The Architect's Dream

The Architect's Dream is an oil painting on canvas by Thomas Cole, painted in 1840 for the New York architect Ithiel Town and now in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio. It measures 134.7 by 213.6 cm.

Town, a leading figure of the Greek and Gothic Revival in America, commissioned a landscape from Cole in 1839, originally a view of Athens, and paid him partly in cash and partly in books from his large architectural library. Cole, who called himself something of an architect and supplied plans for the Ohio State Capitol and for St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Catskill, turned the commission into an imaginary panorama of building history. He finished it in about five weeks and showed it at the National Academy of Design annual exhibition of 1840, where reviews were mixed.

Seen as if through a window framed by heavy green drapery, the styles are arranged in time from back to front: an Egyptian pyramid and temple in the misty distance, then Greek temples joined by a wall of pilasters, then a Roman aqueduct and round temple, and in the foreground a Gothic church rising from the trees, apparently based on an 1815 engraving of Salisbury Cathedral in one of Town's books. The dreaming architect reclines on huge folios atop a colossal column inscribed PAINTED BY T. COLE FOR I. TOWN ARCHt, 1840; he may be Town or a self-portrait of Cole. In a letter of the late 1830s Cole described architecture rising from Egyptian portals to the perfection of the Greek temple, declining under Rome, and finding in Gothic an expression of Christian aspiration.

Town refused the picture as almost exclusively architectural. After a long exchange of letters Cole painted him a more conventional landscape and kept The Architect's Dream, which stayed with his family until the Toledo Museum of Art bought it in 1949. It appears on the cover of Richard Tarnas's book The Passion of the Western Mind and inspired Kate Bush's song An Architect's Dream (2005).