The paintings, Childhood, Youth, Manhood, and Old Age, depict a voyager who travels in a boat on a river through the mid-19th-century American wilderness.

Thomas Cole is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century and was concerned with the realistic and detailed portrayal of nature but with a strong influence from Romanticism.

[1] This group of American landscape painters worked between about 1825 and 1870 and shared a sense of national pride as well as an interest in celebrating the unique natural beauty found in the United States.

Cole clearly intended The Voyage of Life to be a didactic, moralizing series of paintings using the landscape as an allegory for religious faith.

[2] The first set is at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute in Utica, New York,[3] and the second set is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.[4] The four-part series is an allegory that traces a man's voyage along the "River of Life," portraying the innocence of childhood, the confidence and ambition of youth, the trials of manhood, and the approach of death in old age.

[7] In the first painting, Childhood, all the important story elements of the series are introduced: the voyager, the angel, the river, and the expressive landscape.

The boat glides out of a dark, craggy cave which Cole himself described as "emblematic of our earthly origin, and the mysterious Past.

In the distance, an ethereal citadel towers in the sky, a shimmering white beacon that represents the dreams and ambitions of humanity.

Gentler country lies at the bottom of the defile and the distant sky line lightens in that direction hinting of the hope of better times ahead.

Among the dangers the man has not lost his faith: he has let go of his boat's tiller (which may have broken) and is part kneeling, gazing upward with hands clasped together.

The vessel's figurehead now holds the hourglass while far above, behind and unseen by the voyager, his guardian angel continues to watch over from the Heavens, shining brightly through a break in the clouds.

It is only when experience has taught us the realities of the world, that we lift from our eyes the golden veil of early life; that we feel deep and abiding sorrow; and in the picture, the gloomy, eclipse-like tone, the conflicting elements, the trees riven by tempest, are the allegory; and the Ocean, dimly seen, figures the end of life, to which the voyager is now approaching.