The most important thing about Titan’s Goblet is that it “defies full explanation,” in other words nobody has any idea of what the heck is going on here.

Yes sure, we can all see that it’s some kind of giant bird bath with a Greek temple, Italian palazzo, some sailboats, probably a nice beach, towering over a little town and romantic landscape. We get all of that. An early auctioneer thought the cup was meant to be the Norse Tree of Life, holding all the people in its big ol' cup part. Probably Cole was thinking more along the lines of an Italian fountain that had a baby with a lake. Water-feature reproduction sounds more like the “culmination of Cole’s Romantic fantasies” but it still makes pretty much no sense.

The only clear way to understand this painting is as some Dadaist craziness, even though Dada didn’t show up for another century, it was the only 19th century American work included in MoMA’s Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibition in 1936. The scale is so whacked out and the implied size of whatever Titan left their cup on the headland is so at odds with the laws of physics, that our brain warps the landscape into some kind of joke at humanity’s expense.

Cole’s other paintings, while very into metaphor, don’t come close to Titan’s Goblet’s beat-you-over-the-head symbolism. His sketchbooks feature all kinds of similarly tripped out drawings featuring the surface of the moon and views of Earth from outer space (WAY before astronauts), but he never went on to paint them in oil—like people weren’t really supposed to see this side of him. Or maybe he wanted to paint like this all the time but when his patron sent this painting back in rejection Cole couldn’t muster the energy to try again. His self-worth as an artist was, after all, quite low. He loved Turner, penning romantic passages in his journal about how Turner’s object look like “Sugar Candy Jellies” that make irl nature look full of “dullness and darkness.” Then in letters to other painters he called Turner the “prince of evil spirits...in pictures representing scenes in this world, rocks should not look like sugar candy, nor the ground like jelly.” If he’s mean it’s just because he like-likes you, or something like that.

Despite his insecurity, Cole could take the most site-specific vista, like everybody’s favorite vacation lake, and turn it into a human-erasing landscape with universal appeal. Titan’s Goblet is so universally appealing that some 180 years after Cole finished it, a Young Adult fantasy fiction publisher used it as a cover and I definitely bought it, for the cover.