The presence of the large, the massive, the majestic, the panoramic in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century American painting can be well documented. Aesthetic theories of the sublime, scenes of Niagara Falls and mountains, large canvases, vast views—all of these attest to the longing of the small American nation on a sprawling continent to project its vision of a great destiny, the possible future, the promised future, in its art. An early work in oil on canvas (1833) encompassing the large in a small (193⅜ by 16⅛ inches) canvas is The Titan's Goblet by Thomas Cole, who is called the father of American landscape painting and who, in fact, in his transitional role between Washington Allston and Frederic Church, transferred a symbolic way of seeing, especially in terms of American nationhood, to the enterprise of American landscape painting. The Titan's Goblet, “one of Cole's smallest and most finished works,” according to an early biographer, is a mysterious and fantastic painting that begs for interpretation: It seems peculiarly central to the process of making the American landscape function in a metaphorical way. Clearly symbolic itself, the goblet in the painting may be more than that and can be seen as emblematic of what it represents; that is, it can be seen as a singular object that stands for something else by suggesting the other thing's nature or history.