Humbug!: The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City's Penny Press 9780823285402

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Humbug!

HUMBUG! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York City’s Penny Press Wendy Jean Katz

AN IMPRINT OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com/empire-state-editions. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 First edition

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii Introduction: The Penny Press 1 1 The Aristocracy of Art and Bennett’s Herald 2 Artists, Their Agents, and Press Manipulation 3 Old Masters versus Young America

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4 The Penny Press’s Utopian Alternative

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5 The Genteel and the Bohemian 156 6 Rearing Statues amid Gothic Spires 188 Conclusion: Art and Politics 227 Acknowledgments 237 Notes

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Index 291

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ILLUSTRATIONS

I.1 Sun, February 17, 1834

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I.2 Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, April 24, 1854

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I.3 Herald, October 19, 1837

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I.4 John Bleecker, “Meeting of the Locofocos in the Park,” Sunday Morning News, April 8, 1838

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I.5 Walter Oddie, View across the Catskills, 1838

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I.6 James Cafferty, Newsboy Selling the New-York Herald, 1857

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1.1 Alfred Hoffy, “R. P. Robinson, The Innocent Boy,” 1836

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1.2 John Vanderlyn, The Death of Jane McCrea, 1804

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1.3 Henry Inman, Portrait of John Inman, c. 1828

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1.4 “Grand Fancy Dress Ball,” Herald, March 2, 1840

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1.5 “Brilliant Bal Costume,” Herald, March 5, 1840

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1.6 “Opening of the National Academy,” Herald, April 27, 1840

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1.7 William Page, Portrait of Colonel William Leete Stone, 1839

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1.8 Henry Inman, Newsboy, 1841

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1.9 J. J. Butler, “The Newspaper Boys,” New World, January 1, 1841

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2.1 “Dick Dropsy, An Office Beggar,” Herald, December 29, 1840; “The Loafer Literati of New York,” Herald, December 8, 1844

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2.2 Henry Inman, The Children of Bishop George Washington Doane, 1835

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2.3 James McDougall, “James Varick Stout,” Sunday Mercury, December 1842

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2.4 James Stout, Sketch of Fanny Elssler, c. 1841

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2.5 William Page, Young Traders, 1842

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2.6 William Page, Cupid and Psyche, 1843

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2.7 Tompkins Matteson, The Spirit of ’76, Columbian Magazine, April 1846

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3.1 Copy of The Assumption of the Virgin, after Francesco Albani, c. 1775–1825

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3.2 “New York Gallery of Fine Arts,” Herald, December 15, 1844

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3.3 Charles Burt, after Daniel Huntington, The Signing of the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey, 1848 110 3.4 “Young America Celebrating the National Anniversary,” Herald, July 6, 1847

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3.5 Jesse Talbot, Happy Valley, from Rasselas, the Prince Meditating His Escape, 1841

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3.6 Jesse Talbot, Christian at the Cross, 1847

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4.1 Thomas Whitley, Passaic Falls, Spring, c. 1839

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4.2 Alfred Jones, after Lilly Martin Spencer, One of Life’s Happy Hours, c. 1854

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4.3 Henry Gray, The Wages of War, 1848

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4.4 William Mount, Bishop Benjamin T. Onderdonk, c. 1830–1833

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4.5 Henry Brown, Choosing of the Arrow, 1849

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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4.6 Thomas Whitley, View of New York City from Hoboken, New Jersey, 1865

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5.1 Lilly Spencer, Jolly Washerwoman, 1851; Lilly Spencer, Shake Hands?, Cosmopolitan Art Journal, September 1857

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5.2 “The Cook,” Dispatch, December 24, 1848; “The Washerwomen,” Dispatch, August 27, 1848 161 5.3 “National Academy,” Picayune, June 20, 1857

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5.4 “We Visit the Academy of Design,” Vanity Fair, April 28, 1860

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5.5 Karl Lessing, The Martyrdom of Hus, 1850; Christian Kohler, Awakening of Germania in 1848, 1849

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5.6 Lilly Spencer, Young Husband, 1854

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5.7 John McLenan, “Scene in a Market House,” “Market-Scene,” Yankee Notions, June and August 1853

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6.1 Dispatch, January 23, 1848

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6.2 Picayune, December 27, 1851

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6.3 Philippe Garbeille, Guillot, n.d.

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6.4 David d’Angers, Thomas Jefferson, 1834; Democratic Review, January 1846

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6.5 “Correspondence of Vanity Fair,” Vanity Fair, September 1, 1860 201 6.6 Engraving of the Washington Monument, after Walcutt’s Design, by William N. Dunnel, 1848

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6.7 Henry Inman, “A Valentine,” Sunday Mercury, February 20, 1842 209 6.8 “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers,” Illustrated News, September 17, 1853; “Artistic Feeling,” Picayune, July 4, 1857

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6.9 Henry Brown, George Washington, 1856

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6.10 William Walcutt, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, 1857

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6.11 Clark Mills, Andrew Jackson, 1853; “Equestrian Statue of Jackson,” Illustrated News, January 15, 1853

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ILLUSTRATIONS

6.12 Frank Leslie, “Inauguration Ceremonies of the Crystal Palace,” “Kiss’s Statue of the Amazon,” Illustrated News, July 23, 1853

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6.13 “President Pierce at the Opening of the Crystal Palace,” Illustrated News, July 23, 1853

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6.14 “How He Is Bought into It,” Picayune, January 24, 1857

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6.15 Inauguration of the Perry Statue, at Cleveland, 1861; “Perry Monument,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 15, 1860

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C.1 “The New Brown Stone Front Statue,” Picayune, May 16, 1857; James Thom, George Washington, 1838

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C.2 Henry Sadd, after Tompkins Matteson, Union Portrait, 1852

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Humbug!

INTRODUCTION

The Penny Press

If newspapers cannot be made entertaining without a daily exhibition of poor human nature in its most miserable or contemptible points of view, let them be dull forever. . . . [Penny] papers are very extensively read, and that in very many instances by persons who read nothing else; they . . . corrupt and mislead their readers, by ministering to the morbid appetite for horrors and excitement, for the sake of increasing circulation. . . . A licentious and disorganizing press was among the forerunners of the French revolution. —New York Spectator, May 2, 1836 The daily press and the cheap periodicals appear to possess the only strength— the only eloquence—the only nerve—the only real talent and genius. . . . The cheapness of the Penny literature and its sterling good sense—its foundation in science, art and genius, have opened for it a channel in every rank of life, and to every variety of mind. —New York Herald, September 30, 1836

This book argues that the politics of the antebellum press affected the meaning of American art in ways that have gone unrecognized. In an era when political parties and factions were dissolving and reforming, artworks were an occasion for political positioning. By taking seriously the art criticism of mass-circulation newspapers, it is possible to see how art actually shaped antebellum politics. These cheap papers, though unquestionably part of the period’s expanding capitalist economy, offered socialists, working-class men, bohemians, and utopianists a forum in which they could propose new models for American art and society and tear down

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existing ones. This book accordingly traces the personal and political relationships between editors, writers, and artists that drove the terms of art criticism for thirty years, from the emergence of the penny press to the Civil War, years when art seemed most vulnerable to manipulation. The inexpensive “penny” papers that appeared in the 1830s, unlike older, larger “sixpenny” dailies with subscription lists, relied on advertising and so on sensational stories and breaking news that would sell papers on the streets. These papers also were explicitly or implicitly motivated by local political conflicts and conviction. They therefore innovated new kinds of coverage of city politicians, markets, crime, and celebrities, including artists and art exhibitions. Newspaper commentary on art, with its rich language of personalities, satire, and partisan judgments, was equally aimed at contesting traditional sources of power in American society. Locating antebellum art and artists within the competing political aims and agendas of the penny press, particularly in the context of the drive to undermine cultural authority, brings the social and economic values that shaped the practice and consumption of art into sharper view. Mass-circulation newspapers first appeared in the mid-1830s. Robert Hoe’s new industrial presses permitted newspaper proprietors to print tens of thousands of fairly small, easy-to-carry papers (fig. I.1). They sold for one or two pennies, an amount affordable to almost anyone in a period when a journeyman printer—a skilled artisan or “mechanic”—made about fourteen dollars a week, more than most newspaper writers. These papers as a group were quickly called, often with contempt for their “vulgar,” that is, working-class, readers, the “penny press.” The first successful one was the New York Sun in 1833, followed in that city by a host of others, most notably the Herald (1835), Tribune (1841), and Times (1851). These papers all adopted a new business model, one that relied on charging high prices for short-term advertising in widely circulated papers, instead of income from subscriptions, as had been the practice of the older, more expensive “sixpenny” papers. Suddenly, circulation mattered. In 1839, the Herald estimated its daily circulation at 15,000, the Sun’s at 25,000, and the total circulation of the “cash” or cheap press at 60,000 (versus a total of 14,000 for the sixpenny papers).1 An army of newsboys bought the penny papers at discount from the downtown press buildings, near City Hall, then vended them to passersby on nearby streets, docks, and hotels, shouting the headlines—which were accordingly dramatic. This sales model had consequences both for how penny editors determined what was news and for the style in which they wrote the news. Before considering how they transformed coverage of the arts, however,

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Figure I.1. Sun, February 17, 1834, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Public domain; image provided by National Museum of American History. Most penny papers were small: three to six columns wide, fifteen to twenty inches high, four pages (one sheet, folded, front and back).

it’s important to note some of the consequences of the ways in which their business model diverged from the practices of older, established dailies, like the Commercial Advertiser or Evening Post. These “Wall Street” papers—an epithet reflecting their location and readership—relied for income on ten- dollar annual subscriptions from a small circulation base of 600 to 5,000. These papers were huge: two feet high and three feet wide (fig. I.2). This was partly because of the constraints of technology. Rather than adding pages, it was more practical—given the presses available and the way postage was calculated—to enlarge the paper by adding or lengthening columns whenever an increase in advertisements dictated. Penny papers did the same until the 1850s, when they started adding pages instead. But the size of these so- called blanket papers, with their dense

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“sleepy” columns of two- line ads, meant they were best read on a large table or desk. Even when folded, the sixpenny papers were not designed for a pocket or street sales, as were the penny papers. And to some extent, one did not need to subscribe to more than one Wall Street paper, as the basic information about auctions, markets, ship arrivals, and even election results did not vary greatly from one to another. Even the same advertisers appeared every day for a year. The wealth of the subscribers to the Wall Street papers was reflected in the advertisements that dominated their pages. Up to 75 percent of their pages were ads, and these ads were not primarily aimed at consumers. They represented import and export merchants, shipping companies, and auction houses, and they targeted commercial buyers and investors. One reason for subscribing to an “Advertiser”—a name that, like “Commercial,” “Commerce,” or “Gazette,” usually indicated a Whig affiliation for a newspaper—was to obtain the ads’ information on commercial goods. By contrast, the penny papers targeted consumers with ads for housing, jobs, and patent medicines, often with eye-catching pictures and verses. In sixpenny papers, an ad cost forty dollars a year; the same advertisement would cost about $1,000 in a penny paper like the Herald, which gave only about half the paper’s columns over to them. All the papers—except in instances of editorial religious objections—carried changing daily ads for theater and entertainment, the latter including book and magazine publishers, art galleries, and exhibitions, often with brief editorial notices or reviews, many of which were press releases or, as the period termed them, “puffs.” But the penny papers emphasized their resistance to advertiser influence, especially to press releases masquerading as editorials. They claimed that unlike the sixpenny papers, which depended on large advertisers, they had “no inducements to this disgusting practice.” Their patrons were the readers, and so the penny press could claim to be the sworn enemy of humbug in every shape, humbug implying any notices or promotions that verged on imposture or false pretences. The penny workingman’s Transcript drew attention to Whig editor Colonel William L. Stone’s “amusing” review of his own book Tales and Sketches in his Commercial Advertiser. By contrast, the Transcript’s very organization “reprobated” such practices as advertisers paying for editorial publicity or concealing favoritism, practices that the “sixpennies dare not notice.”2 Similarly, the penny papers presented themselves as free from corrupting political influence. Because it was typical for a third of the annual subscriptions to the Wall Street dailies to go unpaid, to cover costs these

Figure I.2. Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, April 24, 1854, Library of Congress. Photographs provided by author. This influential Whig “blanket” sheet, or “wet blanket,” had eleven columns and was about five feet high.

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papers also sought political subsidies. The penny papers, however, to attract the broadest sales and circulation possible, claimed to be nonpartisan: The Sun “shone for all.” This claim of “manly” independence of party was important for the penny papers. Neutrality was part of what permitted them to claim that they represented the ordinary man on the street rather than political or financial interests. In the first issue of the cheap weekly Sunday Dispatch, the editors promised bold, manly opinions and accordingly noted that they would not seek party patronage. As added support for their claim to manliness, they also pointed out that each of the three coeditors was over six feet tall.3 The subscription papers fought back against charges of bias. The tendollar Whig Express argued that the penny press, rather than being able to advocate for the best political policy independently, in giving up partisanship had given up moral power, by trying to be all things to all men. It then rather weakened its own argument by saying that the penny press was only read by the poor and thus had no influence anyways.4 Their argument was further disabled when the Express, like almost all of the subscription papers, shifted to the penny-press cash model in the 1840s and 1850s. A more effective criticism of the penny papers’ pose as neutrals was to accuse them of merely feigning impartiality. Horace Greeley, the editor of the most influential Whig penny paper, the Tribune, accused the Herald of pretending to adulate the Whigs while actually attacking them and described the Sun’s writings as imbued with locofoco (radical Democratic) spirit.5 And Greeley was right: though they were not dependent on party subsidies like the Wall Street papers, the penny papers—located on less elite downtown streets like Ann or Nassau—still had strong political allegiances. Their editors and writers, like those at the subscription papers, jockeyed for government office and influence as well as patronage, the latter in the form of post office and government advertising, which was awarded both to papers belonging to the current administration’s party and to papers with the highest circulations. The cheapness of the penny papers meant that one could buy several papers or choose ones to purchase on a day-to- day basis. Accordingly, there was an explosion of cheap dailies and weeklies, the latter costing three or four cents. In 1839 there were forty-six papers, and by 1850 the Evening Post counted 106.6 As will be discussed in Chapter 1, because it required increasing amounts of capital to compete successfully, the artisanal printers who invented the concept were increasingly shut out; $500 was enough to start a paper like the Herald in the 1830s, but by the 1850s it took $100,000 to start the Times. Inevitably, many undercapitalized

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papers were short- lived, such as the Inveterate (edited by an inveterate punster), the Bubble (its very name ephemeral), the Regenerator (Associationist—that is, promoting communal living), the Broadway Belle (an example of what was called the “flash press,” a genre more scandalous than the penny papers, as indicated by its choice of a name closely tied to women on the street), the Splifincator (dedicated to mirth and sarcasm), the all- encompassing and cosmopolitan Universe (there was also the Globe, World, and New World, naturally), the White Man’s Newspaper (started in opposition to the colored man’s paper the Ram’s Horn), and on and on—even a Humbug.7 The number of relatively stable papers in New York in any given year probably ranged from ten to thirty, the higher number including the weeklies and the foreign-language (French, German, Celtic, Hebrew, Spanish, Italian) presses. As contemporaries observed, this outstripped any British or European city, despite their larger size. Such media diversity gave expression to the fault lines among New York’s rapidly growing population. In 1833, the same year the first penny newspaper appeared, disgruntled Democrats founded the Whig Party. For the next thirty years, the Whigs operated as something of an omnibus party, united more by their opposition to Democratic policies of territorial expansion, laissez-faire economics, and expanded rights for working-class white men than by a coherent philosophy. In 1837, a financial panic occurring under the Democratic president and New Yorker Martin Van Buren gave oppositional Whig views a considerable boost. About 60 percent of newspapers were Whig, reflecting the varied character of that party and, perhaps, its greater wealth.8 Newspapers in every city, but especially in New York, emerged to cater to every possible faction: the Daniel Webster Whigs in the influential sixpenny Courier and Enquirer; the William Henry Harrison Whigs in Greeley’s cheap campaign paper the Log Cabin; the John Tyler Whigs, who were nearly Democrats, in Walter Whitman’s inexpensive Aurora; the Van Buren and then free-soil Democrats in fellow poet William Cullen Bryant’s sixpenny Evening Post; the locofocos in the suitably named penny Plebeian; the John Calhoun or Workingmen’s Democrats in the weekly Subterranean; the nativist Whigs in the Express; the Sabbatarian but free-trade Whigs in the Journal of Commerce; the proslavery Whigs in the Day Book; the hardest of hard or conservative Democrats in the Sunday Mercury; and so on. Factionalization led to similar diversity in the foreign-language presses, too. In the buildup to the European civil revolutions of 1848, for example, the more radical Franco- Américain emerged to compete with the monarchical Courrier des États-Unis.

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Journalists at the extremely competitive penny papers pioneered circulation-boosting strategies for covering the news and directed them toward a readership that they represented as a broad public: They tried to speak for “the people.” Typically the white, male, urban journalist promised to uncover sensational (in the sense of corrupt, pandering, self-promoting, or licentious) behavior among powerful people or institutions, in the name of benefiting the ordinary person. Indeed, the journalist, despite himself often being employed by a wealthy and powerful media corporation, writes and acts as a representative of this common man. Art, with its “umbilical cord of gold” linking it to wealthy patrons, including the government and elite institutions, was one of the subjects, along with crime, high society, literature, and theater, exploited by the penny press in its quest to increase sales and advance society along lines congenial to each newspaper’s social agenda.9 Art critics too framed themselves as exposing humbug, insider agreements, and manipulated appearances for the benefit of the common man. Editorial rivalries, which were inherently rivalries with opposing political positions, further spurred coverage of art along with other local affairs that promised an opportunity to uncover the true character of their opponents. As the first penny paper in the United States wrote, it was a period when “every incident of a public character is made an instrument for political purposes,” as “fondness for politics” is the national character.10 Typically an elite weekly frowned on the resulting lack of decorum in the writing of the penny papers, observing that each “paltry cabal” in the press gave “personal abuse to its political adversaries.” The implication was that controversies over art or street cleaning or any issue were motivated or manufactured by political agendas; without such agendas, there would be an agreeable harmony over what was good and right. A cheap weekly put it differently, though they too acknowledged political interests were at play in newspaper coverage of most of issues: “Party [partisan] editors look at a political document as party artists look at a picture—in different lights. The results are amusingly absurd.” They followed this up with their conviction that there nevertheless was a true light in which to survey both pictures and documents: the light of the good of the nation, a light that in their case happened mostly to illuminate Whig policies.11 In this society that all agreed was saturated by politics, a saturation that reached new levels in the years leading up to the Civil War, one journal suggested that only women were fit to be art critics, as it was precisely their status as nonvoters that made them capable of writing without prejudice.12 Compared to Britain and Europe, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the influence of a politicized press on art in the United States.13

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Some of this work, though, has been done for antebellum literature and theater. Scholars who focus on definitive moments such as the Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849, in which city police killed unarmed citizens in a controversy over a British actor’s appearance on stage, have delineated how the press framed preference for opera or melodrama as a statement of political allegiance.14 Historians and art historians have studied the political intent of patrons and art institutions with explicit nation-building agendas, such as the American Art-Union.15 There have also been a few studies of individual art critics, particularly the editors of the art journal Crayon, because of their association with the Pre-Raphaelites.16 Other scholars have positioned art making as one of a range of new metropolitan practices, including press criticism and a variety of popular entertainments, that together defined a modern urban identity. This approach often sets aside political divisions as factional disputes within an otherwise unified middle or upper class.17 Nevertheless, the urbanites who supported more than a hundred papers and periodicals in New York City in any given year did not dismiss politics as irrelevant.18 Art historians who rely on newspapers for insights into American cultural attitudes, including attitudes toward artistic styles, ought similarly to bear in mind that criticism in any one paper—rather than reflecting a broad consensus—was often motivated by personal, which is to say political, infighting. Even more importantly, that infighting so characteristic of the penny press shaped how art was assessed. The Civil War, while it did not close all the fissures in the two parties, did force them into new political alignments and greater social solidarity. After Fort Sumter, crowds (mobs, to some) took to the street in front of the penny papers and forced those with Democratic, pro-Southern sympathies to raise the stars and stripes. One formerly Democratic paper in response claimed that the war “has obliterated all traces of party politics in the North.” Perhaps not coincidentally, in the same paper’s review of a painting that had just been renamed The North, it said that opinion of it must wait “until the Mutual Admiration Society have given their verdict.”19 That mocking phrase had been in use since the 1840s, when it referred to a Democratic circle of editors, but by 1861 it pointed to a Republican coalition. Antislavery Democrats and Whigs had formed the Republican Party, and their penny papers, the Tribune and Times, along with weeklies like Harper’s and monthlies like Putnam’s or, farther afield, Boston’s Atlantic Monthly, had a new economic grip on the market. Many former competitors folded. But even in the 1850s, the merger that led to the Republican Party’s dominance in the North was already visible in the demand for a more

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professional and less politicized press, including its art criticism. The Crayon, the first successful art journal edited by professional artists, in 1861 published a burlesque of just this politicization. In the satire, the “newspaper critic” is a journalist who writes without specialized knowledge of the arts to attract an equally uninformed audience. He finds in a genre painting’s interior—its crockery and clapboards—the cardinal principles that support the Union. The artist denies it, instead crediting his gal Sally for telling him to put in these various elements (once again, women secure the nonpolitical character of art).20 The point of the article is of course to mock critical overreaching for meaning. But the very idea that the Crayon artists, who disliked low or comic pictures like the one described anyways, felt impelled to defend a version of art for art’s sake—crockery for crockery’s sake—is telling of how common it was for newspaper criticism, explicitly or implicitly, to serve or invoke political agendas. The demand for depoliticized criticism in fact extended back to the penny press’s origins. Part of the penny papers’ rhetoric from the start was the position they assumed as outsiders who fearlessly roved the streets (or parlors) and recorded matters that decorum—or a more sinister desire to conceal upper- class wrongdoing—prevented the Wall Street press from printing. Often in alliance with Democratic doctrines that attacked statechartered corporations and monopolies, the penny papers promised to expose insider trading, open up closed social and business circles, and call out corruption that led to favoritism for jobs and other prizes.21 Their style in doing so horrified the members of those closed circles, who saw the attacks as a form of class warfare. One fairly mild critique at the time said they relied on balderdash, ribaldry, obscenity, and disgusting details of misery and crime. Blackmail was another common accusation, but as the penny press rebutted, this was more a matter of them not protecting or concealing the names and positions of wealthy miscreants and instead exposing their misdeeds and callousness while advocating for the just claims of the poor.22 The style of the penny press and what it identified as newsworthy was thus itself political. Its panache was deliberately popular or at least more dramatic and satirical, especially in its approach to local events and actors, than the sixpenny press. That “dramatic” character often correctly conveyed that a controversy was staged. The narrator of an 1838 stage play about life in New York promised audiences that they would see “tricks and capers, / Such as you look for daily in the papers.” 23 That same year, Scotsman James Gordon Bennett, editor of the Herald, a paper so famous for its style that its reporters were specifically satirized in

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another city-life play, articulated this strategy for giving art in particular new—newsworthy—meaning. In an editorial, he described greeting the Providence, Rhode Island, steamer at the wharf, only to be surrounded by “a dozen ragged hatless urchins” offering him his own Morning Herald, with “all the particulars of the pictures in the ’cademy.” This referred to the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition. Bennett responds to this come-on that he’s no painter and “don’t care a cent for pictures.” “But maybe you’d give two cents for an account on ’em” is the answer.24 The penny press is not, in this self-presentation as an exchange between streetwise youths and a shrewd businessman, addressing an audience of connoisseurs; its role is to give art value even to those—such as the “man on the street”—with no interest in pictures. To make art news is to replace the private or familial consumption of luxury goods with a more public and popular—dramatic—accounting. These tricks and capers were in turn, like stage plays, frequently adapted from British and continental journals. Criticism in the foreign press, as one New York journal explained, distinguishing it from the American press’s mere indiscriminate puffery, was “biased wholly by personal or political considerations,” controlled by “sordid and interested,” “corrupt and venal” organs of coteries, factions, and cliques, whether literary or political, in order to promote friends and punish enemies.25 Many of the editors and writers of the cheap papers, like Bennett, were indeed “foreign-born,” something the Wall Street papers, typically edited by native-born, collegeeducated Protestant men, held against them. To Whigs at the more expensive papers, their style was “Cockney,” so not just working class but with a “vulgar” accent to boot. These editors’ “slashing” style of criticism, which was pioneered by partisan (Tory) British journals like Blackwood’s or Fraser’s, often depended on billingsgate’s crudities. One Herald editor counted forty-five adjectives for “villain” in a rival newspaper’s column describing Bennett, the Herald’s chief editor.26 As this indicates, the penny press employed the personal, whether for abuse, or when pioneering “I” instead of the more magisterial editorial “we,” or when interviewing criminals. Local stories, because they often featured specific noted individuals, had more prominence (“the most insignificant events can be swelled to matters of great moment, if they are traced up eternity to their causes”).27 To acquire personal information, editors sought tips and information from the public, not just from preselected correspondents. When these papers have their strategies simply dismissed as sensational ploys for wider circulation, their significance is lost. The self-proclaimed Napoleon of the press James Gordon Bennett, a target because of his

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success with the penny Herald, was whipped in the street by politicians and editors, regularly sued for libel, had his family socially and publicly isolated, and was the subject of an organized economic boycott. The Wall Street press’s violent attacks on him, like its milder denunciations of the other penny papers, had to do with his willingness to publish individual misdeeds (embezzlement, adultery, bankruptcy) on the part of the wealthy, but it was also a reaction to the real threat that penny-press stories posed to the city’s governing elites.28 For example, Bennett early turned to images to supplement his muckraking, as in a cartoon of the Devil on Wall Street (fig. I.3). One of his favorites, he used the cartoon repeatedly, varying the identification of the devil’s allies as necessary for the particular situation. In this instance, he recommends that stock investors would be better served if the Board of Brokers allowed the public, in the form of the press, to monitor their meetings. The penny press’s verbal and visual strategies of self-promotion, scandal, and even blasphemy were sometimes warranted forms of critique, and they helped shape taste and feeling against the real power of these elites. The “cliques” described by the penny press were not imaginary, and they controlled many parts of public life. As late as 1854, Columbia University’s trustees rejected a chemistry professor because he was Unitarian.

Figure I.3. Herald, October 19, 1837, p. 4, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

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One paper that reviewed the candidates before the decision was made had noted that the Jewish scientist would likely not be considered but had given the Unitarian a chance. As the Evening Post, whose editor, Bryant, was Unitarian too, observed, the problem with the trustees was not simply their violation of the university’s state charter barring religious tests. The real problem was, in modern parlance, the lack of diversity of the trustees, who, like the university’s president, were not just Episcopalian but belonged to the same wealthy church, Trinity. The episode highlights not the prevalence of religious bigotry (though it was prevalent) but how closed New York’s various boards, trustees, and managing committees were. Nor were these close circles of religion and politics limited to private institutions. When Theodore Frelinghuysen, the future Whig vice-presidential candidate, was inaugurated as New York University’s president in 1839, the Whig Commercial Advertiser enthusiastically reproduced his warning that “the desire for knowledge may become inordinate and dangerous.” Stone, the editor of the Commercial Advertiser, was committed to keeping the Protestant Bible in the public schools; his chief associate editor, John Inman, served on charitable boards with Frelinghuysen. It was the Democratic penny Sun that criticized his speech as inappropriate for a university president, and it was the threepenny Democratic weekly Sunday Mercury that outright accused Frelinghuysen of fostering religious fanaticism. For Catholics, Jews, and anticlericalists like Bennett and many others in the cheap press, exposing the machinations of such exclusive institutions served the public good as well as their self-interest.29 The penny press’s construction of art exhibitions as news according to the same model by which it represented universities, Congress, or society balls—namely, in terms of favoritism and conflict between old fogies and young contenders—reflects this penny-press style of dramatization, with its accompanying attack on cliques and their interests. So, for example, when Bennett finally got from the docks to his desk in the story quoted earlier and was casting about for copy to comprise the day’s paper, he dismissed a proposed story that “Young Bleecker has painted some beautiful pictures, now in the Academy” because “Everyone knows that.” The implication is that the public (“everyone”) has good judgment and knows the truth about art. So the critic must either investigate the possibly hidden production of this agreement by interested parties or discover overlooked genius, in either case “manufacturing” conflict and creating a sensation. At the same time, revealing this editorial process, exposing the humbug or artifice behind coming up with news, shores up the image of an independently critical press, one capable of speaking for “everyone.”

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This anecdote, at the same time, points to the relationships between artists and editors and how they decided whom to promote or condemn in their columns. John R. Bleecker was “a scion” of the Whig auctioneer and advertiser James W. Bleecker. It was James W. Bleecker, in his Wall Street office, who showed his son’s caricature of a Democratic rally to Bennett in 1838.30 In his design, the energy of the crowd of Wall Street shinbones, roarers, busters, convicts, loafers, and pickpockets is fuel for the buoyant leaders of the radical Democrats, who include “Slam,” Levi Slamm, another penny-paper editor. John R. Bleecker’s “Loafers and locofoco meeting in the Park” actually appeared in the Sunday Morning News: The editor Samuel Jenks Smith, like Bennett a former Democrat turned Whig, pirated it from the engraver (fig. I.4). But Bennett continued to praise Young Bleecker, as an amateur, outside the National Academy of Design, often pairing him with the stockbroker and amateur artist Walter M. Oddie, who with a few brushstrokes could produce “an exquisitely clever little landscape.” In their pictures, “quiet, unpretending” is the true spirit of the artist; they are praised for not seeking the brilliant (presumably commercially motivated) effects chosen by

Figure I.4. J. J. Butler, after John R. Bleecker, “Meeting of the Locofocos in the Park,” Sunday Morning News, April 8, 1838, New York Public Library. Public domain; image provided by New York Public Library.

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Figure I.5. Walter Mason Oddie, A View across the Catskills, 1838, oil on canvas, 36 × 50 inches, private collection. Public domain; image provided by Butterfield & Butterfield.

the Academy professional (fig. I.5). But because Bleecker lacked a friend inside the Academy, his pictures were hung too low, and his genius was compelled to make room for self- satisfied, superficial dogmatists who follow the supposed rules of art.31 This division that the press created between insiders and outsiders, professionals and amateurs, gave the newspaper authenticity. It backed not the principle of representing (authentic) nature so much as the nature of the authentic self. Bleecker’s sketchier style signals his honest, unpretending self, as the spectacle of a newsboy’s rags certifies his authenticity as an outsider—and that of the penny newspaper he carries. That paper, often in the working-class boy’s voice, speaks for them (and for the man on the street) against the rulebound. Understandably, then, in papers with close personal ties to the Academy’s artists and considerable enmity toward the encroaching Herald, Bleecker was dismissed as gross and vulgar, void of merit, and not worth his place in the show.32 Horace Greeley’s inexpensive Whig New- Yorker said Bleecker’s American Scenery would do “considerable discredit to a Miss of fourteen,” equating amateur status with a less desirable sort of outsider status, femininity. H, a contributor to the Whig sixpennies, offered

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mild praise to an artist whose family was well known to the expensive Episcopalian papers: His work is “promising,” “as good as anything we ever saw from him.” A letter from Plain Common Sense in the Democratic Evening Post, however, says that H’s art criticism reveals that a woman wrote it, and she ought to have stuck with just showing her work to her governess. This neatly aligns the sixpenny Post, which hadn’t mentioned Bleecker in its reviews, with more businesslike, practical, beef-eating and money-making male professionals.33 The Whig Evening Star, despite having had Bleecker and Oddie as subscribers, was by 1840 a profound enemy to the Herald; thus, genre paintings by Bleecker that the Herald had called excellent in effect, pleasing as a whole, with fine touches by an uncommonly clever young artist, were disparaged as beneath criticism, with no merit that “we can perceive.” The five- dollar Mirror, which hired Whig subeditors, warned about young artists who want to produce “a flashy effect by superficial means” to win public approval and considered Bleecker as painting an implausible and “very flashy hill.” Like his backer the upstart Herald, his pictures were guilty of too much self-promotion.34 The criticism of Bleecker during the few years he was in the public eye (1837–1845) doesn’t quite divide along partisan lines. He came from a prominent family and shared the Whig taste for satirizing working- class Democrats as rowdy and uncontrolled, but few Whig critics praised his pictures. Having the Herald back him—“everyone knows” that “Bleecker has painted some beautiful pictures”—may have been a mixed blessing. Perhaps most telling is that in 1845, the six-and- a- quarter- cent (so not cheap) Broadway Journal wrote a glowing review of him. Though its editor, Charles F. Briggs, was a Whig, he was enough of an Emersonian transcendentalist to share the Herald’s rejection of traditional art standards in favor of the free individual. Accordingly, Briggs brutally attacked Academicians beloved by the Post and Mirror as merely copyists of engravings, followers of rules. He wrote of Bleecker’s landscape that it was a “charming little bit of tender feeling” that copies nature as he finds her, and that “his day will dawn.” Edgar Allan Poe, coeditor with Briggs, later wrote that although he did not agree with the Herald that the Academy was worthless, its friends in the press encourage its coteries of painters to forget art in service of their party’s purposes. Poe then defined those parties not as Whig or Democrat but as the old and the young, with the excluded young as the more promising.35 Poe briefly flirted with the Democrats during this time, but more significantly, his and Briggs’s rhetoric indicates they shared the penny press’s broader challenge to established institutions and the “fogies” who run them without permitting true competition.

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As this suggests, the penny press constructed art along the same lines as it represented other institutions and monopolies, and artists felt the impact. This disruption created by the penny press was evident in the appearance of newsboy pictures in 1839, at the time when the penny-press attack on the National Academy of Design was most strenuous and when a rival for displaying contemporary art, the Apollo Association, first emerged. Newsboys were the visible agents of the penny papers. Mostly working- class boys, they were symbols of the new model of appealing to the masses.36 Crowding the same streets as wealthy businessmen, they possessed the latest news and so possessed a kind of power. Unsurprisingly their very presence on the streets became a subject of controversy. Several spasms of outrage in this regard on the part of the sixpenny Commercial Advertiser, Journal of Commerce, and Courier and Enquirer led to attempts to block them from crying the headlines, especially on Sundays. But as the penny and Sunday papers observed, moral outrage over violating the Sabbath was a thin veil for an attempt to cripple cheap-press circulation. One interested editor called this form of Sabbatarianism “the most impertinent of imbecilities” and lauded the newsboys’ demonstration at City Hall against “Puritan pokenoses” who practice good only homeopathically, that is, in infinitesimally small doses. His jibe is less at religion than at the moralistic (and self- serving) New England editors of the sixpenny papers.37 In one of several such cabinet (small, invented) pictures of newsboys by James Cafferty, the boy selling the Herald is paired with a city wall covered in handbills and posters promoting the latest plays and products (fig. I.6). Both boy and wall represent the latest, most sensational and most widely (even democratically) circulated news; they both were symbols of the modern urban hub, with its social mixing, promiscuous advertising, and new spectacles. For example, Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s 1854 novel Newsboy, about a great-hearted hero who overcomes all obstacles, was greeted by the Whig Albion as an example of literature that had become popular merely through excessive advertising. Her publisher’s advertising campaign was a “humbugging” and “quack operation,” like her novel producing an exaggerated sympathy for the poor (as represented by the newsboy), a hucksterism that tarnished the authenticity of the penny press’s voices as well.38 There may be a cautionary tone to Cafferty’s painting, too: The resemblance between the paper filled with ads and the wall of posters plugging book auctions and cheap furs suggests that the penny papers too are commodifying knowledge and falsifying news, in an ungoverned and even illicit market.39 The humorous mixing of signs on the wall in any case was a reminder that an indiscriminate economic order, exemplified by the

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Figure I.6. James Cafferty, Newsboy Selling the New-York Herald, 1857, oil on canvas, 16 × 12 inches, collection of Walter and Lucille Rubin, Boca Raton Museum of Art. Public domain; photograph provided by The Athenaeum.

penny press and the newsboy, had leveled the traditional sources of authority that filtered information (and art) and determined its value. The daily newspaper, the boy, and his vocal come- ons in Cafferty’s painting are in this sense reinforced by the column-like array of ephemeral commercial performances behind him. All these motley and possibly specious elements have been elevated to participation—literally given voice—in the public realm of the new American democracy. Great men and Whig orators like Edward Everett must compete with the street crier and hawker. But Cafferty at the same time compares the solid, active, working-class boy, his cheeks as ruddy as the tempting apples next to him, with the flat sheets of paper capriciously pasted behind him. In a world of arbitrary and deceptive signs, where trust is wanting, the newsboy and

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the cheap paper for which he speaks are the ones who seemingly stand for nature. Indeed, Cafferty’s picture in the next year for the Herald finance editor, showing Wall Street during a financial panic, included newsboys selling papers. Though this was a naturalistic detail, in the context of a painting where banks, stocks, credit, and paper money are all collapsing, it is papers sold in the street by barefoot children that seem most trustworthy. The Herald had pioneered coverage of the money market, including exposing conflicts of interest when Wall Street editors like James Watson Webb of the Courier and Enquirer invested in stocks that were promoted in his newspaper. Part of the allure of the cheap press, then, was just this promise to level old authorities, to burlesque elite pretensions and their attempts to monopolize knowledge—to bring them down to the street—and in doing so, the cheap press aligned itself and its reporting with working-class oral as much as educated written culture, as closer to the vernacular and to contemporary life. Thus, their usual means for creating copy on art took the form of a list of artworks with brief comments on each, suggesting a kind of quantifiable and impersonal system not unlike the city’s grid of streets or the array of signs for commodities on those streets or in the papers.40 Such lists were often numbered, following the exhibition catalog that was sold by the National Academy for twenty-five cents in addition to the entry fee, but of course the press’s version of the catalog, at a penny, was much cheaper (and racier). The list format also emphasized that the exhibition possessed a kind of all-encompassing variety, with the individualizing commentary on each piece not so far from gossip’s word on the street. Jottings on an hour spent in the gallery, a typical mode, evoked the presence of a spectator who was not necessarily expert; it even allowed for a female speaker. In it the writer “spoke” with a democratically sociable voice, often in dialogue. In the Whig Nathaniel P. Willis’s periodical the Corsair, named after his unabashed piracy of British authors, which turned them into cheap literature for the masses, his art reviews might string together a series of one- liners: Portia “looks as if she were holding ice in her mouth,” or “Governor Mason “remind[s] one of a butcher stripp’d for slaughter. I would not willingly be done by A. Smith!” It was a personal style that exposed the freaks and vagaries of art, artists, and patrons, mocking their pretensions, and simultaneously called attention to the press’s role in uncovering heroes and villains. Like Bennett in the Herald and other penny-paper journalists, Willis wrote conversationally, in this case as if addressing his coeditor, and this format’s potential to include contradictory opinions would be exploited further, both for humor and to expose

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conventionality and cant on the part of supposed experts. The resulting personalization and deflation of art may explain why newspaper criticism in this period frequently seems disjointed, written in what one scholar calls a combination of “opinionated claptrap and lowbrow ekphrasis.”41 Bennett called Willis an “author of slip-slopperies” and dismissed the “gossip” that passed for his correspondence on art and other urban affairs as a mercenary five- dollar column, puffing oyster cellars (places in New York that paid Willis to be mentioned), and written in a perfect diarrhea of twaddle, nonsense, puerility, and egotism.42 Often the City Items (or gossip) editor of a paper commented on art exhibitions, and the tone varied from flippant to serious. Gossip was shallow and ignorant, the familiar slam at the cheap papers, but it was interested in exposing local scandals and elites. When penny papers in the early 1860s like the Democratic Leader and Republican World switched to titles like “World of Art” for what was essentially the same column, it was perhaps for that reason, to signal a move away from the local character of gossip. Though art critics were not professionals until the 1850s, they were not intellectual lightweights, nor were they dismissive of the arts. The poets Whitman and Bryant, who both had close friends among New York’s professional artists, joined magazine writers like Willis, Poe, and many other lesser-known literati in writing art reviews. Editors, who often traveled to Europe themselves, emphasized that the correspondents who sent in reviews were educated in the arts and had been abroad, even if they were not artists.43 But the critics’ literary attainments and educational qualifications, as well as their attitude toward nature and the republic, were not separate from their political positions. Whitman and Bryant spoke at political rallies, as did Horace Greeley, who also wrote on art. The Herald even advertised that one of its art critics was a recent congressman.44 So to understand what often seem like selective and elliptical reviews, it helps to see them as written not only in response to the art; the authors are also often writing against other (party’s) newspaper accounts as well as others’ assumption of the authority to judge modern norms and styles.45 Amid stiff competition in what was still a fairly small city—most of the editors and writers for the press, like most painters and sculptors, knew one another—editors tried to demolish the claims and pretenses of political rivals as well as their claims to be connoisseurs of art or to grasp the banking system. Often the greatest hostility would be directed at close kin, as papers with similar views were competing for the same potential audience. In attacking the standards for, and the language of, art criticism, the penny press created a plurality of voices. The penny press could therefore

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proclaim itself an agent of cultural democratization, an agent for dispersing cultural authority, just as its broad circulation dispersed knowledge. But the editors’ strenuous proclamation of a democratic public sphere for art, one that permitted and promoted expanded public access to “everyone,” whether in its own pages or in the city’s galleries, itself had a market function. That is, the critics’ creation of a democratic profusion of views, seemingly undermining cultural authority, was profitable; its controversies and debates increased circulation, which in turn facilitated a few individuals’ control of the market.46 This is because the very success of a penny paper, with the capital required for industrial printing presses to produce editions of 60,000 a day, exemplified the market’s actual concentration of power in fewer hands. The newspaper critic emerges in this economy as a modern consumer (like the imagined newspaper buyer), an exhibition-goer whose pleasures in art are not reasonable (that is, reasoned according to interest) but popular. The critic’s personalization of art in its flippancy and satire both undermined traditional authority and marked his ability to represent the People, outside of professional or institutional interest. The penny press’s self-proclaimed role was to break up the coteries that strove for monopolies of credit: in art, often those who supposedly tried to dominate public attention and patronage by “mannerism.” Manner, the idea of a prescribed style, the notion of correctness in art itself, becomes in the penny press a tool wielded by cliques to suppress works of original, vigorous genius, to push them to the margins of what should be a democratically open market.47 That may be why cliques remain the model for understanding taste and criticism into the 1850s. Writing in 1853, after losing his political office, New York Evening Mirror editor Hiram Fuller identified a Harper’s clique, a Putnam’s clique, a Literary World clique, a Press Club clique, an Art-Union clique, and scores of lesser ones. If you know what circle someone moves in, Fuller said, it is easy to predict their peculiar views of New York art and artists.48 The Herald and other critics of early American art institutions characterize them as trying to create a self-serving standard and monopoly, an aristocratic practice, one unwilling to recognize individual merit. The construction in the penny press of the independent critic who speaks for the People, in the vernacular, is the sign of that desired free trade; one paper was even named the Critic. For shrewd consumers of newspaper criticism, then, who attended exhibitions to see potboilers (artworks that should be burned, to make the pot boil) and young genius, to brush elbows with high society, or to mock the portraits of editors who looked like they had just sat on something warm, like a litter of puppies (Nathaniel Willis’s description of rival editor William

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Stone’s portrait), art was detached from both private sentimental objecthood and public bourgeois rationality.49 This book traces the penny press’s drive for a more egalitarian market through its impact on taste: the preferences newspapers articulated for allegory over nature, muted or colorful palettes, or idealized rather than expressive physical bodies. These values were shaped by the pressures and politics of the press, and these pressure points changed over time. Chapters 1 and 2 start with Bennett’s Herald, the bête noire of the conservative Knickerbocker circle, and the response of artists and writers who resisted the incursion into their terrain by the impertinent puppies of the penny press. Bennett was especially resented. He turned the radical republicanism of the early penny presses toward the arts, creating a new constituency for them, in a way that the Sun, despite its greater circulation, did not. Bennett’s Herald, and the way it altered the values attached to art, accordingly plays a dominant role throughout this book. Chapters 3 and 4 turn more specifically to Young America, a movement advocating for expanding the US political system into new territories, and to Associationism, a movement for cooperative living and working, as sources for the values the penny press attached to style and for its attacks on art institutions. Both chapters touch on the penny papers’ attack on the American Art- Union. The Art- Union was an influential organization in which the Board of Managers purchased artworks from living artists, exhibited them in a free gallery, and then distributed them in an annual five-dollar lottery. The resemblance of this to a mutual-benefit association actually caused problems, as neither artists nor newspapers were certain who—artists, public, or managers—was really receiving its benefits. The Art-Union, though embracing much of Young America’s vision of modernity, intersected with another form of the art market, the auction trade. Chapter 3 explores how contrasts between the two kinds of commerce, auctions of dingy “old-master” Madonnas and sales of “glaring” contemporary art, was itself a catalytic agent for penny- press controversies over what and who constituted “native” art. Chapter 4 follows the career of the Art-Union’s leading antagonist, the Fourierist, Swedenborgian, agriculturalist, painter, politician, editor, nativist, judge, satirist, dealer, Hoboken booster, and art critic Thomas W. Whitley, in order to illuminate the penny press’s framing of art within a critique of capitalism. Whitley and the New York Herald are usually credited with destroying the American Art-Union. Both have been dismissed as vengefully nursing grievances over rejections by the city’s most important source of art patronage. But their ill will toward the Art-Union originated

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in a working-class critique of monopolies. Indeed, Whitley was an Associationist, a utopian socialist who advocated cooperative enterprises for artists. He had personal and political ties to fellow Fourierists at Bryant’s influential Evening Post, Greeley’s penny Tribune, and Willis’s genteel Home Journal. His criticism of the Art- Union was backed by these and a wide array of papers that supported artists’ control of the art market, as part of a larger campaign to interrupt corporate charters that conferred economic privilege rather than served the public good. In the 1850s, the Republican Party consolidated, absorbing free-soil Democrats and some of the urban artisanal constituency that had fueled the penny presses. Media outlets and voices defining taste consolidated too, and art criticism lost some, but not all, of its hurly- burly partisanship. In Chapters 5 and 6, the growing influence of Greeley’s Tribune and Henry J. Raymond’s Times is examined in case studies of individual artists and exhibitions and through their commentary on monumental public sculptures in the city. A new generation of professional art writers emerged in these papers, advocating for fixed standards for judgment of art. More bohemian authors, many with ties to Democratic papers, working alongside them, still advocated for artists who celebrated the commonplace and natural. They found common ground, however, in deflating the authority of the past in favor of the modern and in rejecting the sentimental and commercial, a taste they associated with women and the penny press’s claim to represent the people. Given the turnover in newspapers, editors, and writers over nearly thirty years, not to mention artists and political factions, inevitably a great many different names appear throughout this book. Some, like Bennett of the Herald, have a bigger role to play in defining American art than others, but one can’t understand the Herald without also considering its less famous enemies, rivals, and friends. In trying to recuperate this world in which artists and critics lived, with if not all, then at least some of its web of gender biases, class animosities, racial projections, and personal relationships intact, there is a real danger of also recreating its chaos. But because so many of these people—and their beliefs in the egalitarian distribution of resources, freedom of religion, and workers’ rights, voiced in their newspaper commentaries on art just as much as in their editorials—have been left out of the histories of American art, it seems important to retain and record their still significant imprint on American taste.

1

The Aristocracy of Art and Bennett’s Herald

Penny papers, especially James Gordon Bennett’s despised and successful New York Herald, turned art exhibitions into an occasion to expose the political and economic hypocrisy of their opponents. Art’s longstanding associations with aristocratic taste and license made it especially useful for a press that crusaded on behalf of the “man on the street.” Artists, despite their ties to artisanal modes of production, did not entirely escape this egalitarian campaign. The penny press cast the artists’ National Academy of Design as a self-serving and aristocratic monopoly, akin to other economic monopolies, that stifled genius. The Wall Street press, which backed art institutions, responded by condemning the flippant, gossipy criticism in the newspapers as being no better than the opinion of the crowd. Almost every newspaper in the antebellum period, of every class or type, had items about art and artists, if only as filler: anecdotes about famous artists scissored from exchange (British, European, or out-of-town American) papers, fiction featuring artists as protagonists, or notices of recordbreaking art auctions, sales, and local exhibitions. That filler was chosen to appeal to the journal’s imagined audience: The Emancipator in the early 1840s selected an account of the baroque Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, who discovered that his mulatto slave painted better than any of his highborn pupils; the republican Franco-Américain gave a mocking anecdote of British millionaires’ immoderate rivalry over antiquities. The Sun in the 1830s offered a (false) story of the fourteenth-century Italian painter Giotto, in which the artist so wished to draw a crucifixion to the life

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that he murdered his model, winning the admiration of the pope despite his crime. It was this criminal portrayal that became the basis for most of the famous crucifixions since, the rather anticlerical article concluded.1 Indeed, most penny papers’ lengthier clippings about art had a flavor of suspicion about art’s practitioners and patrons. In just one month, the Sun published items about an English drover who had traded dead pigs for pictures in a deal where he was cheated, an emperor who believed he was an artist and who forced his models to paint their faces to match the color in his pictures, and an ornamental painter who kicked women.2 Art in these selections was associated with England and Europe, tyranny and autocrats, cruelty and the likelihood of working men getting duped or hurt, whether it was a grandee who commanded the Spanish Inquisition to kill an artist or a news story describing a sign painter injured in a fall from a roof. The penny papers even here were watching out for the ordinary man. The question, however, was whether artists and artisans were made of the same manly republican materials. The Sun, the city’s first successful penny paper, expressed what has been called an “urban artisan ideology,” secular and rationalist, expansionist, and egalitarian, a worldview that typified the penny press.3 Benjamin Day, its editor, was a New England–born Protestant, a printer and so an artisan himself, with a common- school education. Plump, with a short beard fringing his genial face, he had worked at the Democratic Evening Post and had associations with the more radical arm of the Democrats, the Workingmen’s Party. The penny New York Transcript was founded shortly after the Sun by printers from the same milieu as Day. But unlike party paper and rival the Working Man’s Advocate, the Sun and Transcript had little to say about politics. Working-class people appeared in their columns, but most often in the reports on the police courts. By 1836 the Sun and Transcript had about 20,000 readers each, and the Herald, which had begun publishing in 1835, was never far behind. This large readership required increasingly expensive steam-run presses for expanding editions (plus new type, paper, etc.), so by the financial panic of 1837, with its constriction of credit, it was already becoming more difficult for artisan printers like Day to become editor-owners. In 1838 Day sold the Sun to Moses Y. Beach, another New England artisan and his brother- in-law; the Transcript folded in 1839. But from about 1833 to 1853, the cost of starting a cheap paper was still low enough that there was something of an open media market for “ideological commodities,” and artisans—printers—were their producers. The penny Man’s masthead was composed entirely of farming and mechanical instruments: It was artisanal tools that “make the Man.”4

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The urban artisan ideology of the early penny papers seldom extended to contemporary painting and sculpture, though occasional commentary on art reflected those values: An equestrian figure of Black Hawk looks as savage as a meat axe (Jacksonian expansionist politics’ typical hostility to Native Americans); Eighth Ward citizens, not some elite-run association, show civic virtue when they meet to discuss a statue of George Washington.5 The city’s fine artists, who had a considerable amount in common with craftsmen, were cited for their work on fire engines and theater sets, with an emphasis on the high monetary value of their ornaments. Sculptors had especially strong connections to artisanal labor: A local shoemaker named Van Patten was praised for following his “natural genius” (nature thus reinforcing the republic) in producing a “highly finished” portrait of the New York politician and Democrat DeWitt Clinton. This category of fine artists with ties to the trades included founders of the National Academy of Design, for example the engraver Asher B. Durand, who was friendly with William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the Democratic Evening Post. Francis Edmonds, a friend of Durand and an amateur painter whose regular job as a banker removed him from this realm, was at least a cashier for the Mechanics’ Bank and the Leather Manufacturers’ Bank. He was also a Democrat.6 If art was aristocratic, at least some artists were not. Whether engravings were fine art and engravers were fine artists was not always clear, and the publication of wood engravings in the cheap papers muddied the issue further. Penny papers initially had not been illustrated to any great extent, but by 1840, the Herald had near-weekly images of recent events: fires, steamboat disasters, portraits of criminals at trial, scenes of the crime, and so on. Cheap weekly and daily papers also produced special New Year’s editions that collected their engravings from throughout the year. These pictures had a mixed reputation. Though they were heavily promoted when they appeared, pictorial features were sometimes thought to cheapen or commercialize the press. Poe, when he proposed a literary journal, disdained including them. The Sun, likely sniping at the Herald, criticized papers “claiming respectability,” who removed their “usual chaste dress” (typeface) for “every conceivable pictorial device,” for “dandies and devils,” “with no more edification than play bills” or menagerie advertisements.7 An incident of a pirated engraving illustrates how the idea of design, the question of individual originality and genius in the trades, as opposed to the trades being associated with commercial reproduction or mass manufacture, was contested ground. A regular Herald engraver and advertiser, J. J. Butler, whose shop on Ann Street was near the penny papers, sold his engraving of an amateur’s design to a rival paper,

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under his own name (fig. I.4). The amateur, John Bleecker, had promised the caricature of a Democratic rally at the City Park to the Herald, but Butler argued that the engraving was his, not Bleecker’s, work to sell. He accused Bennett of treating him and his reproduction of the scene like a “boot maker.”8 The penny Sun, Transcript, and Herald and twopenny Daily Whig, all publishing in the 1830s, carried ads for prints of all kinds, as well as for sign painters, painting lessons, old- master auctions, and art exhibitions. But displaying art, other than portraits, in private or commercial spaces, with such commercial spaces extending to the pages of the paper, was a practice readily associated not simply with wealth but with sites of license or privilege, whether sexual, political, social (leisure), or economic (stock speculations, etc.). Nudity in art could often highlight the hypocrisy of art patrons and their pet editors in the sixpenny press—the difference between their private and public behavior. The Whig Express, by this time a penny paper, observed that a Titian in Joseph Bonaparte’s collection sold in London for 1,200 pounds, even though it couldn’t be displayed publicly. So too the cheap weekly Plaindealer credited the success of biblical paintings by the French artist and nonstop advertiser Claude-Marie Dubufe in New York to a semilibidinous taste, which was grateful to the artist for calling a prostitute Eve. The Sun, however, hostile to papers that blamed licentiousness on both exhibitions of art and the cheap daily papers, called the desire to annihilate these “few trophies of the fine arts” among us “A Precious Specimen of Liberality, Light and Learning” that really aimed to block the diffusion of knowledge and return civilization to the Dark Ages.9 Tarnishing the New York Democrat Martin Van Buren and his allies with a taste for expensive luxury goods that was akin to aristocrats hoarding precious objects was a successful Whig strategy. Bennett followed His Republican Highness and Democratic Majesty Martin Van Buren on a visit to a New York senator’s “princely mansion,” entire walls of which were covered with superb old-master pictures from Europe.10 The spread of such aristocratic tastes to the humbler classes who supposedly read penny papers (which detailed such luxuries) was also an agitating idea, as it might, depending on the interpreter, expand who possessed formerly elite privileges or threaten republican morality. Thomas Hamblin, proprietor of the Bowery, a theater whose low prices associated it with a workingclass audience and that advertised heavily in the Sun, is mocked (or promoted) in that paper as a liberal patron of the fine arts. He put up prints of every description in the punch room, from a “lady in the bath” to a gentleman turning a somersault “sans culottes.” The latter phrase puns on

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the gentleman’s nudity, neatly paired with his “revolutionary” (republican) politics. Niblo’s, a much-praised lounge, a term that also described art galleries, and regular advertiser, had “splendid pictures” to go with its flowers and ice creams, while at other saloons, gentlemen sat at marble tables with “beautiful pictures” and splendid mirrors, smoking cigars.11 To the extent that such lounges were widely accessible, like the papers that described them, so too were sexual and social license and privilege. The Arena, the “racy” paper that described Niblo’s alongside other types of exposés of sexual display, was published by the freethinker and radical Thomas L. Nichols, who, like his engraver Robert Elton, had formerly worked at the Herald. Elton engraved comic pictures for these papers, then sold satirical papers like the Arena that took on the follies of the rich at his shop. Not surprisingly then, printshop windows, though they were noticed approvingly for their caricatures of politicians, portraits of celebrities, and reproductions of famous European artworks, raised concerns about corrupting the public. Whig sixpennies decried both the criminal types attracted to such a “free picture gallery” and the vulgar nature of the art shown. Alfred Baker, a Wall Street lithographer taken to court for obscenity, published a caricature of the Herald’s editor Bennett and invited newsboys to view it in his window, since Bennett had claimed they had a taste for the fine arts. One paper described the prints in the shop windows as less satirical hits at folly than literal exposés of indiscretions, liable to lead to arrest.12 When the Whig printseller Henry Robinson was arrested in his shop on Courtlandt Street (close to the streets where most newspapers were published) for possessing $20,000 worth of lewd paintings, engravings, prints, and books, the penny press promptly turned the occasion into a display of the political and economic hypocrisy of the arresting magistrates. The Herald suggested Robinson had tried to escape arrest by showing the Whig city councilmen portraits of Henry Clay. The ploy failed because the Democratic police chief, George Matsell, a former printseller himself, was unimpressed. A paper edited by a sometime Herald ally added that Matsell had sold similar “beastly” prints from his infidel bookstore in Chatham Street and had sold them to Robinson, too.13 So when a “Man About Town” described his typical day of visiting the city’s Fashionable Lounges, he included the Academy of Fine Arts, Dubufe’s paintings (“oh ye gods!”), oysters at Downing’s (an African American–owned saloon), a panorama, Niblo’s (which regularly advertised dioramas and exhibitions), Colman’s print shop on Broadway, and the theater, an itinerary that has in common that all these stops featured publicly viewable art. Inevitably he wound up with a hangover from too much brandy punch.14

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Figure 1.1. Alfred M. Hoffy, of Hoffy and Bowen, “R. P. Robinson, The Innocent Boy,” 1836, lithograph, 16½ × 10½ inches, Museum of the City of New York. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

The most spectacular incident of the association of art with aristocratic license, one again turned by the penny press into an exposé of the hypocrisies and injustices of the “respectable” and politically powerful, came in a murder case of 1836. The penny press’s unprecedented coverage made the murder of Helen Jewett and the trial of her suspected killer notorious. Bennett went beyond merely transcribing court testimony. He visited the crime scene and described the victim’s elegantly furnished brothel in much the same terms as were applied to other lounges, as a place that hosted the city’s elite amid splendid paintings, mirrors, and sofas. He identified the Romantic English poet Byron, a hero to the older literary and social set known as the Knickerbockers, as the brothel’s presiding genius. In one engraving of Jewett’s bedroom, the portrait of Lord Byron is in the center of the room, as the accused murderer, Richard P. Robinson, flees the scene (fig. 1.1). The lithographer accompanied Bennett to the brothel. Henry Robinson, the Whig printseller mentioned earlier, perhaps did not, as the Sun said that his lithograph of Helen Jewett was sufficiently indecent to render it attractive to depraved taste but was not a likeness.15 Bennett observed that Jewett subscribed to the expensive Knickerbocker magazine as well as to the Mirror, American Monthly, and Lady’s Companion, all journals with close ties to the Knickerbocker set and looser ties to

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the detested Martin Van Buren. Bennett also noted in his interview with the brothel’s madam (his interview itself an innovation) that the art in the brothel’s parlor included John Vanderlyn’s Death of Jane McCrea (fig. 1.2). That painting illustrated an epic poem by the Jeffersonian poet Joel Barlow, set during the Revolutionary War. Vanderlyn’s American heroine, with her vulnerable position between two brawny men and her partly clad bosom oriented voyeuristically toward the viewer, undoubtedly seemed to Bennett a good symbol of the decadent and even murderous tastes of Jewett’s wellto-do patrons. The Sun and Transcript had identified Robinson, an elegant Whig merchant’s clerk, as her killer. Bennett implied that the brothel’s patrons included William Townsend, an editor of the Wall Street paper the Express and member of the Jewett grand jury.16 In calling attention to this picture, Bennett also neatly, if less directly, condemned Jewett’s wealthy Knickerbocker landlord, John R. Livingston. Livingston owned a number

