:40:10,620 the last of the Mohicans. 572 00:40:16,980 --> 00:40:21,500 This is Thomas Cole's house at the edge of the Catskill mountains, 573 00:40:21,500 --> 00:40:24,060 just 100 miles north of New York City. 574 00:40:25,180 --> 00:40:28,740 From here, Cole watched the landscape being ravaged 575 00:40:28,740 --> 00:40:33,460 as "civilisation" began to encroach on what had once been wilderness. 576 00:40:37,380 --> 00:40:40,060 This view from the porch is an invention. 577 00:40:42,300 --> 00:40:44,140 By the time Cole painted it, 578 00:40:44,140 --> 00:40:46,980 the smoke from those distant homesteads 579 00:40:46,980 --> 00:40:49,940 had been blotted out by the steam from a railroad 580 00:40:49,940 --> 00:40:52,780 that ran close to Cole's house. 581 00:40:55,020 --> 00:40:58,020 Appalled by what he called the "iron tramp of progress", 582 00:40:58,020 --> 00:41:01,700 Thomas Cole conceived of a series of paintings 583 00:41:01,700 --> 00:41:04,580 that would be unlike anything he'd done before. 584 00:41:04,580 --> 00:41:09,660 One that would deliver a powerful message to modern America. 585 00:41:14,540 --> 00:41:17,780 Cole called his series The Course Of Empire. 586 00:41:17,780 --> 00:41:20,100 Five hugely ambitious paintings, 587 00:41:20,100 --> 00:41:22,940 preserved by the New York Historical Society, 588 00:41:22,940 --> 00:41:27,780 that appear to chart the rise and fall of Roman civilisation. 589 00:41:30,580 --> 00:41:33,540 But I think if you go through it frame by frame, 590 00:41:33,540 --> 00:41:36,860 looking at it in detail, I think what you realise is 591 00:41:36,860 --> 00:41:38,540 that Cole's real subject 592 00:41:38,540 --> 00:41:41,340 is not the decline and fall of Ancient Rome. 593 00:41:41,340 --> 00:41:43,620 What's really on his mind 594 00:41:43,620 --> 00:41:47,260 is the history and the destiny of America, 595 00:41:47,260 --> 00:41:50,900 and there are little clues to that in all of these pictures. 596 00:41:53,540 --> 00:41:56,140 The first scene shows a primitive world. 597 00:41:58,660 --> 00:42:01,780 There are hunters armed only with spears. 598 00:42:04,020 --> 00:42:08,340 And in the distance, a group of figures are dancing around a fire. 599 00:42:09,540 --> 00:42:12,620 But don't those tents look exactly like Native American wigwams? 600 00:42:17,060 --> 00:42:19,780 The next picture shows the same view, 601 00:42:19,780 --> 00:42:23,620 but now time has moved forward to an early civilisation. 602 00:42:23,620 --> 00:42:28,100 A woman is spinning, the beginnings of manufacture. 603 00:42:28,100 --> 00:42:31,140 A greybeard is scratching a symbol in the dirt. 604 00:42:31,140 --> 00:42:34,180 The origins of science. 605 00:42:34,180 --> 00:42:38,820 And in the distance, a Stonehenge-like structure, 606 00:42:38,820 --> 00:42:40,620 the birth of architecture. 607 00:42:43,300 --> 00:42:46,180 But does Cole see the advent of civilisation 608 00:42:46,180 --> 00:42:50,100 and human progress as an entirely good thing? 609 00:42:50,100 --> 00:42:56,460 Well, there's a strong sign that he doesn't, because this detail here, 610 00:42:56,460 --> 00:43:00,140 the stump of an axe-felled tree, 611 00:43:00,140 --> 00:43:02,540 was one of his great personal symbols. 612 00:43:02,540 --> 00:43:04,860 He included it in a lot of his pictures. 