In his landscapes,

Cole often included America's indigenous peoples.

But they are invariably dwarfed by the vastness of the scene,

as though they themselves

are merely features of the natural world.

The embodiment of the Enlightenment idea of the noble savage -

an idealised, uncorrupted people,

living a pure life, connected to nature.

But underpinning Cole's work

was a fear that the American wilderness and its inhabitants

would inevitably be tamed, even destroyed,

in the process of creating a new nation.

In his masterpiece, an allegory of civilisation in five paintings,

Cole fused landscape with an imagined history,

to challenge mainstream ideas about America's future.

These five paintings tell an epic story,

the story of the rise and fall of a great civilisation.

And they're influenced by a historical theory

that saw the past as an endless cycle of rises and falls,

and that was popular in the 19th century.

It begins with what Thomas Cole called the Savage State.

This is a primordial Earth.

There's a hunter chasing a stag across the landscape.

In the background is his village,

which is a cluster of animal-skin tents,

which look almost exactly like the tepees of the Plain's Indians.

And this supposedly savage state was the level of civilisation

that many Americans thought

that the Native Americans have reached before the arrival of Europeans.

But it's the next stage, the Arcadian, the Pastoral State,

that in many ways is Thomas Cole's ideal.

In this painting, mankind has discovered agriculture.

There's a farmer ploughing his field,

there's a shepherd with his flock.

And because food is now plentiful,