Figure 1.2. John Vanderlyn, The Death of Jane McCrea, 1804, oil on canvas, 32½ × 26½ inches, Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

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of the city’s brothels and presumably had taken advantage of his membership in the Academy of Fine Arts to borrow the painting from its storage rooms. Thus, the “old noblesse”—men like Livingston and their “pet” papers like the Express or Commercial Advertiser, men who considered the penny press depraved in its willingness to describe publicly brothels, jails, and bankrupts—were skewered as hypocrites and libertines, with art and its institutions as their signs.17 The Commercial Advertiser in response complained that the penny papers had wrongly raised a “moral furor” over Jewett by exhibiting (upper-class) human nature in its most miserable state. It added that the cheap press ought to stick to beets and turnips, presumably better food for their working-class readers; if they did not, the country could have its own version of the “terrible” French revolution. Artists could not entirely escape these associations with privilege and upper-class license. Stories in Democratic papers negotiated the issue by emphasizing the value of their labor and skill, even when it was not appreciated by their royal or religious patrons, and their possession of true or natural nobility, versus the aristocratic rank of their patrons. The French neoclassical artist Jacques- Louis David, the artistic standard- bearer for the French Republic, for example, stands up to the Duke of Wellington, a Tory politician and British general. Benjamin Haydon, the English historical painter, in a display of equal manhood, boxes with his patron the Marquess of Granby.18 But descriptions of artists’ practices, from patronage to the studio, often assumed an antirepublican flavor, because those practices seemed so akin to aristocratic behavior. The Herald registered false concern about an Italian sculptor on Broadway engaged on a statue of a reclining Venus, with a belle of the city as a model, warning that the police might visit; the Herald also reviewed two breach-of-promise suits against painters. The Monthly Cosmopolite, presumably thinking of ongoing revolutions in Europe, in 1849 told an anecdote of a French laundress who broke off her engagement upon discovering that her fiancé was an Academy painter rather than a barber. Artists, like aristocrats, were potential seducers; metaphorically, Nature was a beautiful blushing girl who yields to the artist, and so artists regularly fall in love with their models.19 Bennett reported that Jewett’s accused murderer sketched her portrait on his prison wall along with a passage from the rakish Lord Byron.20 Accordingly, the National Academy of Design, an institution run by artists, was targeted by the same suspicions that the penny press leveled at stockjobbers, bankers, and politicians: that, like other brokers, they served the interests of an elite rather than the public, practicing cliquish favoritism and a kind of insider dealing that verged on deception, the humbug

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of manipulated appearances, and so demanded exposure.21 Bennett frequently wrote such exposés, and his choice of art-world targets reflects his interest in destroying the Wall Street press. Unlike the other penny papers, Bennett had introduced coverage designed to get the Herald bought by wealthy merchants and the Upper Tendom (New York’s social elite), not just the “middling” classes that he claimed were his readers. Such features included his analysis of Wall Street’s money market and financial deals but also his slavish (some might see sarcasm) coverage of fashionable resorts like Saratoga, the elections of the Mercantile Library Association, the annual meetings of charitable and religious synods (abolitionist meetings were especial fodder for brutal satire), and the annual exhibitions of the National Academy of Design. In these pieces on the organizations and resorts of the well-to-do, Bennett promised to show up not the penny Sun or Transcript, which didn’t have much to say about them anyway, but the “empty, whiskered pomp” of Whig sixpennies like the Courier and Enquirer and Evening Star and five- dollar magazines like the Knickerbocker (the “loafer’s magazine”), Corsair, and Mirror. These vehicles for “sickly sentimentalism” were the ones most fit for the kitchen or laundry, unlike the strong and nervy penny press with its knack for real business and real life. Bennett and his writers regularly slammed authors who appeared in such “loafer” magazines as incompetent, pedantic followers of Romantic British authors like Sir Walter Scott, imitators incapable of creating an American literature. Bennett had himself written for these outlets but by the end of 1836 (Van Buren won that election) was turning against the Knickerbocker establishment, including Democrats Bryant of the Evening Post and George P. Morris of the Mirror. With some justification, he accused them of endorsing and puffing each other “like directors of a rotten bank,” trading publicity for free tickets or other gifts, and writing forgettable inklings, loiterings, and trashy sketches.22 Pejoratives like “inklings” and “loiterings” were jabs at the style of Morris’s frequent collaborator, the editor Nathaniel P. Willis, an antislavery Whig. The Herald spared a few members of the Knickerbocker set, but the rest were a mix of brute and dandy, barbarian and baboon, vulgar blackguard and theater hanger-on. They exemplified the previous (that is, before the penny press) era’s “Credit system” in literature, in which a Whig author like Charles Fenno Hoffman, from a family connected to the Knickerbocker politician Gulian Verplanck, is acclaimed by his Whig friends in the Commercial Advertiser, despite his lack of actual vigor and originality.23 The “credit system” accusation compares the Knickerbockers

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to bankers who advocate for paper money, which they control the value of, rather than the less mutable hard coin that Bennett purveyed and the working-class had access to. In Bennett’s usual twist on the epithets that the sixpennies aimed at the penny press, he suggests that it’s the subscription papers’ puffs, twaddle, and imitation of British literature, their selling out of editorial integrity, that makes them fit for the “third tier” (where prostitutes sit in the theater) and the vulgar, whereas the Herald, unafraid to tell the truth, belongs in the lady’s boudoir. Bennett was in part interested in artists and writers because they were fixtures of the theater, and the steady income from theater advertising was important to the survival of the penny press. Theaters in various ways paid for editorial notices, if only with free tickets, so theatrical criticism, even more than art or book reviews, was vulnerable to accusations of puffing. This was enhanced by artists, writers, editors, and actors moving in the same milieu. They married each other, had affairs with each other, worked together, wrote about and posed for each other. The Evening Post and Mirror editors were close to the Bowery star Edwin Forrest; Forrest was painted by William Page, who married an actress, and also by the Commercial Advertiser’s editor John Inman’s brother Henry; Henry Inman also painted the actress Clara Fisher (his brother John married into the Fisher family). When Park Benjamin of the New World, who led a boycott against the Herald, made the actress Matilda Clarendon his protégée, Bennett promptly attacked Clarendon’s performances. Nor was it unusual for theater and music critics to double as art reviewers. James F. Otis was for many years the theater and art reviewer for the Express, and also wrote lengthy and biting art reviews for the Evening Star. Bennett advertised for a racy, quick, and independent theatrical reporter to cut up humbugs (paid-for reviews) and review paintings and literature.24 With editors like Mordecai Noah of the Evening Star and Willis of the Mirror writing plays that Bennett considered filled with the “refined verbiage of album poetry,” stage plays, like art, were opened to criticism that dwelled on aristocratic leisure’s threat to artisanal, republican culture. When Thomas Hamblin’s theater, the Bowery, which specialized in melodrama and spectacles, including a Battle of Tippecanoe that showed the Whig presidential candidate General William Harrison slinking in on foot after the fight was over, burned down, the “Astor House” circle of editors and patrons, who patronized the Astor House Hotel, a Whig headquarters, organized a public benefit for Hamblin.25 The art patron William Astor was an investor in the theater, and other sponsors of the benefit included James Watson Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, who had a

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near monopoly on theater printing, and painters (Inman, William Dunlap), editors, and playwrights (Noah, Morris) of the Knickerbocker circle. Bennett argued that their support disregarded Hamblin’s reputation as an “infamous libertine” and was designed to create an unprincipled school of American art based on denying the propriety of looking into the private lives of “men of talent.”26 Bennett adopted here a tactic of the flash press. The term “flash” originally referred to thieves’ argot, but the satirical and gossipy papers in this category often pointed out the private misdeeds of influential New Yorkers. Bennett wanted to call attention to the involvement not only of Hamblin but of his editorial enemies, in a convoluted affair that began with Hamblin’s alleged seduction of a teenage actress and daughter of a madam.27 Her sister, also a Hamblin protégée, was a Bennett favorite. He identified her as exemplifying the penny- press style of acting. Her “native” style was not to the taste of “loafers,” because of her natural feeling, which defied conventional rules; Henry Robinson, who sold flash papers, sold a lithograph of her in a male (trousers) role. Bennett, or perhaps the Herald reporter William Attree, joined the flash and sporting press on her side, against Hamblin and his backers. Attree, an Englishman known for accurately and trenchantly recording court proceedings, had started as a police reporter on the Courier and Enquirer before joining first the Transcript and then the Herald. As a frequenter of brothels, perhaps as part of his duties covering the theater (Bennett, among other epithets, compared Hamblin, given his many affairs with actresses, to a madam in breeches), he knew the people involved. Elton’s engraved portrait of him would appear along with those of Hamblin and two other Herald reporters in the Sunday Flash’s “Gallery of Rascalities.”28 The Herald, which was frequently accused of libel and immorality, tried to make a case that journalism included such exposés because the public interest required, in this instance, defending female honor. If papers could not report on immoral acts (seductions, adultery, etc.), then, as the Herald said, “fashionable libertines, by their political connections with the courts, lawyers and juries, can at any moment stifle the voice of truth.”29 An immoral aristocracy would retain control of American art. The businessmen, ministers, auctioneers, and politicians the flash press showed up as hypocrites were the same elite Bennett promised to unseat and the same men editors of the Whig sixpennies ardently defended.30 The Astor House hotel, in whose reading rooms members of this set congregated, was said to exclude Democratic newspapers, just as Whig newspaper pages excluded their subscribers’ and patrons’ insider dealings.

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Hamblin assaulted Bennett and a flash-press editor in revenge for their attacks, as did Webb, who saw his monopoly of the theater printing business broken. When the Astor House and Knickerbocker papers unleashed their own “Moral War” against the Herald, the editors were responding to the Herald’s willingness, like that of the flash press, to publish the private lives of the wealthy. This reporting could be trivialized as mercenary or catering to the vainglorious. When a play, itself based on a penny paper’s account of life in New York, portrayed a reporter from the Lightning Humbug as willing to take a bribe at a fancy ball to put a man’s name in the newspaper, Herald journalists led the hissing. The incident offended enough writers that a subsequent mass reporters’ meeting was held, though they decided against a formal complaint to the theater manager.31 But the Herald’s managing editor described more serious efforts to purchase favorable press, included $1,000 if the paper would support a Whig politician. The Moral War then was necessary not only because of the Herald’s influence but because of its willingness to publicize elite indiscretions. Accordingly, in 1840 the Wall Street papers collectively pressured theater owners not to advertise and demanded that respectable readers, especially women, boycott it. Their success was mixed. And Bennett turned the moral war into fresh ammunition against his enemies’ hypocrisy. As the Democratic penny New Era pointed out, Bennett’s enemies “under garb of morality” were pretending to disapprove of his trashy gossip but really feared his exposure of frauds and Whig lies.32 Unlike other penny- press founders, Bennett was not an artisan. But neither was he a member of the New York political or literary elect, a descendant of Pilgrims, or a “scion” of a powerful family. He attended college in Aberdeen and after emigrating to New York City became a successful subeditor and correspondent at then-Democratic newspapers like Webb’s Courier and Enquirer, where he was paid more than most writers, though less than the starting wage for a printer. His financial standing made him sympathetic to white working-class rhetoric against authority, though he was always hostile to radical agrarian or other efforts to alter the basic social order.33 Or as Bennett said, he was a “specimen of the Mixed Style,” with no family heraldry but a “long, graceful Grecian step—such a step as Alcibiades or Pericles took.” 34 When his efforts on behalf of the Jacksonian Democrats were rebuffed, when party officials refused to fund his new paper, partly over concerns that his attacks on Wall Street were damaging to Democratic bankers, he started a paper that deliberately went to battle with his old associates as well as his penny rivals. Bennett unceasingly mocked his old employers, the editors Webb and Noah, who like him had left the Jacksonians for the new Whig Party. He

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repeatedly reminded readers of Webb being “bribed” by (he received a loan from) Nicholas Biddle’s US Bank to support Whig economic policies and of Webb’s bellicosity (multiple duels, two times caning Bennett, active promoter of riots against abolitionists and in theaters) and stockjobbing. Bennett sneered at Noah as a purveyor of “old clo,” equating the Jewish dealers in secondhand clothes on Chatham Street with the used-up news in Noah’s Evening Star. Bryant of the Post, in theory on the opposite political side to Bennett, was a tolerable if dull poet whose fanciful views of real life should be dismissed; Benjamin Day, the editor of the Herald’s real rival for circulation, the penny Sun, was a follower of social radicals and “infidels”; Day’s coeditor, an abolitionist, was “woolly- headed and thick-lipped.”35 Such feuds helped the Herald appear to occupy a political middle ground and probably aided circulation. But Bennett also attacked William Leete Stone’s Whig sixpenny Commercial Advertiser. Unlike Webb and Noah, neither Stone nor his associate editor John Inman, who did much of the editorial work even before he took over the paper in 1844, was a personal antagonist. Bennett nevertheless classified the Commercial Advertiser as one of the tools of a Wall Street clique. Certainly Inman was a Knickerbocker insider: He had edited the Mirror, contributed to the Knickerbocker, and was a member of the Sketch Club, the Academy of Design, and an Author’s Club.36 Stone himself was an old Federalist, with no interest in penny-paper causes like workingmen’s rights or expanded suffrage; Bryant, a Democratic editor as much as a poet, had once beaten him on the street. But Bennett early was concerned about New York governor (elected 1839) William Seward’s growing power, and Inman and Stone (as did Webb) received paying political appointments from Seward. Bennett despised the Seward branch of the Whigs in great part because of their antislavery position.37 In a typical Bennett editorial, he described the administration of Seward as a “miserable piece of patch work, part imbecility—part impracticability [its desire for social equality]—part insolence—part pride—part aristocracy—part wealth—part poverty—part dirt—part rags—and part the rump of anti-masonry.”38 Accordingly, it was useful that John Inman’s “used up” brother, Henry, was vice president of the National Academy of Design (fig. 1.3). Henry was a popular portrait painter who was not particularly involved in politics, though John Inman and other editorial friends certainly promoted him; John Inman’s Columbian magazine published engravings of his paintings, including one of John’s daughter. Bennett in any case used Henry Inman to articulate a version of his general argument about wealthy insider monopolies and the false values for American art that they promulgated. In

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Figure 1.3. Henry Inman, Portrait of John Inman, c. 1828, oil on canvas, 301⁄8 × 25 inches, Warren Collection–William Wilkins Warren Fund, Museum of Fine Arts. Public domain; image provided by Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

1839 he called Henry Inman the leader of the Tee-Total Depravity School of Painting, a school that took offense at any independent criticism of their “miserable daubs.” “Daubs” was a frequent epithet in art reviews, mostly implying lack of skill, as the paint was merely daubed on. Reversing the accusations of moral depravity leveled at Bennett by Inman’s Commercial Advertiser (it had called the penny press the “Total Depravity Press”), he described Inman and his fellow officers of the National Academy as mediocre talents and dabblers who tried to turn a quick penny and thus feared competition.39 The other officers under attack were the miniaturist Tommy Cummings, the portrait painter Charles Ingham, and the landscapist Asher Durand. Samuel Morse, the nativist politician and president of the Academy, who was not painting much anyways, was largely spared. These artists of the Knickerbocker school, the friends of Bryant, Inman, and Morris, who produced designs for their friends’ journals and in return

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received praise from those papers, joined them in exclusive Sketch Club get-togethers, and ran the artists’ National Academy, were cast by the Herald as a self-serving, narcissistic, and aristocratic monopoly akin to the literary and theatrical and Wall Street press establishment, interested in stifling talent and truth tellers.40 As companions to Knickerbocker writers and editors at the Sketch Club, this group of men who met at one another’s homes or studios could also be fit into Bennett’s general attack on libertinism. Sketch Club members could be blackballed by any other member, and women were not allowed, which for Bennett indicated the club’s tendency to promote an aristocracy and vice. Bennett, who refused to join a club, argued that club members were from the noblesse (the loafer class) and that their real business was women.41 Bennett accordingly treated the National Academy—which, like clubs, voted in only a limited number of new members and officers—just the way he treated Knickerbocker claims to cultural authority or social privilege: with satire of their pretensions. The Herald, in its stance as an outsider, diagrammed the relationships and “collusions” at a National Academy dinner in much the same way as the paper reported a private ball for five hundred at the Brevoort house on Fifth Avenue (fig. 1.4). The Brevoorts were friends of Washington Irving, Bryant, Verplanck, and business associates of John Jacob Astor; in other words, they were part

Figure 1.4. “Grand Fancy Dress Ball,” Herald, March 2, 1840, p. 1, Library of Congress. Public domain; image provided by Library of Congress.

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of the Knickerbocker set. Attree, writing as society reporter Ariel for the Herald, probably gained admittance to the ball because Brevoort was hoping to build a nearby hotel. Attree described in detail where in each room the Brevoorts had placed their paintings by Raphael, Boucher, Teniers, etc., however singling out among their collection William Sidney Mount’s 1837 Raffling for the Goose, an image that poked fun at speculators; Wall Street stockbrokers (and even such well-connected Democratic politicians as the Van Burens) were excluded from the Brevoort guest list.42 Mount, a Democrat, was part of the Knickerbocker circle and a former student of Inman. The Commercial Advertiser, in the same issue as its condemnation of the penny press’s portrayal to the masses of upper-class libertinism in the Helen Jewett murder, had praised Mount’s comic scenes of what it condescendingly termed “rustic” people.43 Attree, a former client of Helen Jewett, went on to compare the Brevoort ball to some of the racier French novels of the period and to Noah’s biblical frolic after he left the ark. The final insult came when a few days later Bennett ran a description of a fictional Irish Grand Fancy Ball at the O’Dogherty House, which he said was attended by a “mixed” company of 3,000, as compared to the Brevoort’s exclusive 500 (fig. 1.5). Despite satires like this one, Bennett was not especially anti- Irish. He flirted with nativism but directed most of his fire at those he saw as slavishly devoted to the Catholic hierarchy, especially the powerful Bishop John Hughes of New York. An Irish paper upbraided him for permitting “no Irish need apply” in his want ads, but as with suppliers of contraceptives and abortions, Bennett avoided censoring advertisements. And as the Irish American acknowledged, he hired Irish reporters and editors.44 The illustration of the O’Dogherty Fancy Ball had been in use since 1837, as was typical of Herald cartoons. At first it depicted “Fashionables at Saratoga,” a popular summer resort, as consisting of a chandler’s heiress, a natty Broadway swell, a butcher, grocer, stable boy, a nymph of the washtub, and a bootblack. The Herald’s mockery of pretensions to elegance by the nouveau riche, Irish or otherwise, was not the romantic ideal of American opportunity for advancement. A Whig paper similarly described how upstarts were foiled in an account of a rich “Tammany grocer” married to a girl from working-class Chatham Street, who could not enter society until he went to Europe, brought back pictures, and held a ball. The Herald clarified the anti-Democratic politics of this theme when Bennett reran the cartoon in 1838 as a “correct” representation of a great ball given by the radically egalitarian locofocos after a Democratic victory, now with prison convicts and Irish girls in attendance. The engraving illustrated the

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Figure 1.5. “Brilliant Bal Costume,” Herald, March 5, 1840, p. 2, Library of Congress. Public domain; image provided by Library of Congress.

(to Bennett) absurd idea of the different social classes mixing as equals. So too in 1839, it satirized a Van Buren ball in order to show up his constituency as a hodgepodge of old noblesse and locofocos of the lower order. Then it did service again for another locofoco ball or “Cotillion Party,” in the same issue as Bennett’s first account of the upcoming “fancy” ball at the Brevoorts.45 The hostility implicit in the Herald’s seemingly sycophantic coverage of high society, when paired with its graphic reiteration of the vulgarity and snobbery of such balls, was underscored by Bennett’s description of Elton’s comic engraving of a “Grand Musical Soiree.” This was a finishing-school event also covered by Attree as Ariel. Bennett met his wife, Henrietta Crean, a musician, at a musical soirée hosted by Mrs. William Attree and covered in the Herald. Bennett called the Grand Soiree like his pictorial

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and textual satires of Knickerbocker balls a faithful representation of the present system of fashionable society, which was working toward the complete revulsion of the whole community.46 “Revulsion” punned on the term for financial catastrophes, like the recent panic of 1837 (often blamed on Van Buren), which threw the arrangements of the entire credit system into disorder. The immorality and hypocrisy of the upper classes—who directly cut Bennett and his Irish wife at Saratoga—threatened the same. In the version of the fancy ball cartoon titled the “Brilliant Bal Costume” at the Irish washerwoman’s house, the attendees are dustmen, starchers, “hackmen in high life,” the “has beens,” and the “are to bes.” The crowd is more mixed than any of the previous incarnations of the cartoon, now including not just convicts and Irish but blacks, natives, Indians, Chinese, Moors, and “every nation under the sun.” Of course, the Herald named the most prominent in attendance: Stone of the Commercial Advertiser as Calvin Edson (a circus performer); Webb of the Courier and Enquirer as Captain Bobadil (a stage character of a military braggart); the politician and editor Peter Townsend of the Evening Star as Peter Simple (a naïve character from British literature); David Hale, an evangelical minister and editor of the puritanical Journal of Commerce as the pope; Lewis Tappan, the noted abolitionist, as the Devil; the Whig politician Philip Hone as a Pie Baker; Noah of the Evening Star as an Old Clothes man; and so on. The Mirror’s editor, George Morris, Bennett said, provided the songs for the evening, during which Webb horsewhipped another editor, who was dressed as a clown. The Herald’s indecorous paralleling of laundresses and cartmen in the same pages now not just with the locofoco Democrats but with the leaders of the Whigs, the same ostensible party as the Herald, fueled the outrage among the Herald’s enemies. While most of the sixpennies had up to now refused to acknowledge Bennett’s existence and never named the Herald in their columns, his effrontery in bringing the names of the attendees of the Brevoort ball into the penny press and then explicitly equating their revels with those of the vulgar was something of a last straw. Philip Hone, the art collector and diarist whom Bennett classified as part of the Wall Street clique (he subscribed to the Evening Star), said the Herald had only been admitted to the Brevoort ball because of blackmail, to block the Herald’s outright abuse of the house and guests. This accusation echoed the ones cast at racy papers that similarly “exposed” the behavior of the wealthy. Indeed the flash press imitated the Herald with a description of a Great Charity Supper, organized by the city’s procuresses, itemizing furniture and rooms, one by one, as Attree had done to the Brevoorts.

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Hone added, with a sense of aristocratic privilege typical of the Knickerbockers and Whigs, that Bennett is blasphemous, carping and caviling at those better than himself—“our best citizens.” By giving publicity not only to the society of gentlemen and ladies but to the parties of public bawds, Bennett brought into contempt men who were “natives and to the manor born.” Hone’s category of native would have excluded immigrants like Bennett. There is hardly a man of wealth, Hone concluded, who hasn’t been made a laughingstock, given Bennett’s systematically assailing the credit and character of every public institution.47 Bennett’s satirical coverage of high society aimed to show up not just the undemocratic manners of the elite but also how a sycophantic, partisan press traded favorable criticism of soirees, stocks, or art for insider status or simply to advance its friends. Willis, for example, had praised the Brevoort ball as a link in the great chain binding Americans to the higher circles of Europe, an event deserving honorable mention in every journal and a boon to the “good tradesmen” of New York, who, amid the depression of 1837, should be thankful for the fifty thousand dollars spent on the entertainment.48 Willis, a very successful magazine writer, had himself gotten into trouble for publishing the private conversations of the English aristocracy, heard while he was their guest in London. But he differed from Bennett in that his approach to the aristocracy, even his exposures of their private lives, was not satirical but admiring of elite European and British taste. It’s Willis’s endorsement of this exclusive social structure—the Herald says he’s been emasculated by his narcissistic embrace of it—that Bennett’s own coverage targeted. Bennett even identified Willis’s frequent editorial partner, George Morris, as the effete City Beau in Francis Edmonds’s 1838 painting of American manners. In Edmonds’s satire of the City and Country Beaux, adherence to overly refined European style, an accusation Bennett frequently hurled at his Knickerbocker enemies, dooms the City Beau’s courtship.49 The language of the Herald’s coverage of the annual National Academy dinner, like his satire of the Brevoort ball, aimed at showing the selfinterest determining his competitors’ sense of decorum. A Commercial Advertiser editor, probably John Inman, called the private opening-night banquet for Academy members and guests a “brilliant little fête,” a perfect bijou, where a hundred urbane, intelligent guests who possess “airs of confident assurance” dined amid “rich productions of the pencil” by Inman, Durand, and the other Academicians.50 “All must admire” the harmony and fidelity, the perfection of truth and nature, in the noble and fine pictures they display. Bennett’s coverage of the dinner instead gave the

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“facts,” itemizing, including a diagram of who sat next to whom, what they ate and said, claiming that the whole was paid for out of $5 fees extracted from penniless art students (fig. 1.6).51 His language deflates: The wine is miserable, and it’s drunk by even more miserable blockheads; the puns are miserable (Brevoort was known as a punster), and Bryant of the Post gives a poor speech. He warns his readers that the editors of the Commercial Advertiser, William Stone and John Inman, had been invited in order to publish preliminary puffs of their favorites but made clear that the excluded Herald would have a keen, cutting, impartial, shrewd look at the art—when the public was admitted.52 Thanks in good part to the Herald’s talent at creating controversy, the Academy of Design had received unprecedented publicity, starting in 1838. In that year, Bennett had gone to Britain for Victoria’s coronation, an event documented in his letters and an extensive set of engravings in the paper, which, however, featured George IV rather than the new queen; the “drunken vagabond” engraver explained it as his democratic protest against kings. Under the Herald’s interim editors, who included Attree, that year’s National Academy review took the form of a conversation between an old gentleman “in specs” and a cane and his daughter “Julia,” the name previously given by the Herald to a Broadway belle, on his arm.53 Julia might evoke for some readers Julia Brown, who had a palatial brothel near the National Theater, with pictures of Ovid, Byron, Cleopatra, the dancer Fanny Elssler, and the Reverend Dr. Francis Hawkes (a target of the flash press) on its walls. As observers of not just the paintings but the artists, the older man makes satirical comments to amuse his companion (and the reader) on both: An artist has just returned from Europe to cultivate the arts and a huge pair of moustaches, a portrait painter deceives young girls, and so forth. In a continuation of the Herald’s antiloafer (the noblesse of the Sketch Club) stance, when the elderly snufftaker waxes poetic about the landscapist Thomas Cole, his friendly “sylph” urges him to leave poetry to girls and turn instead to George Linen’s small portraits of the Whig Henry Clay, whose realism Bennett had admired. The column’s general comments were thus gentlemanly, but the series did include a humorously melodramatic portrayal (“Scene—Interior of the councilroom—night— thunder and lightning”) of that year’s election of Academy officers. This relatively mild satire angered the Academy’s president Samuel Morse, so the Herald author apologized—then promptly went on to mock other Academy artists as “Count Peter Funks,” swindlers who (albeit legally) purvey false goods.54

Figure 1.6. “Opening of the National Academy,” Herald, April 27, 1840, p. 6, Library of Congress. Public domain; image provided by Library of Congress.

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It was not just the Herald who had begun to sound the drums about illiberality among the managers of the National Academy. The Whig penny Age (run by men of “family and property”) attacked Academy members for refusing works of “surprising” beauty in order to give their own botches a place. The cheap Daily Whig joined the chorus about the Academy’s bad management and recommended that judges with no connections to artists be appointed, if work by celebrities like Cole were ever to be refused.55 ER in the Commercial Advertiser organized the 1838 review by artist’s rank, which though seemingly deferential operated to suggest a falling off in quality as the critic moved from the officers’ work to that of the other artists. But he lavished praise on a council member’s nine portraits, including one of a fiery Whig politician, Joe Hoxie, and liked Inman’s “usual captivating style,” which some critics saw as slipping that year.56 Even a contributor to the Evening Post criticized Bryant’s friend Durand as having too many pictures on the line, the best position for viewing, arguing that such favoritism was endemic to institutions and should be solved by rotating offices.57 According to Academy records, Durand showed eleven paintings in 1837, thirteen in 1838, and ten in 1839 and had been secretary since 1833. Morse had been president and Thomas S. Cummings (an Inman student) treasurer since 1827, and the other officers had served equally as long. Cole, Ingham, and other Sketch Club artists were longstanding governing council members. Whig papers, however, often felt that the Academy wasn’t exclusive enough. An editor at Horace Greeley’s weekly New-Yorker in 1839 emphasized the overly democratic character of that year’s exhibition, its “crowd of ugly phizzes” and “tavern signposts”: That a sailor was given the dignity of a full-length portrait is wrong; that (Democratic) Governor Stevens Mason of Michigan (painted by an Academician) is wearing a flannel shirt is indecent; even Henry Inman tends to paint people who need to be washed; Colonel Stone of the Commercial Advertiser looks up in astonishment at a “vile daub” of a popular novelist whose head is pregnant with horrible ideas (fig. 1.7).58 Similarly, a reviewer for the sixpenny Evening Post, Ultra Marine, condemned placing the “most gaudy subjects,” evidence of artistic presumption and efforts to catch the eye of the masses, side by side with “modest and far superior works of true genius” that then were inevitably overlooked.59 Ultra Marine believed the Academy as an institution was trying to turn the multitude’s “natural inclinations” for tinsel and vicious displays toward something holier, purer, and nobler. But his dislike of the exhibition’s mixed display was akin to the New- Yorker’s discomfort with sailors on the walls.

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The comic papers instead took up the position that it was because of its aristocratic (not its democratic) bent that the Academy let in trash and excluded merit. Paul Pry (“Hope I Don’t Intrude” was its facetious motto), edited by a former Herald contributor, published by Herald engraver Elton, and printed by Applegate (who competed with the Courier and Enquirer for theater handbills), had an extended review of the Academy’s “enormous quantity of rubbish.” Living up to the cheap weekly’s editorial promise to show up the vices and peccadilloes of the gentry, its critic was ruthless toward the Academy’s frightful imbeciles and their wretched abortions. The Sunday Morning Visiter, another comic weekly, concurred that both the Academy and the newspaper criticism of it were “rather an aristocratic concern” (about 112 artists had contributed about 296 paintings) and that any obscure artist would suffer accordingly.60 The implication was that the unknown artist would not get a newspaper notice; a self- proclaimed outsider artist in the Knickerbocker had similarly suggested that American artists were dependent on, and spoiled by, uncritical puffs by their friends. Most of the Herald’s art criticism that year was written by Bennett. In his letters from Europe the year before, he had described his visits to picture galleries, a common feature of letters by foreign correspondents. As it did for editors like Bryant of the Post, such letters helped establish the writer’s credentials as a knowledgeable critic. Bennett particularly if satirically admired the free National Gallery in London for its mix of classes, the crowd of middling and lower classes standing before masterpieces in a state of rapture. He observed wonderingly that women and men of the highest classes (whom he called a species of Unitarian) gazed together on nudes without them apparently exciting any incorrect emotion. In London too he acquired a taste for the Italian school (Raphael as its exemplar), describing it as superior to the overly elaborate, unpoetic French and English schools.61 So in his review of the National Academy, as a newly minted connoisseur, he begins by dismissing “our newspaper critics” on paintings as “very generally, ignorant and flippant” and says his own criticism will be based on the principle that the intellectual process of a writer is identical to that of a painter. He then, flippantly, classified the pictures as excellent (thirteen), potboilers (ninety-one), potboilers extra (twelve), and so on, though his evaluations of individual works—except for portraits of his enemies—were more measured than mocking.62 Portraits get the worst of Bennett’s satire not because they constituted two-thirds of the three hundred paintings but because of the aristocratic pretensions of both sitter and artist. Willis’s Corsair put it more sympathetically: The portrait painter must “have a mind cultivated in the perception

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of worldly and conventional distinctions, and be thoroughly conversant with the manners, aspect and demeanour of the most elegant society . . . [to] fix on his canvass the subtle spirit which constitutes a gentlewoman.” Paul Pry, as one might expect from a cheap paper, expressed this idea differently. It said a portrait of a child of the Captain H. Holdrige family was in the style of a learned pig on a traveling mountebank’s wagon, revolting in its audacious vulgarity. In the Herald, Bennett recounts a conversation between two “beautiful young girls” in front of a newcomer’s prominent self-portrait—or, as Bennett titles it, “Puppy Unknown.” The girls debate whether the sitter, the artist, is male or female, deciding he is a crossdresser who has stuffed towels in his bosom and put his hair in paper to curl it. Bennett’s ventriloquism is aimed at winning the coveted audience of female newspaper readers, but his jibe is at the effeminacy of the sentimental Knickerbocker artist (and author); one typical reprinted tale “of the Fine Arts” appearing in the Commercial Advertiser features a “first-rate genius” whose poetic powers are nevertheless dependent on an upperclass female muse.63 Bennett, like Paul Pry and the other cheap papers, instead wanted fighting writers, six foot tall, who know low slang and are immune to obscenities, if they were to fulfill their mission of catching out the backsliding elite.64 Bennett particularly hit at portraits of his political enemies, as it allowed simultaneous attacks on the taste of painter and sitter. William Page, an artist who attracted controversy because of the fleshly realism of his style and his ties to antislavery transcendentalists (the sort of Unitarians whom Bennett mocked as being unmoved by unchaste nudes), early attracted Bennett’s attention. In the 1839 Academy exhibition, in addition to a portrait of a wealthy Whig auctioneer whose adulterous affairs had been exposed in the flash press, Page had a portrait of the Commercial Advertiser’s chief editor, William L. Stone (fig. 1.7). Bennett called it ridiculous, a face as handsome as a baboon’s and a body as well proportioned as a pine log, probably painted right after he’d eaten a free dinner (supplied by someone wanting publicity), without a trace of intellect in the countenance.65 Bennett also claims that Durand painted a portrait of the Whig politician and merchant Joe Hoxie to cause a sensation: Bennett believed Hoxie had exerted upper-class privilege to protect Helen Jewett’s murderer, his employee, by withholding incriminating evidence from the trial.66 Hoxie had also presided over a successful libel suit against Bennett. The Herald characterized the portrait as a wretched affair that made one pity both artist and sitter. It is either badly painted or of a bad man, his face effeminate and foolish, with cunning malicious eyes and hair of powdered dust.67

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Figure 1.7. William Page, Portrait of Colonel William Leete Stone (editor, Commercial Advertiser), 1839, oil on canvas, 3515⁄16 × 2915⁄16 inches, gift of various donors by exchange, 1961.171, Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain; image provided by Cleveland Museum of Art.

It was such attacks on portraits that also caused the greatest stir. As with libel suits against the flash and penny press, the line between fair criticism (of a portrait) and unfair (personal attack on the sitter) was narrow. When an artist critical of the National Academy for its “aristocratick” aping of British models called Ingham’s portraits “brainless, boneless, fleshless libels,” a comment on the artist’s smooth, polished, and commercially successful style, he seemingly conflated it with the sitters, by urging Ingham first to wash his subjects before painting them. The Democratic Evening Post tried to dodge the problem by including the demurral in their discussion of Hoxie’s portrait that “we mean this hint [about incorrect drawing] for the artist, and not as a sly insinuation upon his subject.”68 But an artist’s “malicious fidelity” to his sitters was no defense either: When an “educated and intelligent Foreigner” dismissed the efforts of Academy portraitists in

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the Whig Express (whose editor, like Bennett, had written letters about his art experiences in Europe), the New World, as one might expect from a paper with that name, defended the country’s portraitists. It did so on the nationalist rationale that the rigid, cold quality of the portraitists’ style was a truthful reflection of their sitters. The Educated Foreigner responded that regardless of the sitter, the artist’s style must aim for a (gentlemanly) beau ideal. John Kenrick Fisher, a landscape painter who studied at the Royal Academy and who wrote the Knickerbocker’s review, had said much the same when he observed that one of T. C. R. A. Healy’s portraits in the 1839 exhibition was of a man, not a gentleman, if the picture was to be trusted.69 In the wake of the 1839 reviews, including the unpleasant comments on its chief editor, the Commercial Advertiser accused the penny press of licentiousness in its personal attacks. Henry Inman wrote a letter explaining that the National Academy, though private, was entirely public in its objects and so should be spared attacks on individuals.70 He argued that the public press, the “avowed conservator of all that is to be revered in morals, admired in taste,” should avoid criticizing sitters and stick to the painters and their paintings. This would not permit the satirical pen (“the flippant witticism”) to ascribe the poorly chosen attitude of Healy’s sitter to the sitter’s excessive drinking, a form of interpretation that destroyed the “sacred mask” of criticism. Inman pointed out more practically that the artists depended on sitters to loan their portraits, and patrons wouldn’t do so if they were going to be mocked; given the press’s feeling that there were far too many portraits in the exhibition anyways, this was perhaps not his most telling point. The editors of the Commercial Advertiser (John Inman, the New-Yorker said) endorsed his letter, sneering that the pseudocritics’ flippancy substituted for real knowledge and that the puppyism (impertinence) of the press should no longer be inflicted on “gentlemen and ladies.” The next day, the maligned sitter to Healy wrote to say he was one of those insulted (as not a gentleman, and by the New-Yorker as “Entertainment for man and beast”). He was the one depicted lifting a cup of wine and thereby accused of being inebriated. The sitter, not surprisingly, agreed that such personal criticism of the portrait was unfair but perhaps undermined his argument by explaining that the toast was a gesture to the friends in England to whom the portrait was being sent.71 The Inman brothers’ disgust with flippancy evokes Bennett and the Herald, where satire was standard fare. But this style of journalism had rapidly spread, and the New-Yorker certainly assumed Inman was addressing them, not Bennett. They responded to Inman that they had in fact

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followed his strictures—if he painted very, very dirty faces, they agreed, it was his fault—and said it would take more than the Commercial Advertiser to repress freedom of the press, especially since that paper had been made a vehicle for a set of artists.72 The Herald too took credit for the attack and mocked Inman and Stone for taking shelter behind petticoats by claiming that Herald criticism (“the most amusing ever published”) offended women readers.73 Women were a contested audience for the penny press, and the Herald prided itself on its extensive female readership, something the sixpennies implicitly acknowledged in their war on the Herald, when they tried to persuade women that to read the Herald—to take it from the street into the house—was to risk becoming a prostitute. But unlike the New-Yorker or the Whig Expositor (edited by a former Herald reporter), which responded to letters complaining of the “sinful partiality” of prejudiced editors by accusing the complainant of getting into bad company, Bennett outright aligned the National Academy with other institutions run to benefit an exclusive class. Identifying a ruling clique of mediocre talent, who through a blackball controlled membership and thus what was exhibited, Bennett explicitly highlighted the tendency toward monopoly of the “conclave” of Academy officers. In what he called a “juggle,” he said that Durand had sixteen pictures on the line at the last exhibition and Charles Ingham had eleven. Durand—as a favorite of the Knickerbocker coterie at the Evening Post and Mirror (John Inman was a contributor to the Mirror, including perhaps as art critic in 1834)—came in for special venom.74 Some of Bennett’s supposed enemies joined this campaign against the Academy. Park Benjamin, who had been an editor at Horace Greeley’s New-Yorker, in his own cheap paper argued, in rhetoric he usually reserved for villains like Bennett, that the Academy’s managing clique was not only partial but acted to promote their own primary business, portrait painting. The result was galleries filled with pictures that were flat, tame, poor, paltry, white, blue, red, yellow, clean, nasty, mixed, mangled, light, dingy, smooth, smutty, hard, soft, straight, crooked, stiff, easy, grouped, single, standing, sitting, smiling, frowning, smirking, pretty, ugly, fascinating, disgusting, and altogether insufferable.75 When Bennett compared the Academy dinner where Bryant, Stone, and Inman feasted with their favored artists to the postelection orgies of Whig politicians at the Astor House hotel, he identified them both as sites for the consummation of contemptible designs for creating a monopoly. Part of creating that monopoly meant trying to suppress all other voices in art or the press, that multitude of views that the penny press claimed to represent. This accusation of censorship was not entirely a rhetorical

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device. Whig papers had in 1837 proposed that a committee of critics be appointed by the National Academy, whose reviews would be seen as binding in their authority. The Democratic penny papers promptly insisted on a laissez-faire policy instead. This free trade in criticism (free trade was a Democratic economic position) was necessary for any true standard in taste, they pointed out; as the Democratic art critic in the sixpenny Times said, where the Whig paper claims to see “nature itself,” it really sees nature that would suit the sea serpent—a hoax.76 But the partiality of critics, or their false professions of objectivity, was not the only problem. Criticism of the newspaper critic often revolved around the supposed ignorance of the (therefore) flippant journalist assigned to the review, versus his proper role, which ought to be akin to that of the Academy itself, as per Ultra Marine’s argument in the Evening Post: preacher of the beautiful and upholder of established morality. As an example of the press’s lack of seriousness and knowledge, the penny Planet observed that an unnamed morning paper transferred a “lengthy and skillful notice” of the annual exhibition of contemporary art at the Paris Salon in Galignani’s Messenger (an Italian paper) into its own columns as an original critique of New York’s Academy of Design.77 Perhaps to diffuse questions of lack of expertise, after 1840 Bennett and other penny-press editors followed Bryant’s practice of making general initial comments about the Academy exhibition while leaving the detailed reviews to anonymous subeditors or contributors. The critique of newspaper criticism as flippant and the corresponding attack on the attackers as trying to destroy individual freedom of opinion in favor of a standard imposed by an elite would continue unabated until the Civil War. It stemmed less from the presence or absence of educated and intelligent writers on art, whether foreign or native, and more from the agenda of the penny press itself. When Henry Inman complained about press hits (satiric jabs) on the sitters who disinterestedly exposed themselves at Academy exhibitions, he was arguing that by being removed from the market in pictures, portraits were endowed with private sentiments that should shield them from impudent personal attack by the puppies—those with no social standing—of the press. But it is precisely the social structure behind the patrons’ collaboration with artists—as Henry Brevoort colluded in exposing his private life at his ball—that rendered them open to exploitation and satire by the penny press. And this pleasurably transgressive critical maneuver, the exposure of the private, turned art into a commodity that sold papers, along with that paper’s idea of public norms. The editor or the penny-a-line contributor—creatures different than the amateur or connoisseur because they were part of the media marketplace—offered

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the consumer of newsprint or art exhibitions a predefined position as an insider in an urban, not just aesthetic realm. That domain encompassed the lounge and exhibition, Wall Street and Broadway, but also the realm of the penny paper itself. The penny paper was peopled by loafers and fashionable women, artists and brawlers, not unlike the street, or the “mixed” portraits in the exhibition, where individuality was advertised in all its varieties, even as the orchestration or invention of that individuality— through the critic’s very declaration of independence from the coteries all around—was hidden from sight. At the same time that the National Academy members first faced the onslaught of voices from the penny press, the newsboy, a more workingclass voice than the critic, emerged as a subject for painting, literature, and the stage. Henry Inman’s Newsboy, exhibited in 1841, seemed to carry the standard for those who opposed the penny press (fig. 1.8). The critic for the American Repertory, a four-dollar magazine loyal to the National

Figure 1.8. Henry Inman, Newsboy, 1841, oil on canvas, 305⁄16 × 251⁄8 inches, museum purchase, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy. Public domain; image provided by Addison Gallery.

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Academy, for example, admired it as showing the truth and peculiarities of what he sneeringly called the “biped,” implying that the newsboy who sold papers on the street was a new species perhaps not entirely human. Its editor, James Jay Mapes, was a professor at the Academy, an amateur artist, and a patron of Inman and Cole, so unsurprisingly his journal’s critics were certain that they possessed a correct standard of taste. They argued that it was morally wrong for writers to find “unmerited” faults with art and that those who do should be liable to a lawsuit.78 Mapes did see artists as on a continuum with artisans, however, and was president of the American Institute, host to an annual fair that exhibited sculpture and painting with engravings, needlework, and mechanical arts. Mapes’s American Repertory was the official magazine of the American Institute, and attracted contributors from the National Academy, perhaps because both organizations were interested in promoting domestic manufactures. The Whig tariff of 1842 in fact included art and pornography, which may explain the increase in printseller arrests that year as they stepped up publication to compensate for fewer imports.79 Both organizations also could be seen as less than democratic. The American Institute, like the National Academy, faced numerous challenges from the penny press, which accused its partisan (Whig) clique of managers of misusing funds and unfair practices for selecting exhibitors and awarding prizes. And at the American Institute’s annual “mechanics” fairs, as one penny paper observed, mechanics were sent to the rear door so that they would not mingle with gentlemen.80 The exhibition critic for the American Repertory in 1841 not surprisingly praised Academy standard- bearers like Cummings, Cole, Mount, and Inman while condemning Bleecker and city newspaper criticism. Inman’s newsboy, working class but no skilled mechanic, standing at the front door of the Astor House hotel, was a worrying symptom of the age’s diffusion of knowledge. The reception of art was never strictly partisan. The Democrats Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, in their short-lived Arcturus, similarly praised Inman’s truthful perception of newsboy character. But Duyckinck and Mathews had ties to the Knickerbocker set and aristocratically considered newspaper criticism to be unable to distinguish between Shakespeare and cheese, as it was authored by ignoble politicians who (without real knowledge of the subject) could only puff or libel. As one cheap weekly responded, such newspaper criticism was at times the exponent of the feelings of the people. Duyckinck and Mathews and Mapes themselves advocated for distinctively American subjects in art and hoped Inman’s painting might be the start of a popular “people’s” portrait gallery featuring

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Figure 1.9. J. J. Butler, “The Newspaper Boys,” New World, January 1, 1841, p. 1, New York Public Library. Public domain; image provided by New York Public Library.

other new urban American types. Cheap (three- cent) Sunday weeklies like the Democratic Atlas were already publishing these portraits as serial engravings, though the workers in their engravings often had more spunk than Inman’s youth.81 In the New World, for example, the newsboy rather more vigorously thumbs his nose at the reader (fig. 1.9). He and his companions are buttressed not only by the bold typography of the newspaper but by the solid wood framing of J. J. Butler’s engraving shop. Like the verticals and horizontals of the typography of the paper, the weekly’s wood engraver and his establishment enhance the boys’ sturdy uprightness. For Duyckinck, who was friendly with artists like Mount who specialized in comic Yankee types, Inman’s painting may have seemed to similarly elevate the lowly or vulgar, though the parallel with the Astor House suggests more of a comic contrast. It was bought by a collector who specialized in contemporary American art by Durand, Cole, and Mount.

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Inman’s Newsboy, then, was greeted with approval by the very critics who despised the penny press or, more precisely, despised the way the press framed judgments on art. The Anglo- American, a cheap weekly aimed at British expatriates, condemned those art critics and artgoers who attended exhibitions to gossip, mock, and laugh and thought that the Newsboy was happy in its conception. The Whig Express simply wished the boy would close his mouth, a sentiment echoed by Pittoro in the Commercial Advertiser, who compared “picture dealers’” newspaper criticism, with its obvious commercial motivations, to the comments of the “crowd” and “mass” who comment orally on art exhibitions, and wished to silence them both.82 The orality of the newsboy, a tie to the working-class street cries of the city’s tradespeople, becomes the uninformed—and disturbingly loud—voice of the penny press. In the painting, the youthful newsboy, with his hat upturned, sells the Sun, which glows at the center of the canvas. With the half- eaten apple of knowledge next to him, he loafs and cries the paper. The sun, as time marker and newspaper, is a symbol of the current hour (the National Academy advertised in the Sun but not in the Herald), in contrast to the stony, thus permanent and unchanging, Greek- revival architecture or Egyptian sphinx of the luxurious Astor House hotel. Perhaps the newsboy is the one who scrawled on the steps of the Whig stronghold “OK,” slang for Old Kinderhook, the Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren who lost to the Whig William Henry Harrison in 1840. By contrast, the newsboys who sell the cheap Whig New World (its motto: “No pent-up Utica contracts our powers; the whole unbounded Continent is ours”) are positioned in front of that democratic art gallery, a printshop (fig. 1.9). In Inman’s painting, the isolated newsboy’s universe is considerably more contracted. Inman seems to have based the boy on an essay written by his patron, the conservative Democratic politician and poet George D. Strong, president of the Commercial Bank, which had failed in the panic of 1837. The National Academy banked there, the Academy genre painter Edmonds had worked there, and bank investor George Morris, Strong’s fellow Democratic poet and editor of the Mirror, admired Inman’s painting as spirited and true. Strong’s written portrait of the “Newsboy” appeared in the Knickerbocker, and it described him as a revolutionary figure whose force was only dispelled by his momentariness.83 Strong’s newsboy deemed proper dress obedience to social tyranny, so he turned his open-flapped beaver hat sideways and wore an out-at-the-elbows monkey jacket. When he opened his mouth, out flew ridicule of wealth and station. When the Herald identified Strong as a champion of the newsboys, it seems to have been employing its

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usual sarcasm. But his and Inman’s image of the newsboy as a stand-in for the penny press’s attack on privilege seems to explain why, at the newsboy’s Olympic theater, where satire reigned, the Asmodeus (devil) of New York took the Herald.84 A few months later, the Knickerbocker published a letter warning art critics against praising the low; too much sympathy for figures like newsboys might let in the devil.85 With the failure of the moral war on the satanic Herald, Bennett predicted a “new era” (the name of a Democratic penny paper) in art, when young painters would flourish. As evidence, he pointed to the difference between the modern art exhibitions in New York, versus London and Paris, which received occasional coverage in the United States from foreign correspondents as well as from papers like the Courrier des États-Unis. Despite the effort by the Academy, the Wall Street press, and the packs of blockheads in charge of politics and religion, to create self-serving monopolies, in this “republican land,” Bennett argued, there is more originality, genius, power, variety, and enthusiasm than in all Europe combined. Why? Because here “the mind is completely emancipated from all artificial rules in religion, in politics, literature and art. No cold rules of the schools . . . repress that natural enthusiasm, which is the soul and body of the higher order of art.”86 Once the Herald and the penny press finally get rid of the “emasculated pretenders” and miserable imbeciles writing in prints like the Knickerbocker, Mirror, and Corsair, who have no relish for the broad, bold, striking traits of our artists, then sterling genius can spring like an eagle to the heavens. That would be an American eagle: The Herald and many penny papers in the 1840s would embrace cultural nationalism, the desire for a vital national art that departed in distinctive ways from European styles and subjects. If Academy artists seemed to be victims of this press, the next chapter considers in more detail how and why editors and reporters selected their heroes and villains. Artists often collaborated with promoters or acted as advocates and publicists on their own behalf. But for the penny press, artists like the now-forgotten James Stout or the eccentric William Page, whose style violated—or could be constructed as violating—the genteel decorum of the Wall Street papers, were especially useful in defining a national style.

2

Artists, Their Agents, and Press Manipulation

When the novelist and former drawing teacher John Neal became editor of the cheap weekly Brother Jonathan, he observed that the “moment we cast our eyes upon the review of a book or a song, a picture, a play, or a speech,” we may safely infer the personal understanding between the critic and subject: “Where the parties happen to belong to the same neighborhood, to have been brought up together—to have written for the same paper—and not to have quarrelled.” If artist and critic belong to different neighborhoods, competing publishers, rival papers, are opposed to each other in church or state, or have different degrees of popularity with the public, then similarly “every sentence will betray the fact.” Of course, Neal, who had just been brutally attacked in the press for his speeches on women’s rights, then declared himself free from this bias, an editor who would only speak truth to his readers, the People.1 Penny- press exposés of the art world on behalf of the people— undiscovered native talent, understandings and cliques like the ones Neal described, and other humbugs—were manufactured not only by editors but also by artists. They shared a semibohemian world, in which a saloon like Windust’s, popular with the theater crowd (dramatists as well as actors), also attracted artists, critics, and editors. These relationships, the personal and geographic networks of penny- press critics, inflected their style of commentary, too. Parodies, satire, even abuse (like calling a picture “shocking, very shocking!”), all reflected familiarity with the artist and, often, shared former or present-day sympathies. This chapter examines the

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dance of collusion between artists and the press, to point out how and why critics, from widely varying viewpoints, applied the language of the penny press in their judgments of art. That new language, the piquant and lively style of the penny press, was an aesthetic ideal itself. Thus when the Herald described the dark and stormy night of the National Academy of Design’s council meeting in 1838, its satirist spied a colossal bust of the newspaper poet McDonald Clarke in the corner of the room, the genius of his scene. This detail was partly a dig at the Academy for not including sculpture in the exhibition. Lack of sculpture was a particular complaint of the Herald, which had taken up promotion of James Varick Stout, the artist who had carved this bust of the “mad poet” and had to exhibit it at the American Institute annual fair, amid wax babies and mimic fruit. But identifying McDonald Clarke as the presiding genius of the Academy managers was also a way of mocking them and the numerous authors who, as honorary members, were feted at Academy dinners and then wrote puffs for the exhibition in their newspapers. For Clarke wrote a rather different kind of poetry than, for example, the honorary Academy member William C. Bryant of the Evening Post or George P. Morris of the Mirror.2 His poems, mostly for the Herald and Sun, satirized politicians, ministers, and loafers. “Loafer” was a term he and the Herald wielded loosely to include the jobless and the aristocratic lounger, in opposition to the working man, and it would come to be associated with snobbish (elitist) art critics and their lounges (galleries) as well. Henry Inman’s patron and Knickerbocker author George D. Strong used the Italian version of the term, lazzaroni, to stigmatize newsboys as idlers on the street, a view of them that reflects what could be seen as upper-class contempt for the nature of their work. In the Herald, an illustration of the type of educated, or literary, loafer accompanied Clarke’s poem on “Dick Dropsy, an Office Beggar” (fig. 2.1). Dick, a Whig agent formerly to be seen on Broadway at the Astor House steps (like the newsboys), was a loafer. Now appearing as a ragged idler, Dick is pleading for a salaried office from the newly inaugurated President Harrison. James Gordon Bennett, the Herald editor, counted some five thousand such office seekers in the city, listing among them rival Whig editors (and fellow commenters on art) James F. Otis, John Inman of the Commercial Advertiser, and a trio from the Whig Express. Bennett called one of the latter, Express editor Booby (James) Brooks, a loafer of literature and lazzaroni of politics. The equation between loafers and aristocratic newspaper writers dependent on political patronage would only solidify in the next decade. In a slightly later Herald illustration, the “man o’ letters,”

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Figure 2.1. “Dick Dropsy, an Office Beggar,” Herald, December 29, 1840, p. 1; “The Loafer Literati of New York,” Herald, December 8, 1844, p. 1, Library of Congress. Public domain; image provided by Library of Congress, photograph provided by author.

or freelance writer, though more dandified, is much the same figure as the loafer (fig. 2.1).3 The sketch’s reference to oyster cellars suggests the men trade articles for free drinks or other complimentary items. Bennett called Clarke the “Prince of loafer poetry,” superior to Bryant in spirit and originality. This was not precisely sarcasm, though it exaggerated, in order to jab at worshippers of the Evening Post editor. A similarly motivated maneuver came from the editor who wrote a deliberately bad poem and put Bryant’s name on it, just to see how often it would be reprinted, despite its lack of quality.4 Whereas Bryant, like Morris at the Mirror, was widely seen as adhering to European lyric models in his descriptions of nature, McDonald Clarke seemed to pioneer new styles in his willingness to address and satirize contemporary life, art, and loafers in New York. When Clarke wrote a poem to the sculptor Edward Brackett, another native, youthful “genius” promoted by the Herald in a small back-and-forth with the Commercial Advertiser (over whether Satan required traditional emblems), Clarke started in a lofty style, appropriate to Brackett’s statue group from Milton. But he ended by praising Brackett—who put the spirits of good and evil into human guise—as destined to wake Yankee Doodle. Bennett similarly undercut the pretensions of the Advertiser’s

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jargon of sublimity (and its dismissal of Brackett and Stout) by saying that that paper only had space for its editor John Inman’s puffs of his brother Henry’s portraits, not for real art.5 The cheap Sunday Morning News urged Clarke to tackle the warfare between Bennett and his sixpenny enemies in a mock-heroic epic, and he eventually did something of the sort for Brother Jonathan. Stout’s monumental bust of the poet, now lost, echoed this modern, epic, American mode: For Bennett, Stout caught his models “from a living race,” not the dead past. If Bryant’s poetry was the poetry of cliques and books, not the poetry of American social, physical, or civil nature, McDonald Clarke was the true poet of the democratic age of literature, as Stout too was beginning a new school.6 The printer Jared Bell’s locofoco and appropriately named New Era agreed; Bell also published Clarke’s biography, written by a dentist whose family portraitist produced sketches of Bennett, Stout, and their future protégé, the dancer Fanny Elssler, for the cheap Democratic Sunday Mercury.7 When Bennett ranked the poets of the day, he gave Bryant three lines and Clarke a half-page, a style of evaluation that itself satirized the anthologies of American poetry being compiled by Bryant, Morris, and Rufus Griswold (editor at the Evening Signal), which openly displayed their own favoritism. Not only were they prone to writing their own reviews (Bennett pointed to the reciprocal arrangements between the poet brother of the editor of the Knickerbocker as making them both insipid, mincing, and thieving), but anthologies like Griswold’s Poets of America had more poems (forty-five) by his friend and fellow newspaper editor Charles Fenno Hoffman than by any other writer. Hoffman’s Knickerbocker friends (he had attended the exclusive Brevoort ball as a friar) approved, though Poe (three poems) had his doubts. Bryant too left out talented poets, Bennett claimed, in order to include middling ones of the “Rosa Matilda and Della Cruscan” (sentimental love verses) school. When a Courier and Enquirer critic, probably Hoffman’s friend Henry William Herbert, a disinherited British aristocrat and classicist who wanted American art and literature to uphold British ideals, attacked Clarke’s poems as an exhibition of his “mental maladies,” Bennett called the critic madder than Mac.8 The cheap press that supported Clarke and Stout would also support the painter William Page. They often presented him too as a materialist rival to romanticizing Academy portraitists like Inman. The aesthetic values they attached to Stout and Page were bound up with their rejection of the gentlemanly decorum—in art and elsewhere—that disguised the misdoings of the powerful. Inman, for example, a fashionable portraitist,

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Figure 2.2. Henry Inman, The Children of Bishop George Washington Doane, 1835, oil on canvas, 25 × 30 inches, Louis Bamberger Bequest Fund, Newark Museum. Public domain; image provided by The Athenaeum.

charged at least $200 and often more, and his patrons were not just wellto-do but members of New York’s establishment. He specialized in clerical portraits, especially Episcopalians. His portrait of his friend Bishop Doane’s boys has the charm and sweetness for which Inman’s pictures of children were famous (fig. 2.2). The steeple in the background is Doane’s church, St. Mary’s, in New Jersey. Both cherubic boys would become members of the clergy. Despite this idyllic setting, Doane, a Whig who tried to admit a black student to seminary, was a target for the penny press, which was hostile to anyone associated with abolition. By 1849, he was embroiled in a public scandal over his embezzlement of church funds, or, as the Herald observed (adding that he was defended by antislavery editors like Horace Greeley), he cheated bakers, butchers, tailors, grocers, builders, and shopkeepers while dazzling their eyes with his gorgeous paintings of the New Jerusalem. Benjamin Day’s Brother Jonathan added, in a typical comparison of elite behavior to the punishments given to the poor, if it is alright to borrow money of poor spinsters and widows without the remote chance of repaying them, the Lord deliver us from such morality. Doane kept his seat as bishop of New Jersey, but he and other gentleman moralists remained

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vulnerable to these penny-press accusations of falsity, accusations not unlike the press’s characterization of Inman’s style as a kind of fairyland.9 Page, like Inman and unlike Stout, was closer to the antislavery wing of the Whigs and the Democrats and to their advocacy of high art rather than a working-class vernacular. Page burned Clarke’s diary after he died for its “indelicacies.”10 Page’s reputation for challenging convention owed more to his connections to the Boston transcendentalists and sympathetic editors allied with them. His long friendship with the editor Charles Briggs also gave him more stable support than Stout’s partnership with the opportunistic Herald. But the hallmarks of the same type of successful campaign to cast his sensuous, eccentric style as able to upturn the establishment are visible both in the 1840s and when Page returned from a prolonged stay in Italy to exhibit a controversial nude. Stout’s fate, as an Academy outsider like McDonald Clarke, instead illustrates the more uneasy alliance between artists and the penny press’s valuation of craft. James Varick Stout was the son of an engraver (fig. 2.3). Though the Herald downplayed the matter of Stout’s training in favor of the myth of the self-taught genius, he had been a student of John R. Smith, a scene