613 00:43:04,860 --> 00:43:08,700 And what it stands for is the rape of nature by man. 614 00:43:08,700 --> 00:43:12,940 It's his way of saying that progress comes at a great cost. 615 00:43:18,660 --> 00:43:21,900 I think the whole series is shot through the strong sense 616 00:43:21,900 --> 00:43:25,980 of Cole's own bitterness, anger, and irony 617 00:43:25,980 --> 00:43:31,220 because here, he's depicted the supposed zenith of civilisation, 618 00:43:31,220 --> 00:43:34,460 and yet he sees it, he conceives it, 619 00:43:34,460 --> 00:43:38,860 as a scene of decadence, corruption, 620 00:43:38,860 --> 00:43:41,980 empty triumphalism. 621 00:43:47,780 --> 00:43:51,260 At the head of a great procession sits an emperor. 622 00:43:51,260 --> 00:43:55,420 But he's a parody of the then-president, Andrew Jackson, 623 00:43:55,420 --> 00:43:59,860 who was satirised in the press as an American Caesar. 624 00:43:59,860 --> 00:44:02,780 The ruler of a "mobocracy", 625 00:44:02,780 --> 00:44:06,580 where everyone was chasing wealth and power. 626 00:44:06,580 --> 00:44:09,020 And look at the architecture, 627 00:44:09,020 --> 00:44:14,740 teeming with people, like a kind of infestation of humanity. 628 00:44:14,740 --> 00:44:18,020 Yes, it's Ancient Rome, but I think it's meant to be 629 00:44:18,020 --> 00:44:20,060 a conflation of the banks of New York 630 00:44:20,060 --> 00:44:22,620 and the government buildings of Washington, 631 00:44:22,620 --> 00:44:28,540 even a bizarre prophecy of...modern Las Vegas. 632 00:44:28,540 --> 00:44:33,780 This is a world that symbolises the greed 633 00:44:33,780 --> 00:44:37,860 that Cole saw eating away at the heart of America. 634 00:44:42,740 --> 00:44:46,780 Cole called the penultimate picture Destruction. 635 00:44:46,780 --> 00:44:50,660 Rome, it appears, is being overrun by barbarian hordes. 636 00:44:52,260 --> 00:44:54,940 There are scenes of chaos and terror, 637 00:44:54,940 --> 00:44:57,540 a cast of thousands, 638 00:44:57,540 --> 00:45:01,620 as a city of marble and stone is tragically laid waste. 639 00:45:03,660 --> 00:45:06,340 When I think of it in terms of what I believe 640 00:45:06,340 --> 00:45:07,980 this series is all about, 641 00:45:07,980 --> 00:45:12,020 an allegory of American civilisation, 642 00:45:12,020 --> 00:45:17,300 I see it as a flourishing fantasy, a kind of dream 643 00:45:17,300 --> 00:45:23,780 of America itself being swept clean of civilisation and all its ills. 644 00:45:23,780 --> 00:45:27,020 That the land will be made pure again. 645 00:45:27,020 --> 00:45:29,660 And if you come to the last picture of all... 646 00:45:31,140 --> 00:45:33,540 ..Desolation, he called it, 647 00:45:33,540 --> 00:45:35,860 again, I think it's a painting 648 00:45:35,860 --> 00:45:39,020 that almost defeats your expectations 649 00:45:39,020 --> 00:45:43,300 because it's supposed to represent the aftermath of civilisation. 650 00:45:43,300 --> 00:45:46,540 You might think of it as a deeply melancholic image, 651 00:45:46,540 --> 00:45:51,380 but for Cole, I think, this is the true climax of the series. 652 00:45:51,380 --> 00:45:54,340 This is the moment he yearns for, 653 00:45:54,340 --> 00:45:57,900 the moment when civilisation will have disappeared 654 00:45:57,900 --> 00:46:03,780 and nature - nature - will once again have reclaimed this land. 655 00:46:03,780 --> 00:46:05,580 That's Cole's fantasy. 656 00:46:13,220 --> 00:46:17,420 Within a generation, America would in fact tear itself apart, 657 00:46:17,420 --> 00:46:19,820 although not in the way Cole had imagined. 