Prometheus Bound (Thomas Cole)

Art historians have tentatively linked the bondage of Prometheus to abolitionist sentiment by reviewing the presentation of the mythical figure in contemporaneous literature.

The famous American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church wrote in 1876 to Cole's son, "I've always admired greatly the sky of that picture, deeming it the finest morning effect I ever saw painted".

Art historian Patricia Junker notes that writers and artists often took up the myth of Prometheus in the decades before Cole's painting; they include Lord Byron, James Gates Percival, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, James Russell Lowell, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Cole submitted Prometheus Bound to the 1847 exhibition at Westminster Hall, London, the third in a series of competitions to select art for the British Houses of Parliament.

The competition offered cash prizes, the possibility of a fresco commission, and the chance for recognition in the press through reproductions in the Illustrated London News and lithographs by print publishers.

[7] To gauge public response, Cole first showed the work at the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts along with the collection of his one-time patron Luman Reed.

It was well received; the Literary World wrote, "The whole composition produces in the mind of the spectator a feeling of utter loneliness and desertion; which was, unquestionably, the artist's aim.

The star of Jupiter is seen above, hovering within sight of his victim, and one feels, in looking at him, as if he were placed there for all time to gloat on the agonies of the tortured Prometheus.... We wish Mr. Cole could find it in his heart and in his way to treat us oftener to his imaginative creations.

Earth and air—dark blue depths of illimitable ether—vasty foundations—mighty summits helmeted with the crystal of eternal winter, glittering under the white cold Jupiter, in the first golden flashes of the day.