Figure 2.3. James Alexander McDougall, and Benson J. Lossing, engraver, “James Varick Stout,” Sunday Mercury, special issue: “Spoons’ Pictorial Gallery” (Christmas, 1842), Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

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painter, and the National Academy mainstays Thomas Cummings and Frederick Agate.11 On returning to New York from Europe in 1837, Stout capitalized on the Herald’s extensive coverage of the coronation of Queen Victoria by exhibiting a life-size statue of her at the Stuyvesant Institute. That is where Bennett, describing himself as tired of theaters, shows, and mediocrity, discovered an “Extraordinary Work of Genius” that heralded a “new Era of American art.” Bennett emphasized that rather than imitating famous neoclassical sculptors like Antonio Canova or Bertel Thorvaldsen, Stout had studied the antique in Rome and Venice (Stout’s friends pointed out he also studied Carnival) and so had been able to join perfectly the outline and grace of the antique with the “moral envelopements of the modern.” Victoria’s attitude of raising a scepter was a sublime conception, partly because it lifted the gossamer drapery away from her bosom: She was instinct with life. The great appeal to Bennett, however, was not to the grosser passions but to Stout’s creation of a pure, beautiful, and animated young American woman of sensibility—who just happened to resemble the queen of England.12 Bennett said Stout’s lack of fame was due to the press being ignorant, timid (afraid to praise an unknown artist), and incapable of appreciating genius of the highest order. He suggested that Epes Sargeant, a collegeeducated New England poet at the Mirror, had been forced to backpedal on his good review of Stout. Sargeant had dwelled on the queen’s anatomical developments, especially the successful disposition of the drapery, which left the lineaments of the figure from neck to ankles entirely unconcealed. Bennett mocked “Miss Nancy Willis,” identified as a literary loafer at the Astor House, for dismissing the statue as a “pretty thing” with a “gigantic foot.” This Miss Nancy was Nathaniel P. Willis, another editor with Whiggishly aristocratic tastes. Emphasizing the physical appeal of the statue, Willis added in the Corsair that Stout might start a fashion for (nude) likenesses à la Pauline Bonaparte.13 What Bennett called a “clique of artists,” behind a writer signed “Q,” dismissed Stout as a tyro who blended nature and art into a human deformity. Victoria is too skinny for antique prototypes, and Q implies that a corset has shaped her. Her equally modern self-conscious expression to Q reflects the actual model’s feelings, rather than the Queen’s. Q explained the Herald’s approbation as blinded by the desire to promote native-born American talent regardless of skill. Bennett promptly responded that an art critic must take the viewpoint “of an American position—surrounded with American models—and warmed with American feelings,” because the statue is the “beau ideal of a young American woman.” Her fairylike

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lightness is indeed absent from Greek or European models, who have been fed on mutton chops resembling Q’s beefsteak (presumably ham-handed) criticism. What Q can’t see is that Stout belongs to a new race of sculptors who walk forth on a new continent.14 The controversy was to a considerable extent invented, a tool for Bennett to promote a style of art whose raciness matched his vision of the penny press’s challenge to conservative standards. Nearly all the Whig newspapers were supportive of Stout, though Sargeant at the Mirror refused to publish a poem addressed to his Victoria.15 The sixpenny American, though like Willis troubled by Victoria’s foot, said that if the statue had been dug up at Pompeii, it would be thought wonderful. Bennett measured her foot to prove that the American was being hypercritical: The foot’s eight and a quarter inches was in proportion to Victoria’s height of five feet. The ten-dollar-a-year Times and Commercial Intelligencer admired the striking simplicity of the design, with no trappings of rank other than her native nobility. The sixpenny Commercial Advertiser, expressing the common concern about insufficient drapery, was brief on Victoria’s “close-fitting vesture” but still found marks of genius, and even the Courier and Enquirer at least found promise of future excellence.16 A pair of lawsuits, in highlighting the different intellectual rights of painters and sculptors, points to why Stout and the Herald had difficulty tying a commercially popular style to genius. The National Academy had offered free exhibition space to Philadelphia painter Thomas Sully’s portrait of Victoria, but not to Stout, who had to rent rooms in a commercial exhibition hall. Bennett compared Sully’s portrait to Stout’s to emphasize their commonality: Sully’s picture was not only beautiful, but the queen’s proportions (even the feet!) resembled Stout’s astonishingly. The Herald’s enemies, however, accused Sully of commercialism. His stylizations (the Times and Commercial Intelligencer called them Cinderella feet) were not the result of inexperience, as with Stout, but the artist’s desire for profit, evidenced in his exhibiting his copy of Victoria against the prohibition of his patron (who feared it would infringe on their own profits from exhibiting the original). Sully sued. The verdict determined that he owned the painting, as an author owned a book, and so could hold the copyright in copies and engravings of it, even though the St. George Society owned the actual picture. This idea that the artist had “property” rights in the queen may have stimulated the Whigs’ worry that Sully had demeaned both her and art for commercial ends: Her arms were dropsical and her back enormous, an effect presumably created by her stylishly narrow waist. The Sunday Morning Visiter said that if Sully’s dowdy likeness was accurate, then

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they had seen her weeding onions in Weathersfield, Connecticut.17 For Stout, the outcome was different: The materials of the sculpture defined what he owned, not the design, and that relegated him to artisan status. This was demonstrated in the trial that followed from a shipper dropping Stout’s statue at the docks en route to Boston, breaking the plaster into pieces. The question of where the value of a famous artwork (or an artwork of someone famous) lay got aired again in the lawsuit Stout brought against the owner of the boat. The American Institute, where Stout had exhibited, encouraged artists to experiment with cheaper materials than stone, and Stout’s colossal bust of Clarke had been stucco, perhaps encouraging him to use plaster for Victoria. Despite the inexpensive material, Stout estimated his loss at $3,000, based on the statue’s potential exhibition value. This sum was cited in almost all the accounts of the accident, though the Herald inflated the number to $10,000.18 As evidence supporting Stout’s damage claim, the cost of the materials ($350) and labor (it took ten months to construct, and the original model had been destroyed) were itemized. But it was an offer of $3,000 to take Victoria to Europe for exhibition that corroborated his estimate. The shipper, however, argued that the plaster statue had no intrinsic value and called to the stand the sculptors John Frazee, a founder of both the Mechanics Institute and the National Academy, his partner Robert Launitz, who was also involved with both institutions, and Edward Augustus Brackett, the sculptor who had made a splash with his Satan from Milton’s Paradise Lost (and, pleasing Whig papers, his bust of presidential candidate General William Henry Harrison). These three witnesses agreed that Victoria was a mere plaster-of-Paris affair, “inferior to the [wooden] figure head of the President steamer,” and set a low value on it, an opinion that Bennett put down to jealousy.19 Perhaps to prevent Bennett from turning against Brackett, who until now had enjoyed the Herald’s favor, a letter writer explained that Brackett declined to give any opinion as to the merits of the sculpture but only said that he thought a plaster statue could be repaired. Stout’s lawyers, instead of calling sculptors, called to the stand Lorenzo N. Fowler, a well-known phrenologist. In the course of his business examining heads in order to identify character traits, Fowler had hired artists to make life masks, thus arguably was an expert on physically faithful sculptures. The plaintiff also brought in a minister and other “critics,” who compared the statue to ones by ancient Greek (Phidias, Praxitiles) and modern English (Chantry, Westmacott) sculptors. All of whom, it was noted, would charge a thousand pounds for such a work. Not surprisingly,

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the critics, as consumers, emphasized the purchase price or exhibition value, versus the sculptors’ emphasis on production. Stout lost the case and had to pay court costs. As the satirical Paul Pry said, genius is nothing but labor and industry.20 Stout, unlike Sully, had no rights to style, so to speak, and so the Whig press too could dismiss his claims. Stout, however, reappeared the next year at the Stuyvesant with another exhibition of a female celebrity, but this time one who collaborated on creating a spectacle. Bennett’s friend Henry Wikoff was in charge of the dancer Fanny Elssler’s fabulously successful ($70,000 was the estimate of the day) tour of the United States, a success that critics then and now ascribed to the eroticism of her ballet style. Bennett, who helped Wikoff with the publicity campaign, got Stout a sitting with Elssler (fig. 2.4). The ensuing controversies over the sculpture’s pose and drapery were bound up not

Figure 2.4. James Varick Stout, Sketch of Fanny Elssler, c. 1841, pencil on paper, 103⁄8 × 8¼ inches, gift of Robert S. Pirie, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

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with questions of insufficiently refined feet but with newspaper quarrels over the respective morality and styles of Elssler, her dancing, the Herald, fashionable portraitists, and the Whigs, especially Horace Greeley’s new penny Tribune, which had emerged as a real contender for circulation. In the course of this collusion between artist, editor, celebrity, and publicist, the terms for assessing the value of Stout’s sculpture were shifted away from materials and toward the inner man and woman. Wikoff had been the Herald’s Paris correspondent in the late 1830s and remained a correspondent and contributor through the Civil War. He authored many if not most of the newspaper’s frequent and fulsome notices of Elssler, perhaps including the one about the “celebrated sculptor” Stout sketching her for a masterpiece.21 But Bennett joined in: He named his newsboat the Fanny Elssler, invented correspondence from London praising her, and published poems to and engravings of her. Accordingly, as Elssler’s biographer notes, most of the hostility to the opera dancer emerged from the Herald’s Whig enemies.22 Park Benjamin, who vigorously led the crusade against the Herald’s “Fanny Elssler school of morals,” called Elssler a stupendous humbug. Bennett in return called Benjamin a beast, a libertine (he had an affair with a famous actress), a brute, and a malformation, as well as “Hervio Nano,” after a Broadway performer with stunted legs, a reference to Benjamin’s own missing leg. Benjamin targeted the Herald’s manipulated press notices, though Benjamin himself about this time was corresponding with George Morris on how to invent a conflict to gain them both publicity. Bennett was not abashed. He himself exposed the coordinated publicity campaign for Elssler but did so as another humbug. His revelations, part of his defense against Wikoff’s accusations that Bennett had blackmailed Elssler into paying for publicity, actually publicized Wikoff’s new (if short-lived) penny paper, the Republic.23 But in 1840 and 1841, Bennett cudgeled moralizing and hypocritical opponents like Benjamin with the defense employed later so successfully for Hiram Powers’s nude sculpture of the Greek Slave—that any man who thinks improper thoughts on seeing Elssler is a brute and libertine.24 The politics around Elssler, however, shifted in August 1840, turning some of Bennett’s Democratic allies against her. German serenaders outside the Viennese dancer’s hotel were attacked by the Butt-Enders, Indomitables, and other anti-immigrant Democratic gangs. The Courrier des États-Unis, a French-language weekly with a Whig editor, predicted this would drive the usually Democratic Germans into the Whig Party at the presidential election in the fall; thus, Elssler was a “personnage politique, et la pirouette un ingrédient électoral.” 25 Bennett, who had embraced

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the Whig’s candidate William Harrison, suggested the Democratic rioters were actually allied with his old foe Thomas Hamblin at the Bowery Theater—Elssler played at the Park. Edwin Forrest, a Bowery star famous for his manly bearing and forceful delivery, was an active Democrat, and Wikoff had been best man at his 1837 wedding. John Van Buren, the expresident’s son and himself a Democratic politician, had escorted Elssler to a Forrest performance at the Bowery.26 Despite these efforts to stress her Democratic credentials, working-class papers and the flash press, perhaps reflecting the sentiments of the nativist gangs, became more critical of Elssler. They had started out in her favor, publishing her Memoirs (written by Wikoff for the Herald) to dispel rumors of her love affairs, criticizing Whigs for focusing on her morals rather than her dancing, and praising the picture of her by the Herald’s engraver Robert Elton as better than a Whig competitor’s.27 They shifted to an emphasis on her immorality and foreignness—she was the French wanton—joined with more typical penny- press rhetoric about the high prices charged by the Park, which meant only the wealthy could see her. If working- class people did go, it meant she was taking bread from the mouths of babes and getting rich while virtuous women starved.28 Stout’s statue of Elssler did not go on display until September 1841, in tandem with the renewed engagement of Elssler at the Park Theater. General Harrison had died, leaving his vice president, “His Accidency” John Tyler, the presidency. Tyler had greatly disappointed the Whigs, especially antislavery Whigs, by both vetoing favorite banking measures and showing a readiness to annex Texas. The Herald was a Tyler organ, and this not only provided critics with evidence that Bennett was a Democrat in disguise but meant that the Whigs could attack both Bennett and Tyler through Elssler. Thus Greeley’s antislavery Tribune, which generally denounced the theater’s licentious and demoralizing influence, calling its performers libertines and courtesans, condemned Elssler in particular, advising women to boycott her performances. Greeley made it clear that Elssler did not even have financial necessity to excuse her immoral behavior.29 The Sun, where Bennett’s old enemy Mordecai Noah was now employed, instead picked on the Herald’s other stand-in, Stout. Likely as part of its ceaseless circulation war with the Herald, it had early been hostile to Elssler worship and ignored Stout in a roundup of American sculptors. In 1841 it ran a racy story, “Fanny Divine and the Sculptor,” that claimed she had been paid $1,000 to pose nude for the “handsome” young artist.30 Elssler’s eroticism of course was part of the appeal of her statue, as it was for her still sold-out performances, so Stout did not necessarily want

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to dismiss the idea of a love affair. When Willis in the Corsair called her “Madame Wikoff,” with the same implication, Wikoff underscored the idea by his public denial in the Courier and Enquirer.31 Stout and Elssler’s potential affair was accordingly reinforced by Stout’s friend and witness at his earlier trial, L. N. Fowler. Fowler published The Phrenological Developments and Characters of J. V. Stout, the Sculptor, and Fanny Elssler, the Actress, in which he called Stout the “maker of Beautiful women.” Fowler argued that America’s most successful sculptors (he included Hiram Powers, Brackett, and Stout) presented the true shape of the brain, in their faithfulness to the physiognomy of the head. In Fowler’s readings of the skulls of clients, he too promised to disclose this inner character, as it existed apart from habit and circumstance. So in an analysis that neatly exculpated Stout from charges of exploiting Elssler, he found Stout to be an ardent lover of the (female) sex but prone to idealize them into angels, not wantons; any violation of decorum in his images was because ambition governed him, his desire to secure the approbation of the “corrupt and unchaste taste of the many.”32 Stout’s statue was not a nude. The dancer wore a bodice and jacket (her legs were exposed), but it showed her in the role of the Gypsy in La Gitana, awaking from a dream and arising from her bed in the “apartment of the Prince.” Bennett called it a beautiful design and conception, but the half-reclining pose, the bed, and her hand on her breast were enough to make one of Stout’s admirers later compare it to the beautiful young “model artistes” who posed, clad only in gossamer, as classical statuary.33 Wikoff, however, whether actually jealous of Stout or just interested in encouraging the publicity, agreed with the Sun that Stout had pressured the dancer to pose nude. Stout defended himself (all this was covered in the Herald, of course, and in Wikoff’s Republic) by describing Elssler as an enthusiastic partner.34 Possibly she was. Her traveling companion admired the statue unreservedly. But it was Stout, still working with inexpensive materials, who profited from the spectacle of the statue’s exhibition, in which democratic viewers could find angelic beauty in its conception, as per Fowler and the Herald, or, as per the Whigs and nativists, in an early alignment, foreign depravity. In either case, Stout’s sculpture was not just art or a commercial venture but news, thanks to the ways the penny press turned pirouettes into politics. The relationships between artists and their promoters or antagonists in the press are not always clear. Bennett and Wikoff embroiled Stout in their enterprises, but he had some agency of his own. The Sunday Atlas, the grandfather of the cheap Democratic weeklies, backhandedly

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acknowledged the editorial influence of artists: They complained about artists who drag an editor on a hot day to a room, where they say their painting is the finest ever offered to the public, request a notice instead of placing an ad, and reward him by asking him to come again as often as he likes. The Atlas says this “swindle” is “no go” in New York, unless, of course, the artist already has an editor friend. Stout had such editor friends, including one at the Sunday Mercury who profiled him. With his friends, Stout later vigorously promoted his proposal for a marble statue of George Washington, though it never came to fruition.35 Artists like Stout, in the language of the day, may have suffered from the approbation of their friends—that is, their art may have received a different reception from the enemies of their promoters. The reception of William Page’s sometimes racy paintings—like Stout, a modern style attractive to the penny press’s war on aristocratic tradition—helps illustrate this. In contrast to Stout, William Page was an extremely well- connected New Yorker. He went to a public school and studied with a Knickerbocker lawyer. He then apprenticed to James Herring, an entrepreneurial artist who founded the Apollo Association as a rival to the National Academy. But he also studied with Samuel Morse, the Academy’s president, and he exhibited at all the available art institutions.36 His first wife was the daughter of an Irish theater manager, but he had patrician friends, including the influential Knickerbocker editor Evert Duyckinck and the equally influential New Englander Charles Frederick Briggs. A writer for the Knickerbocker, Briggs’s biting style quickly made him a valued contributor to the dollar weeklies and penny dailies, including eventually the New York Times. Briggs would introduce Page to transcendentalist and abolitionist circles in Boston. Page’s children would be educated at the Fourierist (socialist) and Associationist commune, Brook Farm, a utopian society famously satirized by one of its founders, Nathaniel Hawthorne, in his Blithedale Romance. Page’s third wife wrote for the Tribune, whose editors all had ties to Associationist social reformers. While Page became more closely allied with transcendentalism and later the mystical religion Swedenborgianism, Briggs, like most of the New York literati not writing for the Tribune, mistrusted spiritualism. The two stayed friends but followed somewhat different paths: Page, for example, would write on art for the antislavery Independent, edited by a fellow transcendentalist. Briggs’s last publication would be a friendly satire of the Independent’s Republican readers.37 Page exhibited portraits and historical or religious compositions throughout the 1830s, which attracted attention for their vividness. In

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1836, John More-Anon in the Herald lauded Page’s portraits as “by far the best” and a “masterpiece of the collection” at the National Academy. In an early establishment of the rivalry between Inman’s style and a more realist one, he noted that a group of children by Inman was ruined by its proximity to Page’s picture. Morris, whose portrait was also painted by Inman, published a sonnet in the Mirror by a friend of the sitters’ family, that called the children “wooing turtle- doves” and a “chef d’oeuvre” (cf. fig. 2.2).38 The tendency of the Mirror editors and contributors toward slapping one another’s backs would later be satirized by Briggs, with the assistance of another Associationist artist, Thomas Hicks. And an article by Stout’s friend at the Sunday Mercury suggests what the penny press disliked about Inman’s and the Mirror’s style, though Inman himself was spared: The reporter wrote about the experience of having his “head” painted by a fashionable portraitist, whose style consisted of very beautiful compositions without a germ of similarity to the originals.39 The artist’s triumph consisted in ensuring that no one could mistake the sitter’s wealth. Page was thus, despite his establishment connections, noticed by those seeking artists to carry the banner for a new, less stylized, American art. Though their positions on slavery would eventually drive Briggs and the Herald in different directions, they were both casting for the role of artistic insurgent. The Herald’s former congressman and art critic More-Anon accordingly turned to Page’s genre paintings, scenes of “ordinary life” or common people that often had a political subtext. He acknowledged that Page’s picture of one child coercing another, You Shall and I Won’t, is variously estimated—both worshipped and damned—perhaps because of his offensive color. The sixpenny Evening Star disliked Page’s overuse of bright carmine and white paint, and the Mirror agreed it had too much color.40 But More-Anon praises it in detail and concludes his glowing endorsement with a general “word to the artists,” to, like Page, stop copying European lowlife characters and instead study (American) nature at the races, on Broadway, or in a tavern. The sensuousness of this urban “nature” is emphasized by the critic’s urging that one can pick up ankles, busts, forms, and divine faces in the streets any day, whether from pretty Bowery (working-class) girls or the pious in the Tabernacle. The painter must strip this nature of all her fashionable attire and place her before you in puris naturalibus.41 Page, like Stout and the penny press itself, was already and would continue—likely because of his transcendentalist connections—to have his style associated with too much Nature for decorum. This was part of what made him useful to those in the penny press attacking artistic

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styles tied to English modes, the old masters, and the monopolistic politics of the aristocracy. Page’s style retained sufficient classicism to help mark his departures from that tradition, so he retained support among the Knickerbocker establishment, though they typically constructed him as Inman’s heir, not his rival. When Page in 1837 exhibited a Holy Family rather than a genre scene, the Evening Star suggested that he was hard on Inman’s heels. The Sunday Morning News’s Italian critic (also a writer on canals, railroads, mines, and banks) praised him.42 In the pro-Inman Mirror, there was a long and enthusiastic review of Page’s work as being of the “highest order,” rich gems that rival the old masters.43 Nevertheless, resistance to the “superlative Nature” of the “peculiar style” of his portraits, as Greeley put it in the New-Yorker, namely, their departure from the sketchier English school that Inman represented, was still visible. The Commercial Advertiser, Inman’s great backer, one year wrote off Page’s portraits entirely.44 So though Briggs would later, in one of his defenses of Page, describe him as despised by the critics, this was not quite true. It was a rhetorical device common among penny-press authors, however, designed to position the artist as an outsider, which then reflected on the independence of the press or critic who was sponsoring him. In 1838, the tie between Page’s style, Nature, and the sensuality that troubled Whig moralists in Stout and Fanny Elssler returned to the fore. That year Page’s only nonportrait at the Academy exhibition was The Last Interview, a wife’s meeting with her condemned husband under the watch of the jailer. The pose of the lady sitting on the knee of the gentleman is not chaste, the Herald explained, and there is visual confusion as to the hands of the husband and jailer. Nevertheless, the Herald (Bennett is not writing this) saw the painting as striking, and the paper served up its usual warning to the Academy to do justice to those like Page who weren’t its particular favorites. The Whig American Monthly Magazine saw bold, original genius, and Greeley’s New-Yorker dismissed those who affected delicacy and ignored the unequalled strength of feeling in the scene.45 Their support, like the Herald’s, may again have been in dialogue with Inman’s Commercial Advertiser, which said that while the Last Interview wasn’t indiscreet, it was ludicrous, and it condemned Page for his intentional disregard of pictorial rules. J. K. Fisher in the Knickerbocker, himself trained in the English school and a copyist of old masters, agreed, as did the Evening Star (awkward and queer), and the five-dollar New York Literary Gazette blamed it on Page being more artisan than artist, too servile (“Chinese”) in

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his efforts to portray the animal man. Inman remained the prince of artists; he never made his sitters ridiculous but preserved a rigorous decorum. The American Repertory, which was allied with the National Academy (Page’s portrait of the Repertory editor would be exhibited there in 1843), compromised: Page was painting masterpieces—but Inman was still in first place.46 By 1839 the sixpenny press had come around to the idea that Page represented a desirable ideal, the antitrickery, antiartifice school.47 With promotion to Academician in 1839, Page began to receive well-paying ($1,000 for a full-length) political commissions for portraits. Prosper Wetmore may have brokered some of these contacts. A friend of Inman and a Mirror poet, Wetmore was also a Democratic politician and a future president of the American Art- Union, which became a patron of Page; Wetmore wrote a sonnet about Page, calling him the founder of a new era in the fine arts.48 In 1841, Page sent his portrait of the Democrat Robert H. Morris, New York City recorder and mayor-elect, to the Apollo, the predecessor of the American Art-Union. The locofoco New Era gleefully described it as showing Morris holding the Glentworth papers, with the seal still on them. The auctioneer James B. Glentworth’s “papers” had incriminated his Whig colleagues by showing their involvement in vote buying, but Morris had seized the papers illegally. The Glentworth papers became either a symbol of Whig corruption or Democratic lawlessness, depending on the newspaper. Bennett blamed the “Wall Street clique,” a group of Seward antislavery allies and their pet newspapers like the Commercial Advertiser, for funding the Glentworth scheme. His description of the clique included Robert C. Wetmore, the brother of Prosper; Robert M. Blatchford, who probably arranged for Inman to paint US Bank president Nicholas Biddle; Mirror editor Nathaniel Willis’s in-law, the art collector Moses H. Grinnell; and Simeon Draper, who married into Bennett’s hated family of auctioneers, the Haggertys.49 Page’s style was joined to this war on Wall Street cabals. The New Era said “them papers” appeared in Page’s painting just as they had looked when the Whig Wall Street “posse of pipe layers” (vote buyers) tried to steal them back from Morris. Anyone, the paper observed, could recognize in the portrait Morris’s firmness, honesty, and determination to defend his possession of the evidence. The New Era even quotes Morris, sounding like a heroic editor of a penny paper: “I owe a duty to the people which I must and will perform, though . . . I may be abused, nay, assaulted and beaten by those who have transgressed the laws and are anxious to hide their guilt.” The New Era credited Page with the decision to include the

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Glentworth papers in the portrait.50 The Commercial Advertiser, though its editor William Stone had his own much-abused portrait by Page exhibited at the Academy, naturally disapproved of this portrait (fig. 1.7). As one of Morris’s most strenuous attackers, the Advertiser said that Page’s design was spirited; however, in a jest at both Morris’s legal troubles and Page’s reputation for overly strong coloring, the reviewer also said he “never saw a man look so blue.”51 The Herald, though sympathetic to Morris in the Glentworth case, had backed his Whig opponent for mayor. Writing just after Morris’s victory in the election, the Herald’s exhibition reviewer—who was not Bennett— called Page’s portrait of Morris a miserable thing. With the Herald’s usual facetiousness, the critic promised that he wouldn’t speak about art in the trifling spirit of light gossip, as sincerity was needed in a world where common observers admired the fine, not the natural. He then pounced on almost all of the artists favored by the Knickerbocker set, including Page, as unnatural, with their “eye-trap trickery” taking in voters as well as viewers, sending in the vilest things as a joke to see if they would be accepted. Perhaps because of their political inflections, Daniel Huntington’s “lazaroni boy,” a title that evokes the Herald’s mockery of aristocratic loafers, was approved, as was Alvan Fisher’s genre picture of a corn crib, an allegory of Whig politicians seeking office in order to get rich.52 Bennett in 1840 had proclaimed Page’s pictures the “gem” of the National Academy exhibition, carrying the banner for his statement of the principle that American art needed “forcible” nature, not highly finished paintings resembling wax or enameled French snuff boxes.53 In the year between this and calling Morris’s portrait at the Apollo a miserable thing, the Herald’s reviewer changed (Bennett had advertised for a critic in the interim), but so did the exhibition venue, to the Apollo gallery. That suggests Page was becoming embroiled in the growing tension between those like Wetmore and the Apollo, advocating for a democratic (so more natural) native art, and the National Academy, which invited Democratic Mayor Morris to its private opening. The Apollo bought Page’s controversial jailhouse Last Interview, but its governing board included longtime Herald enemies in the Seward clique. Accordingly, despite the considerable overlap between the Herald and advocates for a more natural American style, from the start the Herald was suspicious of artists favored by the Apollo, as potentially tinged with New England’s idealist (antislavery, especially) notions of modern American life. This split between those loyal to the National Academy and those who favored a more natural art (perhaps to find a home at the Apollo) is visible

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in the Knickerbocker. Its editor, Lewis Gaylord Clark, had rejected an American school of painting as “too democratic for our notions”; plus, he was sick of Indian subjects (implicitly “nature”), and those who cry “Paint from Nature.” Clark worried that Americans, because they didn’t look at Nature with a sufficiently cultivated eye, would, if they depicted her, produce an unadorned and unattractive picture of her in everyday dress, not her most enticing apparel. Moreover, newspaper critics, as ignorant of theories and principles of art as artists, did nothing to correct this. He recommended as a corrective a public gallery of European masters, which would provide an unchanging standard for both artists and critics.54 Page’s friend Briggs reproved Clark by telling him how he had gathered his family and servants to judge his new portrait by Page. As in a genre painting, each member of the household commented in a manner appropriate to their age and station: His wife valued him as worth thousands, the cook thought it looked like he could eat, the Bostonian sister saw soul in him, and the children were confused by his presence. He then lectured them, and editor Clark, that a painting’s only merit is truthfulness, and if it is a true copy from nature, then appreciating it is something that even the socially insignificant can democratically do.55 Briggs embraced pictures of nature in her everyday dress (which could appeal to all), became a board member of the Apollo, and by the end of the decade would edit a dollar magazine. But his antislavery sentiments, and the strain of elitism visible in his satire of his cook, would keep him from fully engaging in the white egalitarian politics of the penny papers. By contrast, Clark’s dislike of abolitionists eventually moved him and the Knickerbocker closer to the Democrats and the Herald. Briggs was called on again that same year to defend Page’s democratic credentials for a different audience. Wasp, a name associated with the flash press’s “stinging” exposés of public figures, profiled Page in the cheap Sunday Mercury as part of his City Characters series. Wasp’s previous profiles had included aristocratic and powerful Knickerbocker targets: Charles Anthon, a Columbia professor born with a “silver spoon,” but whose students hated him; Theodore Frelinghuysen, an upper-class Whig politician whose religious beliefs threatened the secularism of the public New York University; and college-educated New Englanders the “vain weathercock” Park Benjamin and his “literary quack” coeditor at the New World.56 When Wasp turns to Page, the artist’s name is followed by the initials “N.A.,” to reflect that like these others the attack on the individual is part of a larger critique of an institution. Like Clark, though on different grounds, Wasp calls it futile to look for a national art or literature amid the glittering

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theater signboards and banknotes of the city, and especially futile to seek it at the misnamed National Academy, which has no more national qualities than a raree show. Page, as a type of Academy artist, though an excellent painter and perfect gentleman, has a mind too saturated with the classical (like college-educated editors) to portray the peculiarities and manners of our age and so to be a national artist. Wasp like Clark concluded by calling for a free public gallery, but his was one that would hold masterpieces from home-taught painters. Briggs, the very next week, rebuts that Page is “nothing if not national” and that his portraits of the city’s bourgeoisie are as much of the age as the genre pictures for which Wasp seems to advocate.57 Perhaps that explains why Page’s next contribution to the Apollo—as part of a $500 contest for a picture of American history, literature, and manners—was a genre scene of a strawberry girl and a newsboy, Young Traders (fig. 2.5). Set near the columns of the Astor House and City Hall,

Figure 2.5. William Page, Young Traders, 1842, oil on canvas, 421⁄8 × 36¼ inches, bequest of Henry C. Carey, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

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it may have been an answer to Inman’s Newsboy (fig. 1.8). Inman in that picture had moved away from the stylized “tea tray” style of the 1830s into the more realist, contemporary mode promoted by the penny press. Page’s version of the subject, despite its participation in a tradition of flirtatious strawberry-eating pictures that dates to the eighteenth century, went further in this direction. His depiction of a working- class girl absorbed in reading the newspaper on the street was an especially modern touch. The New World endorsed the painting, though the boy’s upward gaze, perhaps directed at an adult buyer, is more appealing, or at least questioning, than the defiant newsboys in the New World’s own artisan-designed publicity (fig. 1.9). The cheap weekly was undoubtedly predisposed in favor of the Young Traders, not only because Briggs was a contributor but because the newsboy carries a copy of that paper, which like most penny papers sought a female readership. The critic for the New World said Page’s children looked “cut out of nature.” He continued that these “children of the soil” (not children of the streets, which would have fewer racial implications) have a “national character” that gives the picture a “national interest” greater than even Revolution-era battle paintings, which are dismissed as consisting of tired images of Washington on a horse, a wounded Indian, and a “thick-lipped” Negro. As an advocate for Page’s entry in the Apollo’s contest for an American painting, the New World thus briskly disposed of the competing historical pictures. Briggs similarly tried to equate Page’s work with the more prestigious genre of historical painting. Knowing it was a favorite painting of Prosper Wetmore, one of the Apollo’s founders, and urging Wetmore to buy from Page, Briggs described the artist’s genre pictures as deserving the same high prices that artists like Inman, Weir (a Knickerbocker artist known for his Indian subjects), and Titian imitator Henry P. Gray received for their inflated “half-acre” historical canvases.58 But like the Knickerbocker’s editor’s rejection of Indian paintings as truly “American” subjects, the New World is careful to avoid defining the national race (sprung from the soil) as one filled with an expansionist war spirit, the theme conveyed by General Washington’s mounted conquests. Nor does the American race include, even if only as disappearing, Native Americans or, even if subservient, African Americans. That type of American painting, the kind which envisioned military conquests creating a nation that incorporated Southern plantations and western territories with their varied populations, and with cheap land available to immigrants, was a Democratic style. Indeed, the New World notes that one such historical painting on view at the Apollo—part of the same contest—was admirably

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calculated for Democratic headquarters at Tammany Hall.59 The ideas seemingly instead proposed by Page’s picture, that American literature consisted of pirated British and European novels made democratically accessible by cheap papers like the New World (just as his painting presented continental street children as modern American merchants), did not convince the directors of the Apollo Association. The prize wasn’t awarded at all. Both Briggs and Benjamin then, despite their enmity to Bennett, not only practiced the penny- press style of slashing criticism but equally accused the National Academy of persecuting the young men like Page who in their view provided the annual exhibitions’ only signs of life. When the National Academy rejected Page’s Cupid and Psyche as indecent, Briggs took up the pen in the New World to defend Page’s palpable style and his breaks with decorum (fig. 2.6). He praised Page as giving life and warmth to Grecian art and accused the Academy of being of the class who would like to throw a shawl over Horatio Greenough’s nude statue of Washington in the Capitol, and who keep the Academy exhibition a gallery of dough faces and magazine fashion plates.60 Though a slam at the prominence

Figure 2.6. William Page, Cupid and Psyche, 1843, oil on canvas, 107⁄8 × 14¾ inches, gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Public domain; image provided by Wikimedia Commons.

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of portraits in the exhibition, the term “doughface” hints at Briggs’s antislavery views as well. “Doughface” described Northerners who compromised with the South. A letter to the New World defended the Academy, explaining that Page’s painting had been rejected as a copy of a hackneyed subject, an argument that keeps the battle on penny-press terrain, in which imitation of traditional models produces trashy art. But the writer then undermined this rationale by adding that the Academy ought to exclude anything that might be offensive to delicacy, in order to preserve it from the Fanny Elssler school of morals. That phrase, of course, enrolled Page in the racy, contemporary, satirical, and sensational school of art and literature represented by the Herald and the penny press generally, and which Park Benjamin had supposedly opposed. Briggs promptly responded that given this definition of good art as free from imitation, the engravings (after paintings) the Academy exhibited were servile copies, as were its portraits, which were copies of the sitters. Page’s sensual classicism by contrast offered a middle ground between what Briggs saw as the two extremes of American art: the sculptor Hiram Powers’s too “warm and pulpy flesh,” on the one hand, and Thomas Crawford’s dry, cold marble, so deficient in individuality and nature as to make one shudder, on the other.61 Originality comes in design, not the objects (human figures) selected, Briggs further argued. He then pointed out that as far as morals, the Academy had admitted Inman’s portrait of Elssler at her dressing table and Edmé Rousseau’s “half undressed” picture of the dancer (in her role in Tarantule), as well as the latter artist’s “abomination,” the Gamester, a hideous affair that would not be admitted to the lowest den in the vice-ridden Five Points.62 Briggs doesn’t exactly join the penny press in its demand for bolder art. He instead accuses the Academy of succumbing to that style, in contrast to Page’s more classical (if still kissing) nudes. Briggs may have singled out Rousseau because he applied a bloodless neoclassical style to contemporary subjects in the mode of artists like JeanDominique Ingres, in the reverse of Page’s colorful, more painterly style applied to classical subjects. The Courrier des États-Unis, rallying to their countryman Rousseau’s defense, blamed the press’s hostility toward the French miniature painter not on his style, however, but on his inclusion of “lost women” in his allegory of a young gambler’s downfall. The Courrier also noted that he had exhibited at the French Salon, where, unlike New York’s “Louvre,” portraits did not dominate, and so expectations were different (that is, higher).63 But for Briggs, Rousseau’s devotion to classical

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linearity was the problem, and this was made worse because, as he pointed out, classical art in its original state flaunted gorgeous polychromatic hues like Page’s (thus more authentically classical) paintings. But Briggs acknowledged, even as he made this comparison, that to praise young artists for adhering to the styles of the past was a bad form of criticism—certainly the penny press disapproved of it. It was as foolish as to compare President Tyler to ancient emperors or the Democratic satirist Cornelius Mathews to ancient authors. Since Briggs very much disliked Tyler and Mathews, his rejection of imitation (something he shared with his Academy opponent) was, if not sarcastic, certainly tempered by dislike of some of his fellow travelers. Nevertheless, Briggs regularly accused his fellow art critics not of flippancy or impertinence but of being too traditional. Claiming they were cradled in the Vatican, famous for its collection of classical and Renaissance art as well as its library, Briggs recommended that every book on art and plaster model of it be destroyed, leaving only nature and science as authorities. When a young artist asked him if he was part of that “great onward party of the present day” that wants to dispose of the English trinity of Joshua Reynolds, Shakespeare, and Milton, Briggs replied that Reynolds was a bag of wind and that our effigies of men should resemble men, not gods.64 Briggs’s acerbic and “onward” style of art criticism—though he would have disliked the comparison—encouraged Herald-style attacks on the National Academy and its favored artists as an incubus on art, sapping it of potency. For example, Page had been a candidate for the official commission for Governor Seward’s portrait. A committee of five men was appointed to select the painter, each battling for their favorite artist, but to Briggs’s disgust they ended by flipping a coin and got Inman. The City, he noted, as a result, now has a full-length portrait of a country attorney (Seward), looking highly satisfied with himself at a village tea party.65 At the National Academy, the school of allegory, idealism, inanities, and Europe continues to corrupt Ingham, Cole, Durand, and Inman; however, a younger generation holds promise.66 Writing for the two-cent Evening Mirror under the name of William Congreve’s braggadocio Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, Briggs continued the war. In letters that pretended to emanate from abroad, he mocked Academy artists who worked in a Romantic style, describing how he had informed the pope that America’s great artists were Academy portraitists like James Whitehorne. He further praised the artists resident in Rome for sending home a dozen portraits of beggars and bootblacks in the

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character of Apostles and Virgins. This was less a conservative complaint that the holy were being shown as impoverished than a complaint about American artists’ refusal to paint real, contemporary life.67 Briggs probably picked on Whitehorne (recently elected as National Academy secretary) because the latter had threatened to sue the Evening Mirror over an art review. The Evening Mirror had asked why Whitehorne was an Academician whereas Charles Loring Elliott, who was often seen as Page’s heir in portrait painting, especially once Page left for Italy, and the landscapist Jasper Cropsey, who was sometimes compared to Cole as Page was to Inman, were not. The Evening Mirror’s editor Hiram Fuller’s answer to the threatened suit was typical in redoubling the original criticism: Whitehorne was not to blame for the National Academy operating as the American Institute did for mechanics and West Point did for the military, that is, to protect its members and cherish mediocrity. Fuller explained that it is only natural for the unenlightened—who don’t understand how the Academy or these other organizations work—to expect that merit would rise to distinction. He added that only writers lacked a similar protective group to preserve averageness and that Whitehorne should only exhibit his paintings in the sheltered environs of a private room for Academicians and friends.68 Hiram Fuller was a Whig, and in characterizing the Academy as a protectionist group, he is commenting on longstanding Whig policies like tariffs that protect domestic manufactures. An international copyright, the protection for writers to which Fuller alluded, was in essence a tariff that would assist American writers by increasing the price of and so reducing foreign imports. The hugely popular novels pirated by the cheap weeklies and Harper’s would become more expensive, and so like a tariff on boots, the international copyright would protect the domestic manufacture of literature. The connection between such diverse “protectionist” institutions as the copyright, West Point and the National Academy was the idea that in their different spheres they eliminated competition, which left them vulnerable to accusations of mismanagement on behalf of a clique. Because West Point’s selection of cadets was not based on open competition, it was understood by the penny press to create an aristocratic officer class, at public expense, rather than one based on merit. The American Institute, though a major newspaper advertiser, was known to penny papers as a “farce and a swindle,” a “humbug of a granny association,” and a “caucus of suckers” who put on a “puppet-show” of giant pumpkins and ornamented eggs, or a “Peter Funk show.” 69 A Whig- run association, it overtly supported a tariff on imported manufactured goods, but penny papers argued

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that neither its policies nor its annual fair showing home manufactures advanced the interests of labor. Fuller supported the copyright and tariffs and even suggested that the American Art-Union might be better than a tariff (or the Academy) for encouraging American art. But he joined free-trade proponents and the other penny papers when he asked American Institute managers to show their books, saying that the works of art exhibited at their fair would not be tolerated anywhere else, unless executed by a National Academician, and then they would be exhibited at the National Academy.70 Issues like how to support the growth of domestic culture crossed party lines. While many penny papers and publishers wanted to keep importing cheap literature, others advocated for an equal playing field in which Dickens would cost as much as Hawthorne. Evert Duyckinck, who was friendly with many artists, was a leader of the international copyright movement, and the Democratic Morning News, where he was a critic, saw in Page’s portrait of Duyckinck the highest imaginable beauties, as did Wikoff’s Republic.71 Page appealed to penny-press editors who saw interested parties mismanaging the protection of American art. Whigs who remained hostile to Page’s corporality were often those skeptical of transcendentalism and abolitionism as foolish social experiments. Charles Lanman, the painter and art critic, is a case in point. Like Briggs, he wrote for the New World and held political offices: Briggs was appointed by Millard Fillmore; Lanman was personal secretary to Daniel Webster. Webster Whigs were typically somewhat tolerant of slavery, for the sake of preserving the Union, and Lanman was friendly with Democrats with similar views. However, when Lanman praised artists like Emanuel Leutze, he did so in conservative terms different from the Democrats and antislavery cultural nationalists. They admired Leutze’s energetically modern historical compositions, while Lanman characterized him as an artist whose strength came from studying old masters abroad and whose work had been validated as a result of being bought by kings and academies. Similarly, in Lanman’s “Our New York Painters,” Page, he said, was greatly overrated. His work was too physical, and where Inman painted the mind (Lanman was referring to Inman’s portrait of William Macready, an English actor already understood as a symbol of antidemocratic, antiAmerican sentiment), Page captured the mere external shell of humanity.72 Sometimes it was Page’s experiments with color, which Page promoted in long articles for Briggs’s Broadway Journal and other sympathetic papers, that led to antagonism toward his work akin to that felt for the transcendentalists’ difficult language and religious experiments. Even his

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supporters were led to the expedient of rolling up exhibition catalogues to view his paintings in isolation from the others, in order to understand his coloring rightly. Tompkins Matteson, a genre painter and illustrator in Duyckinck’s circle, might fall into this category of those who lost patience with Page’s experimentalism. Matteson was no hidebound conservative. Yet experimentalism with the painter’s craft threatened to produce a kind of early version of art for art’s sake, a concentration on the medium that, if not outright humbug, could appeal only to a rarefied few. Matteson wrote art criticism for the National Press, edited by George Morris before he rejoined Nathaniel Willis at the Home Journal. Matteson, from an upstate Democratic family, had come to fame when the American Art- Union, urged by the genre artist and Democrat Francis Edmonds, bought his New England-themed Sugaring Off and his ardent The Spirit of ’76 (fig. 2.7). In 1844, the latter painting’s military fervor was easily understood as an endorsement of Democratic president James Polk’s expansionism. Its focus on patriotic “native” (white, not immigrant) Americans would lead it later to adorn a Know- Nothing (nativist) gift book. In an example of how it lent itself to such interpretation, Knickerbocker’s editor Clark, a friend of Morris, married Protestantism and democracy when he renamed the painting “Freedom’s Holy Cause.”73 That fervor was not the same as Page’s. Matteson’s pictures appeared in John Inman’s Columbian magazine (Inman had also worked for Morris’s Mirror). The Columbian’s publisher, Israel Post, leaned Democratic and, unlike Inman, was regularly endorsed by the pro-Polk Herald. In the steel engraving of The Spirit of ’76 that Post inserted into the Columbian in 1846, the men and women of the family group are united in their revolutionary spirit. Even the mother reads a broadside (at its head is the date July 4, 1776), though the baby’s position, resembling a dead Christ, suggests an upcoming sacrifice. That message of unified support for war echoed contemporary Democratic sentiments about the war with Mexico. When Post the next year started the Union magazine, a journal that would support this sort of patriotic American subject in art and literature, he hired Matteson and Caroline Kirkland to edit it. Kirkland was a Democrat, too; however, Matteson’s vigorous support for the Mexican War ran against her antislavery and pacifist feelings, and, like Inman at the Columbian, she openly differed with Matteson’s illustrations.74 Matteson moved on to Brother Jonathan, by then edited by Benjamin Day, formerly of the Sun, who happily published his giant patriotic pictures of the storming of Chapultepec.75 In 1855, the year Matteson

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Figure 2.7. Henry S. Sadd, after Tompkins H. Matteson, The Spirit of ’76, frontispiece, Columbian Magazine 5, April 1846. Public domain; image provided by author.

was elected as a Democrat to the state legislature, Matteson was, like most Northern Democrats, no longer an advocate of war but instead peaceful compromise with the South. His Spirit That Won the War of that year would present a less united family, with the older men now turning away from the young fire-eater. The mother and sacrificial child are replaced by a father reading the paper and a grandfather—a figure who stood for the Union created during the Revolution—who has already lost a leg. In 1846, writing for the National Press, Matteson democratically went through the entire National Academy exhibition catalogue in order, rather than according to a hierarchy of Academy members, or other system for sorting out the best or favorites. Another artist did the reviews of Matteson’s paintings, to avoid ethical conflicts. Matteson rejected those who “affected” (imitated) the old masters in a progressive age, and he inserted attacks on the Academy’s general illiberality and favoritism. But he also

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criticized Page as someone who had once given “promise of a new era” in art but had become engrossed in the “claptraps” of art instead, ruined by his eccentricities and disagreeable color. The paper’s Paris correspondent took issue with this. He observed that he was only an amateur of the arts, a connoisseur not a painter, who acknowledged that young stars were eclipsing lazy old dignitaries, but Page was still the best portrait painter (a realm where his realism was more acceptable).76 Morris may have been swept up in the ardent spirit of the 1840s and no longer supported the sweet, sad school of art, the aristocratic taste mocked by the Herald. Yet those in certain circles, like Briggs himself, still saw in Page’s experiments with the medium an element that captured the ineffable, poetic, and not particularly democratic soul. In the same year, Fuller’s Evening Mirror described “the Snobs of the Press”: the editor who uses “we,” who patronizes the fine arts but has his bust done in (cheap) plaster, and who assists only those artists who have no need of his assistance. The conservative snob has a military title (General Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, Colonel Morris, etc.) and belongs to the highest steeple (Webb at Trinity Church), but the reformer snob (Greeley at the Tribune and those with transcendentalist sympathies) cultivates eccentricity and abhors only those sins he doesn’t indulge in personally.77 This set the stage for the Evening Mirror to denounce the snobbery (dislike of poor people) behind attacks on James Beard’s North Carolina Emigrants, an antislavery genre painting that induced revulsion and loathing in Matteson for its “squalid misery” and loaferism. The painting shows a white nuclear family, led by the father in the dress of an artisan, with only a few possessions and rather starved-looking animals, on its way North. No idler, the father is waiting for his lone ox to drink from a trough. A dead branch points in the southerly direction from which they have come. The Evening Mirror classified Matteson with the newspaper snobs at the American Whig Review, which was created to compete with the very successful Democratic Review. They inflict a “stream of witless criticism” on “Our Painters.” The Evening Mirror describes this criticism as consisting of vile writing, loose thinking, and commonplaces that include praising Inman, but on the wrong grounds, beslobbering Inman’s student Daniel Huntington with praise, writing flummery about Leutze, and scorning Beard.78 Beard’s paintings should be admired, as they are homely, touching, with a vein of satire, and his North Carolina Emigrants is a pictorial sermon on the debasing effects (on white labor) of the slave system of the South—an interpretation with which the Emancipator concurred.79 The Evening Mirror’s ability to see (and welcome) an antislavery lesson aligns

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with the paper’s loyalty to Page and his style: According to these snobbish critics, the true way to paint a faithful portrait (of a man or of a society, as Beard did) is to paint it unlike the original. George H. Colton, the editor who published the article on “Our Painters” in the American Whig Review that the Evening Mirror singles out for witlessness, tried to present his party as progressive. In his summary of the Academy exhibition, he accordingly disapproved of artists who affected the dark tone of old masters.80 But he returned to the Knickerbocker’s and New World’s argument that an American school based on redskins and primeval autumnal forests was false and injurious to art and that only when national traits are shown in the handling of paint rather than in the subjects will there be a native style. But as the Evening Mirror recognized, this seemingly reasonable point of view, one that echoes Briggs’s earlier defense of originality and that might seemingly apply to Page, was a veil for his unhappiness about the kind of, or rather the class of, subjects that artists chose. For Colton, the best artists (here is the beslobbering), like Huntington, do the highest subjects: allegorical women whose ideal character is recognizable by their high foreheads and low classical brows (versus the large eyes and small mouths that some mistake for materiality—a dig at Page), in cool unobtrusive colors (as opposed to Page’s disagreeable warm ones) and an air of quiet, elevated repose. Leutze’s historical extravagances appeal to idealists, a characterization that damns them with faint praise (or is nonsense, for the Evening Mirror). But Colton’s real problem was not with Leutze’s exaggerated Renaissance heroes but with repulsively working- class subjects: everything in Beard’s Emigrants was wretched, starved, gaunt, blighted, squalid, and painful; this kind of literal copy of actual squalor and wretchedness is not a legitimate subject. William Sidney Mount’s Eel-Fishing, which featured a “negress” painted without caricature as the principal figure, upright and powerful, similarly pains the eye and shocks the taste. As for the portraitist Elliott, despite his (unfortunate) tendencies toward fidelity to nature, he has (rightly) donned the mantle of Inman, the best painter in the world, not of Page. Though Colton was reviewing the National Academy exhibition in the possessive “Our Painters,” his strictures about pandering to a morbid national vanity by bestowing excessive praise on native subjects and native artists suggest he was concerned about the style of patronage of the Academy’s competitor, the American Art-Union. Just as its predecessor, the Apollo, had held competitions, however unsuccessful, to encourage artists to tackle American nature and manners, so the Art-Union, where Briggs

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and Duyckinck both served as managers, bought what they saw as distinctively American scenes. A contributor to the American Whig Review, a few months after Colton’s expression of dislike for such repulsive figures as the poor, indeed wrote “Hints to Art-Union Critics,” explicitly warning them that hateful subjects, such as men whose labors are a grief to them or who are insolent, are not fit for art and that imitation of them is not artistic. To be artistic, the disagreeable must be transformed, and not in the way the theater turns forward minxes and naughty boys (again, people who don’t know their place) into heroines and heroes.81 This manifesto to sacrificing everything in nature to beauty of form includes a long analysis of color based on no other than William Page’s method of painting, which for the critic provides a kind of antidote to the greasy dirt of modern daubs, as if their low subjects had infected the medium itself. That perhaps explains why the Evening Mirror calls this author “learned” and “elegant,” even though the editor still objects to the basic principle at stake.82 If the revered Dutch painter of peasants David Teniers had lived in Stonybrook, Long Island, like Mount, he too would have painted dyspeptic vagabonds. American nature is a suitable subject for American artists, and Mount, like Beard, delineates national peculiarities. His subjects and his color, like Beard’s, may be low and homely, but his style is never vulgar. By 1861, Evening Mirror editor Hiram Fuller, who had sat at Daniel Webster’s deathbed, was in London, advocating for the Confederates. His trajectory was not unlike the Herald. Both penny papers supported Republican John Fremont in 1856 before turning against the Republicans as too likely to split the Union. This trajectory is implicit in the Evening Mirror’s defense of the disagreeable and repulsive in art or, rather, its defense of violations of social and aesthetic decorum, just as it was in the Herald’s. In 1860, still in this mode of attacking elite double standards, the Herald converted the scandalous reputation of William Page’s Venus into an expression of the character of Page’s Republican defenders. In addition to unkindly noting that his picture, refused by the Paris salon, had made money in America’s provinces, it facetiously complimented the rush of New York’s virtuosos and ladies to its classical precincts. Earlier the Herald had described Page’s style as medieval, emphasizing its undemocratic character in trying to recapture the styles and hierarchies of the past rather than the present. The exhibition of his Venus in New York was a Grand Chance for the Truly Pious, for those who wished to keep the consciences and morals of the masses in order by rigid scrutiny and the arrest of newsboys, to censure the unmistakable immoral

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tendencies on exhibition.83 Surely its tendencies, the Herald asked, were the same as the (pornographic) pictures recently seized in Frankfort Street, and the metropolis’s leaders of moral and religious sentiment ought not to lose the opportunity to distinguish themselves. The Evening Mirror too kept up the artillery against snobbishness and exclusiveness in art, often in connection to the National Academy: for example, an essay on Club Snobs with, on the next page, an article about the Academy exhibition being hung badly, as usual, with pictures arranged in order of Academy member precedence (officers first), not merit.84 Fuller often spoke as the voice of ordinary exhibition-going people, in contrast to the snob: a Fifth Avenue noodle, a fashionable man, a simpleton, a New York dandy, an exquisite person at the Academy of Design, who with foppish dress and an effeminate air (and a half-impudent amorous stare at ladies, which identifies his interest in art as potentially prurient as well, perhaps in accord with a taste for French prints) disdains the whole exhibition as unworthy of one who has been “abwawd.”85 What qualifications give him finer taste than other critics? He inherited a small fortune and is a member of a Used-Up class of the idle. He accordingly disdains everything peculiar to American life, including the supposedly vulgar daubs of countrymen like Elliott. The aristocratic loafer and political hanger-on targeted by the Herald as unqualified to determine a democratic nation’s taste survived throughout this period as a foil for the voice of the penny paper, albeit in increasingly Republican guise. When the Southern-sympathizing Day Book warned that the middle classes should understand that insolent snobs and bankrupts in Union Square were trying to lead them by the nose, they were referring to a neighborhood busy erecting proto- Republican markers.86 To understand how Bennett and Fuller ended up together, it’s necessary to turn to the rise of Young America, a political movement with connections to land reform, nativism, territorial expansion, and cultural nationalism, which inflected the penny press’s argument about the nature of good American art and aristocratic monopolies. Or as the Herald described the situation in 1844: The newly emerging political power of Young America had scared Whigs at papers like Greeley’s penny Tribune into trying to pretend liberality on social issues, but the corrupt, selfish, old Whig Party recognized the handwriting on the wall. Young America’s reformers were determined to obtain the blessings of cheap, just, and wholesome government, which meant embracing egalitarian policies. Adopting a landscape metaphor, the Herald promised that though Whig issues like the tariff and national bank had been thrown into the eyes of the people to lead them

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astray, the real question about the future of the nation was emerging. It was rising above the mists of the partisan prejudice and passion that had concealed it, like the Catskill Mountain House on a bright May morning. And, continuing the comparison (Thomas Cole’s paintings of the Catskill mountains were being exhibited at the time), under Young America’s influence, the Indian races were disappearing before the Anglo-Saxon one, like morning mists before the rising sun, and only slavery had prevented the same from happening to the African race.87 But against such mists, Young America had no chance.