658 00:46:30,580 --> 00:46:32,660 Slavery in the South, 659 00:46:32,660 --> 00:46:36,460 a long-festering wound at the heart of the American nation, 660 00:46:36,460 --> 00:46:38,060 would be the cause. 661 00:46:42,380 --> 00:46:43,660 Since independence, 662 00:46:43,660 --> 00:46:46,580 the increasingly industrialised states in the North 663 00:46:46,580 --> 00:46:48,980 had gradually abolished slavery. 664 00:46:48,980 --> 00:46:50,740 But the Southern states, 665 00:46:50,740 --> 00:46:55,620 with their labour-intensive cotton and tobacco plantations, would not. 666 00:47:06,340 --> 00:47:10,580 By 1860, the United States was, said President Abraham Lincoln, 667 00:47:10,580 --> 00:47:12,820 "a house divided". 668 00:47:14,620 --> 00:47:17,340 The following year, the division became total. 669 00:47:17,340 --> 00:47:20,940 11 Southern states formed the Confederacy 670 00:47:20,940 --> 00:47:23,420 and in April 1861, 671 00:47:23,420 --> 00:47:26,460 the first shots were fired in the American Civil War. 672 00:47:38,980 --> 00:47:41,340 It was the new medium of photography 673 00:47:41,340 --> 00:47:45,740 that produced the most compelling images of the Civil War. 674 00:47:54,020 --> 00:47:57,340 Most famous of the photographers was Mathew Brady 675 00:47:57,340 --> 00:48:00,180 who, together with his own team of cameramen, 676 00:48:00,180 --> 00:48:03,420 covered almost all the major events of the war. 677 00:48:08,340 --> 00:48:12,980 The Civil War claimed over 600,000 lives - 678 00:48:12,980 --> 00:48:16,620 greater than the American death toll of both World Wars combined. 679 00:48:17,820 --> 00:48:19,980 In 1865, the South surrendered. 680 00:48:21,300 --> 00:48:24,340 Officially, the country was at last united. 681 00:48:36,540 --> 00:48:38,780 But the lingering hurt and bitterness of war 682 00:48:38,780 --> 00:48:41,660 could still be glimpsed through American art. 683 00:48:43,100 --> 00:48:47,300 Though not an art you're likely to find in a gallery. 684 00:48:47,300 --> 00:48:50,820 This warehouse outside Philadelphia 685 00:48:50,820 --> 00:48:54,580 houses an impressive collection of antique American flags. 686 00:48:56,580 --> 00:48:59,500 So this is where we do all of our restoration. 687 00:48:59,500 --> 00:49:04,700 And we see ones here in various stages of mounting. 688 00:49:04,700 --> 00:49:07,100 Jeff Bridgman, who collects these flags, 689 00:49:07,100 --> 00:49:09,220 believes that if you know how to read them, 690 00:49:09,220 --> 00:49:10,700 you can follow the threads 691 00:49:10,700 --> 00:49:14,300 of America's long and complex struggle for identity. 692 00:49:16,940 --> 00:49:20,580 What's the basic symbolism of the American flag? 693 00:49:20,580 --> 00:49:23,660 Well, originally there were 13 stars 694 00:49:23,660 --> 00:49:27,940 in the form of a new constellation, and 13 stripes. 695 00:49:27,940 --> 00:49:32,780 And both of those counts reflect the number of original colonies. 696 00:49:32,780 --> 00:49:37,260 So the stars say that, instead of being separate colonies, 697 00:49:37,260 --> 00:49:39,900 we are now a single constellation. Yes, 698 00:49:39,900 --> 00:49:45,220 and when it said a new constellation, they never specified 699 00:49:45,220 --> 00:49:48,420 what that constellation was supposed to be. 700 00:49:48,420 --> 00:49:50,300 This is a great example here, 701 00:49:50,300 --> 00:49:54,540 where the stars are arranged in the form of one big star. 702 00:49:54,540 --> 00:49:57,140 So during the early years of American flag design, 703 00:49:57,140 --> 00:50:00,220 you can kind of freeform it with the stars. Anything goes. Yes. 704 00:50:00,220 --> 00:50:02,860 It's a very American individualism. It is, yeah. 705 00:50:02,860 --> 00:50:06,060 Have you got any other examples where you can look at a flag 706 00:50:06,060 --> 00:50:08,540 and it tells you about a moment in history? 