Prometheus Bound

Prometheus Bound is an oil painting on canvas by Thomas Cole, dated 1847, in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young Museum, 1997.28). Measuring 162.6 by 243.8 cm, it is one of Cole's largest paintings and one of his last.

The subject comes from the Greek tragedy attributed to Aeschylus. The Titan Prometheus, who gave fire to humankind, is chained by Zeus to a rock in the Caucasus, where a vulture comes each day to eat his liver, which grows back overnight. Cole turned to it in 1846 after abandoning his unfinished series The Cross and the World, and spent about fifteen months on sketches and studies. Like his other major works of the 1840s it was not commissioned; he conceived it as an exhibition piece.

The landscape carries the story. Prometheus, nearly nude, is so small and so close in colour to the rock that the viewer finds him only after a while, chained to a sunlit crag beneath snowy peaks and a cold dawn sky. The vulture rises towards him from lower down, and above shines the planet Jupiter, the morning star, as if Zeus himself were watching. Cole built the glowing snow over a red underpaint, and Frederic Church later called the sky the finest morning effect he had ever seen painted. Cole left no comment on the theme; because the myth was widely used by writers of the period, including an anti-slavery poem by James Gates Percival, historians have suggested it may be an allegory of slavery.

After a well-received showing at the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, Cole sent the canvas to London for the 1847 Westminster Hall competition for decorating the Houses of Parliament. Hung high on the wall and ill-suited to the brief, it won no prize, and it was still in London when Cole died in 1848. The San Francisco museums bought it in June 1997.