3

Old Masters versus Young America

Much of the penny press’s framing of art and art exhibitions replicated its strategies for attacking monopolies generally: accusations of favoritism, privilege, and collusion with the press. But in the near-constant discussion of the auction trade in old masters, the critique took a new shape. Prominent auctioneers, who were involved as judges and managers in other art institutions, received their share of mockery for self-serving behavior in this form of the art market.1 However, the commercial auction had both elite and popular (“street”) varieties, and the would- be American aristocratic connoisseur and auctiongoer could, accordingly, be conflated with the unlearned masses and the newspaper critics who catered to them. As a result, art sales fueled the debate over whether the national school of American art should abandon the “cold” rules of European old masters, which presumably appealed to elite connoisseurs, for something warmer and, perhaps, more inclusive. In this context of the contemporary art market, old masters became a foil for newspaper critics advocating for a fiery (rather than static) democratic national school of art. This stance reflected the cultural nationalism of Young America, a political and reform movement embraced by much of the penny press. Until the Democrats broke up the auction- license monopoly, a restricted number of auctioneers sold everything from art to furniture to land. Auctioneers were one of the biggest advertisers in the penny and subscription papers, and they expected in return brief editorial notices. Auction houses and newspapers were intimate in other ways, too. The

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Sunday Morning Visiter put in its masthead that its location was across from the auctioneer Bell’s rooms on Ann Street, a street where the Herald also had its office for a time. The Herald, when endorsing a Bell auction, called Ann Street a center of wit and popularity and used the occasion to slam its sixpenny Wall Street rival the Courier and Enquirer for endorsing trashy auctions elsewhere. But when the Herald described the Apollo’s gallery as run like an “auction store” on the “Jack o’Haggerty plan,” it was no compliment. Bennett had been attacking Philip Hone and the Haggerty family of Whig politicians, auctioneers, and art patrons since the latter’s firm prosecuted a successful libel suit against the Herald, one presided over by the Whig politician Joe Hoxie.2 In 1851, a sign warning “Beware of Mock Auctions” was “mistakenly” paraded in front of the Haggerty & Sons business. The Herald understood that like other dealers in secondhand goods, the small profits involved obliged auctioneers to cheat. But Bennett argued that there was the most roguery in the buying and selling of pictures. Both contemporary European and American art and European “old masters” were sold by auction, often by the same houses. Before an auction, the lots would be exhibited for free. If an auctioneer did not have a gallery, he could display paintings, sculptures, and objets d’art like mantel clocks in downtown buildings like Stoppani Hall, Stuyvesant Hall, the Washington Divan, and the Lyceum building, venues which regularly hosted temporary for- profit exhibitions, like Stout’s sculpture of Queen Victoria. Many collections were shown in the Arcade Baths on Chambers Street, where the National Academy had exhibition rooms on the top floor before moving to Clinton Hall. The Apollo Association’s gallery and its successor the American Art-Union, both of which exhibited loaned old masters alongside contemporary art, rented their rooms to auctioneers, and there were also auction exhibitions in the Granite Building, home to many artists’ studios.3 Since most entertainments in the visual arts charged twenty-five cents admission, a barrier for the working class, the free auction displays potentially reached a wider audience. Women’s presence amid this possibly risqué art (advertisements highlighted Venuses) was downplayed. This was not the case for paying contemporary art exhibitions. For example, Clinton Hall, where the National Academy had rooms, was across from the Herald offices. Its reporters often described spying on the parade of beautiful women visitors entering the hall, their presence serving to identify contemporary art with fashionable leisure, aristocratic “lounges,” and, later, with a generally popular audience. Press coverage of art auctions

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was instead directed at men’s taste and social ambitions, and penny papers mocked audiences at auctions more harshly than mild criticism of narcissistic (desire for portraits) or pretentious viewers at the Academy. The disdain for auctiongoers was multipronged: The taste for old masters was questionable, whether that taste was valid depended on the authenticity of the paintings, and it was doubtful if buyers could tell if the paintings in question were actually by old masters. As contemporaries observed, it was surprising to see so many Leonardos, Michelangelos, Raphaels, and Rembrandts available so cheaply: sixty-two dollars for an undoubted Ruisdael. To buttress these claims with the authority of in-person European experience, many collections were advertised as belonging to a European aristocrat or assembled by a gentleman just back from (or about to depart for) Europe. Testimonials from experts occasionally served a similar purpose, and almost all of the officers of the National Academy endorsed the importer (of engravings) William Hayward’s Picture Gallery. Those who paid a fee would be permitted to copy in his gallery, further underscoring his exhibitions’ claim to originals worth copying. Hayward’s collection of Rembrandt, Rubens, Claude, Vandyke, Reynolds, Correggio, Guido, Murillo, Greuze, Ostade, Ruisdael, et al. was also certified by his fellow dealer Michael Paff.4 The German-born auctioneer Paff had a reputation as a shrewd buyer and member of the “cognoscenti,” and when his widow advertised the sale of his engravings, paintings (including the standard Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Correggio), and articles of virtu, most newspapers, including the Herald, puffed them as likely authentic. The True Sun, a more Whiggish version of the original Sun, however, noted that Paff had been at the head of the “picture cleaning” business that produced Correggios and Teniers from the cracked canvases of the auction rooms.5 As this indicates, dealers shared auctioneers’ reputation for interested claims of (dubious) authenticity. Paff’s rival Aaron Levy received positive notices for his collections of “restored” old masters, richly framed, with more originals than ever before, in almost every paper. But he served as the con man in an early example of the “auction exposé,” written by James Aldrich and published in Aldrich’s own Literary Gazette and George P. Morris’s Mirror in 1839, both expensive weekly magazines.6 Aldrich’s auctioneer is the fictional Moses Levy; Aaron Levy had married into the Moses family (one early Art-Union manager, the Democratic banker Benjamin Nathan, was connected by marriage with the Levy family). Aldrich generally condemned the practice of extensive advertising for art auctions, on the street as well as in newspapers, as literally cheapening art. He ridiculed the language of the paid- for puffs that endorsed the seller as

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a distinguished cognoscenti parting with rare and invaluable oils by old masters. In his story, the catalog for the Levy auction he attends says the collection belonged to an English nobleman and names Raphael, Michael Angelo, Claude; Aldrich sees nothing but the rudest and roughest art, contemptible in everything but design. They are miserable copies of good pictures produced by artists in some “low Dutch school” and bought on speculation by a Yankee trader. Like the advertising, like Jews turning the sale of art into a trade or investment, the art auction is for the roughest and rudest class of men. At the sale, when Aldrich woke from his reverential “revery” on (real but absent) great art, he spots Levy rubbing the pictures with a wetted sponge, an allusion to the picture “restoration” (that is, faking) business. During the auction itself, Levy is mocked for mispronouncing the names of the artists, for his German (“Wenus” for Venus, for example) accent, and for his uneducated Irish assistant, who reads the names of the old masters off the backs of the canvases as proof of their authenticity. Aldrich suggests that the more widely respected Paff, who was a judge for the American Institute’s annual exhibitions of artisanal goods (including painting and sculpture), was in the same game as Levy (Levy auctioned Paff’s estate, with caveat emptor on the attributions) but that Paff got better prices for his copies than the cruder, mass-market Levy, who sold five hundred to six hundred paintings a week. In the end, the buyers in Aldrich’s sketch are happy with their dollar old masters, but Aldrich is puzzled by the relatively high prices paid for Michael Angelo. He points out, in comments that draw attention to his own connoisseurship and European experience, that Michael Angelo’s paintings are not highly regarded in Italy. He then explains the enthusiasm for them as a confusion among the buyers. They supposed the pictures to have been painted by Mike Angell, the artist who did the transparencies (large banner-like pictorial or allegorical scenes) for Tammany Hall’s Democratic Party.7 The satire is not so much of Levy, then, as of the would-be art patrons and Democrats who presume they are capable of aesthetic and other judgments, but who mistake sign painters for old masters. Aldrich calls one buyer “Mr. Varnish,” a name suggesting someone who hopes his purchases will lend him the veneer of good taste necessary for social climbing. Aldrich actually admires “real” old masters. He approves of buying them and feels certain that some New Yorkers (presumably his “courteous readers”) can tell the difference between the “low” schools that produce these copies—the Dutch, with their supposed literalist style, are credited

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for them—and the high, idealizing school of the originals. Aldrich himself was in a related trade of reproducing European art. By 1842 he was assisting at the New World, a weekly whose mainstay was the cheap reprinting and translation of contemporary British and European novels for a mass audience. Even before that, more expensive weeklies like his relied heavily on foreign literature, both reprints and unacknowledged imitations. Indeed, Edgar Allan Poe would accuse Aldrich of plagiarism—of making inferior copies of—British poets.8 But the dig at the artisans who paint for Tammany Hall suggests he wants to create a parallel between Levy’s mass production of old masters, distributed on the street at cheap prices, like the penny papers, and Democratic politics as deceptive (and foreign) hucksters selling to gullible or social-climbing consumers.9 James Gordon Bennett was no Tammany supporter, but his attacks on art auctions formed part of his war on Wall Street Whigs like the Haggertys. To do so, he aligned the trade in old masters not with Democrats but with Whig colluders. He too used Levy, but to attack his longtime enemy the Jewish editor Mordecai M. Noah at the Evening Star.10 When the Star puffed a Levy sale of French art, Bennett pointed to the falsity of the endorsement, warning that the sale was a hundred pieces of humbug, where if you pay six times what the pictures are worth, you can prove your fine taste. A month later, the Star again puffed a Levy sale as “choice” old paintings from a private collection in the city, the fruit of much industry and research, with no humbugs in it, only the genuine works of esteemed masters. The Star urged readers to set aside the picture dealer’s (Levy’s) cicerone style of marketing and pointed readers to a gem of the first water by Guercino (even if it’s not by him), a large picture in the style of Murillo, and others that if sold in Europe would be priceless. Levy’s advertisement in the Star even invited buyers to bring judges with them.11 The Herald called the sale and its promotion a gross humbug and, as Aldrich would do, mocked the low prices at which the masterpieces were offered (ten dollars for a Poussin) and sold (the Poussin went for seven dollars)—as well as the ignorance of the auctioneer in identifying Guido’s Orpheus as “Orphans” and using that as an explanation for why the hero had no clothes. Levy gave the Herald his invoices showing paintings marked as worth $750 selling for fifty- two dollars, and the Herald convincingly pointed out that no one would send original paintings to be auctioned at a loss of 93 percent. The humbug of old pictures is, Bennett says, the same humbug of old (secondhand) clothes.12 The tagline about dealers in old clothes, one of his favorite slams at Noah’s supposed retailing

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of old news, points to the Herald’s real goal: to expose the connivances of the Wall Street press with advertisers and cliques, regardless of any harm done to the ordinary consumer. The Herald was still battering Noah when Bennett took on John Clarke’s Old Italian Paintings in the Granite Building on Broadway. Clarke’s gallery advertised itself as permitting American artists to place their works for sale alongside the old masters he was selling at auction, akin to displays at the Apollo; one Commercial Advertiser review of an Apollo exhibition in fact described the old-master copies almost to the exclusion of the Americans. But if what Clarke called a “European model” (contemporary and old masters together) for the gallery came to pass, contemporary art was not mentioned in the press notices, which emphasized his Guido, Raphael, and Salvator Rosa and offered $5,000 to anyone who could assemble a better exhibition of old masters.13 All the Wall Street presses approved: The Commercial Advertiser praised Clark’s expenditure of great patience, ingenuity, and funds to acquire such choice and valuable masterpieces; the Express recognized the style of all the old masters so plainly as to repudiate all idea of deception; the Mirror counted undoubted originals amid excellent copies; the American, in a review written by W, a man of leisure, said the paintings bore the stamp of genius; and the Evening Star bestowed near-weekly puffs, saying that “never was an exhibition more worthy.”14 The Herald naturally called Clarke’s “Imposture” a mock auction shop, comparing it to the shops on working- class Chatham Street that sold (fake) gold watches to those usually described as newcomers to the city. Clarke passed his miserable trash as gems on the equally rustic “fashionable innocents of New York.” Bennett went through the collection picture by picture, trashing them as wretched, contemptible foreign daubs, impudent forgeries beneath criticism, and miserable copies that though priced at $10,000 would sell at Levy’s for sixteen. Indeed, demonstrating that Bennett’s rancor was aimed as much at his rivals’ collusion as at art fraud, the Herald the next month praised a rather similar Levy collection of old masters (Rubens, Velasquez, Murillo, etc.), which included several pictures formerly owned by Paff and a beautiful and presumably more authentic, as it was copied from the work of a contemporary artist and favorite of Bennett’s, landscape “in the style of young Bleecker’s.”15 Clarke and his allies, like the letter writer Verax, who called himself a lover of the Fine Arts who could truthfully judge them, paid for statements (what were called “cards”), accusing Bennett of malice and envy.16 Bennett mocked that practice, too. The sixpenny press, including the Evening Post, which had the best reputation for art coverage of all the papers, frequently

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published thinly disguised tributes to commercial exhibitions, whether of single paintings, single-artist shows, or private collections. These were written by “lovers of the fine arts” like Verax, probably for pay. Bennett accordingly described receiving a letter from “Jude,” who called himself a “frind of merit and the finer arts” and told Bennett “you be not good cretic.” Bennett via Jude satirizes the pretensions or poses of Verax and his fellow promoters but also mocks the wealthy of New York, the presumed buyers at old-master auctions, as similarly “innocent” of education. Perhaps as pointedly, Bennett observed that unlike Levy, Clarke doesn’t advertise with him. That may have resolved the issue. By 1844 Clarke was advertising in the Herald, and it was politely noticing Clarke’s auctions, even though his promotional practices had undergone no reform. The sixpenny Courier and Enquirer and its letter writers were still emphatically proclaiming that eminent connoisseurs had not the least doubt that most of Clarke’s paintings were originals to be appreciated by those who could recognize masterpieces of the divine art.17 Bennett was often accused by other editors of this sort of blackmail, in which a payment to the editor supposedly changed the paper’s coverage. Bennett’s blackmail consisted more of expecting authors, publishers, entertainers, and amusements to pay for an advertisement if they wanted an editorial notice. Bennett, however, often singled out the inflated language of auction endorsements in which the editor, despite not having seen the paintings, praised rare splendid old paintings, undoubted originals, best judges, eminent artists, etc., as an imposture typical of the Wall Street papers’ false values and untrustworthy or interested judgments. Perhaps as a response, criticism of the auction trade in old masters shifted from lampooning gullible buyers of questionable (artistic or printed) goods to whether the flood of copies was good for American art. The Whig Express in 1846 revised Aldrich’s account of awakening from a reverie on the old masters to find himself at a New York City auction, to make just this point.18 The author begins with a familiar condemnation of the taste of the newly rich, saying that auctions in Gotham (the name “Gotham” implying foolishness) are ridiculous spectacles designed to vindicate the pretensions of our millionaires to vertu by bidding twenty dollars for a fine original and a hundred for a copy of a copy. A French middleman tells the author that he sold a fine old master (in this account, an original) for nearly nothing, while a new painting he did himself (presumably as a fake old master) sold for ten times as much. Now he does not even try to import good art; he just paints as much as possible himself. The problem, then, is not with connoisseurship or bad copies but with a lack of interest in the style of

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actual old masters. The Express author was mortified by the judgment of his countrymen, who filled splendid dwellings with daubs and whose cabinets and galleries glittered with paste rather than gems. But his account keeps slipping between the authentic old master and the modern copy and between the authentic old master and contemporary art. He agrees with the Frenchman that American merchant princes cannot distinguish the chastity of real art, the old masters, from the meretricious blaze of bright colors under varnish, the style of contemporary art. The inability of patrons to distinguish between copies and originals is not the issue (it would be acceptable if they bought faithful copies); their preference for contemporary art, revealed by their purchase of unfaithful modern forgeries, is the problem. When the writer dreams that the great museums of Europe—the Louvre, the Uffizi—are brought amid the throngs on Broadway, he hears New Yorkers comment on the masterpieces: Such stale things satisfy the dotage of the rickety Old World, said one who was distinguished for his lavish patronage of modern art, but ten to one these Raphaels and Correggios are spurious. I would rather have one painting I know is an original than all these musty relics. Another savant says no, these pictures have an authentic pedigree, but their day is over, and the only way to enjoy them is to have them copied in bright tints. The two agree: Such dark, dismal things belong to the misty past. Frenchmen and Italians were born and bred among ruins and may cling to them, but give us pictures that are luminous and new. A third middle-aged patron of the arts encourages his friends to attend with him instead an exhibition of what he calls Young America at Gotham’s Temple of the Muses. The dreamer, the critic from the Express, then wakes to find himself back at the auction, where the “hero of the hammer” is dilating on a Madonna still moist from the easel, which is proclaimed handsomer than the original and sells for $3,000 dollars to Mr. Greenhorn. If the pope offered the Vatican’s greatest treasure to Mr. Greenhorn for free, the Express bitterly concludes, it would be refused; he would point to his copy and announce that this is the style for Young America, and with a dose of anti-Catholicism adding that the pope, Raphael, and his rubbish can moulder together in the ruins and sepulchered superannuations of Pompeii. There are numerous points of interest in this account. First, the critic is not very upset about the auctioneers fraudulently selling sham old masters, though he mocks them as “heroes.” What bothers him most is that so many wealthy buyers prefer what he tellingly calls the style of Young America. This epithet had various and changing meanings, but the basic

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implication was an American equivalent of the Italian republican revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy or Daniel O’Connell’s Young Ireland.19 Advocates of Young America objected to what were termed “old fogies,” whether Whig or Democrat, who looked to the past and acted as an aristocratic block to egalitarian political and social change. Young America, whether in its nativist, workingmen, or literary/artistic formation, typically supported American intervention on behalf of foreign democratic revolutions (as for example in Hungary, Italy, or Ireland), expansion of US democracy and its yeoman farmer into new territories (especially Mexico, Cuba, and South America), land reform (measures designed to distribute public lands to the poor), cheap literature like penny papers that distributed knowledge broadly, and “progress” or reform, which in practice meant focusing less on causes like abolition or temperance than on measures that affected white urban men, such as trade or industrial unions, free public schools, and ending the death penalty. This endorsement of progress tied Young America to the idea of “fast” young men, as speed was seen as especially American, thanks to the telegraph and other mechanical inventions that had “sped up” the age. Like fast young men, “Young America” was an adjective also associated with sporting men and their racy lifestyle. As Abraham Lincoln said: “We have all heard of Young America. He is the most current youth of the age. . . . Is he not the inventor and owner of the present, and sole hope of the future? If there be any thing old which he can endure, it is only old whiskey and old tobacco.” With some exceptions, notably Horace Greeley’s penny Tribune, which often articulated similar reforms, Young America was understood—as witnessed by Lincoln’s mockery—to fall mostly in the Democratic camp.20 These styles, then, that the Express hated—the bright, the new, with their moist signs of the present—were the styles of democratic Young America. The Express had started in 1836 as a Wall Street subscription paper, but in 1843 dropped its price to two cents, picked up some Herald reporters, and, especially in its evening edition, became lively and combative, as befit a paper sold on the streets and ferries. It was edited by a trio of New Englanders: a merchant, a college-educated lawyer who became a Whig congressman, and his brother, a printer and artisan, whose letters from Europe and Washington show considerable interest in the arts. Penny-a-liner James F. Otis was hired as a drama, music, and sometimes art critic by the end of 1843 and would remain attached to the paper until the mid-1850s.21 The nativism of the editors eventually pushed the paper toward the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings, and their fear of abolitionism

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kept them apart from the Republicans. But in 1846, when they published the nightmare about Young America art, as a staunch Whig penny paper, the Express was faced with the seeming triumph of Democratic forces. The Democrat James Polk had defeated Henry Clay for the presidency and was pursuing the annexation of Texas and war with Mexico. John O’Sullivan, a leader of Democratic and literary Young America (and coiner of the term “manifest destiny”), had started a new penny daily, the New York Morning News. The Democratic editors Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews (the latter would later join the Know-Nothings) had started a literary journal, Arcturus, and Mathews spoke on Young America at New York University.22 The Workingmen’s Party radical George Evans had begun publishing Young America, an organ of the National (Land) Reform Association. Mike Walsh, like Evans a free-soil Democrat, declared his own paper the Subterranean the only true Young America paper, though nativist papers like the True American, American Republican, and even the Herald (for whom Walsh would also write) claimed that distinction too. The Express complained, with justification, that in 1845 even the stoutly Whig Tribune was in league not only with Young America (Emerson had first popularized the term, and the Tribune editors were almost all involved with transcendentalism) but also with the National Reformers, the locofocos (Democrats favoring a radical egalitarianism), and the Empire Club, a militant branch of the Democrats.23 The Express writer on old-master auctions, then, when he looked wistfully to European palace museums, looked to them as a brake and alternative to Young America in what he sneeringly called Gotham’s Temple of the (too-modern) Muses. This was a jab at the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, which had opened in late 1844.24 It contained the collection of the self-made dry-goods merchant Luman Reed. Reed had bought contemporary art from almost all the founding artists and officers of the National Academy, though the centerpiece of the collection was Thomas Cole’s famous Course of Empire series, an allegory of civilization’s rise and fall. Typically though, Whig sixpennies told “cognoscenti” that Reed’s finest and most beautiful works had been purchased in Europe at immense cost: his copies of old masters. After Reed’s death, a group of fifty merchants, plus the Academy officer T. S. Cummings, a miniaturist, and the genre painter Francis Edmonds (whose style, like William S. Mount’s, was often linked to the “low Dutch” school), raised $13,000 to buy the entire collection. They chartered a corporation to exhibit it for twenty-five cents (a dollar for a lifetime membership). They hoped to turn Reed’s collection into the nucleus of a civic museum, a campaign that inevitably triggered competing movements to persuade the city

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Figure 3.1. Copy of The Assumption of the Virgin, after Francesco Albani, c. 1775–1825, oil on canvas, 18¾ × 24¾ inches, collection of Luman Reed, gift of the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society. Public domain; image provided by New-York Historical Society.

(or the nation) to buy a collection of old masters instead.25 The New-York Gallery of Fine Arts compromised: Exhibited along with the work by contemporary American artists were Reed’s copies after old masters, in the vivid style attacked by the Express (fig. 3.1). The Gallery continued to accumulate copies, especially ones by Knickerbocker artists: Asher Durand gave his copies of a Titian and a Gilbert Stuart, and Cummings contributed copies of Inman paintings. J. K. Fisher sold his copies of European art to the Gallery while penning letters to the Literary World (then edited by Duyckinck and Mathews) urging the American Art- Union, where Duyckinck was a manager, to award copies of old masters like his to members as prizes, as more likely than contemporary originals to improve art and taste. Or as the Mirror put it, they would correct public taste by directing it away from flashy effects, violent contrasts, and intensely bright colors.26 The editor of the Albion, William Young, embraced the plan: Contemporary art galleries should encourage artists to study the “mighty masters of bygone days who can’t be excelled or equalled.” Young proposed that artists copy masters who resembled their

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own style, so the summer-landscape painter Durand would do Poussin, comic Mount would do Teniers, and Henry P. Gray Correggio. He concluded that such copies would make a better National Gallery for the country than the originals by the same artists that hung in the Gallery of Fine Arts and the Art- Union.27 Christopher P. Cranch, a friend of Duyckinck and a transcendentalist with twenty- two original landscapes at the ArtUnion, offered a Young America riposte when in 1850 he hung a “dusty, snuffy looking painting” in front of his Broadway studio as a sign and wrote “Old Masters done to Order.”28 Old masters were the real commodities. The Albion scheme was not so far from the aims of the Express’s satire: Old masters that had been faked to appeal to modern taste would be replaced by faithful outright copies, which would in turn correct the overly ebullient style of living American artists. For Young, this copying had the additional advantage of stopping Young America (or Young Ireland) from perpetually harping on nationalist subjects and would furthermore block the influence of the penny papers on artists. Under his editorial predecessor, the Albion had called the modern press a monstrous, intangible hydra, a tyrant and whirlwind that roused men’s angry passions at its will.29 Young, who had “good family connections,” modified this stalwart conservatism. He believed the middle class might progress toward enfranchisement but that artisans would not, because they think they are kept down by others, when it is really their tendency to band together as in trades unions that keeps them stagnating. Nor did he wish progress to move quickly; Young asked for deliverance from painters who worked too rapidly and spontaneously, from “fast” men in literature, science, the ministry, politics, and philosophy, and from critics who employ a satiric “cut and thrust style.” Such men may be products of the age, like the penny press, steamboat, railroad, and telegraph, but they err in being too willing to annihilate the past.30 As a sidenote, the connection between modern technologies and modern art was embraced by photographers. A Mathew Brady ad for his photographic gallery in the cheap Sunday Dispatch carried the headline “Modern Art: We are so progressive in our feelings and intentions that we desire not to follow in art matters at least, the ‘Old Masters.’ We care very little about the petty quarrels of the Vandyke, Raphael and pre-Raphael schools of painting. . . . Above the past we prefer the present.” In a Young America version of the art-auction sketch, an author in the Photographic Art Journal dreamed he was at an old- master auction. A minister in the finest black broadcloth lit a cigar, and the fire caught the varnish of the cheap paintings.31 As the bright light of the fire burned up all the imported

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European old masters, public taste improved. The writer concluded that it is a falsely moralized taste (wealthy, smoking preachers) that prefers old masters to the actual, “spirited,” original pictures of modern artists. Naturally, the Herald, which embraced the age, concurred. Old masters were “connoisseur pictures,” identifiable as such by the presence of “two or three old codgers” discussing the merits of an “assemblage of bushelheaded, brutal- looking figures, blasphemously called a ‘Holy Family.’” Recapitulating the themes that old masters are for the old and the aristocratic, and, as manufactured commodities, are crafted by capitalism not artisans, the Herald added that such pictures are imported from French government mills where boys are made to copy the works of celebrated artists; shrewd Yankees are the only ones who buy them. Their unfortunate impact on American artists is apparent in the writer crying shame on all those who imitate, especially acclaimed predecessors like Inman (who he says barbarously enveloped a family in a dirty cloud of smoke, implying an old master–ish tone to his painting) and Cole, instead of stepping boldly forward into the paths of nature. These artists themselves were imitators: Landscape has been be- yellowed by Cole, who was himself befouled by Turner and Martin. The writer hoped for their purification; only feebleness follows the manner of others.32 Despite the Express’s hostility, the New- York Gallery of Fine Arts, which advertised widely, had been greeted with widespread approval in 1844 when it debuted (fig. 3.2). The Gallery’s initial rooms in the Society Library on Broadway were lent by the National Academy. Its fifty Trustees, all “most influential citizens,” seemed uncontroversial. Eleven of them would also be involved in the Art-Union. The Herald, which published lengthy stories on the gallery, was supportive of the Gallery’s “liberal principles,” language that, like the promotional engraving it published of the gallery, suggests the paper was reprinting a press release. In the engraving, however, Cole’s Course of Empire series, the main attraction of the gallery, is impossible to see, and the relatively sparse viewers are a bad omen. The Gallery’s mostly static exhibition, with an admission charge associated with spectacular temporary shows, meant it struggled to survive. The Herald would later add that while much was said about the role of this temple of the arts in forming and nurturing the taste of the citizens, its admission charge and location meant that no one but its managers went. When the Gallery asked the city to donate a more convenient building near City Hall for permanent rooms, the trustees emphasized that the Gallery served the public interest, as a school for the young. Actual schools would be admitted on Saturdays for free. But Mayor James Harper, of

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Figure 3.2. “New York Gallery of Fine Arts,” Herald, December 15, 1844, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

the Harper publishing family, whose portrait by Inman cost the City Council five hundred dollars, vetoed the plan.33 The Gallery’s association with Young America had entangled it in religious politics. Harper, from an artisan background, was the mayoral candidate of the nativist American Republican Party. According to Bennett, who thereby neatly blamed antiCatholicism on Catholics, that party’s origins were in New York bishop John Hughes’s political activism. In an 1841 speech, Hughes had endorsed candidates who supported using public funds for parochial schools, on the grounds that the public schools taught from the Protestant Bible. The next election demonstrated the power of Catholic swing voters. Governor Seward, a Whig, hoping to pull the Catholic vote (and perhaps the Jewish) from the Democrats, signed a law allowing wards to control local schools and barring sectarian doctrine. The Protestant backlash, which led to the American Republican Party, was immediate. Seward and Hughes were accused of violating separation of church and state and of trying to prevent the Bible from being read in schools; Hughes’s house was stoned. Even the Unitarian Evening Post

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joined the forces against Hughes, and the American Republican Party gathered political strength. As a third- party candidate in New York, it was useful that Mayor James Harper’s brother Fletcher, the founder of Harper’s Weekly, was a Democrat whereas his other brothers in the firm were Whigs. Harper’s had also published Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures, a fraudulent anti- Catholic narrative endorsed by the Whig Commercial Advertiser. Democratic papers who lent Harper support may have cynically recognized that his candidacy weakened Seward and the Whigs far more than the Democrats. Undoubtedly perceiving this, the profoundly anti-Seward Herald coopted the term “Young America” for the American Republican Party. Doing so pointed out that they were not just opposed to a sectarian party of foreigners (Hughes’s Irish Catholics) but determined to “sweep away a rotten, corrupt, bankrupt society,” essentially the aristocratic, Protestant, native cliques targeted by the penny press. A Catholic who had married into an Irish family, Bennett emphasized that the new party was not antiCatholic per se, just opposed to the pulpit injecting religion into politics, a common position for the Democratic and Sunday press then and again later during evangelical- led abolitionist campaigns. Bennett predicted the new party’s victory would bring a “revolution in morals and manners,” thanks to the rise of the respectable mechanics, artisans, and storekeepers in the party, whose moral worth and patriotism was far superior to fashionable (Whig and Democratic) society on Broadway. Indeed, aligning the party with artisanal demands for public education, the American Republican alderman and hotelier (his hotel was named the American, naturally) William B. Cozzens had joined the Democrats on the City Council in supporting the New-York Gallery of Fine Art.34 Harper’s veto, for that matter, may have reflected concern about what sort of art school would be publicly funded. The Express in supporting Mayor Harper and in labeling Gotham’s flashy taste—enshrined in an institution like the Gallery of Fine Arts, which seemed close to a public museum—as that of Democratic Young America may have been trying to diminish the appeal to Whigs of the Herald’s more artisanal and egalitarian version of the party.35 The Herald indeed positioned the third party as above partisan conflicts, like the penny press itself. Bennett envisioned Young America rising above the mists of prejudice and passion, like the Catskill Mountain House on a bright morning in May. This was not a random metaphor. Valorizing Thomas Cole’s paintings of the American wilderness, rather than his allegories, which anchored the Gallery of Fine Arts, became a kind of touchstone for Whiggish Young America. Doing

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so positioned the critic as favoring native artists and the American future, rather than old masters and the European past. Charles Briggs, for example, joined the Herald in approving Harper’s veto, on the egalitarian grounds that if the Gallery were really to serve the public, admission ought to be free. Briggs argued that art makes the viewer feel its beauty, which is why it can benefit the uneducated (presumably those who could not afford the Gallery’s admission) as well as the connoisseur. Cole’s allegorical landscapes on view at the Gallery, what Briggs in the Broadway Journal called his sermons in green paint, fail to impress the heart the way his more direct View on the Catskills does.36 Briggs’s friends at the Evening Mirror agreed, accusing Cole of being soulless in the allegories, and described his newer religious landscape, Elijah, as having the melancholy deficiency of being cold throughout, as if Cole were incapable of feeling the glory of Scripture (or the warmth of Young America). The Aristidean, a weekly edited by a former Evening Mirror writer followed a similar line in its review. It dismissed the copies of old masters and thought Cole’s Course of Empire series lacked reality and nature.37 For these Whigs, it was Cole’s realist and not his religious paintings—in their sublimity— that bespoke the desired Young America cultural nationalism. For those hostile to Young America and fond of European hierarchy and old masters, his paintings were dazzling, and exaggerated, or coldly artificial. The corollary to this embrace of Cole’s American landscapes and rejection of his more poetic narratives was the rejection of the European models that supposedly underlaid only the latter. For Briggs, copies of old masters, with their decayed Old World sentiments, should be excluded from the Gallery of Fine Arts. The country is “so belittled by imitation and copyism” that it needs self-dependence in this as in other things, and it is better to buy from American artists than to disfigure the walls with daubs, that is, copies of old masters.38 Copying from the Old World was the antithesis of progress for critics who adopted Young America’s language. By contrast, the Englishman Henry Cood Watson, who wrote for both Briggs’s paper and the Albion and dismissed flippant and idle newspaper writers who pretended knowledge of the arts, was sympathetic to Cole’s imaginative allegories in the Gallery as “poetical in the highest degree.”39 When Briggs urged artists at the National Academy to stop painting lakes of polished steel (the implication is such lakes are taken from steel engravings after European artists, not nature) and instead take the ferry to Staten Island to watch the ever-varying form of the water until they too are imbued with living, palpable ideas of motion, he was speaking the language of Young America. In backing the tender feeling in the amateur

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J. R. Bleecker’s landscape over the stagnant pool in an Academy officer’s, Briggs is not endorsing the detested Herald but occupying the same position backing the young and unconventional. He was still voicing a version of Young America when he praised the many portraits at the National Academy exhibition as examples of the nineteenth century painting its own history. Instead of historical masquerade pictures set in Greece, England, or Spain or paintings of religious subjects and allegories, Briggs wanted living men and women, like those in Mount’s or Edmonds’s pictures of rustic American life.40 Writing in the New World, he singled out for criticism Sybil, a painting by the college-educated Daniel Huntington, perhaps because it had been purchased by the New- York Gallery of Fine Arts. Briggs emphasized its unnaturalness, due to it having been turned into a speculative commodity like the fake old masters at auctions: Its breasts of cotton bales, purple hands, green neck, and impossible eyes are illumined not by the sun but by the light of painted windows.41 As an advocate of Young America—he had already been accused of belonging to “the great onward party of the present day”—when Briggs was tough on the New- York Gallery of Fine Arts, it was for reasons opposite those of the Express. For him, the Gallery’s collection was too tied to the supposedly glorious old masters. Artists who went to Europe to copy were infantilized, “cradled in the Vatican,” and their work turned into lumber: unrefined commodities again, like Huntington’s bales of cotton.42 The Sun too argued that in the present age, “sacred and profane” history and myth were unavailable to American artists, whose modern art transcended the “so-called” masters anyway.43 At the core of the Native American movement was hostility toward Irish immigrants, but as the earlier attacks on Bishop Hughes indicated, it expressed itself quite often through anti-Catholicism.44 So when the Express and other papers condemned fake old masters, the examples they used were often subjects—Madonnas and saints—associated with the Catholic Church’s Renaissance and Baroque patronage. The Freeman’s Journal, Bishop Hughes’s organ, makes this explicit. In “Paintings of Old Masters,” its critic, describing him- or herself as not a European connoisseur but an unpracticed American eye, declared that the paintings of Madonnas and infant Jesuses in the exhibition were genuine, or at least good copies, with landscapes that gave nature a solemn, cathedral-like tone. The critic then contrasted this to Cole’s paintings, which had recently been exhibited to benefit his family. By contrast, the critic claims, here is modern Protestant art, where all is fresh and brilliant, exaggerated, and almost fantastic. Though dazzling to the multitude, for one who seeks religious inspiration,

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Cole’s gorgeous and daring brilliance is destitute of repose and sanctity, as is typical of Protestant endeavor.45 The critic signed the article with a star, which might have reminded readers of Margaret Fuller, who had made that signature famous in her reporting for the Young America Tribune, where she advocated for the liberation of republican Italy from a Catholic state; the noted Protestant minister Henry Ward Beecher would also adopt the signature. Nativism and support of Young Italy and similar revolutions against church and state were linked. Contemporary art’s gorgeousness, then, for the Freeman’s Journal, was at the Protestant, Young America center of the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, with its modern old masters, just as it was for the Express. The antiCatholic Commercial Advertiser, in a review of the New- York Gallery, described Cole’s sublime conceptions as a glorious triumph, teaching a lesson Americans should heed for all time.46 Bryant’s Unitarian Evening Post, another Cole and Gallery backer, was solidly Protestant too: It didn’t really object to Sunday bans on alcohol and other religious restrictions on civic life, it complained when Bishop Hughes lectured on the decline of Protestantism, and it was a key booster for the German nationalist Karl Lessing’s Protestant Martyrdom of Huss when it was shown in the city (fig. 5.5). The Evening Post, like the Tribune, supported the European republican revolutions of 1848, a stance that often explicitly criticized the Catholic Church for backing repressive regimes. The Freeman’s Journal, as the voice of the church, condemned all these supporters of the Italian Risorgimento and defended Pope Pius IX’s reactionary policies. Whigs worried about Native Americans and Young Americans could join forces with Catholics in admiring the old masters’ ability to inspire regard for tradition. Religious bigotry was a real problem for Democratic adherents of Young America. When the landscape painter George Inness was arrested in Rome for refusing to take off his hat to the pope, the Democratic ambassador promptly rescued him. The Herald applauded the ambassador but not the artist.47 Tolerance was necessary both for keeping Irish and German voters and for expanding the United States to former Spanish colonies. Many of the editors and artists involved with Young America were Odd Fellows (Bishop Hughes had condemned the Odd Fellows, urging Catholics not to join), and this newer secret society (nativists started several secret societies of their own, including the Know-Nothings) taught the equality of religions, though it did not admit black men. When the Sunday Dispatch, edited by the Odd Fellow and future Republican alderman Amor (an Old Testament name) Williamson and the Associationist William Burns, ran a

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series on religions of the world, it described Swedenborgianism, Mormonism, and Hinduism as equally plausible as Christianity. When the Dispatch editors announced that they were “radical in the extremest degree,” it was, among other things, a Young America claim to a secular civil society. And when Young America critics reproved artists for tackling religious subjects because religion was not part of the spirit of the age, they often were advocating for religious tolerance. An editor for the Jewish Asmonean imagined the revolutionary art that would be shown at the New York World’s Fair of 1905: A Chinese scientist’s comparison of Judaism and Christianity would exhibit “the picturesque scenery of old, obstinately defended errors,” paintings by famous German Protestant artists like Karl F. Lessing of the “Last Judgement of the Missionaries Who Tried to Convert the Jews” (with crowds of triumphing Jews), the Burning of the English House of Lords (which had prevented the Jewish banker Rothschild from taking a seat in Parliament on religious grounds), Czar Nicholas on the Ruins of Russia, and the pope on the ruins of Romanism (the Vatican had recently reinforced the Jewish ghetto in Rome). The editor, making it clear that religious tolerance was allied with a critique of abolitionists, also imagined a remake of the famous antislavery sculpture of the Greek Slave. The catalog description of “Hiram Powers’ Slave of the English High Church” would be furnished by the antislavery writer Harriet Beecher Stowe.48 Young America accordingly took issue with Daniel Huntington overdoing Protestant propaganda: His picture of the Death of Lady Jane Grey confirmed that he had been forsaking nature; the Tribune agreed that these compositions about Protestant martyrs told no story worth telling nor had depth of feeling. The Dispatch went further, saying that Huntington lacked originality and energy in conception and treatment and that his coloring was feeble. The flesh of his women reminded them of boarding-school girls posing as the Madonna in tableaux. It is a craven and emasculated taste, the critic continued, that selects subjects like Lady Jane Gray and other fat, fair-faced feminines of British royalty.49 Huntington’s picture actually makes the Catholic queen Mary sympathetic: Surrounded by Renaissance images of merciful Madonnas, her own cross prominent, she hesitates to sign Jane’s death warrant (fig. 3.3). The cruel and worldly Spanish ambassador, who is in turn reflected in the richly elaborated portraits of male rulers on the walls, insists. Nevertheless, the Catholic friars are conspiratorial, as they were in Huntington’s other pictures of the Protestant heroine. William Young loved the look of Huntington’s friars precisely because they were “repulsive to the last degree.” The American

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Figure 3.3. Charles Burt, after Daniel Huntington, The Signing of the Death Warrant of Lady Jane Grey, 1848, engraving for the American Art-Union, 17¼ × 21¾ inches, bequest of Leonard Hastings, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Public domain; image provided by the Smithsonian.

Art-Union, which purchased Cole’s Christian allegorical series Voyage of Life and Huntington’s Lady Jane Grey and gave both artists $500 commissions, seems to have—in anticlerical Young America fashion—tried to show both sides as guilty of prejudice.50 The Freeman’s Journal clarified what was at stake for Young America— keeping “progress” unsectarian—in response to Huntington’s solo exhibit at the Art-Union in 1850. Bryant had led the call of the “gentlemen” requesting Huntington to organize the exhibit. When it opened, the Post published an “accomplished” correspondent’s review that rejected critics loyal to “blackened” old masters, who therefore demand clinical accuracy and propriety. If the Dispatch et al. called his Protestant pictures pallid and uninspired, this friend says no, Huntington sacrifices Form for impetuous vivacity, heart, and fancy. His is a buoyant and soaring American Art that expresses itself in the pure and high spirit of scenes from John Bunyan’s Protestant narrative Pilgrim’s Progress.51 It’s no accident that this Young

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America language in the Evening Post had also been the Freeman’s Journal’s description of modern Protestant art. Nor did the Freeman’s Journal quibble with Huntington’s spiritual subjects or lack of realism, something that could, after all, be said about Renaissance art too. As the spirit of the present age was a malignant one, they observed, realism was unnecessary in art.52 The Freeman’s Journal even agreed that Mercy’s Dream was his best, but for the Journal, like all illustrations of Bunyan, its subject was superstitious, unreal pietism, and anti-Catholic to boot. Citing Huntington’s catalogue, where he acknowledged that recent events like the revolution in Italy had motivated him to challenge “insidious” theories of church infallibility and priestly prerogative, the Freeman’s Journal pointed out that he had caricatured the priesthood, making his monks villainous—or as they suggested, resembling Puritans. For the Freeman’s Journal, it was not the pope but the Pilgrims who were the enemy of religious and individual liberties. Indeed, the multitude of Pilgrim subjects during this period, including the Knickerbocker artist Robert Weir’s twenty-thousand-dollar picture for the Capitol in Washington, speaks to not just New England’s cultural influence but to nativist emphasis on the Protestant origins of the nation. Presenting the Pilgrims as nobly sacrificing to obtain religious freedom, as Weir and most artists did, identified them with liberty of conscience. The Puritan reputation for religious intolerance, however, made them questionable symbols of liberty not only for Catholics but for Young America. The Dispatch described New York’s Church of the Puritans as an aristocratic gewgaw palace that contrasted in an un-Christian manner with the miserable cellars and garrets around it.53 Like the scorn the Dispatch heaped on the green and yellow embellishments that painters took from old masters, religion’s imitation of European artifice and luxury made it unrepublican, if not in this case un-Puritan. Huntington’s idealized females, when they depicted what seemed to be universal (or Protestant) ideals of liberty, like Italy embracing change, might be approved by Young America papers, but the turn to conventional aesthetic models equally risked draining American art of native vigor, rendering it unrepublican or un-Democratic. A letter to the Dispatch accordingly blamed the collectors of old masters for the lack of national progress among American artists—the artists’ failure to evolve from Europe, as men had evolved from monkeys. The writer, as his example of this meretricious influence, pointed to Gideon Nye. Nye, a China trader from New England, had proposed that his Gallery of Old Masters, exhibited in the National Academy rooms and endorsed by Academy stalwarts like Durand, be purchased as the nucleus for

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a public gallery. The Dispatch writer observed that Nye and the patrons of such a museum would receive financial and press recognition of their public spirit. And the money for purchasing this art would go to the rich for inferior art (old- master copies), rather than to American artists. Another correspondent, naming himself “Young America,” corroborated that Moses Grinnell, one of the financial backers of the purchase of Nye’s collection (and a manager of the American Art-Union), was an old fogy who had been involved in corrupt city politics since the 1830s voter scandals.54 Of course promoting his collection as valuable enough to form a public museum was itself a maneuver to increase its price. Nye’s 1849 auction catalog naturally claimed it was with a purely public-spirited motive that he offered the collection to New York. It further suggested that it be installed in the Astor Place Opera House, a neighborhood where it would be surrounded by millions of dollars of wealth.55 That last suggestion seems particularly telling, as a few months later the same theater became the scene of infamous anti-English, anti-Whig, and antiaristocratic riots; Nye’s gallery was imbrued with all of those elements. Nye’s auctioneer was fellow New Englander Simeon Draper, a prominent antislavery Whig and friend of Nye’s backer, Grinnell. Nye’s collection was advertised as having been gathered with the assistance of an accomplished English connoisseur, and the catalog opened with quotes from British critics, to the effect that without the fixed authority of the old masters (or the residents of Astor Place, perhaps), art would be swept away by such unfortunate modern elements as novelty, fashion, and faction. The catalog cited the Courier and Enquirer to show that scorn of old masters is from the ignorant, a term that evokes the uneducated masses and newspaper critics and, hedging its bets, that good copies are worthwhile. The Whig press rallied with reassuring quotes about the authenticity and value of the collection. The Evening Mirror was happy to have Nye’s Gallery in the National Academy’s rooms, next to the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, as a (free) people’s gallery and school for young artists; the newspaper was clear, though, that in fifty years the American originals next door would sell for fifty times as much. Richard Storrs Willis, brother of Nathaniel P. Willis (who had married into the Grinnell family), went further in his Musical Times, endorsing this genuine collection as necessary to turn young artists away from quixotic experiments in art that lead to mental confusion, wild theorizing, and flashy, glaring abortions that only please the uninitiated. The Dispatch, by contrast, used Nye as a reminder of the humbug of old masters, observing that America’s snob aristocracy deserves to be fleeced for running after faded glory in his Gallery, when

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they won’t encourage native art at home.56 This sentiment may have been underscored by the news that the American Art-Union in 1849 paid the enormous sum of $2,000 for Wages of War, a painting by Nye’s assistant, the American artist Henry P. Gray, a student of Huntington (fig. 4.3). Though this last seems to be an example of encouraging native and original art, Gray was often blamed or praised, depending on the paper, for his imitation of Titian, Correggio, and other old masters. The Evening Mirror said of a Gray picture (Greek Lovers) for the Art-Union’s manager Abraham Cozzens that they wished he would paint more from himself and less from the unnatural pictures of the old masters. Worship of the old masters was a humbug, and the day will come when the Louvre will be considered a mere collection of damaged curiosities. As this Young America stance suggests, and the Dispatch jibed, the Evening Mirror was “out and out Whig” in the sense that it went for free trade and the war with Mexico, traditional Democratic positions.57 So too an Evening Mirror correspondent echoed the Herald in warning that idolatry of old masters harms the “progress” of contemporary art and that the taste for allegorical subjects and church paintings—the flood of Madonnas—is so much poison. Even excellent copies are not natural, and the American school, to be successful, must copy only American nature.58 But the American Whig Review hailed Gray as one who had left the modern school for the old masters’ quiet delicacy and whose effect on younger artists in the American school was wonderful.59 The Dispatch itself had offered mild support of the revival of the “meritorious” New-York Gallery in 1847, contrasting it with both the National Academy’s swindling exhibitions (the editors recommend an exhibition of what the Academy rejected) and the American Art-Union, where every man in it was subject to indictment.60 That last bit of sarcasm was aimed at the idea that the Art-Union was a rich man’s lottery, in a time when Whig and nativist mayors inaugurated their terms by cracking down on poor people’s small- time lotteries and gambling. The Whig and nativist mayor Aaron Clark, painted by two Academy artists with public funds, was shown in a portrait that the “scurrilous” Truth-Teller, a Democratic Irish Catholic weekly, described as picturing Clark, who profited from the sale of lottery tickets, with his hand on the official documents proposing that armed police subdue Wild Strangers (Irish) and Foreigners. The TruthTeller snidely recommended the artist arrange the details in better keeping with the truth, by showing the mayor balancing on a lottery wheel while directing a brutal crew of police to carry out barbarous abuses against the people.61 The nominally Whig Dispatch carried ads for the Peoples’ Art

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Union, where a lottery ticket cost only fifty cents (versus the American Art- Union’s five dollars) and where there are no blanks.62 The American Art-Union’s free gallery may have fit Young America’s goal of bringing art to the people, but its organization, with wealthy patrons attending lotteries and buying expensive old master–ish pictures, as at auctions of collections like Nye’s, made it suspect. When Bryant left the American Art- Union presidency in 1846, he took with him some of the mainstays of the Gallery of Fine Arts. The new president, the Democrat Prosper Wetmore, brought in patrons who like Grinnell and himself were associated with expansion westward (railroads, steamships, and so on). These managers reinforced the Young America character of the Art-Union in some respects, but by this point, the meaning of Young America itself had changed. By the early 1850s, the phrase was to some extent relegated to a joking term for actual children, suggesting its loss of coherent political meaning. In a Herald Independence Day cartoon, boys, not soldiers, celebrate, though the flag these representatives of “Young America” wave is emblazoned with the locations of victories in the war with Mexico (fig. 3.4). Young America is trivialized but still

Figure 3.4. “Young America Celebrating the National Anniversary,” Herald (Extra), July 6, 1847, p. 1, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

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associated with territorial expansion, a position few abolitionists embraced. Young America indeed struggled to adapt to the defection of antislavery Whigs and Democrats to the Republican Party. When the Evening Mirror and Herald announced that they would support the Republican candidate, John Fremont, for president in 1856, editor Hiram Fuller explained that only explorer Fremont’s party could accommodate the progressive, independent, free, broad, grand, and go- ahead spirit of Young America. Old Fogyism would shake its Silver Gray (conservative Whig) locks at the Evening Mirror, but Young America would not throw aside principle in its fight for the Union.63 That go-ahead spirit would try, not entirely successfully, to find a home in the Republican Party but would end up, like Fuller and Bennett, with the procompromise Democrats. Walter Whitman, as he was known in the years before Leaves of Grass, was a free-soil Democratic journalist who became a Republican. No nativist, he was, like most of his anticlerical friends in the cheap press, as critical of Bishop John Hughes as he was of Protestant blue laws.64 In his criticism for the Dispatch he used the familiar contrast between the fraudulent old- master art auction and contemporary American art to promote one of his friends, the painter Jesse Talbot, in a way that’s revealing of how former Democrats tried to redefine Young America. In his aggressively titled “American Art = Jesse Talbot,” he started by saying that even the experienced observer is astonished by how the “very respectable and well to do” are deceived by politicians, books, actors, wines, patent medicines, and exhibitions and sales of paintings. He recommends it as a “great treat” to watch (but not buy at) a Broadway picture auction. Unlike Whig auction critics, though, Whitman says Americans have no worse judgment than anyone else; only after the best artists are six feet under does anyone agree on who they are. Having established why the living Talbot wasn’t more widely known, Whitman connects him to a lineage of American old masters who specialize in religious, allegorical, and European art: Washington Allston, Benjamin West, Cole, and Huntington. Whitman nonetheless advocated for Talbot in the language of Young America: His landscapes are rich, his light intense, and his Nature exuberant, warm, full of glowing blood, throwing out her vitality in manifold forms, but never overdone or garish, because he has studied Nature, not copies of copies in European galleries.65 Since his first appearances at New York exhibitions, Talbot had been accused of copying not Nature but Thomas Cole. Paintings whether of American locales like Rockland Lake (1842) or Happy Valley, from Rasselas (1841), an Edenic picture in Cole’s allegorical manner, have similar

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Figure 3.5. Jesse Talbot, Happy Valley, from Rasselas, the Prince Meditating His Escape, 1841, oil on canvas, 48 × 72 inches, private collection. Public domain; image provided by Christie’s/Bridgeman Images.

compositions: distant prominent mountain, middle-ground lake, youthful man next to a tall foreground tree, with a nearby road or river winding into the background (fig. 3.5). The Herald, in a “cutting criticism” of this picturesque formula, accused Talbot of donning Cole’s spectacles in almost every respect. The Herald liked Talbot, describing him as a gaunt man, with his hand at his mouth, sensitively alive to every expression of opinion about his art but pointing out the beauties in others.66 But they disliked Talbot’s manner of seeing nature “in her night gown, in broad daylight,” casting too many dark shadows across his foregrounds; a dark picture was associated with old masters, versus the brighter palette of the present.67 The American Repertory, a magazine allied with both the Academy and the American Institute, was even more cutting than the Herald about Talbot’s “plagiarism.”68 It accused Talbot in Happy Valley of taking trees from the British painter J. M. W. Turner and other parts from other good masters and then trying to pass off the whole as an original. Whigs who admired the old masters by contrast praised him: The Commercial Advertiser admiringly claimed that Talbot’s poetical feeling and atmosphere rivaled Cole’s. Park Benjamin said of a landscape he owned by Talbot that it had the “fine golden haze” and blue “supernal sky” of “the old Italian masters.”69

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Whitman then, in promoting Talbot, agreed that imitation was debilitating but moved away from the Whiggish Young America position that “copying” American nature was instead the goal. He embraced Cole’s historical and allegorical landscapes, as had the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts and the American Art-Union, as charging nature with American feeling. The Art-Union bought twenty-four of Talbot’s landscapes, including Christian at the Cross, a Bunyan scene that was one of his most praised pictures. Whitman owned a smaller version of it (fig. 3.6).70 Whitman contrasted such pictures to other young artists’ “premeditated deficiency” of fervor and warmth, derived from being “coolly correct.” Their blood only moves by rote; their study of the rules of art prevents them from giving nature life, as Talbot and the portraitist Charles Loring Elliott did, in portraits where the blood in the sitters’ veins jets from the heart, in spasms, the real scarlet, charged, to the full. Like Talbot, Elliott’s (human) nature is hotblooded. The former Sun editor and poet Carlos D. Stuart, who also identified Talbot with an American School of Art, put it more conventionally in a nativist journal: Artists are stopped from greatness and the progress of the human race is slowed because of Academies and Art-standards.71 In

Figure 3.6. Jesse Talbot, Christian at the Cross, 1847, oil on canvas, 39½ × 57 inches, private collection. Public domain; photograph provided by owner.

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embracing Talbot’s luxuriant and fervid (if not real) nature, Young America proponents of a native art tried to open up art to a nature that sent a more stirring message of progress than Whiggish realism permitted. What this might mean is visible in a conservative “hunker” Democratic paper’s mockery of just these aspirations: When a former Tribune writer praised a Talbot picture as “representative of the soul of a landscape,” the Sunday Mercury punned that this sort of “foggy” criticism would be more germane had the critic been operating on a picture of boots.72 The Mercury mocks the mystification of art but, albeit in less spiritual terms, also argued for a less predetermined idea of nature. Young America is republicanism in literature, life, the pulpit, the press, and labor and is the foe of aristocracy and pretension, the cheap weekly observes. It’s not nature, nor are its selections from nature genteelly censored. Young America, unlike the penny Republican Times, with its motto that it only prints what is fit, prints everything, even things shocking and shameful, because newspapers must represent the people.73 The Mercury called the Times’s art critic so wooden, gross, and heavy in his notions of what was fit for art that he ought to confine himself to criticism of (commercial) sign painting. Not restricted to the soul, reluctant to define a ruling idea for others, the penny press and Young America embraced multitudes. The public museum of old masters, not the gallery of contemporary art, was appealing to Whigs as a potential brake on Young America’s dangerous democratic inclusiveness and feeling. The Courier and Enquirer had, as far back as 1835, endorsed the purchase of a private collection of old masters (costing only $60,000) as a noble nucleus for a national museum and as worth the money even if they were copies. Old masters provided a binding law on public opinion that would restore order and value to the market in culture, as earlier Whig journals had imagined licensing art critics. John Armstrong, an editor at the Courier and Enquirer, made the case for this in an 1853 speech, in which he pointed out that reporters who attend a collection of paintings and statuary in the morning are expected to write a highly refined critique the next day, along with a description of the latest steamship and a lecture on women’s rights. The result of such inexpert writing (and exposure to modern technology and political reforms) was chaos in artistic evaluation, and Sigma, writing for the Evening Post, humorously suggested that the Century Club issue certificates of merit on contemporary art, since such newspaper critics couldn’t agree.74 Though the Metropolitan Museum’s collection of donated old masters (Gray’s Wages of War was the first American painting donated) was still in the remote future, gatherings of Republican artists, authors, and patrons at

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the Century Club, founded by Sketch Club members like Bryant, Durand, and Huntington, did act as an unofficial “expert” filter on contemporary art. This reconstituted version of the old Sketch Club chose its members for their artistic achievements, not their wealth, making it an honor to belong, but of course this policy also reinforced its cliquish character, or what one writer called chiefly small artists with great pretensions and small authors with great reputations. Its aristocratic quality, its selectivity, is indicated in Lotsa Nuffin’s description for the Home Journal of the Century’s balls as a royal court, where artists were elevated to the peerage. The Democratic Irish Vindicator and Daily News agreed that the Century was overly fond of genuflecting to crowned heads.75 The clerk who gave the most testimony against the Art-Union in the legislative hearings that helped eliminate the organization had partiality to Century Club artists as one of his accusations against its managers.76 But like the verdict of the Century Club, collections of old masters continued to be promoted as a corrective standard for Young America’s too democratic American art. Not every paper was convinced of the restraining influence of the old masters, however, should the taste for them actually spread to the broader public. When the Democratic-controlled City Council refused to pay a $275 bill submitted by the Ten Governors of the city’s charities (the auctioneer Draper was a longtime governor) for pictures “from the best masters” to decorate the city almshouses, the Whig Weekly Yankee was careful not to disapprove of the principle of making art accessible to the poor. But the Yankee suggested that purchasing season tickets for residents to the Academy of Design would be cheaper than buying them pictures. Though expressed satirically, the Yankee was anxious about the poor (not the rich) becoming tyrannical rulers devoted to luxury: Since occupants of the almshouse have expressed their disapprobation of this year’s Academy collection and signified their preference instead for old masters, undoubtedly their next demand will be that the almshouse be furnished in the style of Louis XIV. Given this fear that the poor are becoming monarchs, the Yankee unsurprisingly approved of the city’s police force shooting twenty-two, mostly poor, citizens during the Astor Opera House’s anti-British riots.77 A month later, a Yankee writer declared his antipathy to Young America’s narrow patriotism and cheap literature, which is choking art and causing licentiousness, as is apparent in the large number of crude, distorted, and absolutely worthless pictures in galleries by American artists. These are the same contemporary galleries, of course, where the poor in the almshouse story were supposed to go. Cornelius Mathews’s Yankee Doodle even more explicitly if satirically connected Young America in art to government by

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the masses, proposing that people vote for artists in the primaries, since Americans think connoisseurship, as a species of mental aristocracy that makes the opinion of one man of more weight than another, is at variance with free institutions. The Courier and Enquirer’s Paris correspondent, Sigma, amid the radical mood of the 1848 French Republic, similarly argued that the five thousand modern paintings hung on top of the old masters at the Louvre, entirely hiding them, had intensity of coloring but no poetic sentiment, grandeur of conception, elevation, or beauty, and in their servility only echoed the newly enfranchised multitude.78 This problem with servile imitation (of nature, and the multitude, rather than the old masters and an elite) took on a strangely reversed meaning in the increasingly Republican newspaper world of the 1850s. Critics who admired the Pre- Raphaelites continued, even more forcefully than Young America, to reject Renaissance and Baroque models and painters like Huntington whose style resembled them, but now it was on the grounds that their style was too popular and formulaic. In 1854, the nowRepublican Evening Post says a Huntington Christ is a mealbag, coarse and emasculated, a painting that only affects religious sentiment; the Republican Tribune in the same year says his Good Samaritan, a picture previously endorsed by Bryant, is utterly hackneyed, commonplace, and barren.79 The Tribune critic George Curtis argued, as Young America had in the past, that the principle and end of art was to express the thought of the age. This was precisely why the old masters were overestimated as models for the present. They should only be valued for the record they provide of the “ruling idea” and “degree of civilization” of the time they were produced. But for Curtis, only a realism that found artists like Talbot, Cole, Durand, and Huntington unnatural was the spirit of the age, of American civilization.80 The question of these artists’ dependence on artistic predecessors has been rephrased, though it’s still indicated in words like “unnatural,” “trite,” and “hackneyed.” But it’s now less a question of American artists wrongly imitating the old masters and more the concern that their “commonplace” style appeals to and represents what is identified as a feminine, commercial, and so popular taste. A Republican satire of 1861, in order to show that American connoisseurship is really the (bad) taste of the masses, instead of the codfish snobocrat of old, casts the connoisseur as a woman.81 The author meets the Female Connoisseur in a mock picture shop on Broadway at an auction of Eminent Masters, the collection of a gentleman going to New Jersey. Her qualifications? No insider, she has not been to the artists’ studios but to the commercial galleries (these advertised and were reviewed in the

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newspapers), to see Page’s Venus and Dubufe’s Adam and Eve. Because she trusts that a Moral Era is dawning (an anticlerical slash at social reformers), she is Simply Disgusted by these nudes. At the auction, however, she is in raptures with a “lemon candy view”—too brightly colored, too sweet—of the Prodigal Son, which the author says is worse than the decoration on the door panels of the Fourth Avenue omnibus. Even worse, she plans to write about it in the Family Pudding next week, a knock at papers like the Home Journal, which had regular columns by women, or the Leader, where Blanche d’Artois wrote art criticism. The feminine American connoisseur and patron of paintings, the uninitiated masses who ride omnibuses and attend exhibitions, and the taste for artisan-produced pictures, brightly colored (fake) old masters, and Christian subjects are all conflated. And further, this American connoisseur’s taste remains that of the scribblers of the press, who are tied to the market and the (feminized) masses as well. The author of the satire, his masculine privilege underscored by his lack of prudishness about the Venuses under discussion, accordingly can dismiss the idea of a new era dawning. Democratic supporters of cultural nationalism in art did turn to the commercial market and the commonplace in order to rebut the growing Republican monopoly on taste. As Julia Layman (d’Artois) wrote in 1860 for the cheap weekly Leader, a paper that was one of the last bastions of Young America under the Democrat Stephen Douglas, American art is being destroyed by new types of old fogies. The Knickerbockers who doted on the good taste of the past, despising the fancies and fripperies that bedizen the moderns, foreshadow those who prate of Pre-Raphaelitism yet follow a system of artistic espionage and persecution. Since the National Academy has prostituted itself to private cliques, banknote engravings are the only source left for a national art, the only place where one can find the spirit of the Nation in its proper character and feeling.82 For women writers, critics, and artists, including those who embraced a more sentimental style being discredited by the growing aestheticism of former allies at the Evening Post, Times, or Tribune, the Democratic inclusiveness of artisanal Young America still possessed appeal. Women were even called the movement’s leaders. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, for example, editor with her husband Seba of a two-dollar weekly whose slogan was “onward,” was hailed by a French journalist as a model of Young America’s ardent, audacious, and local style. The Evening Mirror, another of Oakes Smith’s backers, admired her novel The Newsboy for its uncommon energy, lifelike vividness, and pathos that speaks to the “better sympathies of humanity.” What the Hussites were to the fifteenth century

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and the English Revolution was to the seventeenth century, so Young America, the French editor proclaimed, was the eternal principle of (Protestant) liberty now incarnated in the present Republic.83 Oakes Smith, who had a son filibustering in Central America, was equally sure that the snobdom that admired a more aesthetic style of art and a less expansionist foreign policy would not gain ascendancy “while we have Churches in our midst.”84 But the feminine version of reforming Young America that she and d’Artois at the Leader represented, the effort to be “wide awake enough to resist fogyism” but “discreet enough to rein in Young America,” as it was put in Oakes Smith’s journal the Great Republic, was increasingly marginalized.85 Her novel’s publishers in the same year put out a KnowNothing gift book filled with Evening Mirror editorials and a reproduction of Tompkins Matteson’s Spirit of ’76. It was advertised heavily not in the Tribune or the Post but in anti-Republican or nativist papers like the Dispatch, Express, and Day Book. As early as 1857, Oakes Smith had worried that the Academy and other institutions designed to aid artists were regressing to barbarism in refusing to admit women. In 1861, the National Academy did exclude women from the traditional private opening of its annual exhibition, though the move only lasted a year. The private opening was designed to bring the press in for a preview, with a few favored patrons and friends mingling with the artists and editors. Champagne and oysters were an additional inducement, though for the penny press, such refreshments were a dangerous sign of the presence of the “oyster,” or paid (in a quid pro quo sense) critic. As numbers at the opening reception began to climb to seven hundred or more (the refreshments changed to nonalcoholic punch in the wake of temperance reforms in the 1850s), the move to exclude women and their crinolines may have seemed like a simple way to limit attendance and bring back the champagne. But given that there were at least twenty women actively exhibiting work at the Academy and at least one female art critic in the press, their exclusion as insignificant—as social rather than professionally interested members—met objections. LM, for example, a self- proclaimed free- trade Republican (who by asserting her ability to judge art also identified herself as politically engaged), objected in the pages of the politically likeminded Evening Post.86 She wondered if the “clerk” who wrote “the things about art” for the paper was speaking for the Post, for the artists, or only for himself when he wrote that it was right to exclude women from the private viewing because only men were capable of judging art’s merits. In the insider style of newspaper critics, LM suggested that the red-haired “art man’s” opinion of women

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could be explained by a recent jilting. LM added that she had come across his remarks when reading the column aloud to some ladies and pointed out that women were the chief artgoers and often chose what was bought. To her threat to switch to Harper’s, the Post editor replied that he would instantly discharge the arts reporter. Despite his facetiousness, women clearly were important to contemporary art and the Academy exhibitions, as well as to newspapers. Sidelining them, however, did help block the conflation of the male (insider) connoisseur and professional journalist with the masses. As Pittoro (an old-master-style pseudonym) wrote to the Commercial Advertiser, the only difference between the class of “pretended connoisseurs” (who included newspaper critics and commercial dealers, in collusion) and the crowd—those who attend exhibitions of contemporary art—is that the connoisseurs publish their inane criticisms, while the spectators just speak them.87 The critic and the crowd, with their taste for the sweetly pleasing and political aspirations for a new era, threaten to dominate the market. The chilling effect of this alignment on women’s participation in particular is described in a Southern feminist’s article on “Modern Criticism” for Oakes Smith’s magazine. She described it as putting the producer before the production, weighing social position, antecedents, gender, church, and vote before it weighs the work. The result is that modern criticism is a stronghold of cliquedom in which one man’s opinion comes to be accounted as the public’s opinion—and he chooses the fairest and gentlest for his slaughter.88 The author was thinking primarily of literature, but in art criticism, too, there was a market concentration that sidelined women and Young America. Critics in dominant newspapers like the Tribune (“the snobdom,” as Oakes Smith called them) would, if not always successfully, assume their definition of the age was the only legitimate one. At the same time, professionalized criticism helped block penny press accusations of cliques or a humbug. While providing opinion on art, aestheticism did not authorize a profusion of views. Modern art, seemingly depersonalized, would no longer be news.