707 00:50:08,540 --> 00:50:12,420 Yeah, particularly surrounding the Civil War. I have a good example here, 708 00:50:12,420 --> 00:50:16,460 where the maker has done something that Abraham Lincoln said 709 00:50:16,460 --> 00:50:18,100 specifically not to do, 710 00:50:18,100 --> 00:50:22,180 which was to remove the Southern states from the flag during the war. 711 00:50:22,180 --> 00:50:25,620 So you're saying Lincoln has explicitly instructed 712 00:50:25,620 --> 00:50:28,460 people in the North not to remove the Southern states, 713 00:50:28,460 --> 00:50:31,860 but some Northern patriot or other has done exactly that? 714 00:50:31,860 --> 00:50:33,060 Yes. Yeah. 715 00:50:33,060 --> 00:50:37,380 And this is what we call a Southern-exclusionary star count. 716 00:50:37,380 --> 00:50:39,180 The Green Mountain Boys 717 00:50:39,180 --> 00:50:42,940 was a nickname for the Vermont military unit, 718 00:50:42,940 --> 00:50:44,940 and they removed the Southern states. 719 00:50:44,940 --> 00:50:49,620 There's only 20 stars here. There ought to be 34, 35 720 00:50:49,620 --> 00:50:53,220 or if it was at the tail-end of the war, 36 stars. 721 00:50:53,220 --> 00:50:58,300 So this object, it seems that somebody is registering 722 00:50:58,300 --> 00:51:01,420 perhaps loss, certainly a degree of outrage... 723 00:51:01,420 --> 00:51:03,620 Yes. ..against the South. 724 00:51:03,620 --> 00:51:06,820 Maybe the woman that was most vocal about making this 725 00:51:06,820 --> 00:51:09,700 had lost a son to the South already 726 00:51:09,700 --> 00:51:13,140 and she has said, "No, those guys are out. 727 00:51:13,140 --> 00:51:16,820 "I'm not going to include those stars in the flag when I make it." 728 00:51:16,820 --> 00:51:20,260 So this is done actually bang in the middle of the conflict? Yes. 729 00:51:20,260 --> 00:51:23,740 This is actually the war itself in a flag. 730 00:51:23,740 --> 00:51:26,740 What about the other side of that political divide? 731 00:51:26,740 --> 00:51:32,580 Sure. This is a rather interesting flag, 732 00:51:32,580 --> 00:51:35,500 where the stars are configured 733 00:51:35,500 --> 00:51:41,220 in the Southern Cross, which is buried in the design of this flag 734 00:51:41,220 --> 00:51:45,740 and that was sort of a subtle way of displaying Southern sympathies. 735 00:51:45,740 --> 00:51:50,740 And they are doing that through that shape, which is... 736 00:51:50,740 --> 00:51:53,580 A display of the Southern Cross within the design. 737 00:51:53,580 --> 00:51:57,220 And when you say the Southern Cross, that's what you're talking about, 738 00:51:57,220 --> 00:52:01,500 so it's a way of getting that flag into this flag. 739 00:52:01,500 --> 00:52:05,180 Hiding the Confederate battle flag within the Stars And Stripes. Amazing. 740 00:52:05,180 --> 00:52:08,900 When was this flag made? This was made after the Civil War. 741 00:52:08,900 --> 00:52:14,300 So someone somewhere in the South wants to brandish against 742 00:52:14,300 --> 00:52:17,820 the victorious Northerners their sense of Southern independence. 