4

The Penny Press’s Utopian Alternative

The landscape painter Thomas  W. Whitley, along with the Herald, is usually credited with destroying the American Art-Union, a corporation that at midcentury was the most influential art patron in the country. Whitley has understandably been seen as a crank embittered by lack of patronage, and James Gordon Bennett is similarly scorned for fostering a controversy in order to sell papers. But their antagonism to the Art-Union, like that of Whitley’s many allies among artists and the penny press, originated from a working-class critique of how monopolies operated in the market. As its name suggests, the American Art-Union was a cooperative association, organized around art rather than a trade. Membership fees of five dollars, the cost of an annual subscription to a literary magazine, were pooled to pay for the purchase of art and entitled union members to a chance to win an original artwork that cost anywhere from twenty to a thousand dollars or more in the yearly lottery. Decisions on what art to purchase and which pictures to engrave for distribution to all the members were made by an elected board. Whitley shared the impetus behind the Art- Union, the belief in the benefits of cooperative associations for improving living and working conditions for ordinary people. Indeed, he first made a name for himself in New York as a Fourierist, what Karl Marx would unkindly label a utopian socialist, an advocate of communal living and working arrangements that would free people from the brutal

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conditions of modern industry. It was this more radical form of Associationism that found the corporate character of the Art-Union intolerable. The American Art-Union had been chartered as a corporation by the New York legislature, giving state sanction and privileges to a private enterprise, on the grounds that it benefited the public. The campaign against it gained extensive support from penny papers that sought ways to ameliorate working-class or artisan life, often by interrupting corporate charters that seemed to create monopolies on trade that did not benefit the public. Even the main witness in the legislature’s investigation into Art- Union misdoings (champagne suppers, rigging elections, cheating artists, etc.) had begun his career in 1843 by trying to revoke the charter of New York’s Seventh Ward Bank, where he himself had worked.1 How this Associationist appraisal of the Art-Union developed, and the alternative it offered for art, is the subject of this chapter. Whitley was an artisan. Born in Cornwall, he moved to Paterson, New Jersey, in about 1835. He exhibited a window sash that he later tried to patent at the 1836 American Institute fair, a venue that displayed manufactured goods as well as fine arts. He was early tied to religious liberalism as the New Jersey agent for the Universalist Union by 1838. Unitarians and Universalists, with their links to transcendentalism, were seen as shockingly unconventional.2 Perhaps through their shared interest in Charles Fourier’s utopian social reforms, or because they both lived in Paterson, Whitley became friends with Parke Godwin, William C. Bryant’s acting editor at the Unitarian Evening Post. The locofoco Subterranean pointed out, in service of its point that despite being editor of a Democratic Party paper Godwin was a Whig at heart, that Godwin’s father had owned a factory in Paterson and that Whitley worked for him there. Suggesting the truth of Brother Jonathan’s editor John Neal’s point about art criticism following neighborhood alliances, the landscape painter Jesse Talbot, who would be supported by the Evening Post, lived in Paterson too. Around 1839 Whitley moved to New York, advertising that he did transparencies and ornaments, repaired and cleaned pictures, and painted apartments as well as landscapes and portraits.3 He tested the waters with landscape paintings at the National Academy and then the Apollo’s gallery, to little notice (fig. 4.1). He was mentioned briefly in the Evening Star for Scene on the Passaic in 1836 (hard outlines, but shows much talent), and Godwin praised his View of Passaic Falls in 1838, a subject Talbot also painted. In 1840, his paintings garnered more attention. James Otis, writing in the Evening Star about these local scenes, says he has contributed another of his “cold and uninteresting landscapes” and asks rhetorically,

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Figure 4.1. Thomas W. Whitley, Passaic Falls, Spring, c. 1839, oil on wood panel, 23¾ × 33 inches, gift of Dr. W. B. Graves, New Jersey Historical Society. Public domain; image provided by New Jersey Historical Society.

“Wherein consists the value of such pictures?” Their lack of interest presumably came from Whitley’s literal, topographic style. Later, at an 1844 New York convention of the Friends of Association, Godwin perhaps explained their value when he spoke of how as a young man he walked around Paterson.4 Not unlike the men silhouetted against the spray in Whitley’s painting, he had heard the voice of the Passaic Falls telling him: “You are a free being!” The dazzling beams of light pouring down on the falls in Whitley’s picture suggest some of that exaltation. Otis that year, however, loved Lewis Clover’s comical picture The Phrenologist, in which “every one of the busts and casts upon the shelves of the phrenologist seems to be caricaturing the science!”5 Otis was no sympathizer with modern movements like phrenology (Walt Whitman published an encomium for Talbot in a phrenological journal), Fourierism, or Universalism, and neither was Bennett. Like Otis, the Herald praised the future Episcopalian minister Clover’s satire on phrenology (which, perhaps, included real portraits): The boy whose head is being examined in the painting displays his “organ of credulity.” 6 The Herald was not so credulous of humbugs and agreed that Whitley’s New Jersey landscapes

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were a botch. No fan of the Evening Post’s poet, the Herald called Whitley’s efforts at less literal painting, his version of Bryant’s “Forest Hymn,” great trash—dirty, muddled (indistinct)—and his scene from the republican poet James Thomson’s Seasons “shocking Trash.” The comic Paul Pry, edited by a former Herald writer, called Whitley’s View of the Passaic near the Falls “shocking, positively shocking.”7 The humor may indicate he too knew Whitley. Whitley turned instead to the Apollo Association, where he showed a View in New Jersey owned by Parke Godwin. The early exhibitions at the Apollo, the forerunner of the American Art- Union, were a mix of oldmaster copies, loans, and artworks placed in hopes of sale. In the initial scheme, members could buy artworks in the gallery, and the Association used the subscription fees to purchase from among those unsold. The Apollo, like its founder James Herring’s own gallery, functioned as an art dealer in a city where, other than printsellers or framing stores like Clover’s father’s, there were few public places outside the National Academy to exhibit. Whitley had tried advertising pictures as available in his studio and selling through an auctioneer who unloaded oil paintings by “Native Artists” (plus engravings and copies of old masters) every Saturday at 204 Broadway, sometimes outdoors on the street. The Herald had initially, while Bennett was in Washington, approved the Apollo, seeing it as a society of artists that, like the penny paper itself, aimed at breaking the National Academy’s “monopoly amongst painters” in this city, enabling them to obtain better prices than competitors with half their talents and twice their pretensions.8 Yet just a few weeks later, the Herald reversed itself and argued that the Apollo’s backers had questionable taste in their purchases; perhaps it had learned that enemies of Bennett were involved, including James Watson Webb of the Courier and Enquirer and Colonel William L. Stone of the Commercial Advertiser. The Whig political circle around Philip Hone and the Knickerbocker circle around the Mirror, the members of which Bennett regularly targeted as effete aristocrats and members of exclusive cliques, were active. Even the Democrat Prosper Wetmore, a manager generally liked by the Herald, had written for the Mirror and Commercial Advertiser. In a later story, the Herald explained that the Apollo Association had valid principles and goals but exercised no discretion in its choice of managers, who lacked judgment, impartiality, and taste in painting; they were part of a mercantile aristocracy who in their new role as dealers would commercialize art by promoting a tea-tray (falsely refined) style like the illustrators of the Mirror.

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This argument about a merchant’s cabal would later become a familiar refrain, though it was not quite Whitley’s angle. But it was reiterated, in connection with dislike of the effects of the market economy, in Ariel’s commentary from Philadelphia, warning that their Artists’ and Amateurs’ Association was the equivalent of New York’s Apollo but was misnamed.9 Like the Apollo, it was run by businessmen, not artists, and should be called the “Artists and Amateurs Patent Expander and Safety Valve,” for creating and diffusing mediocrity in the Fine Arts. Ariel promised to write the Herald again, on the prospect of steam engines painting pictures, or manu-factories of old masters, as the immense enterprise of the American people must be employed. In that last comment is visible the concern about industrialization’s degradation of labor formerly performed by artisans that agitated both Fourierists and workingmen forming trade unions. Whitley stopped exhibiting for a few years. His oldest daughter died, as Horace Greeley reported in his new penny daily Tribune, and Whitley may have had money troubles. Along with other artists and Democratic politicians, he signed a call opposing repeal of the bankruptcy law in 1842. In any case, he turned his attention from art to communal living, becoming president of the Sylvania Association. The short-lived Sylvania Association was overshadowed by the later and more successful Brook Farm in Massachusetts, but it was one of the earliest attempts at utopian living.10 Stories of its founding usually jeer at the ineptitude of the committee sent to buy a property for the Associationists to farm: a landscape painter, a homeopathic doctor, and a cooper.11 The landscape painter, of course, was Whitley. And the error in selecting the 2,500 acres in Pike County, Pennsylvania, was less its fertility than its sixteen-mile distance from the Erie Railroad, which made transporting crops to market too expensive. But despite the commune’s failure (in 1844), its organizational meetings brought together an interesting set, including the artist Thomas Hicks and the dentist, amateur artist, and Mirror contributor Solyman Brown. Shares cost twenty-five dollars. Supposedly most of the investors were mechanics, but the land purchase alone cost $7,000, requiring deeper pockets.12 The actor Edwin Forrest invested, probably becoming involved through his friendship with Godwin, who was a promoter and member. The treasurer of the Sylvania Association was Horace Greeley, who was promoting Fourierism in the Whig Tribune. As president, Whitley came in for mockery from the Herald’s reporters, as did press rivals like Godwin, who was then editing his own paper, the Path Finder, and Greeley, the “galvanized squash” of the Tribune. The Tribune’s sympathetic willingness to give a place to new social movements

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led the Herald to complain of the “great squash clique in philosophy” and lump Grahamism, vegetarianism, Mormonism, (racial) amalgamation, millenarianism, materialism, infidelism, and several more isms in with Associationism, including Greeley’s antislavery (abolitionism) branch of the Whigs. Greeley’s Tribune itself resembled an Association, as all the editors bought shares of its stock. In the Herald’s account of the “Most Singular Meeting of the Association for Regenerating Creation at the Croton Hall,” Godwin and Greeley are described as speaking coherently to Associationism’s role in transforming society and labor. However, Whitley’s “nasal voice” produced a stream of unconnected and egotistic phrases that went on for a full and lengthy paragraph, as here: “press—sneer at Fourierism—Redeemers of the World—Chas. Fourier—Emanuel Swedenborg—ourselves—other great men—Redeemer of Sinners—all great like us,” and “large dividends—stock—lock—stamina—great labor tree—with the harmonies and unities” and so on.13 They thought that by creating a worker-owned corporation they could save the world. The Herald was critical of Associationism’s desire to overturn the existing Christian social and market order. It lumped such aims with the new and suspiciously infidel geological sciences, but it also attacked Associationism for the same reasons it attacked Wall Street. Organizing society along the same principle as banking and manufacturing, as with buying stock in the Association, is absurd, as long as the managers can do as they please with the property (“stock—lock”) of the investors. The Herald reported that a scenic painter at the Park Theater objected at the meeting that Associationism is really just for the kid-glove aristocracy and still seats workingmen at the third table.14 Associations supposedly designed to benefit artists, whether the Art-Union or the National Academy, were subject to similar criticisms. In 1855, in a departure from the press’s artisanal bias, a Tribune critic said artists ought not to manage their own institution, as art is not for the benefit of artists but for the world, something the ArtUnion would also claim. If the arts are to flourish and the American school ever to break with convention, the Academy should be a public institution. Operating from this position opposed to decorum and in service of the public, the critic also defends flippancy. For critics of art, it is the only way not to be run through with a maulstick by aggrieved painters. In his role as consumer, he thus sententiously promises to instruct the public on “how to look at pictures.” He advises a process of comparison in which you gaze on a prominent Academy artist’s “miracle of art” in order that such “unresisting imbecilities” will whet your desire for something better—and that better is Thomas Hicks, the Associationist.

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Hicks, a much more prominent artist, never became active against the Art-Union.15 But Associationist-edited papers would be vehicles for Whitley’s attacks on New York art institutions. His viewpoint was, like theirs, that of a radical who assailed institutions on the grounds of being antidemocratic and antiegalitarian. Whitley had been agitating for an Artists’ Art Union, a cooperative gallery that would act as a dealer, since he first came to New York. In 1841, before getting involved with Sylvania but after the Apollo Association had been founded, he wrote in the Evening Post and Greeley’s Log Cabin that the Temperance Society ought to put $20,000 into a fund, to supply artists with materials and a hall for them to exhibit and sell works. Art would replace alcohol—that they were linked for Whitley may suggest his later interest in oenoculture—and thus the lot of laboring men, artists, would be relieved of difficulties.16 Greeley’s New Yorker, edited with Henry J. Raymond and Park Benjamin, had approved of the aims of the Apollo Association, saying it would “curb the insolence” of the shabby genteel National Academy and was further superior in having a popular character. But it also aired Whitley’s argument that this kind of an association was never going to produce significant art and that the city should put $10,000 into a free gallery, hiring artists to do pictures and sell paintings.17 For penny papers, especially ones with ties to Associationism or workingmen’s causes, existing art institutions were not satisfactory substitutes for a public gallery and school. Perhaps the crowds of the beautiful and fashionable who visited the twenty-five-cent gallery of the Apollo, so like the brilliant assemblies at the National Academy, were part of the problem in winning the press over; the Apollo was a fashionable lounge, not a school.18 The penny Sun, responding to a proposal by John Kenrick Fisher, focused on the problem of getting the public to pay taxes for such a gallery. Though not an Associationist, Fisher believed that for the fine arts to succeed, what was needed was not a trades union like the National Academy but a principle of combination on a larger scale than even the Apollo Association. A combination of all the people, in other words the government, could buy better art from living artists than the wealthiest individual and make it available to the poorest.19 Like Whitley, who said it did the population wrong to assume they wouldn’t pay such a tax, that to think so was to accept European ideas that the public was a mob, the Democratic Sun said that if the public really understood that such a gallery would serve as an educational institution for diffusing knowledge and patriotism, they would support it.20 Most Whig papers, except for Greeley’s penny Tribune, stridently resisted new taxes for public schools, baths, or libraries that

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benefited the poor. In any case, Fisher and other artists unsuccessfully petitioned the city aldermen to submit a public gallery to the vote.21 Whitley had been producing Whig caricatures since 1834, and a political connection must have landed him a job at the New York Custom House during the Tyler administration. But after the failure of the Sylvania Association, he turned to the Democrat Edwin Forrest. Forrest hired him in 1844 to supervise his vineyard, Forest Hill, in Covington, Kentucky.22 His contract with Forrest for $500 (Whitley told the Tribune he had planted 1,800 grapevines) must have left him time to paint and write, as he sold paintings to the Western Art Union in Cincinnati and may have been a correspondent for the New York Herald, covering the Whig candidate Zachary Taylor’s presidential campaign in Ohio.23 He certainly was a correspondent for the Tribune, praising the Cincinnati Horticultural Society, which counted Nicholas Longworth, an art patron and promoter of wine from the local Catawba grape, among its members.24 Whitley after returning to New York would work as a liquor dealer. Covington was across the river from Cincinnati, and Whitley met that city’s artists. Worthington Whittredge, a leader of the city’s romantic landscape school, must have disliked him. Whittredge, who had antislavery patrons, went on to study in Dusseldorf and became president of the National Academy. It was Whittredge who, in an article in the 1908 Magazine of History, first singled out Whitley’s jealousy as responsible for the downfall of the art unions in both Cincinnati and New York. He even suggested that Whitley bore responsibility for 1849’s devastating Astor Place riots, which involved his former patron Forrest.25 In his own writing, Whitley doesn’t mention Whittredge or the African American landscape painter Robert Duncanson, who lived in Cincinnati and sold work to the Western Art Union. But others from Ohio—the sculptor Thomas  D. Jones, the genre painters Lilly Martin Spencer and James Beard, the brothers John and Godfrey Frankenstein, and the portrait painters William Walcutt and Miner Kellogg, like his old acquaintance Hicks, turn up in his criticism and sometimes joined his schemes for a better system of dealing in art. John Frankenstein would rail against both art unions and the National Academy, and Kellogg would help him reveal the “true character” of art unions as lotteries that injure artists.26 Whitley first developed his assessment of the problems with art unions in Cincinnati. The Western Art Union in Cincinnati, which like the American Art-Union in New York showed copies of old masters and loans alongside original works by American artists for sale or purchased by the union, had its first distribution of art to members in 1847. Early in that same

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year, Whitley tried to establish a competitor: He advertised in the New York Evening Post that he had leased Melodeon Hall in Cincinnati, where he would receive artworks for exhibition and sale. He would charge 10 percent on any pictures sold, any subject welcome. He could be depended on to help with the burden carried by his fellow laborers in advancing the cause of art.27 At the same time, he began to attack the Western Art Union as a rival dealer. It had purchased three of his pictures in 1847 (but would buy none in 1848).28 Whitley’s vehicle for his condemnation of the Western Art Union, the Herald of Truth, was an Associationist, Swedenborgian, and land- reform organ in Cincinnati that noticed Associationist artists. A correspondent praised the genius of Lilly Martin Spencer, whose parents had been active in Ohio phalanxes (the Fourierist term for communes), as did Maria Varney’s “Letters from the Queen City,” which also described the Western Art Union as a “perfect paradise.” Another female writer found the heart of a woman and mother, a great and noble soul, in Spencer’s art (fig. 4.2).29 The Herald of Truth’s editor, the lawyer Lucius Hine, also approved of the Art Union. In Associationist language, he explained that group effort was necessary for cultivating the public taste in art because individual efforts to do so had amounted to nothing. It was accordingly an Institution for the Public Good, not organized to enrich artists (Whitley’s “laborers”) but to bring paintings to the people. Associationist promotion of “American” art could be allied to mild nativism, as seems to be the case for Whitley and Hine. In a bust of a Whig politician by the sculptor Jones, a friend of Spencer’s, the editor found the “soul” of art, from a native artist who, unlike the “humbug servers,” had not been to Italy. Whitley identified one of the few good managers of the Western Art Union as one who would restrict it to American subjects and artists; this manager would in 1849 deliver “An Address on AngloSaxon Destiny” to the New England Society of Cincinnati.30 Hine had worked with the Democrat E. Z. C. Judson (he used the pseudonym Ned Buntline), who would found a nativist newspaper, Ned Buntline’s Own, in New York City in 1848. Responding to 1849’s Astor Place riots, Buntline would take Forrest’s side on behalf of “American” thespians and against foreign British ones. So though like Hine and Whitley many of the Associationists were Whigs, their interest in workingmen’s causes like land reform and economic reforms (including free trade) pushed them toward the Young America (expansionist) branch of the Democrats and the KnowNothing branch of the Whigs.

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Figure 4.2. Alfred Jones, after Lilly M. Spencer, One of Life’s Happy Hours, 1847, engraving, 21 × 16 inches, c. 1854, Library of Congress. Public domain; image provided by the Library of Congress.

Though Hine didn’t condemn art unions, like Greeley, he kept his pages open to any opinion (and like Greeley, had been accused of infidelism as a result), and Whitley’s screed on the Western Art Union appeared in the Herald of Truth. Whitley claims that he participated in the first movements to start the association, but his and others’ efforts to give that Art Union a plan that would preclude partiality had failed. Instead, the managers and especially the president, Charles Stetson, whose portrait was hung prominently in the Art Union building, exhibit copies of prints, import fake old masters, and buy ten paintings from a tyro. This is perhaps the landscapist Benjamin McConkey, who like Whittredge left to study in Dusseldorf. They bought twenty-nine paintings from him, and the American Art-Union bought sixteen.

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The Gallery is ostentatious, Whitley continues, with too many imitators of Thomas Cole’s gorgeous colorings, rather than topographical scenes near home.31 The editors and contributors to the Herald of Truth were great admirers of Cole, as were both cities’ art unions (and McConkey). But Whitley argues that such inauthentic (highly colored) fantasies of the Rockies, clichés of the Catskills, or pictures of the westward- ho variety corrupt the eye and soul. They are mixed drinks unlike, the recent vine planter says, our own sparkling Catawba wine. It’s not enough to buy from American artists or to buy without favoritism. The Art Union should educate the public to buy art in a less romantic and derivative style. If the managers seemed to do just that in the picture selected as their engraving for the year, James Beard’s animal genre scene The Poor Relations, Whitley still objected. He acknowledged its cleverness but said that as an allegory of the queen of England rebuffing the Irish it was not a national subject. Whitley recommended William Powell, a local artist disliked by Cole and McConkey, instead.32 Whitley reprinted his entire screed against the Western Art Union in a pamphlet, to a generally positive reception in New York. The Fourierist Harbinger, on receiving the pamphlet (perhaps Whitley brought it with him on his return to the city), praised him as an accomplished artist whose earnest devotion to the cause of art had led him to expose quacks cheating the public and betraying the cause of artists. They would, a couple months later, notice Spencer’s new New York studio and, like the Herald of Truth, praise her ability to create expressive faces and original designs.33 Spencer may have been one of the artists whom Whitley was defending from exploitative managers. Her painting Life’s Sunny Hour had been engraved for the Western Art Union, but only after she sold it to its president (fig. 4.2). The Harbinger had previously agreed with the editor of the Herald of Truth that art unions were a striking illustration of the advantages of Association. Like Whitley, they must have found it frustrating that such associations were both successful and governed by men like “Fullpurse the leather dealer” or lottery venders, rather than by artists. “Leather dealer” may have been a snip at the manufacturer Charles Leupp, Bryant’s and Forrest’s friend and an art collector. The art union, they said, bought pictures from Fullpurse’s friend Thinbrains (perhaps the satirist Francis Edmonds) and thereby missed the chance to buy other paintings better animated with the soul of the age. But they do concede that the local New York managers were wise enough to buy from William Page, William S. Mount, and “our friend” Thomas Hicks. The Tribune endorsed Whitley’s pamphlet as well, both his perspicuity and his forceful comments on the

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Western Art Union’s pictures and its administration.34 The Evening Post backed Whitley’s credentials on art—he was a devoted student of nature— but more mildly hoped that the Ohio managers were not so deserving of censure as he said.35 Bryant, the editor of the Post, had been appointed president of the American Art-Union in 1844, just when Whitley left the city, but had retired at the end of 1846, at the same time as his friend Leupp (Edmonds followed a year later). When Whitley returned to New York, then, he didn’t just have the Herald as an ally. In October 1848 he started a series of letters on the “Progress of the Fine Arts” in the Tribune, at about the same time that George G. Foster, formerly the City Items editor of the Tribune, was concluding his “New York in Slices.” Foster, who was sympathetic to Fourierism, introduced the series with a jab at the National Academy: His would be a series of “pictures” of the city for the paper, “dashed in” with a free hand, because “exact portraiture” is as commonplace as the National Academy, while an artistic representation presents the eye not with physical lumber but abstract truth.36 In Whitley’s seventeen-odd letters on art for the Tribune, he put the National Academy and the American Art-Union together. In penny-press style he worried about the lust for dominion and exclusiveness that threatened to transform republican artisans into aristocrats, he argued that a steam engine is a poem, that all men are Artists, and more practically that the progress of civilization is measured by the fact that there are now engravings on the parlor tables of mechanics. His language veers into panegyric that is really condemnation: The National Academy is to be thanked for our “great scholars in art” whose reputation is “of so universal a character” they need not be mentioned; it is an Oxford and Cambridge in Art, with the American Art-Union (which had recently bailed out the broke Academy) its nursing mother. He took up the cause of old masters brought from abroad in similar rhetoric: True, they are often fakes, but they should not be reviled, as they are favorites with the learned and devout, and thanks to Chatham Street (mock) auction stores, hundreds of exquisitely wrought works of art are now here.37 The Tribune would largely part ways with Whitley after 1849, as its reformist energies increasingly were directed toward antislavery, a movement Whitley never endorsed. On other fronts, Whiggish belief in social harmony—a society in which class interests harmonized rather than conflicted—tended to prevail at the Tribune. Greeley, the only real artisan there, was also less present. Though Associationists, Charles Dana, his city and managing editor, and the art critic George W. Curtis were from more genteel backgrounds and supported the managers of the American

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Figure 4.3. Henry Peters Gray, The Wages of War, 1848, oil on canvas, 48¼ × 76¼ inches, gift of Several Ladies and Gentlemen, 1873, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain; image provided by Metropolitan Museum.

Art-Union and the National Academy. Rather than praising Spencer’s expressiveness, the college-educated Dana urged her to rigorous study of the classical (a corrective to too much nature) for two years, to overcome her “crude,” “unmeaning,” “spotted,” and “glaring defects.”38 If Spencer needed the corrective of classicism, Henry P. Gray, the college-educated son of a wealthy merchant family, who spent years in Europe developing a style reminiscent of Titian, did not. He was a Tribune favorite: His Wages of War, with its inevitable progress from weeping women to tomb, its muscular warriors sad, prone, and wounded, suited them in the wake of the war with Mexico (fig. 4.3). It was emblematic of an unjust war, exactly the opposite message of Tompkins Matteson’s Spirit of ’76 just two years earlier (fig. 2.7).39 When the Tribune published letters accusing the American Art-Union of partiality, they often reflected the editors’ preferences. One asks why the Art-Union bought nothing from Gray but five works from other artists, and the editor agrees that this treatment of Gray, at least, was wrong. But an Art-Union “member” writes to explain that Gray charges too much.40 He adds that Gray’s condemnation of the Art- Union’s usefulness (Gray was active in the National Academy) may have played a role. But the editors didn’t lend protesting artists editorial support. Indeed, Dana blamed

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personal vendettas for Fisher’s and Whitley’s assaults on the Art- Union, pointing out that his friend Hicks (twenty-one paintings sold), C. P. Cranch (a writer for the Harbinger who would sell twenty-seven paintings to the Art-Union), and John Kensett (forty-six landscapes sold, one engraved for distribution), artists whose pictures had decided merit, were not at war with the Art-Union. Fisher promptly replied that if he had been as good of an advertiser to the Tribune as the Art-Union had been, Dana would not have said a word against him. Curtis too, though he acknowledged a “want of judgment” in some Art-Union selections (he dismissed Whitley’s landscapes as not transparent enough), still believed it had fostered the growth of American art. In 1852, amid the height of the controversy, the City Items editor reiterated what Dana and Curtis had said previously, that the Art-Union’s directors were incapable of doing injustice.41 Whitley stayed closer to the Evening Post. In 1852, he exhibited at the National Academy his view of Bryant’s home in Roslyn.42 The sixpenny Post, as a longtime supporter of the Academy of Design, would be a vehicle for Academy officers to assail the Art-Union, which perhaps kept it open to Whitley, too. Bryant had also intervened for him in 1848 with Wetmore, then president, for the American Art- Union to purchase three of Whitley’s pictures, and four more in 1849, though for only twenty dollars each. The Evening Post contributor who reviewed the 1848 Art-Union gallery congratulated the management on including, among a variety of Associationists and Academy artists, Whitley.43 Despite this, the Art-Union’s low estimate of his art’s worth probably contributed to Whitley’s outrage. In the 1853 inquiry into possible Art-Union malfeasance, it was noted that a twenty-dollar landscape by the novice artist J. M. Taughner had been won by a subscriber who the previous year had drawn a “contemptible” work. The Art-Union managers realized that Taughner’s was worse. So Wetmore ordered a picture with the same name from an Academy member, John Kensett, for $111 and substituted it, because too many bad paintings in the same small town would hurt subscriptions. The Evening Mirror, which in 1847 was also noting Whitley’s movements in Cincinnati, characterized such swaps differently, reversing the identity of the bad painters. It satirically suggested that it was an example of the Art-Union’s high regard for the National Academy that after they commissioned and paid for a small picture from an Academician, it was so bad that they contrived to lose it. On another occasion, the paper added, when they had to distribute a discreditable painting by an Academician, one of the managers paid out of pocket to replace it.44 The Post understood such incidents as part of the National Academy’s quarrel with the Art-Union over the Academy’s

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shrinking revenues, but it was the low prices for artworks that, according to the artists, hurt feelings. As he had done in the Tribune, Whitley contributed a series of articles on art to the Evening Post, but here he more directly attacked the American Art-Union. Writing as Crayon, a name that for Knickerbocker readers would evoke Washington Irving, he recalled his effort to start an artists’ union in New York in 1849 and outlined a program for doing so again. His emphasis that this organization would benefit the artists (not the managers) involved a side attack on the National Academy, as the existing artists’ organization.45 But dissatisfied National Academy members themselves supported a new organization: Charles Ingham, who sold only one painting to the Art-Union, had hoped to start one, and the Apollo’s former gallery manager had created the Art Re-Union, which counted Matteson, Jasper Cropsey (a friend of Associationists like Hicks and Curtis), and Charles L. Elliott among its members. At an artists’ meeting that included Matteson and Whitley and was presided over by the portraitist Samuel S. Osgood, the subject of a recent biography in the Tribune, a course of lectures at the Stuyvesant Institute (not at the Academy) was organized. It included a number of reformers: Godwin, Curtis, the Swedenborgian Henry James, Daniel Huntington, the Art Re-Union officer Paul Duggan, and Whitley.46 In the meantime, Fisher read Crayon’s letters and contacted Whitley, and the two formed the American Artists Association (AAA), which met at Peale’s Museum and then in Fisher’s rooms. Among the artists most involved in this group were the Ohio artist William Walcutt, whose poetry also appeared in the Evening Post, and the Cincinnati sculptor Jones. The AAA’s first exhibition opened in March 1851, with fifty pictures, including a landscape by Durand (forty- nine paintings bought by the Art-Union, one engraved for distribution), indicating National Academy support. There were also works from other discontented artists, like Huntington, Gray, Ingham, Elliott (Whitley would later do a view of Elliott’s country house), Hicks, and Kensett. Wetmore, the Art- Union president, must have been especially exasperated by their involvement. As he wrote to a fellow manager, they had paid these artists more than a thousand dollars for years, but Huntington and the rest still wrote spiteful and malicious articles in the Post. Godwin of the Post gave the evening’s address.47 Fisher eventually dropped out of the AAA because it kept the lottery system for distributing pictures, but he, like the others, must have initially believed it would be a free public gallery that would provide an alternative to the Art-Union’s. After the Art-Union folded, he urged that their property, the

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remaining pictures, be used to create such a gallery, perhaps as part of City Hall, where there was already a public collection of portraits.48 The Photographic and Fine Arts Journal might seem a surprising outlet for anti-Art-Union sentiment, but its editor Henry Snelling endorsed Fisher’s proposal to disempower the managers of the Art- Union in its very first issue. Photographers typically embraced Young America ideas of American art as ultramodern, new, and faithful to nature, so one might have expected him to endorse the Art-Union’s go-ahead spirit. But disquiet in Snelling’s camp again arose from some of the same groups of reformers and “jack of all trades” artists as Whitley.49 There were links to Associationism, transcendentalism, and antislavery: Snelling was a brother- in-law of George Putnam, who in 1853 started Putnam’s Magazine with Parke Godwin, Charles F. Briggs, and George W. Curtis as editors. Putnam’s editors would say in their very first issue that they had never felt that art unionism was healthy, because it interfered with free trade, a Democratic position. They hoped that its galleries would be used for an artist’s exchange, a point of view Fisher had reiterated in Snelling’s magazine and the Evening Post. There was also a link to Young America nativism. Snelling’s wife, Anna (Putnam) Snelling, was a regular contributor to the Know-Nothing monthly the Republic, which Snelling praised. Walcutt, the president of the AAA, was also a contributor to the Republic. Nativism had strong artisanal backing, and under the artist and editor Thomas Whitney, the Republic addressed itself to working men and women. So to Whitney’s Republic, which called Associationist and locofoco Edwin Forrest a standard-bearer for workers, the Art-Union had been governed by a great defaulter (Wetmore), but Walcutt’s Association would be more safely governed by artists, who had their professional reputation at stake. In the second issue of the Photographic and Fine Arts Journal, Fisher was joined by the photographer, painter, actor, and Forrest biographer Gabriel Harrison, who wrote to accuse the Art- Union of damaging the National Academy, as well as other mismanagement. Harrison had had several paintings rejected by the Art-Union, though he sold one in 1849. Where Fisher promoted a free public gallery that would show large historical pictures, Harrison recommended as a better model the Brooklyn Art Union. He called it a temple to art without a lottery wheel for its cornerstone and that didn’t seek debased material from foreign lands to cover its walls.50 Despite Harrison’s call to exclude debased foreigners, his comparison suggests a pitch for liberalizing the American Art-Union: At the Art- Union, the future Episcopalian minister and Christian Inquirer

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editor Samuel Osgood spoke about art’s encouragement of religion, while in Brooklyn, the Freeman’s editor and printer Walter Whitman, who used a Harrison daguerreotype of himself for the frontispiece of his Leaves of Grass, spoke in support of art for the people.51 The Knickerbocker literati stoutly defended the American Art-Union’s managers. A March 1852 satire in the Post took issue with the accusation that the Art-Union encouraged mediocrity because of the bad taste of its managers, noting that the “daubs” and “humbugs” in its gallery included ones by a list of art-world mainstays.52 The Knickerbocker too, though its editor was friendly with Fisher, Walcutt, and Whitley, even writing Whitley a letter of introduction to Charles Dickens, backed the merchant managers.53 However, Hiram Fuller, at the penny Evening Mirror, wrote that the purchases were not worth the price of admission (which was nothing), adding later that while he was sorry to be on the side of sore heads who can’t sell their abortions, the Art-Union had become tyrannical. If the true insider deals between Prosper Wetmore’s friend, the shipper Marshall O. Roberts, Abraham Cozzens, and the other managers could be revealed, it would be a history of selfish scheming and fraud.54 This was not just snobbery about uneducated tastes: Fuller is taking up the penny-press stance against monopolies interfering with free trade, particularly steamship and railroad monopolies that favored expansionist art and policies. Where Fuller thought Wetmore schemed to bribe legislators into giving him corporate privileges, the Herald saw a track record of battling the same “rotten corporate clique” as the Herald. The Whig state legislature had bailed out the Erie Railroad, managed by Seward Whigs, in what the Herald called a three-million- dollar robbery of the people, as the public had to make up the speculators’ losses. The Herald and Evening Post both opposed the public rescue, as they opposed other Whig government spending that benefited corporate monopolies. In 1845, the Erie Railroad managers changed under Wetmore, who was no friend of Seward, to include more Democrats, such as the artist and banker F. W. Edmonds, Charles Leupp, and other Art- Union stalwarts.55 Herald criticism of the railroad relented, though it picked up again in 1850, when the paper pointed out errors and frauds of more than a million in its accounts under a new set of untrustworthy managers. It was when Abraham Cozzens, a member of the Knickerbocker Sketch Club, took over as president of the Art-Union in 1850 and enlarged the Art-Union’s Bulletin into a monthly journal that the penny-press war on corrupt monopolies truly heated up. The Whig Day Book had earlier joined the Evening Mirror in attacking Wetmore as an embezzling politician.

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Though the penny Day Book was severe on the Art- Union’s purchasing (or Cozzen-ing) of good press ($325 for ads in the Times, sixty-two dollars for a letter in the Journal of Commerce, $120 for one in the Herald, etc.), the villain was not the sellouts in the press but Cozzens. Cozzens had been a manager since 1840, and his family members were all art collectors to some degree, commissioning works from Art-Union favorites like Leutze (the Art- Union only purchased thirteen of his paintings, but they were expensive; two engraved), Huntington (forty- two paintings purchased, two engraved), and Cropsey (forty-five paintings). Rather than objecting to Cozzens’s taste, however, the Day Book’s concern was directed at the unfairness of using the house magazine as a platform to promote his and the Art-Union’s favored artists. So when it attacked “Lord Cozzens,” it focused on the Bulletin as a “monstrous” instrument of oppression, edited by the illiterate and tasteless perpetrator William J. Hoppin, to regulate and control art criticism. The Evening Mirror explained: The managers spent subscribers’ money on the Bulletin in order to establish a standard of criticism. This in actuality meant puffing what they buy, sneering at what they refuse, and withdrawing their advertising from those who differ. Indeed, the Herald, among others, suggested that creating the “abolition paper” the Bulletin had been the Art-Union’s most objectionable step, funding a “foolish and silly publication” with “daubs” for illustrations instead of spending subscribers’ money on art.56 Hoppin, a lawyer paid $600 a year, triggered some of this criticism. Hoppin called the Art-Union’s enemies “hirelings in the press,” ostensibly a different category from his own paid writers, who included Curtis, writing also for the Tribune, Evert Duyckinck, editor of the Literary World, George Peck of American Whig Review, and William Allen Butler, like Duyckinck a manager at the Art-Union. Fuller at the Evening Mirror resented the implication of being called a hireling, as did others. Though the editors of the Democratic Sunday Mercury politely acknowledged the honorable character of the Art-Union’s managers (and ran their advertisements), they pointed out the corporation’s intrinsic bias: It buys pictures with other people’s money at prices it sets, from its preferred artists based on its own judgment, then publishes its own journal criticizing them, with its own canon, and audaciously declares that it (the canon and the journal) is independent, unlike the paid writers of the newspapers. Or as the Herald put it, the Art- Union could achieve Whitley’s ideal of a fraternal association controlled by artists rather than patrons: Its charter said no artists were permitted on the Board of Managers, but the Bulletin could

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simply declare that certain painters were “no artists,” and thus there would be no charter violation.57 The Bulletin’s pretense of authority and its simultaneous lack of independence made it the real hireling. The Herald’s own accusation that the Art-Union managers under Cozzens wasted subscriber money on champagne and oysters was less a literal description than a similar reference to paid promotions masquerading as editorials, a category that, according to the Herald, the Bulletin entirely fit into. When the Art-Union sued the Herald for libel, their indictment repeated the names of the Art-Union managers over and over, in an effort to construct the Herald’s attack on the organization as a personal one, on the individual men’s integrity. Bennett in response emphasized that his quarrel was not with the honesty of the managers and not with Cozzens, who politically was in much the same camp as the Herald. Like Hoppin, Cozzens was a Whig member of the Union Safety Committee, which supported the Compromise of 1850 that allowed new territories to join the Union, at the cost of buttressing Southern slavery.58 Instead of Cozzens, Bennett contrasted himself to his detested rival James Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, a Seward supporter and longtime backer of the Art-Union.59 Webb had used private letters to expose a romance between the artist Henry Inman’s daughter and the journalist Nathaniel Willis. The resulting lawsuit by Webb’s former friends, the Inmans, accused Webb of bringing private life and individuals before a prurient public; by contrast, Bennett virtuously explained that his problem with the Art-Union was not the behavior of private individuals but of the corporation, which like all corporations had become corrupt. He explicitly compared it to a recent Seward “bailout,” the Erie Canal enlargement. He argued that the Art-Union’s purchases amounted to the same type of speculation as Seward’s canal contracts, which were awarded in order to win the loyalty of twenty Whig editors, two hundred and fifty Whig politicians, five hundred lawyers, and three hundred old Hunkers (conservative Democrats), with Webb’s junior editor Henry J. Raymond (by then at his own paper, the Times) and editors of the Tribune paid to help.60 So too, for the Herald, the Art-Union’s contracts with the Times and writers from the Courier and Enquirer, Tribune, and Literary World were a distribution of spoils that benefited the antislavery Seward faction. Like the Herald, the cheap Mercury compared the Art-Union to the traditional tricks and collusion of Whig cliques. Its correspondents Jemima Twattle, Fair Play, and C had complained about Art-Union toadyism, selfappointed arbiters of taste, and rigged elections. The sixpenny papers had taken a long time, the Mercury commented in response, to discover that

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a liberal advertiser can be a humbug.61 By 1850, the Mercury was warning that if the Art- Union is managed for private ends and if allegations of its abuse of artists are true, then it deserved exposure as a stupendous speculation. It accordingly recommended that the Whig mayor Ambrose Kingsland break up rings of boys playing pitchpenny, as the Tribune has proven very conclusively that the boy who gambles at pitchpenny will come to be an operator in Wall Street or a manager of the Art-Union.62 The sarcasm is twofold. It is critical of Whigs for their campaigns against the so-called vices of the poor, whether it is liquor stores open on Sundays, newspaper boys hawking papers on the day of rest, arresting street vendors and shivering prostitutes as vagrants, or penny gamblers. The hypocritical Whig papers, who support the Art-Union but applaud such crackdowns, wink at the upper-class versions of the same things, whether stockdealing, attending opera houses, or participating in art lotteries and “lounges.” This grievance, and especially the idea that only rich people are permitted to gamble, whether on Wall Street or in Art-Union lotteries, whose cost prohibits the participation of the poor, echoes throughout the penny press. Papers like the sixpenny Evening Post pointed out the weakness of the moral argument against the Art-Union’s lottery, but to no avail; the crux of the issue was that New York State had passed an antigambling law in 1851, and that law, while it ought to reach “Wall Street” speculators and “the private saloons of our money aristocracy” as well as the “club houses of town,” was only applied to affect the poor.63 This, combined with the involvement of so many wealthy merchants, ministers, politicians, and newspapers, made the Art-Union’s lottery an excellent target for the penny press’s exposure of privilege. The commercialized character of the Art-Union and art in the hands of men who were far removed from artisan values was sometimes related. The Mercury compared the Art- Union paintings to the beautiful gaiter boots (though the paintings were not as good) being shown by the bootmakers’ union and to the American Artists’ Association exhibition.64 Professionals were better at recognizing beauty. The Sunday Dispatch, which had the biggest circulation of the cheap weeklies, also turned against what it saw as the Art-Union’s corporate hypocrisy. A favorite target of the Dispatch, for example, was the Whig-run American Institute, where wealthy officers and managers nominated one another to office, in what the Dispatch considered a humbug of an election, a Peter Funk show.65 They leveled similar accusations against the ArtUnion, where, like the American Institute, managers and officers were repeatedly reelected by voice vote. The Sun, a backer of Walcutt’s American Artists’ Association, similarly focused on how Art-Union managers served

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private interests. It described the Art-Union’s conversion of the Broadway Tabernacle into a lottery office for its annual distribution, with a rum-hole (tavern) scene as a five-dollar prize. The Tabernacle was a church owned and often rented out by the puritanical Journal of Commerce editor David Hale, who was no friend to labor. The Sun’s commentary at first seems to suggest the Art- Union is desecrating the church with gambling and drinking. The Sun, however, pointed out that while little lottery offices are haunted by the police, this one not only had impunity but was an example of how the elite manipulated the laws to their own benefit. By calling the rental hall a church, Hale saved $24,000 in taxes.66 The Herald’s accusations that the Art-Union was in cahoots with Raymond’s Times, the Whigs, and antislavery activism more generally were not strictly true, but their collaboration is reflected in the penny-press stress on the cliques ruling the organization. The Dispatch argued that the managers, who have no taste of their own, are ruled by an artist’s clique of meager-minded knaves. Their pitiful favoritism toward these artists is turning it into a sad and superlative humbug, their Bulletin a mere advertising concern for its bookselling managers. Bookselling was a jab at (among others) manager Duyckinck, whose Literary World served the publishers. An antislavery Democrat and Knickerbocker, Duyckinck’s Episcopalian and collegiate circle did not particularly share the values of the artisanal penny press. The Day Book had different politics than the Dispatch—it would become New York’s most racist defender of slavery—but it promised to give an impartial account of life in Wall Street and among the fashionable, their intrigues, corners, operations, and transactions, called by their true names. No friend to the Seward papers, the Day Book thus decried how the wealthy and fashionable Art-Union managers—like the artist and Knickerbocker Edmonds—had become petty tyrants and quacks puffing their own taste, staying in office or nominating their associates and accomplices and creating a monopoly injurious to art and artists.67 The Whig Day Book was not particularly egalitarian, so it was also unsympathetic to the Art-Union’s free gallery. Let anyone throw open a collection of beautiful statuary and paintings to the mobbish mass, the Day Book suggested, and in a few days the statues would be noseless and earless, the pictures spotted and perforated by dirty fingers, the frames and pedestals carved with the names and blackguard sentiments of visitants.68 The taste of the “vulgar oligarchs” (too plebeian in their tastes) of the “detestable” Art-Union demanded that artists raise the “flag of revolt” against them and—though the editor demurred here—the old fogies of the Academy. When the Art-Union managers bought from Academicians they had

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intolerably bad taste: The Day Book pointed out that a Gray painting purchased for $1,500 by the Art-Union was resold by its recipient for $300.69 What then is the difference, the Day Book asked, between the Art-Union and a mock (fraudulent) auction shop? Instead, they recommended that a city-owned gallery rent space to artists.70 Defenders of the Art- Union triggered new hostilities. For example, Webb of the sixpenny Courier and Enquirer was not only a longstanding enemy of the Herald but also an enemy of Nathaniel Willis (whose war on the Art-Union will be discussed presently). His associate editor Richard Grant White had been a paid publicist for the Art-Union, and his paper’s actual editor from 1843 through the end of 1850, Henry Raymond, was a manager. Raymond had no Fourierist sympathies. He had dismantled Greeley’s arguments for the merits of Associationism and dismissed Whitley’s idea of an artists’ association as a socialist fantasy. He sneered at the “truly republican” architecture of Whitley’s plan for a “fraternal and comprehensive” artist’s association to supplant the Art- Union, with its proposed lateral halls, transepts, libraries, and wardrobes. Whitley argued that art institutions had failed because their structure was based on antirepublican ideas of authority and privilege, and he advocated a fraternity of artists governing this more democratic “temple of art” instead.71 Raymond’s editorials in the Courier and Enquirer and in his own Seward paper, the Times, about the maliciousness and ignorance of Art- Union hecklers like Willis and Whitley instead fit a Whig position in favor of a regulated market in art and criticism. In disdaining these ideas, though, Raymond further alienated the penny press, which was sympathetic to Whitley’s language casting the Art-Union as “an oppressive government,” a political oligarchy interfering in a market that already worked against artists who dared to depart from convention.72 Whitley’s pursuit of social reform probably helped keep Democratic penny papers from writing him off. He started the Worker’s Journal, a paper for the laboring class, which the Sunday Mercury observed took on the “arduous task of making something out of Williamsburgh [Brooklyn].”73 The Sunday Atlas reported that the artist, politician, philosopher, and high priest of Swedenborg and Fourier (Whitley) was about to issue a paper called the Pantheon, which would illustrate all the great questions of the day. In 1850 they observed that the artist and reformer was founding a weekly Industrial Journal, devoted to Reform and the working classes, which would differ from Greeley in favoring direct taxes and free love. Whitley responded that his monthly Journal of Progress—it featured a tableau of the Triumph of Despotism—was in fact dedicated to a land

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tax, in order to support public institutions for laborers.74 The Atlas editors politely said that Whitley was an artist of extraordinary merit but that his philosophy was erratic and mad and that he might be placed in a lunatic asylum. Nor did the Atlas endorse Whitley’s campaign against the ArtUnion. They had defended the “poet” Prosper Wetmore and, by extension, the organization’s general policy of purchasing artworks cheaply in order to encourage young artists. Nevertheless, the Democratic Atlas was one of Whitley’s steady supporters. Its art critic in 1849 pointed to him as an artist whose views of American scenery were faithful, free, and spirited, with an air of truth if not finish, and they were glad that the American Art-Union was exhibiting him. The same paper also defended E. Z. C. Judson, formerly at Cincinnati’s Herald of Truth, for his role in leading locofoco supporters of Edwin Forrest in a riot against the Astor Place Theater, where his rival the English thespian William Macready was performing. The Atlas had long been a Forrest defender, as when they argued that his luxurious home Fonthill proved that American citizens can build a castle and still be democratic. On seeing Whitley’s 1849 Tappan Bay with Fonthill Castle in Whitley’s studio, they added that the painting by the “able and popular artist” did infinite credit to him and the American Art-Union.75 But eventually, like Whitley, the Atlas abandoned Forrest and the utopian ideas of the Associationists. Indeed it was Forrest’s sensational 1852 divorce trial that shifted criticism of the Art-Union into new camps. The trial distanced Whitley from Democrats who supported Forrest, aligning him instead with Whigs like Willis who were hostile to an overly democratic Art-Union.76 Whitley and Forrest may have first fallen out while Whitley was still in Cincinnati, though he continued to live at the actor’s estate in Covington. Whitley is even said to have revenged himself on his employer by praising Forrest’s nemesis Macready in the Herald. But it was his fellow Cincinnati Fourierists, with their advanced ideas about women, who were blamed for Forrest’s divorce. The Herald of Truth had published what they said was the first English translation of George Sands’s novel Consuelo in 1845. An infatuated phrenologist—phrenologists were associated with radical social reform—in Cincinnati, during Edwin Forrest’s theatrical tour there, wrote what came to be called the “Consuelo” letter, which led to his divorce. This rapturous letter, addressing Forrest’s wife by the name of Sands’s heroine, became evidence for her adultery. In Catherine Sinclair’s reply to the letter, she voiced the understandable desire that married women retain economic independence. This was construed by the Herald as partaking of Fourierist doctrines about the equality of the sexes, women’s rights, and

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consequently free love, leading that paper to suggest that the couple’s indecent idea of fashionable life rivaled Mormon polygamy. When the judge in the divorce trial ruled in her favor, the Herald called it a victory for the Fourierist doctrines of her circle; the Art-Union hired her lawyer to sue the Herald.77 Sinclair, when she left the Forrest household in New York, in a display of wifely loyalty, brought with her in the carriage a large portrait of Forrest and took it to family friends, the Godwins. Fanny Godwin, Bryant’s daughter and Parke Godwin’s wife, was a chum, as was Mrs. Willis, a member of the wealthy Whig Grinnell (Moses Grinnell was a manager of the ArtUnion) family. Like the Evening Post, Nathaniel Willis and George Morris in the Mirror and Home Journal had previously supported Edwin Forrest. Willis had said Catherine Sinclair would grace Forrest’s castellated Fonthill on the Hudson; Willis too lived in a Gothic villa and advocated for the style. He also noted that the Forrest house was octagonal, a hallmark of Fourierist architecture.78 The Home Journal thus initially defended Forrest as not being to blame for the “Macready riots” at the Astor Place Theater, though they were not sympathetic to the rioters. But like Whitley, Willis would be summoned to testify against Forrest in the 1852 divorce trial. Forrest, in response to his testimony, beat up Willis, and his attorney, the Democratic politician John Van Buren, tried to duel him. The two journalists and their allies—Willis was a personal friend of Greeley—went on a warpath that expanded the circle of those hostile to the Art-Union. Both were called on to testify to the worldly nature of the Forrests. Whitley, identified as an artist and liquor dealer on Broadway, was called by Sinclair’s attorney to confirm that Forrest was in the habit of visiting brothels near the theaters. A popular Bowery actress admired by the penny press was rumored as one of his infidelities. Whitley, then, was to testify to Forrest’s libertinism. Willis and his brother, however, were summoned by Forrest’s attorney as potential liaisons of Mrs. Forrest. Van Buren drew on Willis’s reputation as a man of the world to convey that her milieu too was fast, not domestic. In the Home Journal, as might be expected in a magazine aimed at upper-class women, Willis countered by blaming Forrest not only for misrepresenting their innocent friendship but for bringing “kitchen” (servant) testimony against his wife. Such testimony was equivalent to the brothel- like penny press attempting to judge the proprieties of refined society. The Herald suggested that his own more upper-class testimony on behalf of Sinclair had not really helped her, as the “drapery” that Willis provided covered but did not conceal the statue raised to astonish society.79

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Figure 4.4. William Sidney Mount, Bishop Benjamin T. Onderdonk, c. 1830–1833, oil on canvas, 34 × 27 inches, bequest of Henry Selden Weller, New-York Historical Society. Public domain; image provided by New-York Historical Society.

Willis’s image as an aristocratic libertine had begun with his support for the British women’s rights advocate Caroline Norton against accusations of sexual misconduct. Closer to home, Willis had also defended the Episcopalian bishop Benjamin Onderdonk when he was accused by parishioners of sexual harassment (fig. 4.4). Many penny papers saw the accusations as the result of conservatives trying to oust a liberal bishop and defended him accordingly. The Herald, for example, noted that a backer of Charles King’s Episcopalian American, a sixpenny newspaper that in its own words preferred not to reflect the living world as it is, had been at odds with Onderdonk. The Episcopalian Courier and Enquirer, where King would become an editor, supported Onderdonk’s attackers.80 In his portrait of Onderdonk, William S. Mount, who was related to Onderdonk’s chief supporter, the editor of the Episcopalian Churchman, poses him squarely in front of the spire of that Episcopalian bastion, Trinity Church. Mount’s biographer, a

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Young America author who became librarian at Columbia, where King was president, wrote Mount that it could not hang at the university.81 But Willis, instead of lining up a conservative conspiracy against Onderdonk, charged that any virtuous woman knew how to repel a man’s advances with just a stern look, so the wives in the case must not have discouraged Onderdonk’s advances. This idea of upper-class womanhood—as, among other things, possessing sexuality—outraged almost every editor in the city and particularly aggravated Raymond at the Courier and Enquirer. Raymond said that Willis when in Rome had caused the American artists there to blush at his shameless profligacy.82 When the Courier and Enquirer’s charges that Willis had seduced Henry Inman’s daughter emerged during the Art-Union controversy, Willis responded in the Herald, and the Day Book took his side, as did the Sunday Mercury, whose editor had been a close friend of Inman. Willis, then, had reasons to oppose Art-Union supporters at the Courier and Enquirer and Times. His attacks in turn made more convincing the Courier and Enquirer’s conviction that the opposition to the Art-Union was personally motivated.83 In the world of the penny press, though, the personal was political. The Home Journal had early adopted the Whig line of reasoning that the Art- Union was valuable because it established a “standard value” in the arts, though they would have preferred a Gothic gallery filled with oldmaster copies by American artists. Reflecting a particularly condescending strain of cultural nationalism, they explained that the Art-Union spurred artists to closer study of (American) nature, because it was that—rather than wood, water, earth, and sky arranged by aesthetic rules—that was appreciated by the uncultivated intellects who presumably comprised the Art-Union’s audience, if not the Home Journal’s. The Knickerbocker, where the Bulletin’s editor Hoppin had been a contributor, said much the same thing but with a more positive spin: Connoisseurs in moustaches and lemon-colored kid gloves sneer at art in which the poor working woman sees only truth of character and expression.84 But as their faint praise suggests, the Home Journal had reservations about the whole enterprise. The American Art- Union advertised in the Home Journal, but so did Goupil’s International Art-Union. This commercial art dealer made Willis, Bryant, and Durand, an Academy member critical of the American ArtUnion, its board members and distributed Mount’s Power of Music as its engraving to subscribers—Mount was also discontented with the American Art-Union’s prices. Willis praised Goupil’s “professional” selection of European pictures for its lottery and hoped that American artists weren’t

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afraid of the competition. According to Willis, this led the American ArtUnion to stop its dollar-a-week advertising, which freed him to explain that the American Art-Union was actually an Employment Society, charitably purchasing misconceptions of art, whereas Goupil buys the excellent, not the local or national, appealing to “a more advanced stage of taste.”85 This wording was likely a dig at the Young America editor Duyckinck, whose friend James Lawson supported Forrest in the divorce. Duyckinck’s weekly advocated for an international copyright to protect “home” literature. The cosmopolitan (denationalized, to Wetmore) Willis had edited weeklies that relied on cheap imported (but, to Willis, far superior) European literature. The Art-Union’s paid-for response in the Tribune, written by Quispiam (Raymond, some said), explained that the advanced taste being advocated by profligates like Willis was for highly colored prints of naked females in the most meretricious French style. The accusation rehashed Raymond’s earlier charges against him at the Courier and Enquirer.86 Willis’s defense that such pictures were to be found not just at Goupil’s but in other New York printsellers’ windows only underscored his immoral character to Quispiam. Such private shops are not pretending to be art unions benefiting the public, Quispiam pointed out, as Goupil’s was. The distinction the American Art-Union drew in this question about their “taste” was not really about nudity, but between their aims as a chartered corporation to benefit the public and Goupil’s as a private, for-profit business. Willis then brought forth the penny-press argument that the public corporation was really a façade. The managers of the Art-Union (or some of them) had turned it into a vehicle for private advancement at the expense of artists. Like Goupil’s it was run by tradesmen, and not professional ones at that, in their own interest. As part of this line, Willis noted that the Art-Union was trying to buy Powers’s Greek Slave (the Western Art Union bought it instead), a statue of a woman who stands consciously exposed in a marketplace, which is worse than Goupil’s unconscious bacchante in the wilderness.87 His comparison pointed to the American Art-Union’s income-gaining (like Goupil’s) rather than moral or taste-improving motivations, since Hiram Powers’s world-famous statue was certain to increase subscriptions. The refined and cultivated visit Goupil’s, whose art is exclusive and not for the masses.88 Willis’s attack shortly after on the morality of a nude sculpture by Henry Kirke Brown, a favorite Evening Post artist, may be explained by his effort to consign the Art-Union’s taste to Forrest’s kitchen.89 The Art-Union had commissioned Brown to make bronze statuettes of an Indian Hunter, twenty of which were to be distributed in 1850 (fig. 4.5). The bronze was

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Figure 4.5. Henry Kirke Brown, Choosing of the Arrow, 1849, bronze, 22 × 113⁄8 × 55⁄8 inches, purchase, Mia R. Taradash and Dorothy Schwartz Gifts, and Morris K. Jesup and Rogers Funds, 2005, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain; photograph provided by the Metropolitan Museum.

based on the Apollo Belvedere, and giving an Indian the pose of classical heroic manhood was certainly enough to make many dislike it. Willis implied just this when he said that the bronze color of the statue, bringing its surface too close to the real subject’s flesh, was part of the statue’s problem. Just as there could be no black Apollo, there could be no brown one. But Willis’s main objection was that it was an outrage to show a male figure’s undisguised nakedness in a public gallery and that the fig leaf belatedly added was too easily dislodged. It was erroneous to consider the Greek Slave indecent, because she expressed no indelicate sentiment, so any indecency was in the mind of the beholder (Willis thought the statue inspired women to join a gym and become more fit; a female gymnasium was among his advertisers), but the Indian Hunter’s male nudity is completely disgusting, if typical of the vulgar atmosphere of the Art-Union. Willis in

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effect accuses the Art-Union of profligacy; it supposedly had to remove the sofas from its gallery to prevent trysts. Newspaper writers had suggested that the Art-Union’s gallery was a place to watch beautiful women, not unlike the National Academy, and stories set romantic encounters there or even documented real-life trysts. Willis in his attack on Brown took advantage of both the Art-Union’s accusations against his own “advanced” taste and its reputation as a democratic (Brown’s statue existed in multiple copies) lounge for the lower classes, a Bowery b’hoy or working-class travesty of aristocratic clubs. Willis couched his demand for more propriety in a way that underscored his dislike of the Art-Union’s democratic appeal, by revising his enemies’ attack on Onderdonk. One of the bishop’s defenders had said that Onderdonk felt toward the women as if they were so many ivory statues, and it was just that his guileless heart was “too little heedful of the figleaf proprieties with which a refined society sews to itself aprons.” Such proprieties were thus matters of taste more than morality. The Courier and Enquirer naturally despised this type of coverup, which denied moral justification to its idea of decorum. Willis now seemed to concur, or rather, he insisted that the Art- Union observe the figleaf proprieties as necessary, given the unelevated (immoral) character of its public. When some years earlier the Evening Mirror had praised Brown’s perfectly nude Adonis at the National Academy, with its delicate, almost hermaphroditic beauty, the estimate of the public at that exhibition, which cost twenty-five cents, was much higher. Fuller accordingly could say that statue’s paper figleaf insulted the moral taste of the New York public.90 The Evening Post, a longtime ally of Forrest and the Democrats, countered that it was acceptable for male figures of the working class—brawny black laborers, workmen in trousers—to be shown nude, and the naturalness of Brown’s style sufficiently modified the ennobling effect of posing the realistically modeled Indian like an Apollo.91 In this account, though, Brown’s realism brings the nude bodies of working-class men into the room (gallery) with young women. The Evening Post may not have successfully derailed Willis’s Whiggish belief that it was the ideal (the upper class), not the natural, that improved the taste of the masses. Certainly, the anti-Art-Union Photographic Art Journal thought Brown ought to try to stop astounding “the people.”92 Willis’s antagonism to Forrest and the Art-Union, and perhaps even his liberal position on women’s rights, attracted Whitley to him. By 1850, he seems to be writing “off-hand gossip” about the arts for the Home Journal, describing the Academy exhibition that year as like choice wines tasted

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with poorer liquors, where the best pictures are diluted with the quality of the worst, phrasing that recalls Whitley’s vinous analogies in the Herald of Truth. By July, Whitley was advertising his paintings in the paper as both free and faithful and as well-known among amateurs.93 A contributor who wrote an art column signed with an asterisk later in the year is critical of artists staying abroad, saying that they need to be in relation with their countrymen, whether that relationship is of accord or antagonism. The Southern landscapist T. A. Richards, whose topographic style resembled Whitley’s, is one of the few whose works are not adulterated with “hot, suffocating tints” from a mass of imported trash “selected during a tour in Europe.” The columnist is supportive of the American Artists’ Association’s emancipation from the Art-Union’s petty tyranny, observing that the Art-Union Bulletin called them a collective of mechanics and laborers.94 This asterisk may not be Whitley, but the writer’s nationalism is closer to Whitley than to Willis. And a new series of items on the fine arts prepared for the Home Journal “by an artist” and continuing through 1851 continues to reflect his views and those of his circle. Tompkins Matteson, a genre painter whose role as art critic for Morris dated back to 1846, is a candidate for these articles. Matteson was certainly an advocate of Young America, and he knew many of the people mentioned. The series does, however, give Whitley considerable attention. The column tracks Whitley’s activities: The artist has bought some remarkable old masters, to be seen at his studio; he has received a commission from Cypress Hills Cemetery; his work at the National Academy has been spoken of favorably by artists; his upcoming Stuyvesant lecture will be on the Pleasures and Penalties that Attend the Pursuit of Art. And the column, like Whitley, recommends a National Association of Artists, with a free, publicly sponsored city gallery and profits from sales of the art used, among other things, to purchase land in western New York as a communal residence. Whitley was using his rooms on Broadway for the sale and exchange of pictures, as per his earlier schemes, on days when he was not teaching landscape painting. The Home Journal columnist concluded his reviews of the 1851 National Academy exhibition by saying that it will continue to be bad so long as its leading artists paint as instructed by the managers of the Art-Union, which has spawned a spurious race of artists. Like the Art-Union, Whitley’s idea of a national school centered on American nature. But he was hostile to the sublime, to imagined (so false) compositions, which announce themselves with gigantic blue and purple mountains, violently opposed by towering trees that remind one of nowhere at all. Instead, artists should paint

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Figure 4.6. Thomas W. Whitley, View of New York City from Hoboken, New Jersey, 1865, oil on paper laid on panel, 13½ × 26¼ inches, Arader Galleries. Public domain; image provided by Arader.