743 00:52:17,820 --> 00:52:20,380 You may have beaten us but we still feel Southerners, 744 00:52:20,380 --> 00:52:22,380 still don't feel part of you. Precisely. 745 00:52:22,380 --> 00:52:24,140 I think it's fascinating. 746 00:52:24,140 --> 00:52:27,300 The violence of the conflict still seems to be imbedded in it, 747 00:52:27,300 --> 00:52:29,940 as if the shells are still going off in the sky somehow. 748 00:52:29,940 --> 00:52:32,540 It's got a kind of violence about it. A defiance. 749 00:52:32,540 --> 00:52:33,540 Yeah. Yeah. 750 00:52:33,540 --> 00:52:34,980 It's almost like the rebel yell. 751 00:52:44,140 --> 00:52:46,100 Yet the scars of war DID heal. 752 00:52:46,100 --> 00:52:50,620 The states were now not only united, but growing ever more rapidly. 753 00:52:53,260 --> 00:52:56,940 Successive waves of industrialists and prospectors 754 00:52:56,940 --> 00:53:00,660 eagerly exploited the country's wealth of natural resources. 755 00:53:05,900 --> 00:53:11,980 In 1869, construction of the first transcontinental railway was completed, 756 00:53:11,980 --> 00:53:15,180 opening the way for the commercial unification of America. 757 00:53:19,180 --> 00:53:20,700 Within 20 years, 758 00:53:20,700 --> 00:53:24,460 the Western frontier had reached its furthest possible point - 759 00:53:24,460 --> 00:53:29,740 the Pacific Ocean - and was declared officially closed. 760 00:53:29,740 --> 00:53:34,220 This was the moment when the West was finally won. 761 00:53:34,220 --> 00:53:39,180 The first chapter in the history of modern America was coming to an end. 762 00:53:44,580 --> 00:53:48,300 Until now, artists such as Audubon, Catlin and Cole, 763 00:53:48,300 --> 00:53:51,580 those who had protested against the implacable expansion 764 00:53:51,580 --> 00:53:54,220 of industrial, urban America, 765 00:53:54,220 --> 00:53:56,460 were unheeded voices in the wilderness. 766 00:53:59,100 --> 00:54:01,700 Yet American art did have the power to stop 767 00:54:01,700 --> 00:54:04,100 the juggernaut in its tracks. 768 00:54:04,100 --> 00:54:07,660 Or at least to give those driving it pause for thought. 769 00:54:10,660 --> 00:54:13,540 In the summer of 1871, 770 00:54:13,540 --> 00:54:16,180 a government-funded geological expedition 771 00:54:16,180 --> 00:54:19,580 set off into the Yellowstone region of the northwest United States. 772 00:54:22,780 --> 00:54:27,060 The group included a photographer, William Henry Jackson, 773 00:54:27,060 --> 00:54:29,900 and a young landscape painter, Thomas Moran. 774 00:54:34,060 --> 00:54:36,460 The point of the expedition was to survey the land 775 00:54:36,460 --> 00:54:39,500 for potential commercial development. 776 00:54:41,420 --> 00:54:44,660 But Jackson's photographs and Moran's watercolours 777 00:54:44,660 --> 00:54:46,780 had an entirely unexpected outcome. 778 00:54:47,860 --> 00:54:51,500 Congressmen in Washington were so impressed by the spectacular images 779 00:54:51,500 --> 00:54:56,380 that they passed a bill designating the Yellowstone region 780 00:54:56,380 --> 00:54:58,540 America's first National Park. 781 00:55:00,660 --> 00:55:04,060 This particular corner of America, at least, 782 00:55:04,060 --> 00:55:07,540 would be preserved unspoilt for future generations. 783 00:55:10,700 --> 00:55:14,940 Thomas Moran's painting of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone 784 00:55:14,940 --> 00:55:19,140 is one of the most exultantly monumental depictions 785 00:55:19,140 --> 00:55:24,020 of vast, sublime, wild American nature, 786 00:55:24,020 --> 00:55:26,940 and yet I think it also marks the moment 787 00:55:26,940 --> 00:55:31,900 when the wilderness has ceased to seem truly wild, 788 00:55:31,900 --> 00:55:35,300 the moment when Americans feel 789 00:55:35,300 --> 00:55:40,500 they have finally become the landlords of their own vast country. 790 00:55:42,300 --> 00:55:46,780 Look at the way the artist has framed and contained the scene, 791 00:55:46,780 --> 00:55:51,700 look at the way he's turned it into a picturesque view. 792 00:55:53,260 --> 00:56:00,340 He's even given us a kind of platform on which safely to stand 793 00:56:00,340 --> 00:56:03,020 as we contemplate this vast panorama. 794 00:56:03,020 --> 00:56:09,100 I can almost imagine a modern tourist bus park on this spot, 795 00:56:09,100 --> 00:56:12,700 disgorging people out to enjoy the landscape. 796 00:56:14,340 --> 00:56:18,420 And when I look at this, I think what a huge distance we've travelled 797 00:56:18,420 --> 00:56:20,420 in the American attitude to nature. 798 00:56:20,420 --> 00:56:25,140 Think all the way back to John White, Shakespeare's contemporary, 799 00:56:25,140 --> 00:56:30,380 arriving in America and finding it a hostile, dangerous, 800 00:56:30,380 --> 00:56:38,380 unsettling place, peopled by Calibans, an island full of noises. 801 00:56:38,380 --> 00:56:43,220 That sense of a vast, mysterious, dangerous place 802 00:56:43,220 --> 00:56:46,060 has completely evaporated in this picture. 803 00:56:46,060 --> 00:56:50,220 All the elements of what once seemed so dangerous are there. 804 00:56:50,220 --> 00:56:53,540 The torrential waterfall, the raging torrent... 805 00:56:56,420 --> 00:57:00,500 ..but they're just elements in a beautiful view. 806 00:57:00,500 --> 00:57:05,340 There's the Indian. He's no longer a foe but he's a friendly guide. 807 00:57:05,340 --> 00:57:10,020 And in its representation of a wilderness made tame, 808 00:57:10,020 --> 00:57:12,500 I think Moran's picture is also 809 00:57:12,500 --> 00:57:14,940 a distillation of the fundamental paradox 810 00:57:14,940 --> 00:57:19,060 that lies behind the creation of the Yellowstone as a National Park, 811 00:57:19,060 --> 00:57:22,260 because, after all, once a fragment of wilderness 812 00:57:22,260 --> 00:57:24,460 has been designated a park, 813 00:57:24,460 --> 00:57:28,220 it can't truly be said to be wilderness any longer. 814 00:57:28,220 --> 00:57:33,900 And I wonder if Moran didn't include a small note of unease 815 00:57:33,900 --> 00:57:36,140 in the form of this detail, 816 00:57:36,140 --> 00:57:39,100 this slightly troubling detail in the foreground - 817 00:57:39,100 --> 00:57:43,300 it's the carcass of a deer, placed just above his signature. 818 00:57:44,740 --> 00:57:48,780 It reminds me of Thomas Cole's axe-felled tree stump, 819 00:57:48,780 --> 00:57:54,980 it's evidence of the handiwork of man, it's the emblem of a death. 820 00:57:54,980 --> 00:57:58,180 It's an intriguing memento mori 821 00:57:58,180 --> 00:58:00,740 and perhaps an emblem of Moran's own awareness 822 00:58:00,740 --> 00:58:03,660 that the birth of the park 823 00:58:03,660 --> 00:58:08,500 also marked the death of truly wild nature. 824 00:58:29,020 --> 00:58:31,500 Subtitles by Red Bee Media 825 00:58:31,500 --> 00:58:34,300 E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk 70794

Can't find what you're looking for?
Get subtitles in any language from opensubtitles.com, and translate them here.