American streets, wharves, and markets. A genre scene by James Cafferty, who painted New York’s streets and newsboys in a detailed manner, shows genius and judgment; Cafferty’s New York Sketch Club created designs that equaled those of the famous Dusseldorf historical painters.95 Whitley’s own panoramic 1865 view of New York places the American flag at the very center of the composition. It flies above the Stevens mansion on Castle Point, the family of Hoboken proprietors who made their money in ferries and railroads but their name in yacht racing (fig. 4.6). The view appropriately emphasizes sailboats, not steam. The promontory, which dominates, asserts Hoboken’s patriotism, despite its reputation as a Democratic stronghold. And Whitley’s Hoboken Gazette continued to publish his art criticism, which was often reprinted in the Home Journal, Knickerbocker, and Post. But the outcropping also bars the viewer’s, or the artist’s, progress toward the city beyond. Whitley’s orbit in the years before the war drew in Unionists, whether Democrats, nativists, or Whigs, who feared that the Republicans would split the nation, but that same orbit kept him out of the mainstream. Whitley still sent an occasional picture to the National Academy; the nativist and Unionist Evening Mirror thought his Gipsey Camp a fine rendition of the old, open woods of Hoboken.96 But, settled in Hoboken, he became a judge, no longer dependent on art. In November 1861 he was nominated by the Union Party for the New Jersey State Assembly. Aware of his stout resistance to abolitionism, Vanity Fair

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suggested that he ought not to perceive plots for dissolving the national Union in a street attack on a Virginian.97 While there have been many astute accounts of the American ArtUnion and its politics and flaws, those histories have been influenced by the way in which the winners—among them Whittredge, a future National Academy president, the National Academy itself, the Tenth Street Studio artists, the Century Club, the New-York Historical Society (which inherited the American Art-Union’s papers, clippings, and some of its pictures), the Republican Tribune, Times, and Harper’s—provided the sources for that history.98 Henry Tuckerman’s Book of the Artists, published by George Putnam in 1867 and still an important source on antebellum art, leaves out most of the artists featured in Whitley’s criticism or among his allies. Certainly it excludes Whitley himself. Recuperating the losers—the nativists, the Associationists, the pro- Southern Democrats and Whigs, the KnowNothings, the Unionists, the hated Bennett of the influential Herald— points to what was lost with them: a penny press or artisan model for a more egalitarian and cooperative art market and for public support for contemporary art. Art critics of the next generation, like George W. Curtis in the penny Tribune, would find much greater success than Whitley by setting their sights on reforming New York art and not its art monopolies.

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The Genteel and the Bohemian

In the 1850s, a new generation of art writers, many with ambitions as professional critics in the growing culture industry, emerged in the city’s Republican and antislavery papers. They revised but retained the old Whig demand for a genteel standard of judgment and decorum in art. At the same time, a loose network of more bohemian authors, many who kept ties to Democratic papers and the tradition of satire, continued to advocate for artists who celebrated the commonplace and natural. They found common ground, however, in rejecting the authority of the past in favor of the present, and in equating the sentimental not with the aristocratic but with the popular. This convergence is evident in the brutal attacks on the genre painter Lilly Martin Spencer and in the appearance of specialized art periodicals and studio buildings. For both freethinkers and followers of John Ruskin, it was not exclusiveness but the commercial character of art that was the barrier to advancing a modern political and aesthetic program. Spencer’s parents had been in a Fourierist phalanx in Ohio, and this Associationist background perhaps gave her initial entrée to likeminded New York circles. The former Associationist Thomas Whitley knew about her work from his stint in Cincinnati. He may account for the Home Journal saying that her pictures were noble, evidencing the power and fertility of her mind.1 Plus, thanks to newspaper exchanges with the antislavery Cincinnati Chronicle (the Tribune praised that paper’s “best principles”), whose editor had “discovered” Spencer, stories about her and other Whig artists had been circulating in New York since 1841. A correspondent for

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the Express grouped her with her Cincinnati friends the painter James Beard and the sculptor Thomas Jones; the Express shortly after hired the art critic Charles Lanman, a former employee of Spencer’s discoverer.2 Having the wealthy winemaker and former New Jersey Democrat Nicholas Longworth as an admirer back in Cincinnati probably also helped. The Democrat Frederick Cozzens wrote Longworth’s golden wedding anniversary poem, sold Longworth’s Ohio wines at his New York shop, and was a regular magazine writer. He was also related to an influential American Art-Union manager. Predictably, journals with Fourierist sympathies welcomed her. In October 1848, the Sunday Dispatch hailed her arrival as an artist of extraordinary genius and praised the American Art-Union for buying two of her paintings, at her price, adding that they would be lucky to get more.3 The Dispatch was as liberal in most respects (antislavery a significant exception), and more skeptical of policing working-class morals, than the equally Fourierist Tribune. In good-natured rivalry, it pointedly congratulated the Tribune’s City Items editor for agreeing with its encomiums about Spencer.4 This overstated it; the Tribune had a mixed review, acknowledging Spencer’s vigor of design and original genius but finding her deficient in the basics of art. However, the Fourierist Harbinger, edited by George Ripley, who would shortly join the Tribune, took a break from praising William Page to promote Spencer’s unusual powers of artistic conception. The Sun, whose editor shared some Associationist aims, had fervent praise for her, too. Like these other sympathizers, the Sun’s roundup of art mentioned a number of artists with ties to cooperative enterprises, including the editor’s friend William Walcutt, the Art-Union gadfly Whitley, an engraver at the Dispatch, and so on.5 In the spring exhibitions of 1849, just a few months after arriving in New York, Spencer continued to receive attention for her strongly original compositions, and in 1850 she was elected an honorary Academy member. In this politically fraught period, there was some suspicion of what could be seen as her Young America compositions. Journals mistrustful of the ongoing European republican revolutions disliked the “lackadaisical” parents (the father subordinate to the mother) in her scene of Domestic Happiness. They preferred a more authoritarian father—and state. But they loved the charming naturalness of the sleeping children, their freedom and “perfect repose.”6 The Democratic Sun, less interested in a repressive state, countered that if the children were “little less than nature itself,” the father and mother were also remarkably fine: Their veins pulse with blood, their skin glows with light, and the expressions of love and devotion could

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not be improved. That this description smacked of the fervor of Young America is evident in an Evening Mirror comment mocking a Spencer water- spirit painted for the Fourierist, feminist, and all- around radical Mrs. Gove as “red-hot.”7 The Evening Mirror often poked fun at the more radical papers, but its editor and writers had ties to the transcendentalists, who were allies of the Associationists. As early as 1847, the Evening Mirror had noted that the Western Art Union was discriminating against Mrs. Spencer, in buying pictures from her at nearly the same prices as from William Powell, an Ohio artist whom they criticized for an undeserved reputation.8 And in 1849, like the Sun, Tribune, and Dispatch, they praised Spencer as manifestly a woman of genius whose style, even in paintings like Thoughts on a Flower, was masculine.9 That term wasn’t just a way of confining genius to men. In a period when masculine vigor evoked Young America speed and expansion in opposition to Whig aristocratic refinement, it also expressed the penny press’s idea of a native school of art that was expressive, realist, and humorous. In the 1850s, these endorsements began to change. An 1850 review in the Dispatch disapproves of the expressiveness of her faces, one of her strongest points. Other former friends become outright vicious. In 1854, for example, the Tribune, home to several former Fourierists, is astonishingly brutal. Her portrait of an infant, the Tribune writes, is of such utter deformity that it has a sense of moral evil, a monstrous creature whose flesh hangs in bunches as if loosened from its frame by beating. Discolored and distorted, the little fiend is not fit to be seen.10 The Evening Mirror, though still acknowledging her merits in design, execution, and natural attitudes, more mildly agreed that the baby was coarse, with a too-loose and flabby texture in its flesh.11 This was the child of the art dealer William Schaus, who also had a portrait of his wife painted by Spencer. Schaus was her biggest single patron, commissioning paintings, publishing lithographs from them, and then auctioning the paintings. As a prominent man in the art world, and one associated with Goupil’s International Art Union (the American ArtUnion’s commercial rival), he attracted some controversy. After Schaus resigned from the Goupil gallery in the wake of two years of management difficulties, the Spirit of the Times and the Day Book defended him as an honorable gentleman with taste, judgment, and devotion to the interests of art.12 Still, it seems surprising that his baby would receive such nasty comments. The painting’s subject too would seem to fit notions of what was appropriate for women to paint, though here the tendency to see political satire in art, especially art in a masculine style, perhaps created problems.

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For example, the Evening Mirror dismissed her Future President, another picture of a “red and chubby” naked baby, as “premature”; the critic wished she had given the baby’s nurse time to wash, dress, and air it before sending it in.13 The problem seemed to be with envisioning the Whigs, who lost that year’s election, as a slobbering and incapable infant. The sixpenny Evening Post, despite having the Fourierist Parke Godwin as associate editor (the antislavery politician John Bigelow was really in charge by this time), was also increasingly unsympathetic. It dismissed as silly another of her democratically engaged fathers, in the family scene Fi Fo Fum!, and the action itself, of a father playfully leading his children against the English, as appropriate for a nursery, not an art gallery. The Albion agreed, perhaps on guard against hostility to the British.14 But the Post, like the Tribune, was now employing full- time art critics who preferred a style whose “nature” had less commercial appeal and could not be sold as nursery furniture. The critic for the Republican, antislavery Independent similarly attacked Spencer for producing humbug (presumably inartistic, like nursery scenes) works for auction.15 Spencer was no more commercial than her male peers. She sold regularly to art unions, and like most artists she participated in occasional auctions. Both types of sales, unlike commissions or private buyers, emphasized that art was a commodity easily convertible into money. Art union subscribers might and did sell their paintings if they were lucky enough to win one by a famous name.16 Press coverage of the American ArtUnion liquidation sale, after its lottery was declared illegal, reinforced its associations with the commodification of art. Whether or not a paper thought the results of this final auction validated the Art-Union managers’ judgment, auctions put the art’s value in dollars. The Evening Mirror, a defender of the Art- Union and its “irreproachably moral” influence on its four thousand daily visitors, said that the really good pictures—including ones by Spencer—brought one-third their real value. Most artists did see a drop in price at the auction from what the Art- Union had paid them, and generally the higher the Art- Union fee, the bigger the drop. For the artists it patronized most, it had indeed been a benefactor, compared to the market. For Art- Union opponents, the drop in price for “star” pictures pointed to the managers’ bad taste, or as the Photographic Art Journal put it, the auction was a benefit for the servile clique’s toadies.17 William Page’s Mother and Child sold in the auction to the Art- Union’s president Abraham Cozzens for $200, $370 less than the Art- Union had paid for it. However, one of Spencer’s more labor- intensive genre paintings, the Jolly Washerwoman, had been purchased for $161 and sold for $240 (fig. 5.1).18

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Figure 5.1. Lilly M. Spencer, Jolly Washerwoman, 1851, oil on canvas, 24½ × 17½ inches, purchased through a gift from Florence B. Moore in memory of her husband, Lansing P. Moore, Class of 1937, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Public domain; image provided by Hood Museum. Rogers & Phillibrown, after Lilly M. Spencer, Shake Hands?, 1854, frontispiece, Cosmopolitan Art Journal 1, no. 5 (September 1, 1857). Public domain; image provided by JSTOR.

The relative market success of humorous paintings like Jolly Washerwoman tied criticism of Spencer to anxiety about commercialism and the presence of the working class in art and literature. The same female urban workers in her paintings turned up in front-page engravings in cheap weeklies like the Dispatch, Mercury, and Atlas (fig. 5.2). In the Dispatch series on modern labor, the “heroine of the kitchen- range” (not exactly a servant, despite the facetiousness) was from Puritan New England but forced to seek her fortune as a cook in New York, at ten dollars a week. The same series’s “votaries of the tub,” like cooks, are educated and unmarried, and though they struggle against the new laundries, they find washing more profitable than sewing. Wage-earning women in the penny press may have left their families to become book binders and ice cream waitresses, but they are not desperate or victims. Rather, they were part of a new labor force; perhaps disposable income permitted them to buy and read penny Sunday papers or attend art exhibitions. Complaints about too many portraits on the walls of the National Academy had similarly developed from fears that American artists were intent

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Figure 5.2. “The Cook,” Dispatch, December 24, 1848, p. 1; “The Washerwomen,” Dispatch, August 27, 1848, p. 1; Library of Congress. Public domain; photographs provided by author.

on serving the market (constructed as composed of commoners, with commonplace faces), rather than serving the high ideals of art, defined as historical compositions. The art critic in the Evening Mirror sighed that the mass of exhibition visitors love personality (portraits), even if it be rude and uncouth.19 Young America critics, of course, writers like Walter Whitman or Charles Briggs, defended portraits of those same uncouth people as the true historical painting of the day. Complaints about tawdry pictures in the exhibitions, like those said to be popular in auctions, stemmed from the related concern that artists painted flashily, to catch the eye of uneducated buyers. The Art-Unions too were believed to cater to popular taste in order to attract subscriptions. Whitley damned the Western Art Union, which later engraved a Spencer painting, for engraving a dog picture by Beard in order to attract a wide audience. Spencer also exhibited paintings at commercial galleries, which selected art for their windows based on popular appeal. The Democratic Leader, whose critic admired Spencer, praised Schaus’s selection of German genre paintings for his gallery and his avoidance of despicable copies of old masters. The Republican Evening Post, however, dismissively noted that Spencer’s “slut and puppies with which the public is familiar” was at Snedecor’s gallery, prior to an auction. The painting, of starving dogs on the street, seemed even more repellent to the Post writer because of its promiscuous exposure in a shop window. Stray dogs like the ones she portrayed were clubbed on the street for fifty cents each or, still howling, drowned in tanks—in the summer of 1859, 9,682 dogs and 387 puppies were killed—while purebred or well-kept dogs were spared. The Evening

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Post, like most papers, endorsed the policy; the Herald had accounts of pets stolen from laborers for the bounty.20 Street dogs, like Spencer’s flirtatious cook and sturdy laundress, were familiar from the penny press, and retailing paintings of them to printsellers like Schaus surely reinforced her art’s low associations. The most highbrow writers nominally supported the role of engravings in bringing art to a broad public, but the key was for the pictures themselves to be morally improving. Pictures that resembled illustrations in a satirical cheap paper exposing injustices to the poor hardly qualified. Commercial popularity, however, doesn’t account for the hostility toward Spencer, since genre painters like William S. Mount and Tompkins H. Matteson followed similar practices. Both sold pictures to Schaus for reproduction, and their works too had sources in contemporary caricature and illustration. Her style, the grotesque monstrosity that the Tribune saw, was not the “tea-tray” or stylized manner of Academy specialists in women and children like Henry Inman, the style the penny press had attacked as the taste of the old Knickerbocker aristocracy (fig. 2.2). Nor did it resemble the mannered or repetitive (qualities also associated with commercial production) style of painters known for their sale of large numbers of inexpensive landscapes, like Thomas Doughty or George Harvey (an Evening Post favorite). Nor did her style have the sketchiness that could be associated with either amateurish efforts or flashy, rapid painting for market. Instead, she had an excess of naturalness that irritated radical Republicans. Henry J. Raymond’s Daily Times, a Republican paper careful to avoid partisan extremes, especially in regards to abolition, described Spencer’s 1854 portrait of Schaus’s baby in a way that points to this. The child is on an ermine robe, counting its toes, and is without any exception the most artistic work in the exhibition, perfectly realized, with a Puck- like expression that is exceedingly ludicrous; the sly laugh is an artistic triumph seldom achieved. The Express agreed: The baby is so natural, it causes much amusement, and a Lover of Art wrote in to that paper to praise her and to vilify red (socialist) and black (abolitionist) Republicans. The Spirit of the Times, one of the few papers to embrace a statue of Andrew Jackson that the Tribune identified as a partisan botch, thought Spencer’s portrayal of children in Fi Fo Fum! worthy of Hogarth and called her an undoubted genius. The Democratic (but free-soil) Sunday Atlas agreed that in paintings of servants and babies she was the talented and versatile Hogarth of American character, able to rival Dutch masters for realism.21 The Sunday Mercury, which supported the Democrat James Buchanan for president, thought that she was wonderfully gifted; by 1859, when that weekly was

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solidly behind Lincoln, they put her in only the third rank of artists (though her coloring was still second to none). The Herald, still advocating that Lincoln compromise with the South, suggested that male artists struggled to keep up with Spencer. The New York Leader, which had backed Lincoln’s opponent, Stephen Douglas, said her Future President, a nude infant bolstered in his cradle, is an admirably lifelike household god.22 The Leader not only endorsed her capital paintings, her Hogarthian wit and sarcasm (devoid of his vulgar coarseness), her careful observation, and her realism but also the latent depth of feeling in her touching forsaken dogs. Putnam’s added that her paintings are understood well enough by “country cousins” (people who can afford the free exhibitions at the picture shops) to be sorry they’ve seen the abandoned dogs; the element in them that we who are sophisticated and sensitive call coarseness, they say is nature.23 Naturalness, whether mixed with pathos or humor, made her popular; the same qualities offended opponents. In 1856, a writer in the genteel Home Journal sympathetically observed that Spencer had been severely criticized, despite her unmatched coloring, invariable refinement, genius in design, and touches of human nature. He pointed out that her Schaus color lithographs of black and white children were seen everywhere. He ended by warning that while nearly all critics champion a few and saber the many, doing so violated the public sense of fair dealing, implying that Spencer hadn’t gotten a fair shake. Perhaps it was not accidental that he also noted that the art journal Crayon, a foe to Spencer, had recently much improved. One of its editors, William Stillman, had just left for a summer painting trip with Daniel Huntington, an old favorite of the paper. The Home Journal’s review of that year’s National Academy exhibition seems to jab again at the Crayon: Fine art was a trade, and critics who use the excuse of “pure art” to justify personal criticism are working from motives that are anything but pure. He went on to smile at the perfect still-life and supra-Dutch verities in Spencer’s Young Wife and Young Husband (commissioned for Schaus), though he disliked her making her wife as coarse as her servant. In 1859, the Home Journal was still simultaneously praising Spencer and tasking fellow critics with making egotism the basis of their censure: Her charming Pat a Cake, the attraction of Williams and Stevens’s window, was a gem, but the desire to impress readers with their superior perception led to critics denying that they followed the bias of their own taste rather than a just standard.24 Critics too were vulnerable to accusations of commercial self-promotion. The Evening Post, an ardent Crayon supporter (Asher Durand’s son, John, was a Crayon editor), responded to the Home Journal—the Home Journal then excerpted their article—that critics who find fault rather than

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just praising are wrongly denounced as having bad motives. It is critics who praise who are vapid. Vanity Fair agreed, observing that the Herald’s art critic was prone to shaking conventional adjectives onto a long string of itemized names, for which he got paid five dollars. With the more serious, albeit more negative reviewers, the Post complained, the artists’ friends (at other newspapers) indignantly rush into a controversy, and the result is that the artist gets the worst of it. The Home Journal had actually pictured a somewhat similar scenario, in which sensitive, ill-paid editors send their newspapers to the reading rooms, whereupon artists rush in, sneer (or hurrah) at their style of criticism, then in retribution scatter caricatures of the editors.25 The Home Journal may have been thinking of the visual satires that appeared in humorous weeklies like Vanity Fair, where “reviews” of National Academy exhibitions were as much mockeries of art criticism as they were of the paintings (figs. 5.3, 5.4). Artists, like writers, were satirized most at periodicals where they had friends; journals where they did not more often ignored them. As a result, this mockery, verbal or visual, was of a different order than the Crayon’s grave “fault-finding.” For example, the Sunday Mercury, which embraced Young America in 1854 when a former Sunday Atlas editor took over, had

Figure 5.3. “National Academy,” Picayune, June 20, 1857, pp. 212–13, Library of Congress. Public domain; photographs provided by author.

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Figure 5.4. “We Visit the Academy of Design,” Vanity Fair, April 28, 1860, p. 276. Public domain; image provided by the Vault at Pfaff’s.

a satirical tone for its art reviews: The Columbia graduate and Post favorite John Ehninger’s ambitious George Washington reminds one of a servant in livery; the critic and artist Charles Rosenberg’s Columbus is inclined to leave a leg on the beach, and his Indians are a heap of crabs; Matteson’s Scarlet Letter shows modern Sabbatarians; Eastman Johnson represents a house running to pigeons, Albert Bierstadt a purgatory for Indians; George Inness is all blue; Emanuel Leutze is rendering the Irrepressible Conflict, Martin Heade a flying haystack, and so on. The critic notes that the column was written “in no joking mood” but in a style calculated to make the artists and public aware of the faults of the most pretentious critics and artists.26 The Mercury’s comments, though pointed, swiped at friends as well as foes. Visual satires at comic papers like the Picayune bespeak the familiarity of the city’s bohemian authors with artists. The Picayune had started under a former Herald writer, sharing contributors with kindred antimoralizing papers like the Atlas and Dispatch. Under the bohemians Frank Bellew and Mortimer Thomson, the latter a City Items writer for the Tribune, it moved closer to the Republicans.27 Bellew was a British-born artist who knew Emerson and Thoreau and sympathized with the Fourierists. In the paper’s pictorial review of a National Academy exhibition, the joke for

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James Cafferty’s portrait of Charles Burkhardt, an editor at the Sunday Dispatch, plays on the cliché of the “speaking” portrait, since Burkhardt’s speech is garbled by his accent—and by drink (fig. 5.3). The two (artist and editor) together might also stand for the pretensions of the younger artists’ New York Sketch Club. So too the Picayune’s mockery of Thomas Hicks and Henry Ward Beecher might stand for the claims of the Associationist and antislavery Tribune crowd. In either case, such bonhomie did not often extend to respectable female artists. Vanity Fair’s pictorial criticism also showed traces of Young America’s democratic feeling (fig. 5.4). In its 1860 review of the National Academy, Rosenberg, the author, artist, and bon vivant, is again singled out; Ehninger, who illustrated comic periodicals, is mocked; antislavery artists like Leutze, Eastman Johnson, Edwin White, and Martin Heade come in for good-humored knocks. The writer is accompanied to the Academy by a drunken Irish artist, Raphael O’Titian, a satire of the typical Democratic painter: His grand historical picture of Columbus (a subject painted by Rosenberg), which included an Authentic Negro, was rejected by the Academy. O’Titian in pseudo–Young America style tells his literary companion that the Academy is managed by a set of fossils, venerable humbugs who praise one another and govern as a clique. His companion demurs: They are virtuous and amiable managers who feel generous sympathy for the young, and he imagines the archrealist Charles Elliott painting them as an angel, seated on a cloud, with a crown of glory. Of course, this is satire too; Vanity Fair gave the title “Justice not Revenge” to the empty frame left after Elliott cut out the canvas from a portrait that the National Academy had hung poorly. Vanity Fair suggests that a few more such highly suggestive and meaningful pictures as this will put the Institution in the place it should have long occupied.28 Elliott was a very successful Academician and Century Club member; he had eight to eleven portraits in every exhibition and was well connected. Junius Brutus Stearns showed him fishing with Frederick Cozzens and the editor of the Knickerbocker, but Young America papers with more egalitarian agendas liked him too. Whitman complimented him in the Sunday Dispatch, the Irish News praised his portrait of a filibustero, and the controversial Young America diplomat and art writer C. Edwards Lester wrote a memorial to him, as did Thomas Thorpe, an amateur artist who became editor at the Spirit of the Times.29 Thomas W. Whitley had a portrait by Elliott and painted Elliott’s country seat in Hoboken. Hiram Fuller of the Evening Mirror was a regular Elliott “he can’t be beat” supporter. Elliott, then, had friends among those who feared that moves to

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end slavery in the South would endanger the Union.30 Elliott’s actions then were often framed (no pun intended) as coinciding with a procompromise or Unionist penny paper’s attack on the Academy and its gross favoritism and incapacity; it was an artistic lodestone and Nemesis hung around the neck of American Art, a penny-show shop, a mutual-admiration affair with old-fogy management (as per O’Titian, satirizing just this style), a National Academy of Donkeys (and National Academy of Designs on the purse).31 In the Evening Post, which supported the Academy and opposed the Compromise of 1850, it was left to “an amateur observer” to make the claim that the National Academy was a monopoly. Not only was Elliott right to remove his picture (the Herald praised Elliott for shaming the academy, in its dingy Tenth Street rooms), but he hoped it would draw attention to other flagrant cases of injustice, as a glance around the exhibition will show that works of very mediocre interest in subject were prominent, while works of sentiment, addressed to human sympathies, have been insulted and degraded. In reply, another letter writer, who identified himself as not being an Academy member (though he was a friend of its President, Durand), defended the hanging committee as doing the best it could with seven hundred pictures. But he didn’t address the question of rejecting sentiment.32 Not only did Elliott refuse to submit any paintings to the next year’s Academy, but neither did Spencer—or she had none accepted. In this discussion of Elliott and the Academy, the newspapers are pointing to the rise of a new clique, with its own critics, something the Home Journal had also alluded to in its defense of Spencer. This is explicit in a Sunday Dispatch satirical exhibition review, a dialogue between Softtongue (a capital exhibition!) and Hardhead (pooh! pooh!). The Dispatch was both Republican and a longtime defender of Elliott (very few rank with him, magnificent, perhaps best portrait painter living, powerful, etc.). Its two imaginary critics agreed that Elliott could do without an Academy that hung good pictures in all sorts of out-of-the-way corners and bad ones in first-rate places. The “bad one” referred to an Eastman Johnson portrait of Genio C. Scott, a fashion writer for the Home Journal, correspondent on art for the Express, and fishing correspondent for the Spirit of the Times, none of which were journals the Dispatch admired.33 The Dispatch’s two mock critics went on to clarify that the Tenth Street studio clique (including Eastman Johnson) ruled the Academy, and so artists outside that circle like Rosenberg may be better than most artists in the country as a draughtsman, but “when a man has no personal friends . . . he is a fool to send a work of any pretensions to them [the Academy].” The dialogue goes on to point out the pitfalls of being a press critic—Rosenberg himself

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was one—with artist friends: Softtongue must defend Henry P. Gray and Hicks, while Hardtongue is a friend of Rosenberg.34 The Tenth Street studio building, built in 1857, had the devout and Republican landscapist Frederic E. Church at its heart (he moved there from a studio in the Art-Union building). Pointing to the influence of the Tenth Street artists often meant mentioning Church, as when the Spirit of the Times argued that Elliott’s portraits (perhaps including his portrait of that journal’s editor) had more intellectual power than Church’s Heart of the Andes, which had been on display in the studio building. Glib oyster-room critics, the Spirit of the Times added, those who puff the Academy and the Tenth Street artists but disparage Elliott, are prejudiced and unable to understand art.35 Hiram Fuller at the Evening Mirror put it slightly differently: The Epicures of art have lost their natural taste, while newspaper writers vent bile on all but their favorite Academicians, whom they puff ad nauseam in return for a portrait of themselves or their pet dog. One critic—Fuller is alluding to his old associate, Charles Briggs—insists Page is the only artist who can express the human face, or Elliott is the Sun of art, but Fuller claims to operate as an innocent eye. As a result, like the country cousins outside the printshop windows, he likes a picture of terriers so real that it will attract the dogslayers.36 To all these Hardtongues, the Tenth Street studio seemed to be actively expanding its sway over the art world. Not only were the Academy’s temporary (from 1857–1861) rooms nearby, but the building’s approximately twenty-three artists held well-attended monthly receptions.37 The Tenth Street studio receptions, like those of the Artists’ Association (a group of fifty artists) at Dodsworth’s hall, were aimed at the crème de la crème of society. Newspapers would list the names of attendees. Rather like the “private” openings at the National Academy (though with fewer beards and shorter hair, according to the Spirit of the Times, suggesting more businessmen than bohemians), the events, attracting thousands, were endorsed by most papers. Understanding that artists had no year-round gallery for exhibition and sales, editors saw the receptions as a happy solution, despite their exclusiveness. But there were some critics of the way these clubby occasions defined the audience for art—and how they corrupted artists. According to the Sunday Mercury, such assemblies were the product of a clique of mutual admiration. The term “Mutual Admiration” had originated with Poe’s satires of literary cliques in the 1840s, but the Mercury and other cheap papers used it for the Whig or Republican managers of institutions. The Herald named the abolitionist editors of the Republican Post, Tribune,

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Times, and Independent (Bryant, Godwin, Raymond, Greeley, Dana, and Beecher) “the Mutual Admiration clique.” These gentry meet at receptions to curry favor with the Potiphars, Creamcheeses, and Barnacles of society, nicknames that evoked the Tribune art critic George Curtis’s comic Potiphar Papers, illustrated by his friend, the artist Augustus Hoppin. At the receptions, the artists engage a band and illuminate their canvases, and romantic boys in spacious collars and magazine writers with curled hair are flattered by art worshippers who admire landscapes resembling iced fruit cakes, portraits of senators that resemble those in the Picayune, and animals who never inherited the earth.38 Where the Tribune condemned the Prince of Wales for skipping the Tenth Street studios in favor of seeing Barnum’s “What Is It?” (an exhibition that suggested African Americans were apes), Spencer’s patron, the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, mocked the Tenth Street artists for social climbing. Instead of trying to catch the prince’s attention, they ought to behave with Elliott’s democratic indifference. He’d resisted a deputation of influential citizens that had asked him to postpone his other clients in order to paint the prince. The Mercury focused not on the Tenth Street artists but on their wealthy patrons, who were trying to please the prince: They were Picture Toadies who make the flunkeyism of the rich repulsively apparent.39 Women were among those excluded from such mutual-admiration societies, despite their representation on the Academy’s walls. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal, edited by a woman who got her start publishing stories in the Home Journal and Evening Mirror, satirized artists’ receptions as places where pretty women and bearded men in white gloves say something artistic: “a delightful commingling of the largest elements of chiaroscuro with the spiritual apprehensions and material perfectness,” or “full of the elaborate touches of true genius and the individualities of the palette.” This is a class that affects aestheticism, not feeling, the same group that shows no interest in subject. She noted, too, that the “class of critics” who do the art itemizing (the notices on artists’ movements, new pictures, patrons, etc.) for the “leading” daily papers attend the receptions in order to minister to artists’ vanity and egotism.40 Elizabeth Oakes Smith, in her own journal, pointedly observed that artists had shown a want of liberality in admitting women to the “privileges” of these institutions (the Sunday Mercury, where her son worked, called them old- fogy clubhouses) designed to aid artists. She praised Spencer as a creative genius and satirist; other artists by imitating her might prove their manhood.41 Raymond’s Times, a paper that started Whig and ended Republican, never entirely joined the developing consensus on art. Its writers echoed

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penny- press language in suggesting that the artists’ receptions degenerated into mutual admiration and aesthetic flirtation. The Times had also supported Spencer and Elliott. Though the college-educated Raymond had started as an ally of Greeley (Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote, according to the Herald), Raymond left the Tribune to join the Courier and Enquirer, a much more conservative Wall Street paper.42 When Raymond, because of his antislavery views, left to start the penny Times, he retained some of the sixpenny paper’s conservatism. In 1852, Raymond welcomed the Democrat Franklin Pierce so warmly after the election that the Herald suggested that the Times might even become Pierce’s mouthpiece. Penny papers, even well-funded Whig ones like the Times, often voiced a desire to expand the Union. That would require compromise with the South and so pushed them toward conservative Democratic positions. The Evening Mirror approvingly described the newsboys’ delivery of the Times as including the shout “Young America—’ere’s the Daily Times.”43 After Raymond was elected lieutenant governor of New York in 1855, Charles Briggs, a Young America Whig, took over as main editor at the Times. Briggs, though friendly with transcendentalists and antislavery, was critical of abolitionists as disunionists. A satirist, he and the Times employed a stable of often bohemian writers who shared this wariness of zealots. Party sympathies were especially complex at this moment. Though the Times supported Abraham Lincoln, these writers retained connections with the penny Democratic press, especially attitudes critical of monopolies and genteel pretensions. To the pro-South Herald, the Times may have been an outright abolitionist sheet, but like Harper’s it was more often accused of temporizing or sitting on a fence. Some of that confusion was attributable to having editors and writers who were critical of evangelical promoters of abolition and “moral twaddle” at other Republican papers.44 The Times, then, was not entirely part of what the proslavery Day Book called an Anglophile, abolitionist, Fremont-loving clique. The Day Book named a few remaining editors with Democratic sympathies, including some at Vanity Fair, the Home Journal, and the Sunday Mercury.45 But the Day Book editor was more concerned with the abolitionist clique, singling out the art critic George W. Curtis as being puffed by a daily paper (the Tribune) that aspired to be the principal literary journal of the country, though his writings were at best feeble, with veneer and varnish over rickety frames. The Times’s art critic by contrast was merely “artistic.” 46 For the Day Book, abolitionist thinking acted as a censor, preventing writers from developing a distinctively American voice (one that would include slavery) and ensuring that they instead continued to imitate English masters. For

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the Herald, English lenses (imitative Anglophilia) made one especially susceptible to abolitionism, which is how that paper explained the position of New England’s Puritan descendants. The Sunday Atlas defined the members of the clique along similar lines and with similar consequences for art. When promoting David Richards’s picture of “the dimpled softness of childhood” at Snedecor’s gallery, the editor observed that no matter how good Richards is, he won’t be noticed until he becomes a member in full standing of the High Mutual Admiration Society of American Art. This clique of “self- important bladders” who believe they monopolize all the taste was weighted heavily with abolitionist Republicans but not with writers for the Times.47 The Evening Mirror had been one of the first to take up cudgels against this group, which they called “our set” of “young men about town” who produced “agreeable magaziny sort of writing.” The editor Hiram Fuller cited in particular Putnam’s treatment of Oakes Smith’s Newsboy as an example of these “editorlings” denouncing anyone who does not submit to their clique. The Evening Mirror, which loved the Newsboy’s lifelike naturalness, its open-mouthed (working-class) countenances and pathos, its Young America qualities, asked why it sold so well if, as Putnam’s said, it was miserable, unartistical, and unnatural.48 Fuller distinguished between the publisher George Putnam, a moderate, and his hirelings and literary leeches, who exploited the magazine for abolition and their favorites; the thrust was at editors Briggs (Priggs) and Richard G. White (Blight), both of whom once wrote for Fuller. Parke Godwin’s editorial presence perhaps explains what Fuller called the magazine’s Tammany Hall spoutings. Curtis, another editor, is the Thersites of Fifth Avenuedom, a title that mocks his vanity (Homer describes Thersites as ugly) as his portrait had appeared in Putnam’s, but also implies that his writing offers misguided social protest. The same Evening Mirror column that identified “our set” with Putnam’s antislavery authors described the new art journal Crayon as mechanically “neat” but unlikely to prove good. “Our set,” in this sense, in the world of art, extended beyond Curtis of Putnam’s and the Tribune to William Stillman, who wrote for the antislavery Evening Post and Crayon, and to Clarence Cook, who wrote for all of these papers plus the antislavery Independent.49 Though all three owed a debt to the English critic John Ruskin and his advocacy of the Pre-Raphaelites, they had reservations about how much Nature a progressive art could embody. The Irish playwright Fitz James O’Brien at the Times, who might be counted in this set, for example, wanted art that rejected Renaissance and Baroque conventions, so

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he praised the principles of Truth behind Ruskin’s Pre-Raphaelites. But he understood that Nature could lead the artist into error—away from the soul of the picture.50 If not united as disciples of Ruskin, Cook, Stillman, and Curtis did have in common a certainty that there was a standard of judgment in art possessed by an educated few that let them evaluate aesthetic merit apart from personality. Their opponents were happy to point out that their ties to political and artistic friends affected their taste as much as their hireling peers, but that they were convincing in their posture of independence is evident by their being the only art critics remembered from this period. To understand their eventual prominence, it’s necessary to look at the battles the three of them waged with one another and with the benighted (often, but not always, procompromise Unionists). George W. Curtis, despite attending school at the Fourierist Brook Farm, where he became friendly with the future Tribune editor Charles A. Dana and the painter Christopher P. Cranch, grew up with aristocratic certainties about the possession of taste. His father, a Whig politician, moved the family from Rhode Island to New York, where he built a house in Washington Square and in his job at the Bank of Commerce earned Bennett’s enmity as part of the Philip Hone circle.51 Curtis traveled in Europe for several years, becoming friendly with Hicks, Page, and the landscape painter John Kensett, and sending letters to the Tribune and Courier and Enquirer describing the preeminence of the German school of art.52 On his return to the United States, Curtis joined Godwin and Whitley in a lecture series on contemporary art. In millennialist fashion, he concluded (to great applause) his summary of the European schools with the promise that American artists stand on “Pisgah’s heights,” with a view of the grand prospect of their harvesting all the Christian fruitage of the age, clearing the field for the establishment of their future Kingdom.53 Perhaps to clear the field for a new sowing, Curtis entered into the lists against the then-Democratic Evening Post by clarifying how Karl Friedrich Lessing’s Martyrdom of Huss, a star of the Dusseldorf gallery in New York, ought to be understood: as a failure (fig. 5.5). John Godfrey Boker, a wine merchant, had imported the gallery’s collection of contemporary German paintings in 1849. Like the city’s galleries of old masters, it was a private collection put on display ostensibly to benefit the public. Boker filled the rooms in the Gothic Revival Church of the Divine Unity on Broadway with paintings mostly from the Malkasten (Paintbox) group at the government art school in Dusseldorf. As the name Paintbox, uniting all the colors of the palette, suggests, these painters favored the democratic revolution of

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Figure 5.5. Karl Friedrich Lessing, The Martyrdom of Hus, 1850, oil on canvas, 141¾ × 209¾ inches, lost. Public domain; photograph provided by Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Christian Kohler, Awakening of Germania in 1848, 1849, oil on linen, 90 × 107½ inches, Durr Collection, New-York Historical Society. Public domain; image provided by NewYork Historical Society.

1848 and a united German nation. Boker was German, and his motives in establishing and exhibiting the collection were probably a mix of patriotism (some of the paintings supporting revolution were not safe in Germany) and profit seeking. The press that favored Young Germany was generally sympathetic. The conservative Courier and Enquirer denied that politics were behind their explanation that Christian Kohler’s explicit antimonarchical allegory of Germania had no meaning beyond the aesthetic (fig. 5.5). No such defense that politics wasn’t involved was issued over their desire to build a wall between Ferdinand Hildebrand’s black Othello and his white Desdemona.54 But Lessing’s Martyrdom of Huss was the centerpiece. Americans knew of it before Boker bought it. William Bryant on his 1845 trip to Europe saw Lessing’s sketch for the burning of the religious martyr John Huss and recounted his admiration for it and the Dusseldorf school generally in correspondence published in both the Post and John O’Sullivan’s Democratic

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and very Young America Morning News. Bryant mentioned that the ArtUnion favorite Emanuel Leutze, who was also based in Dusseldorf, was working on another Protestant martyr, John Knox.55 In 1846, the Tribune singled Lessing out too. A Young American, writing on the Present State of the Arts in Europe, observed that despite its monarchical system, Germany was supporting the grandest style of historical painting. Lessing was tinctured with the coldness of the Dusseldorf school’s detailed, materialist style (the Cosmopolitan Art Association would compare Spencer to a Dusseldorf artist), but the sublimity of thought in his compositions conveyed great lessons.56 After Boker bought Lessing’s finished picture and brought it to the United States to exhibit, the Evening Post office printed his catalogue, and John Ehninger penned a tribute to the Dusseldorf school in the Art-Union Bulletin. The painting, however, got stuck in customs. As the free-trade Evening Post warned, this “noblest production of modern art” might be sent back to Europe because the Whig tariff of 1846 required duties on any paintings imported for sale.57 Like an international copyright, the tariff helped keep imported art priced higher than domestic. Young America advocates in the circles around the Tribune wanted such tariffs, but many Democratic papers, who argued for free competition and accessible literature and art, did not. Certainly the Evening Post used Huss, whose hero stands against a united church and state, to protest state intervention in the market. The Post interpreted the law to say that artworks bought for one’s private home were tax exempt but that artworks put on public display became taxable merchandise, like cotton or hardware, and that this treatment of public art as a commodity was wrong. The art collector and Whig customs house officer Philip Hone naturally defended the tariff against such “illiberal and pettifogging” and “silly and absurd” interpretations.58 And the Post’s position must have seemed disingenuous, given that Boker had initially planned to start an art union and profit from his gallery. Indeed, as he brought in new pictures, he auctioned others. In 1857, he sold them all to the Cosmopolitan Art Association for $100,000. That art union distributed some of the works in its lottery, but kept others in a free Gallery of Fine Arts on Broadway, sustaining the Dusseldorf gallery’s semipublic character. In any case, Boker eventually agreed to pay the import duties: $2,400 on all his paintings; $400 for Huss alone. But this antitariff position perhaps explains Bryant’s eventual support of Goupil’s International Art Union, a French firm that also imported European art. At first, the Tribune, an advocate of democratic revolutions in Europe, seemed to fall in line with its compatriots at the Post in its opinion of Huss.

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The City Items editor, standing in front of the painting, felt “extremest delight,” its artistic triumph consisting in it producing the “just impression” of the scene in the spectator’s mind. That meaning included the profound sorrow of the Bohemian peasants who watch Huss, unlike the array of dukes, cardinals, friars, and fanatics, in whom human sympathy is quite extinguished. Bryant, after a private viewing, had similarly described the composition as contrasting the peasants, who sympathize with the victim, to the civil and ecclesiastic officials who are coldly indifferent.59 Huss, even at the stake, showed serene confidence. Wary of Democratic Young America’s (and Young Ireland’s) hostility toward monarchical countries like England and Germany, the Albion agreed that Lessing’s eighteen-foot canvas was a triumph. Its truthfulness, however, lay not in the peasants but in it being the alpha and omega of art, neither too ideal (like the old masters) nor too material (like the moderns). As the Albion suggested, the idealizing and hierarchical, even monarchical and religious, influence of the old masters balanced the realism of their modern heirs, whose style otherwise approached socialism. Boker’s own press release reinforced this juste milieu interpretation, explaining that Lessing’s compositions were neither learned and ideal, nor melodramatic and extravagant, but with a truth that every beholder could instantly recognize. The Herald, which worried about New York Knickerbockers and New England Puritans being turned by the Tribune (which published Karl Marx’s views on the civil revolutions in Europe) into French-, German-, and Italian-style socialists, followed a similar line.60 Curtis wrote a very different review for the Tribune. Indeed, Boker pasted the City Items editor’s raptures next to Curtis’s, showing that they “perfectly contradicted each other.”61 As he would for his later devastating National Academy reviews, Curtis laid out his critical principles first. He sorted contemporary European art into schools with their own social, political, religious, and metaphysical national character. German art was either metaphysical or, like the Dusseldorf school, vulgar. By treating a spiritual subject in a “commonplace” manner, that is, by giving the peasants priority over the fanatical martyr (Curtis saw it as an anti-Catholic painting) and caricaturing the upper classes, Lessing produced a merely literal imitation of the subject. The Evening Mirror agreed with this social analysis: Because the peasants were grouped separately from the royalty and clergy, such that the painting could almost be divided into halves, the composition lacked power.62 For Curtis, the Dusseldorf gallery was good for young ladies who, like the throngs of fashionable visitors, think its still-life paintings beautifully and elaborately done. Curtis’s association of the gallery and its style of art

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with too many peasants and women was reinforced by the elopement of Boker’s daughter with the family’s Irish coachman. Bishop John Hughes of New York was said to have found him a job after the marriage in the Democratic- controlled customs house. The Democratic papers were thrilled by her class rebellion; the Spirit of the Times said that the parsons of the Upper Tendom left off moralizing about slavery to illustrate the awful consequences of moving from Fifth Avenue to a less perfumed locality. The Herald, in suggesting that the elopement demonstrated the unfortunate effect of the women’s rights movement, further reinforced the connection of the Dusseldorf gallery with both women and an era of expanded rights.63 Popular and revolutionary, if feminine, sentiment continued to dominate the gallery when the Cosmopolitan Art Association, after taking it over, exhibited Hiram Powers’s scene of modern female martyrdom, the Greek Slave. Curtis and the Tribune supported both abolition and women’s rights, but neither he nor his generation of critics would be a friend of the Cosmopolitan Art Association or its aesthetics. In reply to Curtis, Dr. Koerner, a German scholar endorsed by the editors of the Evening Post, argued that Curtis’s display of aesthetic principles was a machine designed to produce a false idea of the painting. Curtis’s principles were antiquated, based on traditions sanctioned by the church, as they required obsolete and castrated forms to stand for supposedly higher, transcendental ideas. The actual effect of such principles was to put unnatural forms and artificial colors in the place of nature. Koerner essentially accused Curtis, with some justice, of clinging to traditional ideas of what constituted the high or spiritual in art. Curtis’s view of genre painting as low materialism was wrong, Koerner explained: Genre represents the conditions of man, and it is false to assume that it is only from the eye of the saints that the divine beams. The spiritual appears in every marketplace and cottage, in plain and unassuming features as much as in noble ones. Because Curtis does not want genre’s truth to nature in a historical or “classical picture,” he discards all modern art (like Lessing’s) that represents the spirit of the times in its full, concrete, sensual existence. But using the idealizations demanded by decaying churches, rotten monarchies, and false schools to show the present leaves the beholder cold because such idealizations cannot express the source of the great agitations of the times.64 Curtis responded that high and low were like primary colors. Though there are shades between them, they still exist, and Lessing’s low realism means that there is no unity of conception; as the Evening Mirror suggested, the picture could be cut in two—the peasants and the aristocracy.65 Demand for the high, for unity, was both a political and an aesthetic position.

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The debate over Lessing went on even as Curtis began publishing that year’s National Academy reviews in the penny Tribune. An Evening Post editor argued that the painting was a direct and powerful realization of the idea of Huss, accomplished transparently, without reminding the viewer of the means by which the effect was produced or the peculiarities of the artist, and that this was the definition of greatness. The Express called Curtis a mannerist who claimed to want higher transcendental ideas in art but actually admired just the fantastic and theatrical; the Courier and Enquirer concurred that Curtis had falsely supposed that there was but one way to treat a great event on canvas and but one principle of art. This alliance of the Wall Street papers, despite their political differences, is a reminder of how radical Curtis and his emphasis on technique seemed. In comparison, even the Post, widely understood to have the most prestigious coverage of art of all the dailies, seemed conventional. Curtis continued his attack on the critical status quo in a signed series of lengthy reviews of the National Academy exhibition of 1851. His opinions have received considerable attention partly because, like his friend Charles Dana, who wrote the previous year’s reviews, he damned favorite Post artists, like Bryant’s friend, “His Excellency,” the Academy’s president Durand, as unable to reveal nature’s real significance.66 In 1850, Dana too had exposed the pillars of an Academy, or “close corporation,” in decline. He largely shared Curtis’s principles: Subject dictates appropriate style, so illusionism is for still-life, and German art’s realism means it does not rise above carrots (or peasants). Though Dana praised Thomas Cole’s imaginative genius, he called Durand’s illustration of Bryant’s poem “Thanatopsis” feeble and sentimental. He preferred Kensett and Church in landscape and Page and Hicks to Elliott’s red and purple portraits.67 He also dismissed Huntington and aimed considerable venom at another Post favorite, the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown: plagiarized, mediocre, ugly, vulgar, painful, and repulsive, expressive but not sufficiently ideal. For Curtis too, Huntington and Talbot (the latter had just started a drawing school that advertised in the Post) were doing clichéd and unnatural (or studio) pictures. Curtis also distanced himself from other types of Young America art: Nationalism does not consist of Yankee Doodle, Niagara, Tecumseh (Curtis considered Elliott’s friend J. B. Stearns’s Tecumseh and Harrison a mere costume group), or Sam Patch. He returned in the reviews to the Dusseldorf school’s imitative jugglery (“absurd to reproduce by pigments the actual motion of water”) as having nothing to do with art; artists in this style are compared to machinery, tin pans, knuckles, children, sticks, and noise, as opposed to Michelangelo’s

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royal heads. High and low are further gendered, as the low is compared to the steps of the dancing master, a woman’s silks and satins, to dainty words, versus a more royal heroic grandeur for the highest painting.68 This tin-pan diatribe, aligning women with both over-refinement and the primitive, was partly a prologue to describing Spencer’s Jolly Washerwoman, which was not even in the Academy exhibition, as “atrociously good” in its depiction of teeth, wrinkles, soap, and tub pails (fig. 5.1). It was a triumphant tin pan, of soiled linen and kitchens, not the pure Greek fire. Other Democratic genre painters fell into this category: Francis Edmonds was similarly repulsive in representing facts without poetry, and Mount (who in 1850 painted greedy gold-rush adventurers for the Tribune’s publisher) was merely narrow. Sentiment expressed artificially (Lessing’s peasants) was something Curtis often assigned to women, though he greatly admired the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, who like the feminist Oakes Smith wrote for the Tribune. Curtis called Jared Flagg’s portrait of Oakes Smith, a leader of Young America (Stearns also portrayed her), an apotheosis of the Poetess of Lady’s books, the heroine of the gilt-edged, a style to satisfy a superficial and sentimental taste. The Sunday Dispatch, a paper often aligned with the Tribune, perhaps explains why he feared female influence on culture. One of its authors imagined a typical National Academy viewer as a pretty girl in a pink frock, who wears a locket with a girlfriend’s hair and a daguerreotype in it and has tears start to her eyes when she sees a dog on Broadway that might fall victim to the dog killers. The fashionable females who thronged to art exhibitions risked vitiating art, with their taste for heroines and daguerreotype detail, making it fit only for boarding-school misses. Such art might, among other things, bring new participants into the public (political) sphere of the penny press.69 When the Evening Post condemned Curtis for his evaluation of Durand, Curtis dismissed the Post as (unlike himself) writing from feeling for an artist rather than regard for Art. He took more seriously Horatio Greenough, whose pursuit of the ideal in his nude George Washington he had previously defended (it didn’t need the conventional bagwig and knee buckles to represent the Ideal). Greenough suggested in the Home Journal that Curtis had attacked a popular favorite in order to create a controversy that would increase the circulation of his penny paper. Curtis responded that to attempt to judge an artwork for its intrinsic merits, as Greenough wanted, rather than by comparing it to other works seen by the critic, would lead to omitting even nature as a comparative standard. Curtis also claimed that a picture, like a person, was what the observer

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sees in it: To the Jew it is always a stumbling block, but peace and joy to the believer.70 He thus allowed for a difference in canons of criticism, an old law and a new, while reestablishing that the elect (every man with trained perceptions) can see and feel the highest ideal. Though Curtis acknowledged that art was democratic in addressing human feeling, his belief in the superiority of those with perceptions of beauty distanced him from the penny press’s unlicensed critics. His viewpoint, however, did align him with the at times more bohemian set who increasingly supplied art criticism for the penny press.71 The generation of critics who dominated the 1850s, despite their differences, advocated for a sincerity that nonetheless took vehement issue with the materialism of artists like Spencer and the Dusseldorf school.72 This demand would solidify in the Crayon, the art journal that William Stillman edited with John Durand and that many newspapers excerpted extensively. But even before then, their impact can be seen at the Evening Post. That paper had typically published a variety of opinions on art. For example, an editor described the paper’s 1850 National Academy exhibition review as cleverly done but written by one who is hard to please. An “amateur” had to write in a couple of weeks later, apologizing that though, unlike the reviewer, he was “catholic and unexcluding in my judgments,” he liked all the styles of art at the exhibition, independent and peculiar as each one was: Page’s force, Elliott with his manly disdain of fopperies and softnesses, Gray’s style of three hundred years ago, and Ingham’s craft. Another outside contributor provided the paper with a defense of Huntington’s exalted religious sentiments, counter to the solemn (Ruskinian) critics who coldly place his figures in a dissecting room, looking for muscles and bones, toes, fingers, and noses; Whitman defended Talbot.73 Godwin and Bryant too still influenced editorial remarks, as with their endorsement of the energy and originality of Henry Kirke Brown’s statue of the Democratic governor DeWitt Clinton against the verdicts of the Times and Tribune. Stillman’s difference from these other Post critics is evident in his letters to the Post on the Modern Schools of Europe, which continue into 1853, when he returned home from Europe on the same ship as Bryant. Rather than the desultory comments on art and monuments typical of Bryant and other editors, Stillman forthrightly argued that style is political. He pointed out that French neoclassicism, while dissatisfied with the status quo, looked backward to antiquity rather than toward the future and so could be turned to support Napoleonic absolutism. The other French stylistic extreme was anarchy, the defiance of even nature’s rules: Constable was this style’s founder, the Barbizon school a more recent example. Like the

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Tribune’s writers, Stillman systematically compared the national schools and agreed that the Belgians and Dusseldorf were materialists.74 They seek only a certain kind of truth, which makes them mannerists, despite a degree of national feeling “wrung” from them by oppression. Contradicting the Post of just a couple years before, Stillman singled out Lessing’s Huss as “truth of the meanest order” with no real mind behind it. Leutze, Lessing’s student and a former Post favorite, perhaps due to the national sentiment wrung out of him, received very qualified praise (his defects were unrecognizable to the uncultivated) under Stillman’s regime.75 Stillman was far more unorthodox than Curtis. A college- educated New Yorker, he studied art with Cole and then with Cole’s very successful student Church. However, he later said that he preferred William Page to Church’s empiricism.76 Page’s spiritualism, like that of H. K. Brown, probably appealed to him. Stillman was more radical in his embrace of democratic revolution, too, traveling on the Hungarian liberator Louis Kossuth’s behalf. By 1854, he was fine-arts editor at the Post, which was also publishing Clarence Cook’s writing. Cook, a Harvard Unitarian and Ruskinian Gothicist, similarly reversed the paper’s usual or previous critical opinions. An Evening Post writer admired William Powell’s De Soto Discovering the Mississippi, a Democratic commission for the Capitol Rotunda, as truthful and effective. A month later, Cook wrote in to demolish Powell’s painting as an unredeemed failure. The Tribune and Putnam’s, where Cook also contributed, concurred.77 Cook continued regularly to send letters to the Post disparaging the ignorance of (other) newspaper critics and, like Curtis, trashing ambitious historical- allegorical pictures along the lines of Huss or De Soto. Cook reviewed the National Academy for the Times in 1856 and 1857 in the penny-press mode of eviscerating insider complacency. Free from the constraints of writing for the Post, Cook was harder on Durand than Stillman had been, grouping him with other Tribune and Post favorites as smothering truth and beauty under the dreary compositional formulas of a dead past. Huntington degraded himself in his religious pictures: If he wanted to paint a great lesson, to move heart, soul, and conscience, Cook said, then he must paint what he sees and find subjects in the streets, houses, and shops of today, while leaving dead churches and a false society in the past.78 Like Curtis, he disapproved of artifice and allegory, but Cook’s rhetoric at the Times owed something as well to its editor Charles Briggs’s ideas of Young America—Henry Kirke Brown’s striking Indian and his student J. Q. A. Ward’s Daniel Boone, two subjects associated with American nature—captured the spirit of the age.

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Cook, unlike Stillman, embraced Church’s empiricism as an antidote to un-American (traditional) compositions and genteel conventionalism. This aligned him with some Democratic papers. The politician Thomas Francis Meagher’s Irish News, for example, which supported filibustering in Central America (Meagher hoped for a diplomatic appointment there), was enchanted by Church’s Andes of Ecuador, and there are parallels between how the antislavery Meagher and Cook (as opposed to Curtis or Stillman) understood a unified composition. Meagher, in a speech covered in the Times and Evening Post, compared the Andes to the American Republic. As with climate and vegetation in Ecuador, all the varieties of race, temperament, adaptability, and intellect congregate in the Republic. Unlike in the Old World, a magnificent aggregate emerges in the New from their infinite diversities. To Cook, Church mastered so vast and grand a landscape as Andes of Ecuador by painting precisely what he saw, not what he thought he ought to see, avoiding the entombed conventionalities that, as for Meagher, had in the past kept the varieties of mankind separate. Church found the truth not of a photograph, but the pure pictorial truth of the perceptions of a human being. Cook promised that if artists would reject old, bad patterns and rules of the past, America’s landscape would find a brighter (and more unified) day.79 The Irish News editors called Ruskin wild, wayward, and conceited, though brilliant, but they recommended the article on him (perhaps by Cook) in Putnam’s. The editors also reprinted the Tribune’s London correspondent on the Pre- Raphaelites’ search for more truthful nature and praised the Pre-Raphaelite disciple Stillman’s two landscapes at the National Academy as magical. For them, Church’s empirical particularization and Young America’s magnificent aggregate of peoples were easy to reconcile. When they joked that Kensett must be a Hard (conservative) Democrat because of his delight in rocks, they quickly explained that his devoted study of the actual gave a poetry to his rocks, which underscores the falsity of the popular expression “more poetry than truth” (to nature). But these Irish nationalists (the Evening Mirror suggested Jacob Blondell’s picture of the Irish News’s literary editor needed a wet blanket to cool the fiery fervor of his rebellious stare) did not reject allegory and the theatrical to the same degree as Cook and Curtis.80 Much as they disliked Huntington, their critic defended Durand’s Symbol, a painting of a storm beating around a tall cliff, which Cook had dismissed as formulaic. Despite not being painted from nature (it illustrated a portion of Oliver Goldsmith’s poem about the rich destroying the Irish countryside, “The Deserted Village”), the Irish News called it a truthful view: The resigned valley, the impotent

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expostulations of the trees, and the roll, tramp, and roar of the cavalcade of clouds, like a gathering of the sons of Fionn.81 The editor of the paper would in a few years name the American branch of the Irish Republican Army the “Fenian” (after Fionn) brotherhood. Meagher’s paper typically sided with the moving storm and its children rather than the tall cliff. The model of art criticism, as articulated by Stillman, Curtis, and Cook, a systematic frame of judgment with comparisons to the contemporary international styles and wielded by experts, would provide much of the Post’s commentary, often scissored from the Crayon, for the rest of the decade. Stillman and Durand started the art monthly in 1854, and it succeeded the Bulletin of the American Art-Union as a medium between, as the Post put it, those who have studied and those who desire to learn. Or, as the Crayon editors said more condescendingly, a demonstration of the civilizing power of beauty on Bowery boys.82 The journal drew from a transcendentalist, antislavery circle, including Briggs, Curtis, Cranch, and Brown, who preferred Nature kept under control by the Ideal and published Durand and Huntington on the old masters. It published correspondence from British Pre-Raphaelites, while Protestant ministers and Century Club members like Henry Ward Beecher, Henry  W. Bellows (Bryant’s minister), and Samuel Osgood justified the value of art in an overly materialist world. Women were encouraged to pursue the industrial arts, where they would not compete with men, violate their modesty, or need original genius. And, especially after Stillman left as editor in 1856 (he continued to write for it), it increasingly admired repose and tranquility.83 This was something of a retreat from Democratic or Young America newspaper critics who identified with the storm, as well as a retreat from Southern fire- eaters and Northern shriekers; good art had nothing to do with such violent divisions. The Cosmopolitan Art Association’s Art Journal offered a challenge to this growing consensus. The Cosmopolitan Art Association, a three-dollar Art Union, as owner of Boker’s Dusseldorf gallery, promoted its “materialist” style. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal’s editors argued that in the Martyrdom of Huss, where a simple man defies the thunders of authority, lay the model for a Christian American art that would have dominion over the passions of the masses of the body politic. Our artists, they warned, must not be inert. The Association’s purchase of the Greek Slave was designed to increase subscriptions, but it was also a statue that stood erect in indignation rather than bent in humiliation or in loafer-like repose. The editors similarly found in Leutze’s historical paintings heroic victims who defy cruel tyrants, even when such defiance is hopeless.84 To the Crayon though, the Cosmopolitan Art Association, with its interest in moving the

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passions of the people, was a contemptible commercial enterprise. Despite the Post’s earlier support for the American Art-Union, Crayon editor Durand was no admirer of such organizations. He recalled his father, when president of the National Academy, being undermined by the Art-Union managers.85 The papers where Cook, Stillman, and Curtis worked were antislavery at a moment when that position was often constructed as hostile to the existing union of the states. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal resembled other papers that, because of this potential for disruption, distanced themselves from abolitionist aesthetics. Where critics in the Ruskinian mode seemingly elevated professional discussions of technique and comparative aesthetics, the Cosmopolitan’s motto was “the True, the Beautiful, the Good,” a slogan that elided the question of whether truth might interfere with the Beautiful (Curtis genteelly felt such truths could be excluded) but that still required didacticism about the good. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal pointed out that the articles on art in the Tribune, Times, and the like equivocated even more on virtue in art than they did on virtue in politicians and named Blanche D’Artois, the art critic for the Democratic Leader, as preferable. James T. Brady, a Democrat even in the late 1850s and a feminist, albeit a temporizing one, wrote a homily on art for the Cosmopolitan Art Journal that put it this way: The aesthetic standard, the high ideals and rules for art and conduct of the reforming papers, supposedly independent and scientific, might just be pretense—or the product of indigestion.86 The involvement of critics like D’Artois (she joined the Art Journal in mid-1860) and Brady, who had a portrait by Elliott and wrote for the sporting paper the Spirit of the Times, helps explain the Cosmopolitan Art Journal’s interest in a satiric and materialist style of art that extended to Spencer and nude slaves. These writers maintained ties to Democratic agendas in politics and art. The Leader, for example, shared writers with the Saturday Press, a journal that tried, not always consistently, to construct a standard of freedom and naturalness that in the penny-press tradition stood with Whitman, naked, among other papers’ poetasters, inflated bladders, emasculated twaddlers, and hollow, artificial pretenders. For them, the future lay with H. K. Brown’s student J. Q. A. Ward, whose Indian statue’s rudeness and wildness resembled the style of their contributor Walt Whitman.87 One of their writers, in a Young America stance, accordingly concluded that true ideality is not poetic but instead the unsentimental, broad, average, vital quality of men and things as we meet them. A second writer, who preferred the tradition of Greenough and Powers, said the true ideal is

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Figure 5.6. Lilly M. Spencer, Young Husband–First Marketing, 1854, oil, 29½ × 24¾. Gift of Max N. Berry, 2015, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain; image provided by the Metropolitan Museum.

men and women such as we don’t meet in the gallery, a solid ordered world such as we do not see.88 In the paper’s two opinions, the democratic and the moral ideal were briefly held in balance. The Saturday Press, however, would collapse at the end of 1860. Neither standard, however, left much room for what the Irish News praised as Lilly Martin Spencer’s “capital expression” in paintings like Young Husband and Young Wife, pictures that paper said were destined for popularity (fig. 5.6). It was this expressiveness, in which the marks of lower-class bodily feeling were awarded to the upper class, creating difficulty in distinguishing wives or husbands from servants, that disturbed the Crayon.89 The African Americans in her paintings were comic and animated and her white servants (whether Irish or Yankee) knubby fleshed and communicative; the middle- class white children and adults in her paintings were most often dark-haired and similarly easy to read (they were often based on Spencer, the daughter of French immigrants, and her Irish

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immigrant husband), rather than genteelly placid.90 To see common nature (nature as common to all classes) was still unusual; Willis recounted with astonishment that Daniel Webster, like her Young Husband, had shopped for his own meats and vegetables. It’s perhaps relevant that the Democratic Irish News suggested that the makers of the frames for the paintings at the Academy be listed in the catalogue with the painters and that the men who volunteered their labor to erect the Washington Monument in Union Square be listed with the names of those who paid for it. Or as they also wrote, “civilized” was a word invented by the British, as was its attendant “Anglo-Saxonism.” The theory that the Anglo-Saxon race was a distinct and pure one that would exterminate inferior ones and their civilizations was a huge English lie. Those who propagated Anglo-Saxon superiority did so for political reasons. They aimed at alienating American citizens from revolutionary France and rebellious Ireland and at drawing together New and Old England. The Irish News preferred a scholarly lecture on the Physiognomy of the American Race, where a sketch of “Paddy,” with short pipe and battered hat, when his pipe was removed and a goatee added, became a Frenchman; off with that goatee, and it was Washington. Another old Irishman turned into Henry Clay, a Welshman into a Southern planter, while Anglo-Saxon peasants turned into the North American Indian. But the new tribe of Saxe Gotha, the editors wrote, despises all races but the flat-faced, round-headed, fair-haired Goths of Northern Europe. This Gothic tribe included men such as the minister Charles Loring Brace, who urged Protestants to adopt Irish children in the Republican Independent, where Cook and the Spencer- hating critic Clarquo also wrote; Bayard Taylor at the Republican Tribune; and the false Democrats of the Protestant, Know-Nothing Journal of Commerce. The Irish News’s version of the American Race unsurprisingly did not include African Americans. The Anglo-African, which published Bayard Taylor, pointed out that the “servile blood” of “Celts” like those editing the Irish News and the Herald gave them an affinity for slaveholders.91 As this conflict over membership in the American race indicates, even when Spencer’s pictures mocked proslavery sentiments, her humor—like the lecture in which immigrants get turned into revered fathers of the country—troubled genteel, nativist, and Republican papers. For example, her Young Husband of 1854 is losing his grasp on the bird in his basket (fig. 5.6). “Staying sound on the goose” was a joke common among those who despised the current Democratic administration under Franklin Pierce (who attended Webster’s funeral) and its seemingly proslavery policies (fig. 5.7).92 Those who had trouble staying sound on the goose, staying

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Figure 5.7. John McLenan, “Scene in a Market House,” “Market-Scene,” Yankee Notions, June and August 1853, p. 180, 235. Public domain; image provided by Google.

proslavery, of course included both Democrats and Whigs. The Irish News preferred the antislavery Republican John Fremont as a presidential candidate in 1856 to his Democratic opponent, though they doubted he was electable. In the Yankee Notions’s cartoons, the reluctance to buy old geese suggests the goose represents Democratic politicians (President Pierce was sometimes portrayed as a goose) as well as slavery. That paper’s editor, Charles Gayler, who had worked in Cincinnati when Spencer was there, had sympathies with Young America’s democratic tendencies; indeed, he edited a paper called Young America and belonged to the New York Sketch Club with the Irish News’s literary editor.93 He also had law- clerked for Abraham Lincoln. Spencer’s painting uses the same, albeit less literal, motifs as Gayler’s caricaturists, the dangling fowl and the uneasy male shopper. But her visceral satire of exposed vegetables and broken eggs repelled progressive critics. To the extent that the earthiness of her figures didn’t clothe form in lofty thought, they better fit the democratic philosophies of those who doubted that any ideal outside of nature (and what could be closer to nature than infants?) existed. Where the Sun rejoiced in a genre painting by Mount worth more than whole yards of canvas bedaubed with imagination, the Tribune wished that Spencer, who had skill, had a little imagination.94

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Spencer had friends in the New York Sketch Club, though she was not a member. The theatrical scenic painters Joseph Kyle and Jacob Dallas (a cousin of Polk’s vice president George M. Dallas) were at its heart, and it permitted women to join—Kyle’s daughter, Mary, who married Dallas, for example—but in Gayler’s telling, they don’t join the men in drinking whisky and eating oysters under the busts of Clay and Webster. As the busts suggest, the club’s writers and artists, though antislavery, leaned toward Unionist positions, fearing that Republicanism was too sectional.95 Despite or perhaps because of their sympathies with Young America’s inclusiveness, Spencer’s upper-class feminist network also represented a relatively conservative (compared to Cook et al.) political and aesthetic position. Neither group had support from the bohemians at the Saturday Press or the advocates of Pre-Raphaelite nature at the Crayon. Spencer’s “repulsively crude imitation of nature” repelled these modernizers, but it appealed to former Democrats, like those at the antislavery Atlas, for whom Spencer’s gossiping servants were not crude but instead very beautiful and never to be forgotten.96

6

Rearing Statues amid Gothic Spires

The penny papers’ interest in “pulling the noses” of the great, in deflating elite authority, spurred heated controversies over statues of great men. Funds for such expensive, public sculptures often came from politically influential donors, which expanded the possible range of targets. But in contrast with the suspicion of aristocratic privilege that the penny press directed at most artworks, sculpted portraits, copies of which were arrayed in fire-company rooms, political meeting halls, etc., often escaped the stain of class precisely because they acted like ancient Roman busts to inspire civic virtue. The Sun approvingly reported on the Eighth Ward citizens who met to discuss a monument to Washington; the mob that attacked the house of the abolitionist Lewis Tappan burned Tappan’s portrait (his newspaper, the Journal of Commerce, was a tool of the aristocracy against labor, as it employed rat, or nonunion, printers) but saved one of Washington.1 Ball Hughes’s statue of Alexander Hamilton for the rotunda of the Merchants’ Exchange was a source of pride, and the penny press often joined Wall Street papers in expressing the desire that more such statues be erected in the city in gratitude to republican heroes. By contrast, viewers of nonportrait sculptures like Hiram Powers’s Greek Slave interpreted them differently (fig. 6.8). Rather than gratitude or civic pride, individuals were supposed to, in a display of proper feeling and so of one’s middle-class status, enter into the figured person’s sentiments. In the Sun, a Yankee was stirred by the plight of the Greek Slave (manacled by Turkish captors) into promising her that the women of his hometown

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Figure 6.1. Dispatch, January 23, 1848, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

would help her; an anecdote that acknowledges Powers’s realism and not coincidentally reassures that the “natural” or uneducated American, though gullible about artistic illusion, possessed the moral sentiments for republican citizenship.2 Displaying too much sentiment accordingly risked accusations of class-climbing. The Sunday Dispatch singled out the Herald editor’s wife for ridicule over her emotional response to statues like the Greek Slave. As well as crying, they suggested she fainted, too.3 To the Dispatch, Mrs. Bennett was not a true lady, so her emotional sentiments were as fictitious as her claims to be a connoisseur, fashion leader, or critic. In one send-up that shows her at work, teaching music, as they’d shown other women as cooks or laundresses, they emphasize Mrs. Bennett’s class origins and so low sensibilities (fig. 6.1). Her “racy” letters in the Herald were signed H.A.B., publicly identifying her as the author in the same style as male writers; indeed, those hostile to the Herald tried to rewrite her as licentious for entering the public sphere precisely by identifying her with the nudity of the sculptures about which she wrote.

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Figure 6.2. Picayune, December 27, 1851, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

But men regarded the portrait statue of a politician differently; that regard was itself public and not the public performance of a private sentiment. One praised a statue’s likeness, its truthfulness, or else contemptuously knocked it over and broke its nose. Owning a copy of a bust or donating to a monument was a public statement of political (partisan) and personal loyalty, even or especially when the monument aimed to present the hero as outside politics and so deserving of a unified public tribute. The cheap Picayune satirizes this gaze in operation at the American Art-Union, which had a bronze bust of George Washington on exhibition (fig. 6.2). The Picayune’s editor had worked for the Democratic politician John Calhoun, and the paper’s comic style made it skeptical of those who asserted timeless greatness on behalf of great men. One of its writers commented, with irony, that the Art-Union itself was “very imposing when placed in a favorable light.”4 A similarly dubious regard about the artistic achievement seems in the cartoon to be directed at the Art-Union busts. This doubtful gaze at statues expressed the penny papers’ desire to expose false claims to power and privilege, including those asserted by rival critics. The fracas between the sculptor Philippe Garbeille and the Art-Union publicist and

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critic Richard Grant White, known as the “prince of snobs,” the “Shanghai critic,” and the Private Gentleman, demonstrates the resentment sixpenny Whig papers felt at the consequent erosion of their authority. Garbeille, like most sculptors, had debuted in New York in a political context, capitalizing on a sitting with a prominent politician, in this case General Zachary Taylor. Garbeille had been based in New Orleans, close to the seat of the war with Mexico. A chorus of pro-Taylor papers welcomed the French sculptor to New York in 1848, led by the Evening Mirror, the first to nominate Taylor for president and the first to notice Garbeille’s statuette of the candidate. Taylor Whigs were not very far removed from Democrats; Taylor’s service in Mexico allied him with expansionists, and he was a slaveowner. The Courier and Enquirer, a reluctant and belated supporter of Taylor, disapprovingly described Garbeille’s five- dollar plaster of Taylor as having the distinction of showing Taylor in “rude attire in camp.” Taylor’s unostentatious style was a way of promoting him as a hero of the people, like the log cabin of the earlier Whig general William Harrison. The Herald, an early and vigorous supporter, featured a front-page engraving of Taylor’s “simple” camp. The Evening Mirror elaborated on the rude attire, but supportively: Garbeille’s statue showed Taylor in his old brown coat, as an honest old soldier with the mind of a hero, the latter indicated by his Napoleonic pose. Garbeille’s success was followed by knockoffs; a dealer copied his bust of Taylor and “hawked them like Washington and Jackson on the streets.”5 Garbeille hadn’t realized he needed to secure a copyright. Garbeille was also known for his caricatures. The Franco- Américain had profiled him in 1847, advertising six-dollar subscriptions to his bust of Taylor sold at their offices. Its liberal editor described Garbeille’s New Orleans studio, where he worked with free men of color. In the studio, in addition to his busts, he had notable burlesques, or fantastic apparitions (fig. 6.3). The Evening Mirror, where the satirist Charles Briggs was still contributing, praised his grotesques as well, his comic plaster statuettes of “notorieties”—singers, actors, and editors. The Evening Mirror added that Garbeille had an ebauche of James Gordon Bennett, which was not in the least exaggerated.6 He is treading on an eel, to indicate his twistings and turnings as well as his slipperiness, and on his head is a Napoleonic chapeau, burlesquing his pretensions to be the commander of the press. His companion is the private gentleman of the Courier and Enquirer, with an immense double-barreled opera glass under one arm and a huge quill resembling a longbow under the other—but his pen has no point. The Evening Mirror hoped Garbeille would be well patronized.

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Figure 6.3. Philippe Garbeille, Guillot, n.d., bronze, 13.78 inches. Public domain; image provided by Ader Nordmann, Paris.

Bennett was unperturbed by such sallies. He had earlier said he was happy to have his picture stuck in the stationers’ windows at a shilling a copy, along with portraits of (his then enemies) Nathaniel P. Willis, Martin Van Buren, Andrew Jackson, and Daniel Webster, and, in case one didn’t understand that he viewed such self- promotion with contempt, Jim Crow. Bennett described his own visit to Garbeille’s studio in Duane Street in entirely admiring terms. The sculptor’s caricatures were jokes, and ludicrous ones at that, but remarkably accurate and ridiculously faithful. They personified the person’s inmost feeling and habit and gave their character tangibility in attitude and expression. He unkindly admired the portrayal of the editor of the royalist Courrier des États-Unis, in a brown study, thinking about his friend and benefactor King Louis Philippe, who of course was under siege in 1848. Garbeille’s portrait of White was the personification of the elite Astor Place Opera House petit meutre, redolent of self-admiration and conscious of his superiority. The Sunday Mercury agreed, saying they thought White’s likeness was a compliment, “as being

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very tall, very thin, very long-necked, and very haughty.”7 Of himself, Bennett mockingly suggested that his pensive attitude, lamenting the follies of mankind, might be too severe. Garbeille mixed statuettes of well- known satirists, like Bennett; John Brougham, an actor, editor, and writer for comic newspapers; and William Burton, whose theater specialized in “local” plays lampooning, among others, Bennett, with men from the Knickerbocker establishment like White or Dr. Valentine Mott, whose free medical clinic was an occasional ally of the Herald. Unlike Bennett or Brougham, White objected to being “exposed” in caricatures or print shops because it endangered his class status. White, a theater, art, and music critic, was a college-educated lawyer, cellist, and Shakespeare scholar. Fuller facetiously said he had dismissed him from the Evening Mirror as too cheap and common. White’s nickname was another indicator of his elite position. Willis, one of the United States’ first celebrity writers, whose gossipy “slip-sloppery” style was mocked as overly democratic in his own day, argued throughout his life for keeping journalism anonymous: the stance of a “private” gentleman who nevertheless made it his business to expose private life for public gain. After Garbeille’s comic statuettes were exhibited in a shop window, White was arrested for destroying his portrait with his cane. White’s caning of Garbeille’s statue was not unlike his boss James Watson Webb’s earlier caning of Bennett. The penny press and the plaster sculptures, which like the newspapers were often sold on the streets by vendors, had exposed that (supposedly unlike the independent penny press) Whig claims to independence (and so to superior authority) masked that they were for hire. In Webb’s case, Bennett had accused him of publishing favorable reports on banks and stocks in the Courier and Enquirer that were related to his own investments. In White’s, he had been paid fifty dollars by the Art-Union’s president to write press releases that appeared as editorials in sympathetic papers. The French rival of the Art-Union, Goupil’s International Art-Union, would hire Garbeille shortly after White’s vandalism to make bronze miniatures of the Greek Slave. But even before White was publicly revealed as a shill, it was known that like most music critics he was paid by stars to write and publish press releases, a practice that led to newspapers trading frequent accusations of theatrical blackmail and puffs. Or, as the Herald mockingly put it, fashionable society was composed of cliques trying to oust one another from the dignified position of critics, leaders, censors of opera, and oysters—“oysters” a reference to paid press agents.8 White’s pretensions as the “little master” of the Astor Place Opera House made him an especially good target.

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The Astor Place Opera House, with its high prices and a dress code that made working-class attendance difficult, was particularly associated with Whig religious and ethnic exclusiveness. Its reputation, and White’s, was sealed when rioters protested the performance of an English enemy of the American actor and Democrat Edwin Forrest. White and many others signed the public letter asking William Macready to go onstage regardless of the protests, a performance that led to the Whig city administration shooting the unarmed rioters. Adding fuel, White was accused by Democratic papers of prejudice against “foreign” (Catholic, Italian) opera stars. He wrote for the nativist Gazette and Times and served as editor pro tem at the Anglo Saxon–boosting Albion—White loved being mistaken for an Englishman.9 As even the small scuffle over Garbeille’s statuary indicates, criticism— whether verbal or physical—of public statues was more closely tied to politics and factions than almost any other kind of art. Those ties had complex roots and repercussions. Placing Horatio Greenough’s marble statue of Washington in the Rotunda of the Capitol in 1841, for example, meant displacing one of Jefferson, in what seemed to some an unfortunate political and aesthetic reversal (fig. 6.4).10 The Jefferson statue had been donated to the Capitol by a Navy officer, the New Yorker Uriah Phillips Levy. The statue, in 1834 the only bronze in the country, shows Jefferson as the author of the Declaration of Independence (its title just legible), rejecting the monarchy, and, for the Jewish Levy and many other Democrats, rejecting state constraints on religious liberty. Even the foreign sculptor, David d’Angers, the Whig Evening Mirror pointed out, was a “red republican,” a locofoco or radical. Levy exhibited the statue in New York, giving the proceeds to the poor, and donated a bronzed plaster copy to the city. When Greenough’s colossal neoclassical sculpture of Washington arrived to replace it, the patriotically named ’76 wrote that “there were some persons then as now who never admired the character of Jefferson, and never would have willingly allowed his statue to be placed in the Capitol. Those who claimed to be admirers of the fine arts, pretended to find great fault with this statue.” The paper to which he was writing, the sixpenny Times and Evening Star, had championed Jefferson’s statue at least partly in solidarity with Levy, who had repeatedly encountered religious barriers in government service. Mordecai M. Noah, an editor there, was Levy’s cousin and a former Jacksonian diplomat.11 ’76 wrote his defense of d’Anger and Jefferson in order to correct the paper’s Washington correspondent, who had rhapsodized over the very Christian painting Baptism of Pocahontas, newly installed in the Rotunda. That correspondent had

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Figure 6.4. David d’Angers, Thomas Jefferson, 1834, bronze, 7 feet, 6 inches, US Capitol Rotunda. Public domain; photograph provided by author. Frontispiece, Democratic Review 18, January 1846, Cornell University. Public domain; image provided by Cornell.

admired the religious awe of the native princess as she knelt to the venerable clergy and governors of the colony. This then prompted him to sneer at Levy’s “old brazen statue” still lumbering up the Rotunda, soon to be removed for Greenough’s noble Washington. The political significance of this Whig triumphalism—it was a Whig administration that oversaw the installation of Greenough’s statue and the ejection of Jefferson—is clearer in a Herald anecdote. The Herald described how the financial panic of 1837, the crisis that doomed the reelection of Jackson’s appointed heir, Martin Van Buren, caused fears of a riot in Wall Street against the banks. In response, New York’s nativist Whig mayor Aaron Clark sent men into the crowded street “bearing aloft statues of the immortal Washington” made of white and green plaster, and

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the effect was “instantly perceptible.” Awe and reverence pervaded all who saw the noble form “looking down upon them in its calm majesty,” who then cried “turn out Van Buren” and all will be well.12 Washington was the regal Whig antidote to Jacksonian democracy. It was not just Jefferson or Jackson that was the problem with Levy’s statue; the continued connection of its donor to the administration installing Greenough’s statue all compelled newspaper critics to take aesthetic positions. Levy was court- martialed in 1842 for opposing flogging in the US Navy, and President John Tyler commuted his sentence, much to the dismay of most Whigs, just after Greenough’s statue had been installed. The Herald’s Washington correspondent, however, noted that the court martial was unjust and that Tyler was right to reinstate him. The Express described a subsequent Tyler meeting at the Shakespeare Hotel in New York, where portraits of all the presidents hung around the hall, and in attendance were Captain Levy with numerous former Democrats, including the Atlas editor.13 The alignment of Democrats with Tyler on a popular issue like ending flogging of enlisted men helped the penny press stage Greenough’s statue, in its majesty, as expressing antislavery Whig fantasies of power. The Herald explicitly aligned Whig desires with Greenough’s statue: Their correspondent commented that Henry Clay, the leader of the opposition to Tyler, had become a social despot and that the disappointed antislavery Whig editors of New York, who thought they would get offices under Harrison and Tyler, were in despair, haunting the Rotunda, looking at the statue of Washington, and mourning their reversal of fortune.14 A locofoco paper like the New Era, which had defended Levy, avoided explicit comment on Greenough’s commission, which had originated in a Democratic Congress. Instead, they excerpted from a Washington paper the Democratic party line: His statue was elevated, sublime, an Olympian Jove in simple majesty. For the New Era, perhaps even the terms of this praise, with its evocation of kings, were questionable; certainly Greenough’s seated, motionless, and inhuman (divine) Washington provided quite a contrast with the active, upright Jefferson. The New Era editor, by way of commentary on the excerpt, simply asked why the bronze of Jefferson had been removed. He pointed out that Jefferson had equal claims with Washington on the nation’s gratitude for writing the Declaration of Independence and championing religious freedom and thus belonged in the Rotunda. The New World’s Washington correspondent agreed—that is, he agreed that Greenough had chosen an attitude in which Washington was serene, inflexible, invincible, and glorious. Only those who had expected to see “something like the bronze figure of Jefferson” would be disappointed,

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and expecting it to look like that would demonstrate a defect in them, not in the sculpture.15 Bryant, a personal friend of Greenough, had to correct the Democratic Evening Post’s indictment of the statue. A writer had called Greenough’s bare- chested Washington a huge gladiator, exhibiting his brawny arms and muscles, with not a single characteristic of the soldier, statesman, or farmer, and that truth (about the man) would be preferable to Roman or Grecian idealism. Bryant said that he disagreed entirely; he’d seen it in Florence, and it was noble and majestic to leave out Washington’s tailor. Bennett seemed to agree: He compared a turgid subeditor of Noah’s Evening Star to a “man-milliner” in Chatham Street, trying to put a dress of sixpenny (the same cost as the Evening Star) calico on Greenough’s nude Washington. But Bryant acknowledged that it had been placed badly, in the center of the Rotunda, explicitly “where the statue of Jefferson once stood.” A Herald correspondent agreed with the Post, not Bryant: Washington was a haughty Roman despot on an uncouth throne. His lack of life and movement was emphasized by references to his coffin, winding sheet, and inability to stand. Greenough had debased an American hero to an emperor, and at the sight of it even the bronze statue of Jefferson looked unusually black and frowning.16 Caleb Lyon, the Herald’s house poet, in a later ode, created a similar parallel: The Carolinian was astonished by the Greek Slave, as he never saw a slave so white, while New York’s Whig councilmen exclaim that she “beats black Jefferson in the City Hall.” Levy’s bronze of a Democrat and slaveholder became blackened (by slavery) in comparison to the white marble Washington and Greek Slave.17 By contrast, the Democratic Review, edited by a former Herald writer, published a somewhat tortured engraving of the bronze Jefferson that marked that magazine’s embrace of James Polk, John Calhoun, and the annexation of vast new territories (fig. 6.4). Greenough’s most eloquent Democratic defender had earlier put the case in that same journal for Washington being a democratic sculpture in terms of the appeal of the colossal and sublime. To do so, Alexander Everett called in an unfashionable—no kid gloves—group of female spectators. As women, who might be more impartial as they were more apolitical, they affirmed that size was enough to inspire awe: The sculpture was the equivalent of Niagara, whose vastness made it an effective symbol of an expansive United States. Everett acknowledged, though, the problem of the statue’s deathly stillness; he recommended it be moved to Mount Vernon, where Washington’s body was entombed and was already a site for pilgrimage. There it would, perhaps more suitably, become a grave marker. The Emancipator, though citing

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Everett’s persuasive testimony, nevertheless agreed with the antislavery (and antiflogging) senator John P. Hale that Greenough’s statue failed because nothing in it was American. They preferred a sculpture in which one could see how a man’s moral sense of duty might lead him to apply more actively the “flaming torch of truth” to expediency.18 The ongoing commentary on Greenough’s Washington provided a counterpoint to New York’s efforts to raise funds for its own monument. Greenough’s divine albeit classically pagan Washington, with its colossal dimensions coming close to the monstrous, ran squarely into the growing taste for the Gothic. The Gothic had been adopted most notably at two bulwarks of Anglican conservatism, New York University and Trinity Church. In the case of New York University, the religious spirit associated with the Gothic was evident when in 1838 the faculty wrote to the Commercial Advertiser that the chancellor had paid for a Gothic chapel and winding stairs in the library but not for books or salaries. The university trustees had yielded to English prejudice and adopted a style of Gothic barbarism rather than (Jeffersonian) classical geometry and rational taste. The university’s council, supporting the chancellor and underlining the feudal hierarchies associated with the Gothic, compared the firing of complaining faculty to removing kitchen servants.19 Trinity was similarly conceived by penny papers as a Gothic bastion of prejudice. In 1846, the Herald published elaborate views of Richard Upjohn’s church, but its editorial called it suited for a monarch of the Old World to worship in and warned that true religion would meet a fatal check should such thirst for show and downy cushioned pews succeed here. As late as 1856, the cheap Dispatch was calling Trinity’s famous steeple an architectural abortion that pointed to its Wall Street parish and, with true aristocratic piety, to its choice monopolies and genteel religion.20 Its pews of satin tried to lift the worshipers above the rest of American society, though the wealth of the church came from real-estate investments in brothels and bars. The Dispatch also pointed out that Trinity had stayed loyal to King George and had proclaimed George Washington a rebel. The popularity of the Gothic villa (rather than Jefferson’s Monticello) with patrician Knickerbocker literary circles reinforced the style’s associations. The architect Alexander Jackson Davis, with his partner Andrew Jackson Downing, led the domestic Gothic revival.21 Writers at the American Agriculturist, the organ of the Whig American Institute, whether Octogeneria (an old fogy, one must assume) or the reformer Solon Robinson, praised the picturesque and homelike Gothic cottage. Now that “Brother

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Jonathan” had aged into “Uncle Sam” and was not so hostile to England, he would avoid Greek temples as not “fitting” and perhaps even appoint a city architect to impose a rule to prevent helter-skelter, ugly, incongruous, and misshapen buildings.22 The Evening Mirror described the Henry Clay, a steamship owned by Whigs (and one of the editor’s relatives), as having a Gothic interior that was the “acknowledged type” of imperishable strength and beauty. It symbolized the power of the time- tried and time-honored, even amid the shifting, ephemeral systems of politics of the stormy republic.23 Young America, however, in the persona of Charles Briggs, called Davis’s Gothic villas a gimcrack gingerbread style, a sorry affectation like a crest on a stockbroker’s carriage, designed for a parvenu who only reads the British romantic novelists Sir Walter Scott and G. P. R. James.24 The Express more moderately thought they were tolerable, if undistinguished, but questioned the stockbroker and painter Walter Oddie’s decision to place a beautiful Gothic villa amid the American wilderness, where even log cabins had not ventured.25 The Gothic, like a pedigree, was not quite compatible with American nature. The Tribune, in an article on clubs, dismissed them as the result of a colonized nation imitating the metropole in London. Clubs, in this imitative sense, were comparable to liveried flunkies, Gothic churches, and academies of music and painting. Since the Tribune held up Mormonism, black slavery, and monster hotels as the only indigenous American institutions, they may not have truly disdained such subaltern forms. Bennett, however, who covered every moment of Queen Victoria’s coronation in person and identified himself as a Tory, concurred: The Gothic revival stimulated by her coronation could not last in America’s democratic and commercial age.26 These were all at least nominally Whig papers, but their language was the same as the Democrats’. Nimrod, a name made popular by the Knickerbocker author James K. Paulding (who had a Davis Gothic villa) in a play about the backwoodsman Nimrod Wildfire, wrote in a Democratic sixpenny that he admired the Gothic in its proper place. Its place was for the castles of titled bandits or for decorating European dungeons, prisons, and churches, where the clergy were sustained by the strong arm of power and preached obedience to the divine right of princes over cattle- like mankind. Nimrod the letter writer recommended using this style of plunder and violence for houses of worship and colleges in this country, and especially for the city’s new jail (the authorities chose Egyptian instead), as the city’s vast majority possesses a taste for it in art as well as morality. The Dispatch,

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writing without Nimrod’s satire, wanted a classical order for the city’s new free high school, which would provide poor boys the liberal education that would let them compete with the Harvard-educated as national leaders.27 But as Nimrod, that figure of the American natural man, feared, thanks to John Ruskin, the Gothic was popular not just with the conservatives who saw in it the spirit of the Anglo-Saxons and Puritans but with radicals, too, who saw it as an expression of rude but earnest nature. The art critic for Henry Ward Beecher’s crusading antislavery Independent, Clarence Cook, was an advocate for the Gothic. It perhaps is relevant that he was a brother-in-law of Downing. He was able to find sincerity and truth in Upjohn’s Trinity and was critical not of the imitative style but of the insincerity of its stucco imitations of stone and cheap pine painted to pass for mahogany. The Evening Mirror not entirely happily saw the success of the antislavery singing group the Hutchinson family as indicative of the popular admiration bestowed on “a certain class of paintings, and upon our Gothic churches.” For all of those who saw the eighteenth- century Constitution’s liberties as inadequate, the Gothic’s irregularities, in opposition to the earlier era’s geometric neoclassicism, could express not the imposition of monarchical tyranny but more freedom. But like the Herald, most cheap papers dismissed the imitation of the Gothic in the present as a sham, just as Greenough’s naked giant Washington, an imitation of the classical, was a folly.28 Both elitist and radical, the Gothic was susceptible to penny-press manipulation, as was that great advocate of the Gothic, John Ruskin. As early as 1847, newspapers were reviewing Ruskin with approval of his plowing up the “conventional shams” and “cherished prejudices” of “hide-bound critics.” 29 But a writer for the Albion, who said he had met Ruskin, explained how his modernized Gothic was actually conservative: As we must have a code of laws that is accepted and enforced nationally, he explained, so we must have laws in modern art, and Ruskin supplied them. Originality does not depend on invention of new styles but on being great within the law. As Cook would point out, this meant that Ruskin was still in a mode of seeking to bind art with rules, demanding in a modern age of revolution that the public surrender their feeling and sentiment to the superior taste and knowledge of artistic gentlemen.30 But Ruskin did have radical rule-breaking potential; Vanity Fair even accused him of promoting “pre-Adamite” pure abstraction by teaching that imitation of objects is below the dignity of Art and instead that the imagination should make its own forms out of abstract shades, lights, and colors (fig. 6.5). The Paris correspondent for the antislavery Commercial Advertiser tried in 1851 to

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Figure 6.5. “Correspondence of Vanity Fair. Our European Letter. No. 3.” Vanity Fair, September 1, 1860, p. 115. Public domain; image provided by the Vault at Pfaff’s.

sort it out: architects who favor Greece and Rome revere antiquity like the divine-right monarchies; the Gothicists accept the modern but wish to go no further, like constitutional monarchists; and the eclectics are the progress party, believing in the possibility of constant advances in Christian art, science, and ethics.31 The three positions were set against one another in the competition to design a Washington monument. A former protégé of the Herald led the charge against the Gothic establishment. In January 1842, a memorial from “the best men of the day” was presented to the City Council, asking that James V. Stout, a native of New York, be commissioned to execute a bronze statue of Washington for the city.32 As evidence of his ability, they pointed to Stout’s previous “noble” and colossal bust of the president, which Samuel F. B. Morse compared to Jean-Antoine Houdon’s neoclassical Washington. Where Houdon’s man was asleep, Stout had thrown into the features of the Christian patriot the spirit of a Washington awake and

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on the eve of battle. Morse, who ran as the nativist (Native American) Party candidate for mayor in 1836, was alluding here to Washington’s farewell address, which warned Americans to stay constantly alert to insidious foreign influences. But a wide-awake Washington found wide support, and newspapers across the spectrum, monarchical to Democratic, supported Stout’s bid for a sculpture that put the divinity of Greenough’s hero into action, though no city funds were forthcoming. Stout’s Washington stood in opposition to the existing proposal of the Washington Monument Association, a private fundraising organization that had Morse’s federalist foe John Trumbull as its president.33 Its “grandiose and Gothic plan” for a tower was promoted at the American Institute annual fair, suggesting its appeal to both artisans and manufacturers. The tower was based on the Gothic Walter Scott monument in Britain and had originally been designed by the architect Calvin Pollard in 1834, at the time when the Gothic style was being debated for Trinity and New York University. The artisanal True Sun, which disapproved of Greenough’s classical Washington as un-American, approvingly described Pollard’s design as a 425-foot-high cenotaph enriched with Gothic ornament. Its Rotunda would contain a Washington statue holding the Declaration of Independence, niches for his “foreign allies” and fellow generals, and, more practically, rooms for an observatory, library, artists’ studios, and galleries. Or as the Stout-supporting Democratic Sunday Mercury said, it was a gewgaw tower of Babel.34 Under pressure from critics, the Association opened a competition to design the monument. Classicism like Stout’s had the support of Young America boosters of expansion of the nation under its eighteenth-century (slavery-permitting) Constitution. Vitruvius wrote to the Courier and Enquirer recommending John Frazee, the Workingmen’s Party sculptor, who was also a member of the National Academy and who could be counted on for classic purity. The penny True Sun, supporting a fellow artisan, admired Frazee’s Grecian purity as peculiarly adapted to both Washington and the present age of freedom (and annexation of new territories). It ran counter to the Egyptian obelisk, which was fit for the tombstones of tyrants, and to the Gothic’s gross barbarism.35 Frazee’s not entirely pure design was based on a Greek temple, with “Indian” capitals for its thirteen columns. Greenough’s belated inclusion of a Native American on the pedestal of his Washington, like the Indian motifs on Frazee’s and others’ proposals, testifies to the Indian’s function as a symbol of American territory and nature, conquered by Washington. The Kentucky-born poet William Ross Wallace, who fought with Daniel O’Connell’s Young Ireland, similarly

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proposed corn and palmetto capitals for the monument’s columns, to represent the North and South unified by the classical design. When the Journal of Commerce advocated for removing Indians as no more necessary to American civilization than African Americans, the message, of the white republic’s conquest of nature, was the same.36 The Albion, which disliked the penny press’s influence on the taste of the masses, pointed out that this equation of styles with governments was farfetched.37 Was Egyptian architecture despotic, given it was the style of the city’s Tombs (jail)? Was Gothic still barbaric when it was the style of Trinity? The Albion, no fan of US imperialism (it interfered with British imperialism), recommended that sculptors like Frazee give up the aim of American originality and refrain from mutilating the standard and approved classical models. That hint of eclecticism troubled the Courier and Enquirer too. It condemned Pollard’s “feudal” Gothicism but recommended Upjohn of Trinity for the monument. Pollard’s tower of Babel, his eclecticism—or progressivism—was not really feudal. His design was endorsed by the antislavery, Democratic Globe, and the Sunday Dispatch, one of the city’s most radical weeklies, sympathetic to Fourierism, trade unions, and land reform, though it opposed the Gothic’s marriage of church and state for Washington, embraced Chinese, Hindu, Turkish, Egyptian, or Aztec styles as alternatives. Members of the Odd Fellows, such as the Dispatch editors, whose hall in New York featured Gothic, Egyptian, Elizabethan, Doric, Persian, and Corinthian rooms around a classical rotunda, had an expansive notion of brotherhood and aesthetics. They recommended the utilitarian principle as the most appropriate one for an American monument. A monument to Washington should emulate the Croton reservoir, the great engineering triumph that brought fresh water to all the city’s inhabitants.38 Initially, the Sun favored a less functional feat of engineering: a railroad engineer’s Corinthian column five hundred feet high, with a globe of the world and statue of Washington on top. They also liked a Corinthian column supporting a Genius of Liberty and a combination of the Goddess of Liberty with Washington in a Grecian temple, suggesting that colossal classicism rather than functionality was at the heart of its taste. The Sun, however, also approved of the eclectic, endorsing Eureka’s proposal of a two-hundred- foot statue (on a hundred- foot pedestal) of Washington in citizen’s dress, holding the Declaration of Independence, with his arm resting on the fasces. Inside there would be a stairway and concealed windows, so that his head could serve as an observatory.39 Further anticipating the Statue of Liberty, the Sun wanted to put the statue on the Battery, where

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it would welcome immigrants. The paper was lobbying for an enlargement of the Battery into a downtown park available to the poorer people who lived nearby, and it envisioned the statue there as a “type” to every pilgrim seeking asylum in the Republic. Cynics at the True Sun suspected that the campaign was backed by ferry company owners who wanted to enlarge the Battery docks. The more literary Brother Jonathan recommended planting the statue in Five Points, a notoriously crime-ridden and crowded neighborhood, to help it gentrify.40 Perhaps recognizing an advantage in the Sun’s preference for the colossal, Stout began to campaign anew in their pages. Warning that the Monument Association was ensnared in corrupt and imbecilic conduct (Pollard was on its board), Stout pointed out that its board wasted people’s donations on printing lithographs of Pollard’s design (distributed to the papers for publicity), stationery, a secretary, and office space at Clinton Hall. Clinton Hall housed the rooms of the National Academy, which donated to the Monument Association and exhibited architectural designs at its annual exhibitions, but rarely showed sculpture. Stout advocated for forming a different committee of “great men,” men who would be experienced at judging art rather than saddles or syphilis (one of the Association members ran a free clinic). They would collect money for his colossal equestrian bronze of Washington, to be located on the Battery. His design would be free from the “Gothic gimcracks” and “paltry emblems” that Stout linked to heraldry, and so free from reference to New York’s feudal landholders, the Von Beekmans and Von Rensselaers, who had battered tenants in the recent Anti- Rent War. Stout’s equestrian statue, though in the classical tradition, would not, like a temple, have a “cluster of little columns to be downtrodden by a very big one.”41 Perhaps worried about the Sun’s circulation, the secretary of the Monument Association wrote them arguing that a disappointed competitor was behind the “hue and cry” against Pollard and “styles hallowed by the greatest examples.”42 As could be predicted, this had the wrong effect on cultural nationalists. The editors snipped back that Gothic was fine for Scott’s memorial (they preferred the French socialist Eugene Sue), and while Pollard’s design was better than Trinity’s steeple, the “darling style” of England was wrong for Washington. The Sunday Mercury, another Stout champion, similarly rejected Pollard’s and the other architects’ gilt gingerbread (too decorative, with ornament as a mark of the exclusive) affairs. The Sun was critical of the Monument Association itself, too, as a swindling operation, hijacked by real-estate speculators trying to develop uptown (expensive, exclusive) squares rather than the public Battery. When

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Figure 6.6. The Engraving of the Washington Monument, after Walcutt’s Design, by William N. Dunnel (New York: William S. Dorr, 1848), New York Public Library. Public domain; image provided by New York Public Library.

the cornerstone was laid in Hamilton Square, the Journal of Commerce openly called it a humbug, which, as the Sun pointed out, was typical of its usual patriotic feeling toward public spending on schools, immigrants, and the general amelioration of mankind.43 The Association responded by condemning bastard and mongrel designs. The most heterogeneous of them may have been William Walcutt’s for the Sun’s preferred Battery site (fig. 6.6). Its description appeared in the antislavery and “treasonously” (to Democrats and the Herald) anti–Mexican War Tribune. The Sunday Dispatch artist William Dunnel illustrated Walcutt’s promotional pamphlet, and the Dispatch and Sun sang Walcutt’s praises. Walcutt had friends at all three papers. He had won a $200 prize

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for a Henry Clay medal, and with his friend the sculptor Thomas D. Jones, whose bust of Clay adorned Clay’s namesake Gothic steamship, he was aligned with antislavery forces. But he had ties to artisans and Young America too: His design for a monument to printers who died in a terrible workplace explosion was endorsed by the nativist and artisanal America’s Own; he was active in the American Artists’ Association, which had set itself up in opposition to the American Art-Union; and he was a member of the younger artists’ New York Sketch Club, which included the Sun’s editor Carlos D. Stuart (whose portrait Walcutt painted).44 The spirit of expansionism, nativism, and revolutionary egalitarian reform can be seen in Walcutt’s design for the Washington monument. Walcutt emphasized Washington’s youthful military exploits as part of a narrative that moved onward and upward. Washington on horseback, charging forward, like Stout’s hero, was the principal statue in the multipart monument, but as a prelude, Walcutt had a statue of Washington with his fallen horse, representing the moment when the twenty- three- yearold first won military honors, during the French and Indian War. Walcutt’s sculpture of a godlike Washington for a Temple of Liberty at the termination of the spiraling monument was wisely not detailed. A Tribune correspondent, in response, criticized Walcutt’s monument as Romanized, like Greenough’s, which detracted from a Christian hero and associated Washington instead with military processions, appeal to prejudices, and a “fanatical philosophy.” He added that it was wrong to attach taste for architecture to political creeds.45 But as he albeit disapprovingly observed, Walcutt’s narrative was triumphalist, or progressive, in an expansionist sense. Walcutt started with a Nomadic base “typical of the wilderness,” then stacked the orders from Doric to Corinthian (porticoes with corn, cotton, and tobacco showed the Confederation of the States). Washington at each level was shown in various stages of his career, with his apotheosis at the top; as civilization had gone from primeval to perfectly American, so Washington had risen from his dead horse on the field of a British defeat to immortality. The Dispatch said it would be a monument not only of Washington but of the Nation and the Age.46 The optimism behind Walcutt’s progressivism was satirized by a much more patrician (he contributed to Richard White’s comic paper) advocate of Young America. Cornelius Mathews’s novel Moneypenny (1849), which was excerpted in the True Sun, has the sculptor Slack, a beggar-like figure dependent on patrons for handouts, designing a Washington monument that imitates European models to ludicrous results. Washington has the legs of the Apollo Belvedere and appears as a brawny man about to do

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a somersault. Like Walcutt’s, it represented Washington at the various stages of his career and, ultimately, on the roof of a classical temple, with wings, ready to take flight. Mathews, though a proponent of native artists and American themes, believed in maintaining social distinctions and was critical of politicians like Jefferson for trying to erode them. Bowery boys and gals should not try to dress like the rich; Mike Walsh, the locofoco politician, should never sit in the front pew of Trinity Church; and Pat should never dine with his landlord.47 Walcutt’s monument was absurd not so much because it mixed up its classical symbols as because it showed Washington’s achievements beginning so abjectly with a dead horse. The Washington Monument Association, in a gesture that acknowledged their need for wider support, moved their exhibition of the competing designs from the American Institute to the Odd Fellows’ Hall, where for a dollar anyone could vote for one of the plans. The Odd Fellows themselves endorsed Stout. Ultimately, an obelisk, described by the Evening Mirror as a universally recognized style expressing endurance, beat the Freemason Frazee’s temple by about forty votes.48 Stout, however, continued defending a hybrid and so more American—mixed class, penny-paper—style in a series for the Sunday Mercury, whose editors were Odd Fellows. He wrote “An Artist’s Revery” in the style of the Herald, with a dollop of paranoia.49 Stout attacked imposters and copyists in the realm of high art, including a Mr. W, whose genius has been emasculated by his devotion to the “upper ten,” a phrase Willis (the owner of a Gothic villa) had coined. The politicians who rule the city like fiends, as Louis Philippe does France, do so for their own mercenary lust, while condemning the poor to suffer. The ragged seeker of beauty is shut out by moneyed speculators, who—like the church, state, and medical fraternities—run in secret conclave, guided by Satan. So though the people can see exactly how to shape the metropolitan tomb of Washington, those who say they are knowing, and are in control, are actually busy leaving their slippers outside ladies’ bedrooms. Artists too who go into the countryside to sketch a few rocks or trees, or a Thanatopsis (the title of a famous Bryant poem and of a Durand painting), are really looking for Dutch girls to bundle with, a seeming dig less at early settlers than the realist styles promoted in the antislavery Academy, Evening Post, and Tribune. Stout’s own artistic studio was “world-girdling”: It had a painting of the Virgin Mary, Walter Scott’s death mask, a bas relief from the Parthenon, a horse’s head from St. Mark’s that had been admired by Henry Inman, engravings after Titian and the animal painter Edwin Landseer (Stout and the Mercury were sympathetic to dogs, unlike most of the presses content

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with bludgeoning strays), a colossal bust of Daniel Webster, and a gleeful cherub (perhaps a nod to Greenough’s chanting cherubs, which had been bought by J. F. Cooper), as well as an uncovered bust of a lovely American woman in the “budtime of life.” This last sent Stout, the sculptor of the notorious dancer Fanny Elssler, on a tangent about the enviable professional privilege of sculptors to finger the coral tips of their sitters’ breasts. His theory was that a sexual magic lamp fueled sculptors’ imaginations, allowing them to transform hobbling grannies into Queen Victoria (the subject of his first statue) or Greek Slaves. Despite its chaotic narrative, many of Stout’s reveries were concerned with discrediting Hiram Powers, whose Greek Slave had succeeded so brilliantly in its tour of the United States in 1847 and 1848 (fig. 6.8). Stout argued that Powers’s statue, rather than assembling the most beautiful parts of individual women into a classical (idealized) whole, had incoherently selected ugly parts: limbs of women of different ages, a breath-palsied chest (so presumably not big enough), square shoulders, short legs, scraggy hair, and a right hand as angular and knotted as a woodcutter’s. The result had the “stamp” of an Amazon, a masculinity that for Stout was a deformity, and risked confusing American girls as to the true ideal of beauty. He worried they might become dissatisfied with their own large gazelle-like eyes, luxurious tresses, sweetly bowed mouths, low- falling shoulders, large oval pelvises and thighs, small heads, and tapering legs, arms, and fingers.50 His description recalls Henry Inman’s stylized, romantic young women (fig. 6.7). Inman of course had also portrayed Elssler, and his flirtatious metropolitan girls (in their “budtime”) were featured in the Mercury. The Greek Slave was disqualified as the modern American girl not because she wasn’t beautiful but because her (manly) courage and defiance was not in accord with true female character. Barnum’s Illustrated News acknowledged that the Greek Slave had been much admired at London’s Crystal Palace but rehearsed the complaint that her constraint—born not of her manacles but out of her awareness of her degradation—deprives her of feminine charm (fig. 6.8). The Albion conceded that the Greek Slave was a chaste, graceful, and beautiful young woman, but that only abolitionists could read a tale of woe and suffering into the sculpture’s (actual, unfeminine) lack of expression. The Weekly Yankee published a letter in rustic dialect by the New Englander Patience, who puritanically did not want to be shaped like the voluptuous Greek Slave; Patience blamed the statue’s curves on the sculptor “Hiram Ketchum”—a joke that “confused” Hiram Powers with the prominent New York nativist and pro- Southern politician.51 A statue by Hiram Ketchum would not arouse sympathy for

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Figure 6.7. Henry Inman, “A Valentine,” Sunday Mercury, February 20, 1842, p. 1, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

slaves. The Aristocratic Monitor, which complained that today “progress” actually meant retrogression and so opposed a Gothic Washington as barbarous, agreed with Stout that they wished to see in the Greek Slave more of the fresh, rosy pudency of girlhood. She was too intellectual, stood too firmly upright, with too-hard arms. The satirical Picayune, edited by antislavery bohemians, suggested she was so hard she would become a woman’s rights activist, a pun on the suffragette Lucy Stone.52 In their cartoon framing the statue in a sort of shop window, despite the faintly visible classical pilasters, they suggest fashionable women really desire to become not equals but objects or commodities on public view (fig. 6.8). A masculinized (intellectual, self-controlled, classical) or commercialized Greek Slave could stand for civil rights, but turning the issue to the nature of American feminine beauty blocked such empathetic displays. It was not Stout or Walcutt who were chosen for the Washington monument installed in Union Square, however, but Henry Kirke Brown (fig. 6.9). Brown was regularly positioned as a sculptor who, unlike Powers and other expatriates in Italy (Brown had studied in Rome but come back to Brooklyn), avoided sleek imitations of Grecian art in favor of “remarkably

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Figure 6.8. “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers,” Illustrated News, September 17, 1853, p. 141, NewYork Historical Society. Public domain; photograph provided by author. “Artistic Feeling,” Picayune, July 4, 1857, p. 229, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

expressive” human feeling. He accordingly had the potential to found a school of American art, with American subjects, in opposition to restrictive (or militant) neoclassicism. When Willis attacked Brown’s bronze statuettes of an Indian for their immodest nudity, while excusing the Greek Slave’s, he had been critiquing their Young America aesthetic: The Indian was a distinctly “American” subject and Brown’s style a too-natural one. So too when the Evening Mirror warned Brown not to succumb to the figleaf morality of the prurient and drape his nude men, the paper was acknowledging Brown’s realism, which invited such measures.53 At the same time, his statues, in which Indians posed as Apollo, had enough restraining classical elegance to avoid an overly democratic or antislavery reading of the national character, or, as Bennett put it, a culture that ran only to “niggers and dollars.”54 The money for Brown’s colossal bronze was raised by donors from both parties. Given the failures of previous associations (the Herald pointed out that the system of raising money for statues, like art and education, relied on cliques of bloodsuckers, mendicants, and harpies, when it ought to rely on public funding), the triumph of completing the statue seemed to belong to the forty-six patrons as much or more than to the artist. Their names were publicized in almost every story about the inauguration. A poet who had contributed a globe-straddling proposal for a Washington monument

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Figure 6.9. Henry Kirke Brown, George Washington, 1856, bronze, Union Square, New York. Public domain; photographs provided by author.

wrote an ode to them in the Tammany Daily News. However, the Democratic Irish News, which admired Washington’s outstretched arm, poised as if restraining the ardor of his soldiers for the charge, rebuked the glorification of the donors. The paper observed that the statue had been carted, the pedestal built, and the statue set on it all by volunteers.55 So while we know the names of the men who gave the gold, that paper observed, we don’t know the men who actually consummated the plan with their sweat, brain, and nerve. Until their names were on the pedestal, it would be an unfinished work. Brown’s equestrian statue was understood to be riding to war, which was important in separating his conception from nativist emphases on Washington’s farewell address. The Evening Post, a longtime Brown supporter, had back in 1851 condemned a Whig mayor for asking all the papers to publish the farewell address as part of a politicized—nativist and proCompromise—celebration of Washington’s birthday, as an act designed to “depreciate the name and character of Washington to their own moral level.” The Daily News, which understood being pro-Union as being proslavery and reprinted Washington’s farewell address, described Brown’s statue as showing Washington keeping his equipoise amid the tempest of the times.56 Putnam’s said this outright: Brown showed Washington in

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repose, the prudent father discerning danger, who restrains himself and curbs the injudicious (as well as his horse), rather than exciting their enthusiastic charge. The Evening Post agreed that the statue was the soul of moderation and that rather than going into battle it showed him calling his countrymen to new duties—though one Post writer suggested Washington was leaving the Union and heading west, as his opinions on emancipation were no longer tolerated in Virginia. A Washington correspondent in Raymond’s Times, whose Democratic bias was revealed by his considering Clark Mills’s statue of Jackson in that city a triumph of genius, disliked the moderate Washington. He argued it should have featured more exciting action: The horse, the visible symbol of the ordinary American men under the general’s command, seemed fat and frightened, not alert and eager. The Irish News too had assigned the Young America language of ardor for the statue not to Washington but to his men. Maintaining its reputation for political equivocation, the Times responded conservatively that it was important to keep Washington in graceful repose, away from battles, and the horse’s neck showed it (like the people) was “accustomed to the Government of the curb.”57 The design was based on the famous equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, which had also served for a statue of King George III that had been destroyed in Bowling Green during the American Revolution. Walcutt’s painting of the overthrow of that statue had been exhibited in the city a few years earlier, and such depictions of upended hierarchies must have influenced Brown (fig. 6.10). As one art historian has observed, statues of Washington “could not quite shake the phantom of the deposed monument.” Unlike Andrew Jackson’s hickory poles, descendants of eighteenth-century liberty poles, equestrian statues inherited a monarchical tradition and an American history of their destruction.58 Walcutt had earlier done complex compositions from authors like Bryant and Cooper and fiery American revolutionary scenes, including a Molly Pitcher at the Battle of Monmouth (1849) that the Herald thought was the best painting at the National Academy that year. His initial version of George III being toppled was painted on his return from France, where his republican sympathies were reinforced by Emperor Louis Napoleon’s dissolution of the French Republic. In accord with these sentiments, the future American citizens in the painting undermine the classical composition. Walcutt created a triangle, with a tilted George III statue at the apex, a form reiterated in the Dutch building façades that contain the action.

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Figure 6.10. William Walcutt, Pulling Down the Statue of King George III at Bowling Green, 1857, oil on canvas, 515⁄8 × 775⁄8 inches, Lafayette College Art Collection. Public domain; image provided by Lafayette College). A smaller version (private collection) was painted in 1854.

But the stability of the compositional hierarchy is under assault by the diagonals of the ropes and poles toppling the statue and the raised men’s arms. The foreleg of George’s horse is raised but seems to suggest recoil or fright, like the horse on the left of the painting. It contrasts with the raised legs of several of the men: one who has hopped onto a pedestal and strains toward the statue and others who run forward in excitement. Walcutt, like many Whig nativists, emphasized his ties to the soldiers of the American Revolution; his grandfather had helped melt the lead statue of King George into bullets. The crowd of ancestors he depicts in the scene consists mostly of men, in respectable wigs, hats, jackets, and stockings. The only person on horseback other than the king is a young, well-dressed man, who lifts his hat, pigtail jauntily raised, to cheer the men on, his leaning pose reversing that of the deposed king. In the foreground, one of the few men in shirtsleeves (though he is still in a wig) has his brawny arm aligned with the poles of the statue topplers. Near him, and filling the welllit foreground, is a line of boys and girls, including an elegant republican mother in a variegated gown and feathered hat, smiling as she explains the event to her daughter and waving a handkerchief in approval. Walcutt

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contrasts this group to a more frightened woman, wearing simpler clothes in red, white, and blue, linking her to the abandoned laundry near the well. She is seen from the back, seeking comfort in a young man’s arms. Still-life details like the laundry basket, and the frightened dogs in the foreground, were added for this, the second and larger version of the painting. Walcutt also added the African American woman who stands close to the railing, respectably gowned and hatted, with her mouth open, shouting in enthusiasm. The African American boy in the foreground has more visibly exaggerated features than she does, perhaps because he is more involved in the action. Like the white men who raise hands, hats, and tools toward the statue, he points to it, facing a more finely dressed white boy, whose running stance parallels his, as if explaining to him what is happening. In this minstrel-like guise, he seems to mark a moment when white men, in order to free themselves from a tyrant, violently break from genteel decorum and observation of property rights. Walcutt’s inclusion of African Americans as active revolutionaries, however, is also a reminder of the way abolitionists and nativists at times found common Republican ground in celebrating the power of a native citizenry.59 In Walcutt’s scene, the iron railing that had ineffectively protected the statue separates the men hauling down the statue from the onlookers; an array of guns substitutes for the iron posts of the fence where it gapes open under the assault. Though the railing could be seen as a repressive royalist feature, in the painting the black fence’s curvature, repeating the line of the stone pavement, counters the heavy stone block and height of the centered statue. Its swelling curves seem to press up at the sides and visually boost the amount of energy in the crowd, which was, after all, the actual hero in the scene. Railings for statues were a subject of debate in New York; like the bit of a horse, they indicated that the people needed curbing. Greenough in the Home Journal (edited by his friend Nathaniel Willis) disapproved of one around his Washington because it implied that the public lacked respect if not for Washington then for monuments. After Brown’s equestrian Washington was installed, the nativist Express and Evening Mirror carped about the then-Democratic city government’s cheapness, evidenced in their reluctance to install a railing around the statue. Tammany, they claimed, had no artistic perceptions and, perhaps, no interest in suggesting mistrust of the crowd.60 Though lacking the tempestuous dynamism of Walcutt’s scene, Brown’s statue had enough naturalness in the pawing of the horse and the “westward” gesture to satisfy Democratic or reform-minded advocates, despite its classicism and repose. A letter from the antislavery sculptor Erastus

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Palmer in the Home Journal suggested that when seen in dense fog, the noise of the stages rumbling by supplied the cannon’s roar and made the statue even more impressive.61 William C. Desmond, a poet who often published in the Evening Post, described in the Dispatch overhearing a group of “Irish rustics” at the base of Brown’s statue asking (not unreasonably) whether it was the Duke of Wellington or King William of Orange. That it could be mistaken for a Tory and a Protestant tyrant was worrying, but one in the group corrected the others. He of course still misidentified it, but in doing so invoked Washington’s role in legitimizing the American empire: It was actually a statue of Alexander the Great, on his steed Bucephalus, who conquered the world. Perhaps that idea of democratic conquest is what the English critic Charles G. Rosenberg, who had worked with Whitley on the nativist Young Sam, presented in his watercolor of the statue.62 The Republican Dispatch, the Unionist Home Journal, and the Democratic Leader and Spirit of the Times all endorsed his “clever” picture as bold and vigorous. Part of what made Brown’s statue seem moderate was its contrast with Clark Mills’s endlessly vilified statue of Andrew Jackson in Washington, DC (fig. 6.11). The idea originated with John O’Sullivan, who proposed in his Morning News that New York City ought to commit $50,000 for a grand, equestrian statue to Jackson. He provocatively (the Express thought

Figure 6.11. Clark Mills, Andrew Jackson, 1853, Lafayette Square, Washington, DC. Public domain; photograph provided by author. “Equestrian Statue of Jackson,” Illustrated News, January 15, 1853, p. 41, New-York Historical Society. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

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he was being sarcastic) suggested two monuments: the sculptor Thomas Crawford, beloved by antislavery Whigs like Senator Charles Sumner, for Jackson, and Luigi Persico, Senator James Buchanan’s friend, for Clay.63 O’Sullivan found a more responsive audience to his idea in Washington during Polk’s new administration. The resulting statue committee was all Democrats, and the fundraising included selling ten-dollar engravings framed in hickory. It was clear to all that the statue was a partisan endeavor. As a Herald correspondent noted disapprovingly, clerks in Washington, who were dependent on party patronage, were forced to donate to the Jackson “statty.” In a sign of the narrowing construction of the party, the New York Globe, a Democratic Party paper that was antislavery and so in conflict with the Morning News, noted the committee’s rebuff of a “leading New York Jacksonian.”64 The statue was inaugurated in January 1853, under Franklin Pierce. Pierce’s administration had sent prominent Young America expansionists, including O’Sullivan, to a variety of diplomatic posts, and the future Young America presidential candidate Stephen Douglas orated at the installation ceremony. The True National Democrat and Morning Star, a New York penny paper, acclaimed the way in which Mills made Jackson look alive, at the hour of his victory at the Battle of New Orleans.65 The sculpture’s most striking feature was in fact Mills’s balancing the colossal statue on the hind legs of the horse, all 35,000 pounds of it, with no other support. This was, its admirers said, a triumph of science as well as art. On the north side of the pedestal, the words “Our Federal Union it must be preserved” highlighted Jackson’s assertion of federal authority over Southern nullifiers like Calhoun. The Illustrated News, which tilted Democratic, illustrated the statue in the same issue as a picture of Greenough’s bust of Cooper, a view of Tammany Hall, a sketch of the home of Franklin Pierce, a profile of the locofoco Fanny Wright, and an article on religious liberty. Their drawing of the statue accentuated the hero’s drive forward and his tipping of his hat to the soldiers, loafers, men, women, and children gazing at him. No railing blocked them. The correspondent for the National Democrat described the statue at its unveiling as greeted by a shout from the hearts of the masses because the statue, without allegory or myth, appealed directly to the sympathy of the American people. He added that Jackson pointed to the well-known bronze statue of Jefferson that for years had stood near the White House. The Democratic House promptly passed a bill to give Mills $40,000 for an equestrian statue of Washington, showing him in a moment of victory on the field.66

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Antislavery papers with lingering Democratic sympathies (the Post had supported Pierce) or with a Democratic Washington correspondent (the Times) were mostly guarded in their response to the statue, but Whig papers were virulent. The choice of Mills, who was known mainly for a marble bust of Calhoun, and that made with local stone, not Italian marble, was the first aggravating factor. That a famous sculptor like Hiram Powers had been unsuccessfully seeking a congressional commission for years reinforced that partisan lobbying rather than aesthetic standards was behind the selection of Mills. But not only was he relatively unknown, he seemed to be as much artisan as artist. Mills had invented a method for making lifemasks (so to enemies, he was a copyist), and he did his own marble carving, as well as casting his own bronze, rather than sending models to Europe. This departed from the practices of sculptors like Powers, who relied on Italian experts to cut the marble. The Sun’s Washington correspondent, loyal to that paper’s artisanal origins, praised Mills for a triumph of labor: skillfully overcoming his materials and furnaces to produce a striking and imposing statue. However, for Whigs, his novel achievement of the horse’s equipoise was a mechanical gimmick rather than the heroic idealization of a Bucephalus. Newspaper writers in New York had their chance to comment when Mills exhibited his model of the statue at New York’s Crystal Palace in the summer of 1853. That setting, New York’s first World’s Fair, did not help Mills’s reputation. The exhibition’s general tendency was to mix crowdpleasing displays of art and commodities, whether colossal European sculptures or heads of presidents carved from soap. The Tribune derided Crystal Palace audiences as easily humbugged into admiring famous foreign names and condemned “Baron Thung’s” (Baron Carlo Marochetti, an Italian-French sculptor living in England) and “Mr. Thing’s” (the Irish sculptor John Carew) giant statues of Washington and Webster as intolerable abortions (fig. 6.12).67 Mills’s Jackson was similarly ignorantly and absurdly praised by the gullible crowd, both for being made by a self-taught artist and for standing unpropped on the horse’s hind legs. The Tribune explains that this grossly praised feat consisted merely of substituting for the legs of the horse those of a gigantic ox or moderately sized elephant. The rider, Jackson, was stiff, awkward, graceless, and undignified, lacking ease and grace (terms that connoted aristocratic behavior), with too many sharp angles, and the result was a national misfortune. The Express elaborated on the taste of the “country cousin visitors” at the Crystal Palace, the same dupes who admired Jackson in the Tribune.

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Figure 6.12. Frank Leslie, “Inauguration Ceremonies of the Crystal Palace—View under the Grand Dome,” detail of Carlo Marochetti’s Washington; “Kiss’s Statue of the Amazon—at the Crystal Palace,” Crystal Palace Supplement to the Illustrated News, July 23, 1853, New-York Historical Society. Public domain; photographs provided by author.

They mistook a French sculpture of “a naked savage” on horseback, armed with a crossbow, for Jackson. The Express suggested Jackson, famous for his Indian Removal policies, wouldn’t have cared for the comparison.68 The Express continued that schoolboys think every equestrian statue is Jackson, even the German sculptor August Kiss’s Mounted Amazon, but that’s because these rustics think the Amazon is a man (fig. 6.12). The Tribune had actually admired the Amazon, describing her as a beautiful woman, mounted on a wounded horse, who shows a bold heart, firm hand, and courage superior to the attacking tiger. This critic cited as a defect that from some angles, her body was concealed by the animals, making the message of human superiority to nature (animals) illegible. Whether as a naked savage or an Amazon, Mills’s Jackson erred in bringing the former president too close to the wild, animal nature of ordinary Americans. The Home Journal, a defender of the Pierce administration, was kinder if equally patronizing to the ordinary spectator: An urban “Irish maidservant” at the Exposition understood the religious feeling of art more than the male sinners and country gentlemen who grin at nudes and make their fortunes, while annihilating their souls.69 Typically, they noted that women generally had not been well served at the Exhibition, which lacked space for their “industry and genius.” The Home Journal added that Republican critics assailed the Crystal Palace sculptures without respect for the sculptors’ virtuosity (Marochetti, like Mills, was known for his technical

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achievements in bronze). The Home Journal further admiringly compared the vastness of the Crystal Palace exhibition not to colossal abortions but to the enterprise of Collins’s Atlantic steamers, a metaphor with implications beyond the obvious world- dominating ones. Collins’s company, which competed with the British antislavery Cunard line, like the Crystal Palace, was headed by Democrats. Theodore Sedgwick, formerly at the Evening Post, was president of the Crystal Palace, and its managers included the artist Francis Edmonds and the art patrons August Belmont and W. C. H. Waddell. Edward Collins of the steamship line, Edmonds, and Waddell had all been on the board of the Washington Monument Association. Barnum’s Illustrated News covered President Pierce’s speech at the exposition opening and illustrated him reviewing the New York militia in a pose that distinctly resembles Jackson’s in Mills’s statue (fig. 6.13). Whig dislike of the art and commercialism at the World’s Fair thus had a ring of disdain for Democratic pandering and progressive eclecticism. But, pointing to the party’s shift away from producers, the nativist America’s

Figure 6.13. “President Pierce at the Opening of the Crystal Palace,” Illustrated News, July 23, 1853, p. 48, New-York Historical Society. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

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Own observed quite critically that no mechanics were actually honored at the Crystal Palace.70 One of the few New York journals to defend Mills vigorously was the Spirit of the Times, which though it was increasingly Democratic was never artisanal. It was a three-dollar sporting journal with a literally and figuratively racy emphasis on the gentlemanly pursuits of horseracing, hunting, boxing, farming, music, and theater. The National Academy of Design and other art exhibitions, especially provocative ones (or animal painters), were part of the sporting circuit. Its admiration for the Jackson statue may have in part developed from its notion of upper-class masculinity. That it—this is part of its racy character—was interested in a certain physical naturalness is evident in its contributor Duke’s account of Dubufe’s Adam and Eve. The French artist’s superb picture was exhibited in a darkened room that heightened its illusionism, and, according to Duke, it spurred discussions among the male and female spectators about how modern white and black men and women had lost the perfect bodies of these ancestors. Art viewed in such urbane circumstances allowed both men and women to measure and voice their sexuality. In 1849, Spirit’s editor made clear that while he “had no love of Native American [nativist] principles” in politics or culture, he supported a Young America view of art more akin to Bennett’s dislike of precedents, rules, and European imitations than to Whig moderation, albeit with a patrician angle. Its editor William Porter published Cornelius Mathews, including Moneypenny, his satire of Walcutt, and scissored notices of art from Duyckinck’s Literary World. By 1850, the Spirit of the Times was producing satires like the five-dollar Trumpet Blast of Freedom, a journal devoted to politics, polite literature, and Buncombe. Porter’s friends at the Knickerbocker had similarly produced the mockingly titled “Bunkum FlagStaff and Independent Echo.” Naturally, the Trumpet Blast supported Seward, Frederick Douglass, William Garrison, Lucretia Mott, Wendell Phillips, G. G. Foster, the phrenologist L.N. Fowler, and so on, all cast as extremists and hoaxers. Feminism, abolition, phrenology, and papers advocating them, like the Tribune, were “shriekers” whose stridency threatened the Union. A Democratic saloon, with its sign for Franklin Pierce, started to advertise in the journal. Amid this effort to define abolitionists as screamers, the Spirit of the Times’s initial write- up of Mills’s Hero of New Orleans emphasized not Jackson but his wondrous steed Apollo: Its fiery eyes wildly striving to pierce the smoke, its distended nostrils breathing fire, and its mighty swelling neck are all signs of a horse that sees a death struggle but is “not

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affrighted.” Instead, he recoils on his haunches with his forefeet madly pawing the air and distended jaws striving to elude the thralldom of the bit. This warhorse bears the general to lofty fame. A contrast between the physical excitement of the animal and the iron will of the rider is a familiar motif in equestrian statues, but the critic pinpoints Mills’s innovation: The charger, the symbol of the forces—the ardent army, the massed ordinary white American men—that Jackson reins in and directs, is itself self-balanced, self-controlled. In the rearing pose, it displays its “highest grace and power.” Mills’s artistic genius and mechanical science created a democratic symbol in a horse that was both powerful and self-sufficient.71 The rustics at the Crystal Palace may have been right to see a similarity to the Amazon. Harriet Fanning Read, a regular Washington contributor to Spirit of the Times and who seems to have known the sculptor, called Mills’s statue the most glorious achievement in modern or ancient art. She initially wrote to correct a letter that disliked how the general was shown holding his hat in hand; the writer would have preferred a pistol. Read explained, more conservatively than writers who envisioned Jackson charging into battle, that Jackson was reviewing troops. He saluted them with his hat in correct military form.72 She added that she was sorry to see Mills’s glorious creation distorted by party spirit and predicted that his statue of Washington would be even better than Jackson. Read, who like Spirit did not support women’s suffrage, was a playwright, poet, and actress whose work featured strong women, colonialism, and settings associated with revolution but did not address slavery.73 When she commented on Henry Kirke Brown, it was to notice his busts of the Southern senators Calhoun and Know-Nothing Whig John J. Crittenden. By the end of the decade, it was impossible to separate Mills’s glorious creations from slavery. After Congress paid him for Jackson, Mills purchased a site at the junction of the Anacostia and Potomac rivers, outside the city limits, as the home to what he called an American School of Design and Art. Following John Brown’s insurrection at Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, there were stories of his slaves trying to escape the “college.” Mills’s foundry was where he and his workers, slave and free, constructed his colossal Washington and a similarly scaled group of Indians hunting buffalo, and it received crowds of tourists.74 By the time of the Washington statue’s inauguration in 1860, even the Herald thought it botched. The statue and its installation ceremony, like the language of Democratic Young America, had been almost entirely co- opted by Unionists, who rejected interference with slavery. The future Confederate speaker of the House Thomas

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Bocock gave the oration, praising Mills’s Washington as a soul fired with zeal, in exultant triumph, fearless in his dash toward the enemy.75 The Republican Vanity Fair mocked Southern fire-eaters’ recasting of Young America’s ebullient ambitions, untethered from national unity. A “patriot” agreed that Mills, in throwing overboard old trammels and restrictions of the schools, displayed his genius, as the hind legs of his horse were in fact a fitting tribute to Jackson. Mills’s Washington by the same reasoning ought to stand in his saddle like a rider at the circus, with no legs on the ground at all.76 Against this Washington, New York’s Republican press recalled Powers’s America, a goddess of liberty who trampled the chains of defeated despotism with one hand on the Union- symbolizing fasces, which Democrats had refused to purchase. Disgust at Mills’s inanimate, monstrous potato, the product of congressional (and so political) art patronage, was paired with the desire for an appointed commission of professional American artists to replace Congress in determining future art appropriations. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal, now based in New York, for example, argued that art in the capitol was chosen by private, personal, or political favor: Mills’s Jackson was a monument to Young America audacity and, playing on the childish associations of the epithet, a toy. In comparing it to the bronze Jefferson, even their assertion that Jefferson was the only respectable sculpture in Washington underscored the continuity of Mills with Democratic and political patronage.77 In a Picayune satire, art is the vehicle for buying politicians, and the energetic flag-carrying man in the painting evokes the popular style of a fiery hero going into battle (fig. 6.14). The artistic taste of the (corrupt) people’s representative is now the taste of Democratic Young America. The Republican press’s antipathy to Mills, however, would be ameliorated by the news that Henry Kirke Brown would chair a Fine Art Commission at the National Capitol and rectify the bad judgment of political intriguers. As the bohemian Saturday Press noted, Brown’s sculptures had more moral energy than any of the others—certainly more than Mills’s hippo.78 The great enemy had emerged as political (Democratic) patronage of unprofessional or unartistic, artisanal sculptors, with their coarse or local materials. In some respects, this was the same character that the Herald had used to promote Stout and his plaster Victoria, but twenty years later, it could be rendered as the taste of those who falsely represent the popular spirit. As the Tribune put it, the “archaeologist of the future” will be confused by the ruins of our monuments and buildings, unable to believe that Americans were a race of “pure descent.” He will think them a bastard people who came from nowhere in particular. The disorder in

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Figure 6.14. “How He Is Bought into It,” Picayune, January 24, 1857, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author.

the government had led to public art without design or method, suited for a house of prostitution.79 That last, though it evokes the romantic and neoclassical art in Helen Jewett’s brothel, alluded to the lively frescoes painted by foreign (Italian) artists on the walls of the Capitol (an Italian fresco painter in New York had recently been accused of serial adultery), which the new Fine Arts Commission would replace with American and so presumably more orthodox artistry. When Walcutt finally received a commission for a public sculpture, for the Whig hero and naval commander Oliver Perry, Republicans more successfully fused with the nativists to exclude Jeffersonian or artisanal Democratic interpretations of his romantic style (fig. 6.15). The inauguration of his statue in Cleveland, Ohio, was widely covered in the New York press. Frank Leslie’s illustration emphasized the statue’s connection to d’Angers’s Jefferson, exaggerating the height of Walcutt’s monument, which tops the background steeple, and equally exaggerating the statue’s contrapposto, and so its sense of movement and action.80 Leslie’s engraver, who had worked for comic Young America papers, repeats the pose in the enlisted men below, though they are at rest. The more tepid official lithograph

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Figure 6.15. Frontispiece, Inauguration of the Perry Statue, at Cleveland (Cleveland City Council: Fairbanks, Benedict & Co, printers, 1861), Library of Congress. Public domain; image provided by archive.org. “Perry Monument,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, September 15, 1860, p. 263, Allen County (Indiana) Public Library. Public domain; image provided by archive.org.

portrays a more static monument and minimizes the relationship between commodore and sailors. It called Walcutt’s statue an American Hero, carved in a strictly American style that could be produced by no one but an American. However, the Irish Phoenix pointed out that Perry’s mother was Irish and that Walcutt’s sculpture resembled a fat old Dutch woman in a bad humor more than the chivalrous Hero of the Lake.81 Certainly the former secretary of the Navy George Bancroft in his oration emphasized that Perry surveyed less Lake Erie than a space created by the principle of popular power. Bancroft and other Democratic speakers included in this place, as sharing the American “blood,” naturalized Irish and German citizens, who would inevitably advance from Mexico to Oregon and beyond. In this progress (of extending liberty and the nation), they became the Moral Heroes of the Age.82 On the eve of the Civil War, Perry’s son added that his father’s ship, the Constitution, had returned safely from every encounter, a happy omen for the actual Constitution.

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John O’Brien, the sculptor who carved the statue from the Italian marble imported by Walcutt, wrote the Herald, addressing that paper as “an eminent arbiter of public justice against intrigue and wrong.” Put differently, he may have expected that the Democratic Herald might harbor its own suspicions of how antislavery nativists—Republicans—went about glorifying a revolutionary hero. He argued that since Walcutt never put his hand to the chisel, he (O’Brien) was the actual artist; the statue exceeded the (clay) model.83 No intelligent man, he went on, believed that the great sculptors like Michelangelo only worked in clay and plaster; great sculptors, like himself, carved. O’Brien added that he hoped his claims were not being ignored because he was Irish, an idea echoed by John O’Mahoney’s Phoenix, which suggested the press had conspired to give the credit to a “native” artist even though it was O’Brien who had ensured that the statue would be admirable. The Herald published a rebuttal by the Cleveland contractors for the statue. Thomas Jones, an immigrant himself who had become an active free-soiler, pointed out that Hiram Powers did not cut, Thomas Crawford did not cut, and Henry Kirke Brown did not cut. Perhaps most sharply, he asked, so who is the sculptor of Crawford’s statue of Liberty for the Capitol in Washington, if Clark Mills is the one who “reproduces” it? This last question in his litany of antislavery sculptors was especially pointed. The Republican press hated Mills as a self-taught mechanic, Democratic appointee, and slaveholder, who pretended to the status of a sculptor, so they were ready to dismiss Mills’s role. But Democrats who embraced Mills were neatly reminded by Jones that in his artisanal casting of his own and Crawford’s statues at his foundry, he had been assisted not only by Irish men but by his slave Philip Reid. In elevating his position, O’Brien’s argument would also elevate Reid’s. Vanity Fair ostensibly threw in on the side of manufacturers, observing that the Colt family, who enforced strict Democratic voting among their factory workers, wouldn’t stand for a laborer adding details to their gun designs. They suggested O’Brien inquire about stonecutting wages in Italy.84 Since it was widely accepted that sculptors did not actually cut their own works, the controversy was short-lived. But O’Brien’s complaint, like the resentment over crediting Brown’s patrons for his Washington or the condemnation of feudal monuments to Washington, all voiced anger at the way the aesthetic standards promulgated by the new generation of Republican art critics was the result of a fusion with nativism and abolitionism and not with Young America egalitarianism. Penny-press arguments, over whether naturalism expressed American nature or threatened to

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turn national soil into dirt, whether expressiveness, satirical or emotional, marked the modern style or should be reserved for the lowly, whether and how labor should be visible in sculpture or how the moral power of the ideal might be harnessed to an American nature, provided the terms on which art was valued. These terms, however, because of their imbrication in the politics of the penny press, expressed conflicting desires to democratize and enlarge, and to regulate and curb, the public body.

CONCLUSION

Art and Politics

In October 1857, a financial panic gripped New York City. By one estimate, thirty thousand workers lost their jobs by mid-month, with a thousand more losing jobs each day, as winter approached. The Evening Post encouraged its readers to retrench by buying fewer dresses and gloves. But they sharply criticized Mayor Fernando Wood’s proposal to distribute food directly to the hungry and issue bonds for a public works project that would hire laborers to improve Central Park, the reservoir, the streets, and so forth.1 For most of the Republican papers, not just the laissez-faire Post, this sort of activist government was the lowest kind of Democratic demagoguery. These papers’ critics accordingly worked to detach art from a political and economic commons where the values of men like Wood held sway. Still promising to protect the public from humbug, independent (redefined as professional) critics worked to establish cultural authority for art outside both the market and the media. What did Wood represent? He was the city’s most despised politician. He had started as an ally of the Workingmen’s Party, defended by cheap Democratic papers like Levi Slamm’s New Era. He advocated for women’s free university education, low omnibus fares, inspection of food at markets, clean water, and other reforms that benefited the poor. But except for what he considered the inviolable Unionist position of noninterference with slavery, he was flexible in his positions. He flirted with the nativists, though his base was composed of Irish and other Catholic immigrants. Elected mayor in 1855 thanks to working-class voters, he won over (briefly) his

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Whig or Republican enemies with campaigns against prostitution (and one Freelove Club), Sunday drinking, vagrancy, the flash press, and gambling. As the Democratic Daily News (before it became a Wood organ) pointed out, these promises to “clean up” the city via measures that affected only the poor were the typical measures of a Whig mayor. When Charles Loring Elliott was hired for Wood’s official portrait for City Hall, at half the typical fee, the Times gave a rundown of some of Elliott’s other city commissions as a lineage for the painting. Elliott had painted a Whig mayor who had defeated Wood in 1850 but who was so corrupt—in alliance with his Democratic City Council—that he actually spurred civic reform. Elliott had painted a Whig governor whose efforts to expand the Erie Canal were declared unconstitutional and who eventually joined the Democrats. This pedigree of turncoats was the prelude for the point that Elliot had a broad field to choose from in “getting up a likeness” of Wood. Between the Tribune’s fraudulent mayor and the Journal of Commerce’s pro- Southern mayor, between the mayor “shown up” in Herrick’s Atlas and the favorite of the New York b’hoys at the last election, the Times observed that it would be difficult to produce a face that somebody wouldn’t say was “like.” The Dispatch added that $500 was still too much to pay for a portrait of Wood. So many were already available from walls (where bills were posted) and the caricature pages of magazines and newspapers that an extensive collection of the “model Mayor” could be formed at no cost at all.2 In the spring of 1857, in the park across from City Hall, under Wood’s auspices, a statue of Washington by a self-taught Scottish sculptor was installed as part of a campaign to win support for the city to buy it. James Thom had not followed the track of stonecutters like Powers, of going to Italy to study classical art and become a fine artist. He instead became a sculptor of architectural ornament, including supervising the Gothic decorations at Trinity; R. L. Colt, who lived near him in New Jersey, owned some of his statues. It was perhaps inevitable that his Washington would be seen as a sign of Wood’s rule. The statue itself showed a youthful and “plain” Washington, as a Picayune cartoon indicates (fig. C.1). He holds a scroll in one hand, reminiscent of the Declaration of Independence in the Jefferson bronze, and rests the other on a globe atop a column, as some of the designs for New York’s George Washington monument had proposed. Washington’s stance with one leg advanced, in the attitude of addressing an audience, resembled or at least evoked the political speakers, usually Democrats, who harangued great mass meetings in the city park. That park had formerly been the Commons, open land owned by the city. There the Sons of Liberty had hoisted a series of liberty poles (wooden ship masts),

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Figure C.1. “The New Brown Stone Front Statue,” Picayune, May 16, 1857, p. 173, Library of Congress. Public domain; photograph provided by author. James Thom, George Washington, 1838, red sandstone, approximately 8 feet, Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson. Public domain; photograph provided by Robert Tontaro.

and after independence, it retained associations with vernacular protest, hosted the city’s Fourth of July celebrations, and was close to most of the city’s theaters. The statue’s connection with Wood’s base, the Irish, was reinforced by the Express’s note that the statue showed the marks of the stones thrown by Irish canal workers during a riot at Rondout, a frequent site for labor conflicts. The physiognomy of the three working- class statuegazers in the Picayune’s cartoon may suggest the same ethnicity. The Picayune thought the statue “quite an attraction to the seedy class” who got their livelihood in the park (that is, newsboys, politicians), but acknowledged his stout manly frame.3 Concerned that his clothes were too snug, without any dignified folds or creases, they punned that Thom ought to give the old-fashioned Washington some new wrinkles. The City Council, after Wood was reelected mayor, moved toward purchasing Thom’s statue. The Republican Evening Post sneered, suggesting the “city fathers” were immigrants and so unqualified to judge. The

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aldermen speak English with difficulty, don’t follow the rules of grammar, have an uninviting appearance that belies their role as connoisseurs, and their vote on Thom’s unrivalled failure followed party lines. This, the Post punned bitterly, demonstrated that “the democratic love of art again triumphed.” The penny Republican World loathed Wood even more than the Post. They too belittled the “art patrons” and “Maecenas” of the city council for purchasing the bifurcated cinder (Thom’s statue was dark-colored; he specialized in a dark red sandstone). They accused the City Council of “coddling” the fine arts by spending $2,000 of taxpayer money on a “statute” (like the Post, they mocked the aldermens’ dialect) of a civilized gorilla, a description that again suggested fears about its dark color and unidealized long arms.4 The Tribune also called attention to the color in sarcastically dubbing it the “miraculous freestone statue.” Unlike white marble, bronze—as with Jefferson, Jackson, or Brown’s Indian hunter—was readily associated with too naturalistic and thus overly democratic styles. For Thom’s statue, the color was also tied to a medium, brown stone, or free stone, commonly used for house fronts. This color and common material were repeatedly invoked, in part to suggest that the statue was overpriced but also to indicate Thom’s failure to achieve the ideal and the resulting association of Washington with the lowly. The Picayune cartoon shadows the statue, so it appears almost black, the same shade as the onlookers’ bodies. The Tribune recommended moving the statue to the dirtiest location in the city— Alderman Boole countered that that would mean moving it to the Tribune’s office—but Vanity Fair said the “drabbish stone” statue should be put on the grounds of the Blind Asylum, with portraits of George Law (the Know-Nothing candidate for president), Mayor Wood, and James Gordon Bennett of the Herald. The joke of course was that no one would see them there, but at the same time it put Washington, at least in this guise, into the list of dirty, or unprincipled, nativists and proslavery Democrats. Vanity Fair’s nickname for Thom’s statue was the “What is it.” Its lack of resemblance to Washington had been mentioned by other papers too, but this phrase referred to an exhibition at Barnum’s museum of a supposed missing link between man and orang-outang captured in Africa. The Subterranean too had once equated Greeley with an orangutan on exhibit in New York, due to his antislavery stance.5 If Greeley’s sympathies made him black (a monkey), the comparison to Washington seems to point to how Thom has ridiculously mischaracterized his alliance with the low. Though a bohemian, free-soil circle wrote for Vanity Fair, including Whitman (who also published in the Subterranean), the magazine preserved supposedly

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natural differences, whether between the races or between men and women. Calling the statue the “What is it” likened its aesthetic character to a form of miscegenation, perhaps turning Tammany’s own arguments about the naturalness of slavery against them. Indeed, Vanity Fair suggested that once the statue is bought for the public, “we may celebrate ourselves, as Whitman says.” The body politic, as found in Thom’s statue, City Hall, the park, or in Whitman’s “very dirty,” too- democratic poetry, was in any case no cause for celebration. In the “age of Wood,” an apocalyptic era when the biblical Gog and Magog bring destruction to the people, to define Washington and with him the Republic as a timeless ideal, surviving intact from past to present with no new wrinkles, was political.6 It was Unionist, presenting the everexpanding but otherwise unchanged original political Union as the national triumph. Unionist penny papers thus defined the antislavery Republicans as a sectional (Northern) party. The Dispatch mockingly urged an oracular (but intellectually impoverished) Republican critic to wash the dirt of free soil off his hands, because they understood that the writer’s exclusion of nonaesthetic values from art rested on grounds that excluded Unionist compromise.7 At the same time, penny-press espousals of national unity in art and politics became ever-more hyperbolic, artificial, and didactic, as exemplified by Tompkins Matteson’s painting of the Compromise of 1850. Matteson, a Young America Democrat, stood the Southern senator Calhoun in the center of the painting, joined by Webster, each resting a hand on the Constitution, under a bust of a hard-to-recognize George Washington (fig. C.2). Winfield Scott, running for president in the year the engraving was published, grasps his sword and rests the other hand on a portfolio of his Mexican battle victories, but the seated general’s knees seem pinched together, preventing him from rising. Matteson’s enthusiasm for expansion may explain the prominence of the Democrat Lewis Cass next to him, who holds his Protest against a treaty with the British. Millard Fillmore, the Whig president who presided over the Compromise, parallels Scott’s pose, his hand resting on the shield of the Union, a crown at his feet. Liberty (carrying the traditional pole and slave’s liberty cap) seems poised to bestow peace laurels on New England’s Webster, while above the seated Henry Clay’s head is a temple of liberty, topped by a globe, with “America” written across it. Its classical columns are an image of the men gathered to secure the Constitution and the Union. The strain involved in bringing them together, however, is evident in the composition’s stiffness. It is merely a legal—grimly superimposed rather than natural—Union. Matteson’s inability to regain The Spirit of ’76 is clear (fig. 2.7). The 1861

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Figure C.2. Henry S. Sadd, after Tompkins Matteson, Union Portrait, c. 1850, mezzotint on paper, 19½ × 26½ inches, 1852, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Public domain; image provided by National Portrait Gallery.

reissue of the print underscored the artificiality of the composition: Lincoln was substituted for Calhoun, and the other traitors were similarly erased. So too would the New York senator Daniel Dickinson, who appeared in the painting, cast out his former Democratic allies. Introduced by the former Know-Nothing legislator and poet Augustus Duganne at a People’s Union meeting in late 1861, Dickinson denounced his fellow former compromisers as treasonous rebels of pure unalloyed baseness, whose wickedness was without stint, a set of graceless, seedy, disappointed politicians who would rather reign in hell than serve in Heaven and who must be scourged from the Temple of Liberty.8 The war fused Northern Democrats and Republicans, and it weakened “false” philosophies in art as it did in politics. That more truthful philosophy found an early home in the publisher Henry W. Derby’s Institute of Fine Arts on Broadway.9 As the friendly Home Journal described Derby’s $200,000 Institute, it was divided into galleries devoted to the French, German (including much of the Dusseldorf gallery’s collection), English, and American schools of art. This arrangement followed the lineup of contemporary schools of

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Europe published in the Tribune and the Evening Post earlier in the decade.10 The Herald called the gallery’s noble white marble entrance, with allegorical female figures and statues of famous European artists, the most imposing and elegant on Broadway. As a “marble palace,” it resembled the much-admired Alexander T. Stewart dry-goods store. Stewart’s building on Broadway was the first to adopt a marble façade; it was also the first to arrange its imported and domestic merchandise in various departments and provide visitors with luxurious reception rooms.11 Henry Derby was an art adviser to Stewart, and the Institute’s splendid interior, with a space for women, was the first “Art Exchange” to model itself after the department store. Its majestically embellished front also distinguished it from the windows of printsellers, but like the commercial galleries of Schaus, Goupil, or Williams and Stevens, it exhibited and sold popular artists, often ones connected with Derby’s brother’s Cosmopolitan Art Association, but also a portrait of Garibaldi that Derby donated to a mass meeting for Italian liberation.12 It also included a room of old masters assembled by James Jackson Jarves. Jarves’s paintings from the Italian trecento and quattrocento by their very esoteric quality (albeit a quality tied to the Pre-Raphaelites) gave the “Institute” a public, educational character. But even its strongest admirers did not believe that such a recondite assemblage, featuring no famous names or artists who were already in private collections, was suited to popular comprehension or pecuniary success. The Unionist Express appreciated how his collection allowed one to follow “the progress of the art in its manifestations in individuals and in nations; to perceive how it was affected by religious or national, or social or political influences, or how it in turn affected religion and society, and politics.” They were also valuable as artworks, because putting aside the rules that guided present taste, they had vigor of thought, great boldness, and feeling.13 Though Jarves was no friend to the Crayon’s editor William Stillman, the promotion of his art at Derby’s reflected the values of critics in Stillman’s wake, who were able to put aside the rules that guided popular taste. Art history then, as well as connoisseurship, would help Jarves finally sell his collection to Yale, as it underpinned the new criticism. The Tribune thus admired Derby and Jarves for distancing art from the market. Derby’s Institute was a chaste and pure temple for art, distinct from the shrines around it dedicated to the Almighty Dollar. Its severe taste combated the malignant influence of Broadway signs with golden letters a foot tall and vulgar displays of figured bunting and emblazoned paper. Amid this kaleidoscope of appalling monstrosities, however, it was not to be expected

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that the public should take to Jarves’s collection.14 Broadway’s commercial exhibitions of an “intolerable quantity” of contemporary French, Belgian, and German art threatened to convert Americans into a conglomerate of nations, a parcel of cattle fanciers or amateurs not of art but of low labor, like cows and donkeys.15 The Tribune critic dismissed cattle pieces, made fashionable by the Democratic and Jewish patron August Belmont, as suitable only for a butcher’s stall, warning that their presence in drawing rooms threatened to bring the barnyard with them. The only art that is of an ideal character and free from such concerns about its power to stimulate American domestic class and ethnic mixing is Jarves’s old Italian masters. Jarves’s first book, Art Hints, published by Harper’s in 1850, had prepared the way for such an interpretation of his collection as a model for a devulgarized American art. As the Evening Mirror put it: Like George Curtis at the Tribune, Jarves believed that the era of great art was yet to come and that republican-Christian America would be its home.16 This golden age would arrive once the artist becomes so divorced from the bonds of patronage and from subservience to prevailing ideas that art would rise into an atmosphere of truth and purity all its own, instead of pandering to mankind. The Evening Mirror commented that this was a false philosophy, as artists who worked solely for the love of art, scorning gold and praise, still bowed to the prevailing ideas of the times. There never was and never would be, the reviewer argued, a time when art would lead a people or an age. Not content with dismissing both the idea of an avant-garde and art for art’s sake, the Evening Mirror added that because American ideas of sociality, religion, and politics were a conglomerate of the ideas of other nations, though our mechanical inventions may be new, our arts cannot be independent. But even in disparaging Jarves, critics articulated a heroic philosophy of an art not just outside cliques or commerce, but outside present-day social conventions, and so able to reform that society. At the same time, their comments point to how such aesthetic principles were harnessed to a restrictive or, or for some readers, sectional nationalism, as well as to a certain piety. The Age of Reason, a short-lived dollar weekly that proclaimed itself both Liberal and Independent, tried to unmask this self-righteousness. The Tribune and pious papers condemned the “satanic press” for pandering to the Millions (in order to sell papers to them) by exposing vice, misery, and the depravity of human nature.17 The Tribune, the Age of Reason observed, hated papers that treated the holiest of subjects in a ludicrous style: the Virgin Mary as if she sold oranges in the street, the Greek Slave as a mixed-race chambermaid. They saw in this elevation of street vendors

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and servants a mockery of established sentiment and eternal verities, as if winking to ribald admirers. But the Age of Reason recognized that it was just this flippant tone that dispelled superstition and fanaticism. For Bennett, the Napoleon of the satanic press, and his marshals, Republican newspaper piety was explicitly in the service of abolition, which they indeed considered a form of Protestant fanaticism. The minister Henry Ward Beecher, wishing in his newspaper that the militant Puritan Oliver Cromwell was alive to lead the United States against slavery, or Beecher’s Brooklyn Academy of Music, whose Gothic style of retrograde ameublement took the country back to the glorious days of the pilgrim forefathers, only demonstrated this point.18 The penny press had always tried to dispel such evangelical zeal, deploying satire, sensationalism, and scandal to weaken the decorum that concealed the sins of its establishment backers. This effort lay behind descriptors like “shocking,” “shameful,” “wretched,” and “execrable,” to name a few not usually wielded against art today. This conflict, however, also determined the values for aesthetic terms, putting the classical temple of Young America up against the Gothic one of Beecher. Practitioners of a more aesthetic, so seemingly objective, art criticism declared themselves independent, like their predecessors. Dedicated, however, to elevating art into an atmosphere if not more purified than at least more rarefied than the street, they were more serious than satirical. Postwar newspaper writing certainly did not put an end to brutal censures (especially of vulgar error), but it helped move art into a realm increasingly distant from politics and so further from the claim to speak—however flippantly—for the people.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My research could never have been accomplished without the unstinting good humor and kindness of the people at the Library of Congress’s Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room: Jay Brooks, Reference Technician; Elving Felix, Circulation; Arlene Balkansky, Reference Specialist; Gary Johnson, Reference Librarian; Travis Westly, Reference Section Head; Georgia Higley, Newspaper Section Head; and Roslyn Pachoca, Reference Librarian. They carted countless bound volumes for me, found treasures, and provided moral and intellectual support for months on end. Much of my time at the Library of Congress, as well as at the National Portrait Gallery, the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, and the New-York Historical Society, was made possible by a Smithsonian American Art Museum senior fellowship in American art. I am very grateful for the advice and generosity of my colleagues at those institutions, especially the expertise and recommendations of Eleanor Jones Harvey, Senior Curator, and Amelia Goerlitz, Chair of Academic Programs, at the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, and Paul Friedman, Librarian at the New York Public Library. My research at the American Antiquarian Society’s invaluable collection of American newspapers was made possible by a Jay and Deborah Last fellowship, and my work there was given new direction and impetus by Paul Erickson, then Director of Academic Programs, and Vincent L. Golden, Curator of Newspapers and Periodicals.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The University of Nebraska–Lincoln generously supported my research: a Maude Hammond Fling fellowship from the Research Council, a Faculty Research Grant from the Hixson- Lied College of Fine and Performing Arts, and a Woods Travel grant from the School of Art, Art History & Design. Faculty development leaves provided needed time. I deeply appreciate the assistance of the art historians, curators, and individuals, including some of those already mentioned, who helped me find photographs and sources for the book: Annette Blaugrund, David Walcutt, Michiko Okaya, Arlan Peters, Toby Jurovics, Peg Forrestel, Mariam Touba, and Robert Tontaro. I greatly benefited from colleagues who read or heard portions of the manuscript. I am forever indebted to the scholarship and kindness of Alan Wallach and Barbara Groseclose, who from the start backed this project. John Ott included my work in a College Art Association session, and Rex Koontz invited me to present to his graduate students at the University of Houston. I am exceedingly grateful to other colleagues who gave feedback: Jessica Skwire Routhier, Edward Whitley, Yonatan Eyal, William Kerrigan, Ruth Bohan, and Eric Berlin. Michael Leja, David Lubin, Peter Betjemann, and David Bejelajac offered extremely valuable advice. Andrea Bolland provided astute insights into art and history, and help tracking hard-to-find artists and artworks. I am glad to have friends willing to put me up while visiting archives: Simon Martin, Peter Ondrus, Allen Lau, Caitlin Dover, Lacy Schutz, and Martin Murray. This book could not have been written without my dear companions Belinda and Isadora and the love and encouragement of Kenneth Marsden Price. It is dedicated to him.

NOTES

Introduction. The Penny Press 1. “The Total Depravity Press,” Herald, May 21, 1839, p. 2. 2. Transcript, May 17, 1834; Transcript, June 28, 1836. 3. Williamson, Burns, and Watson, “Ring up!” Sunday Dispatch 1, no. 1 (December 7, 1845): 2. 4. Express, March 14, 1842. By 1843, they had become a two-penny paper, though like the Tribune they openly accepted party patronage. 5. Horace Greeley, “A Plain Talk to Whigs,” Tribune, April 10, 1841. On Greeley, see James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune (New York: Mason Brothers, 1855); and Lurton D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley (1873; repr. New York: Beekman, 1971). 6. Evening Post, June 27, 1850, p. 2. The Jeffersonian, February 2, 1839, pp. 407–8 (edited by Horace Greeley). 7. See also Patricia Cline Cohen et al., The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2008). 8. See Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Edward K. Spann, Ideals and Politics: New York Intellectuals and Liberal Democracy, 1820–1880 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1972). 9. Clement Greenberg, “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 6 (Fall 1939): 34–49. On the penny press, see Richard R. Wells, “The Making of the New York Penny Press: An Ethnographic History of a Mass Cultural Form,” PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 2003; Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 12–69; and the indispensable Frank Luther Mott: American Journalism (New York: Macmillan, 1950); History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1930); and History of

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American Magazines, 1850–1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938). See also James Lee, History of American Journalism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917). 10. Sun, June 20, 1837, p. 2. 11. Constellation, August 23, 1834, p. 6 (editor A. D. Paterson); Sunday Dispatch, December 7, 1845, p. 2. 12. “Taste in Criticism,” Morris’ National Press: A Journal for the Home, October 17, 1846, p. 2. George Morris of the Mirror was editor; N. P. Willis became official coeditor in November under the new name Home Journal, which specifically addressed women readers in their prospectus. 13. David Dearinger, “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865,” 61–64, in his Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925 (National Academy of Design, 2000), is an exception. 14. Peter Buckley, “To the Opera House: Culture and Society in New York, 1820– 1860,” PhD. diss., SUNY Stony Brook, 1984; Michael Kaplan, “World of the B’hoys: Urban Violence and the Political Culture of Antebellum New York City, 1825–1860,” PhD diss., New York University, 1996; and Karen Ahlquist, Democracy at the Opera: Music, Theater, and Culture in New York City, 1815–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997). 15. Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” Arts Magazine 56, no. 3 (November 1981): 93–106; Rachel Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: The Rise and Fall of the American Art-Union,” Journal of American History (March 1995): 1534–61; Patricia Hills, “The American Art-Union as Patron for Expansionist Ideology in the 1840s,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and Will Vaughn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 314–39; Peter Brownlee, Perfectly American: The Art-Union and Its Artists (Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease Museum, 2011); Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Arlene Katz Nichols, “Merchants and Artists: The Apollo Association and the American Art-Union,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2003; Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993). 16. Karen Georgi, Critical Shifts: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013); Emily Halligan, “Art Criticism in America before The Crayon: Perceptions of Landscape Painting, 1825–1855,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2014, which identifies and discusses critics such as Bryant, Whitman, Willis, Duyckinck, and more; John Peter Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America,” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1952; Janice Reed Hellman, “American Art Criticism in the Mid–Nineteenth Century: 1840–1860,” MA thesis, George Washington University, 1972; Sandr Langer, “The Aesthetics of Democracy,” Art Journal 39 (Winter 1979–1980): 132–35. 17. Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Andrew Hemingway, Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early-Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Andrew Hemingway, “Art Exhibitions as Leisure-Class Rituals in Early-Nineteenth-Century London,” in Towards a Modern Art World, ed. Brian Allen (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 95–105; Karen Georgi, “Making Nature Culture’s Other: Nineteenth-Century American Landscape Painting and Critical Discourse,” Word & Image 19 (July–September 2003): 198–213.

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18. On the formation of metropolitan culture in New York in the antebellum period, see Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Knopf, 1987); Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); and Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1994), and for all things New York, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 19. Sunday Atlas, April 21, 1861, p. 1: Mobs forced the Herald, Daily News, Day Book, Journal of Commerce, and Express to display the flag. On April 28, 1861, the Atlas, a Democratic free-soil weekly, observed rather bitterly the seeming dominance of the Republicans in politics and perhaps in art, too; “Art and Artists,” Sunday Atlas, May 12, 1861, p. 3. The painting was Frederic Church’s The North, formerly called Icebergs. 20. Crayon excerpted in “Fine Arts,” Evening Post, February 5, 1861, p. 1. 21. On the Democratic party in New York, see Jerome Mushkat, Tammany: The Evolution of a Political Machine, 1789–1865 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1971); Anthony Gronowicz, Race and Class Politics in New York City before the Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). 22. Transcript, September 4, 1834, responding to an attack by the Commercial Advertiser. Claiming they had no politics other than reverence for equal rights, the Transcript was founded by printers associated with the radical Workingmen’s Party. On sensational style, see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Knopf, 1988); and Paul J. Erickson, “Welcome to Sodom: The Cultural Work of City-Mysteries Fiction in Antebellum America,” PhD diss., University of Texas, 2005. 23. Robert Montgomery Bird, The City Looking Glass; quoted in Lloyd Turner Willis, “City Low-Life on the American Stage to 1900,” PhD diss., University of Illinois, 1956, 12. Bird knew whereof he spoke; he was an editor of the literary journal American Monthly Magazine from 1835 to 1837. 24. “An Account of An Editor’s Day,” New York Morning Herald, May 18, 1838, p. 2. Emphasis added. “Morning” was dropped from the title in 1840. 25. Henry Stanhope Lee, “Thoughts on Contemporaneous Criticism,” reprinted in Corsair, June 22, 1839, p. 412. 26. Abel Smith (?), “Authors and Critics,” Columbian 1 (January 1844): 17. See also Martin Conboy, The Press and Popular Culture (London: Sage, 2002); Donald J. Gray, “Early Victorian Scandalous Journalism: Renton Nicholson’s The Town (1837–42),” in The Victorian Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 317–48. William M. Thackeray as Michael Angelo Titmarsh was the art critic for Fraser’s for most of this period. His writings (particularly as Yellow Plush) were frequently copied into US newspapers, including the (Whig) American, (Whig) Spirit of the Times, (Whig) Corsair (its editor, Nathaniel P. Willis, hired him on a trip to England), (Whig) Express, and (Whig) New World. Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 459–60, an editor at the Herald, lists the epithets hurled at Bennett. 27. Bennett in the Herald, March 12, 1837; cited in Schudson, Discovering the News, 27.

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28. On Bennett and the Herald, see James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989); Oliver Carlson, The Man Who Made the News: James Gordon Bennett (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1942); Don C. Seitz, The James Gordon Bennetts: Father and Son (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1928); and Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and His Times by a Journalist [Isaac Clark Pray] (New York: Stringer & Townsend, 1855). 29. “Trustees of Columbia College,” Evening Post, January 12, 1854; the Evening Mirror, April 25, 1854, agreed. The Post acknowledged the Presbyterian and three Dutch Reformed trustees but not the one converted Catholic on the board. See Robert McCaughey, Stand, Columbia: A History of Columbia University in the City of New York, 1754–2004 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 125. Oliver Gibbs ended up at Harvard. As Henry Clay’s running mate, Frelinghuysen’s antislavery stance troubled the Democratic penny press. Philo, a lover of knowledge, Sun, June 26, 1839, p. 1; weekly Sunday Mercury, April 10, 1842. When Frelinghuysen left in 1850 for Rutgers, NYU’s faculty was down to four. 30. “A Mean Transaction,” Herald, April 9, 1838, p. 2; the brothers Anthony, Alexander, and James Bleecker subscribed to the Evening Star in the 1830s; Evening Star subscription book, NYHS. James and Anthony were able to obtain auctioneers’ licenses after an 1838 law eliminated limits on licensees. Anthony J. Bleecker had been a moderate Democrat but by the 1850s was a Republican candidate for mayor and subscriber to the Courier & Enquirer, with whose editor he shared membership in Trinity Church. On early newspaper engravings, see Michael Leja, “News Pictures in the Early Years of Mass Visual Culture in New York: Lithographs and the Penny Press,” in Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News, ed. Jason Hill and Vanessa Schwartz (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 146–53. 31. “National Academy,” Herald, May 4, 1839, p. 2; “National Academy,” Herald, May 17, 1839, p. 2; “National Academy,” Herald, July 4, 1840, p. 2. “National Academy of Design, from the Times,” April 27, 1840, Times and Evening Star, p. 2. The ten-dollar Times and Evening Star (1838–1840) supported Clay and Harrison for president, but its editor Nathaniel P. Eldredge had often supported the Democrats. He said in August 29, 1840, at the time of the merger with the Evening Star, that he had been a Van Buren man until the latter proved false. The New York Times from which he adopted the review may have been a weekly or semiweekly version of the Tammany (Democratic/Van Buren) ten-dollar organ. Walter Oddie informally studied with Robert Weir, joined the Sketch Club, and subscribed to the Evening Star from 1838–1840; he turned professional in 1849. Annette Blaugrund, “Walter Mason Oddie, 1808–1865,” American Art Journal 12, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 60–77. 32. E, “Academy of Design,” Commercial Advertiser, June 17, 1839, p. 1 (E may have also written the criticisms for 1838 as ER); An Educated and Intelligent Foreigner, “National Academy of Design,” Express, May 18, 1841 and May 19; Park Benjamin (or perhaps the critic Henry C. Watson), in the Whiggish New World, May 29, 1841, says the Intelligent Foreigner is a Dutch or German artist who only likes artists that imitate European styles. 33. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” New-Yorker, May 11, 1839, p. 125. Park Benjamin, who had a personal feud with Bennett, was literary editor. Benjamin was also writing for the Commercial Advertiser and American. H, “National Academy of Design,” American, May 24, 1839, p. 2. “National Academy of Design,”

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Literary Gazette, June 22, 1839, p. 165. Bennett approvingly noticed the Literary Gazette in the Herald. Its editor, the merchant and poet James Aldrich (1810–1856), was an assistant for Benjamin’s New World. Plain Common Sense, “For the Evening Post,” Evening Post, June 6, 1839. “H” also visits Gerlando Marsiglia’s studio, “An Essay on Painting,” New York Literary Gazette, April 6, 1839, admiring his copies of old masters. A. J. Huntington lectured on the fine arts at the Apollo Association in April 1840 and is described as the author of several criticisms of the fine arts, Evening Signal, April 4, 1840. This may be Jedidiah Huntington, an Episcopal minister and brother of painter Daniel Huntington, a leader of the National Academy. In 1839, he wrote on Washington Allston for the Knickerbocker. 34. “National Academy,” Herald, April 21, 1840, “National Academy,” Evening Star, May 16, 1840, May 20, 1840, p. 2. “The Fine Arts: National Academy,” Mirror, May 26, 1838; “National Academy of Design,” Mirror, May 15, 1841, p. 150. In the 1837 exhibition, when C. F. Hoffman, a member of the Sketch Club, was editor, the Mirror merely noted his name, and in 1838, when Epes Sargeant was editor, it called his landscapes fair, as far as they go. In 1840, the Van Buren Democrat James Kirke Paulding owned a Bleecker painting of a Knickerbocker (Washington Irving) subject, the Dutch Sentinel. The Herald, September 1 and 18, 1835, described the critic and amateur artist Henry W. Herbert (who edited and wrote art reviews for the American Monthly Magazine until 1835) as part of the literary clique at the Courier and Enquirer engaged in putting down James Fenimore Cooper in order to build up Paulding; Herbert had also contributed to papers run by Hoffman, Benjamin, and Aldrich. See also Stephen Earl Meats, “The Letters of Henry William Herbert, ‘Frank Forester,’ 1815–1858,” PhD diss., University of South Carolina, 1972. 35. Charles F. Briggs, “Twentieth Annual Exhibition of the Academy of National Design: Landscapes,” Broadway Journal, May 3, 1845, p. 275. Briggs left the journal in June, so everything after July 12 is not by him; the music critic Henry C. Watson left the journal by October, so everything after October may be Poe. Poe said he disagreed with Briggs’s review of the Academy, suggesting that the column “Fine Arts,” July 26, 1845, which enters into argument with the Herald, is by Poe, though perhaps the more conciliatory “The Fine Arts,” August 16, 1845, p. 90, which urges artists to overcome such cliques, is by Watson, whose art criticism tended to favor Europe and the old masters. On the attribution of articles, see Barbara Cantalupo, Poe and the Visual Arts (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014); and also Linda Patterson Miller, “Poe on the Beat: Doings of Gotham as Urban, Penny Press Journalism,” Journal of the Early Republic 7, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 147–65. 36. On power, knowledge, and the penny-press revolution, see Bryan Jay Wolf’s foundational article “All the World’s a Code: Art and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Painting,” Art Journal 44, no. 4 (Winter 1984): 328–37. 37. The Express changed its view of newsboys around the time it became a penny paper. In 1839, it condemned the Herald’s ragamuffins (August 6, 1839; June 5, 1839), but in September 16, 1842, the newsboys were future Astors (Sunday Mercury, February 10 and 17, 1850). The war on the newsboys is visible in 1838 and 1839 mostly in an attack on the Herald, in which the Sun (June 5 and 11, 1840) joins in, complaining that it does not want the boys to sell its paper with the Herald. The war starts again in 1846 and 1847, when there was a newsboy strike, and climaxes in the early 1850s, as part of a larger “Hope Chapel” campaign to institute prohibitory blue laws to forbid Sunday activities. Sun, February 16, 1850.

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38. “New Books,” Albion, November 25, 1854, p. 561. Her publisher, J. C. Derby, replied, “Mr. Derby and his Advertisements,” Albion, December 2, 1854, p. 573. William Young, the son of an English admiral and an admirer of Herman Melville, was greeted warmly by the Democratic Review and edited the Albion most of this decade. 39. See Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and MidNineteenth-Century Painting (Hanover, VT: University Press of New England, 2000), 34–80; Wendy J. Katz, “Fancy Painting, Street Children, and the Fast Men of the Pavé,” Nineteenth-Century Studies 21 (2007): 85–126; and David Stewart Hull, James Henry Cafferty, N.A., 1819–1869 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1986). 40. Dell Upton, “The Urban Ecology of Art in Antebellum New York,” in TransAtlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860, ed. Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 49–66. 41. On the conversational “I” rather than the editorial “we,” see Greeley’s New Yorker, May 23, 1839, which credits the Herald and Willis for adopting the English style. Nathaniel P. Willis, “Pencil Notes on a First Visit to the Gallery,” The Corsair, May 4, 1839, p. 121. Judy Crosby Ivy, Constable and the Critics, 1802–1837 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), xiii. Willis, a Henry Clay (antislavery) Whig, didn’t vote for president until John C. Fremont’s candidacy in 1856. His longtime partner at the Mirror, the poet George P. Morris, was a conservative Democrat. T. Olcott Porter, his coeditor at the five-dollar weekly Corsair, older brother of the editor of Spirit of the Times, was a collegeeducated New Englander with political and personal ties with the South. 42. Herald, January 14, 1844. Many newspapers had a column titled “Gossip”; the Dispatch had “Gossip with and for the Ladies,” the Home Journal and the Times had “Art Gossip,” Literary World “Fine Art Gossip,” Spirit of the Times “Art and Literary Gossip,” Sun “City Gossip,” Evening Post “Table Talk” (close kin to the “Editor’s Table” of the Knickerbocker or “Easy Chair” of Harper’s Weekly, a location where the editor put disconnected musings, many of them scissored from other papers; some mastheads, like Brother Jonathan’s, showed the editor at his table and in his chair, perhaps suggesting that the character of the whole paper was gossip; the Courier and Enquirer in 1848 rebuked the Knickerbocker’s editor Clark for making his Table into “scurrilous gossip”), European gossip, and so on. There was “Chit-Chat with our Readers,” “Topics Astir,” “Jottings and Anecdotes and Gossip,” and “Things in New York.” These were not aimed at women per se. The same columns were often called “Items,” “Matters,” or “Intelligence,” as in “Art Items,” “City Items,” “Foreign Intelligence,” “Art Matters,” “Artistic Intelligence,” etc. 43. Karen Georgi, “Defining Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century American Critical Discourse,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006): 227–45. See also David Dearinger, “Annual Exhibitions and the Birth of American Art Criticism to 1865,” in his Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925 (National Academy of Design, 2000), 61–64; Emily Julia Hagiland, “Art Criticism in America Before the Crayon: Perceptions of American Landscape Painting, 1825–1855,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2000; William Gerdts, “The American ‘Discourses’: A Survey of Lectures and Writings on American Art, 1770–1858,” American Art Journal 15, no. 3 (Summer 1983): 61–79; William Gerdts, “American Landscape Painting: Crucial Judgments, 1730–1845,” American Art Journal 17, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 28–59; Anne Meservey, “The Role of Art in American Life: Critics’ Views on Native Art and Literature, 1830–1865,” American Art Journal 10 (May 1978): 73–89; and William Gerdts, “On Elevated Heights: American Historical Painting and Its Critics,” in Grand Illusions: History Painting in America, ed.

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William Gerdts and Mark Thistlethwaite (Fort Worth, TX: Amon Carter Museum, 1988), 61–123. 44. John More-Anon, “National Academy,” Herald, May 19, 1836, p. 1. In the same year, More Anon was a Washington correspondent for the Tammany sixpenny organ Times (January 13, 1836), and a doctor using that pseudonym wrote a letter to them (November 12, 1835); More Anon in the Whig Times and Commercial Intelligencer (April 16, 1840) criticizes Whig domination of the American Institute, violating its bylaws; More Anon is the Washington correspondent for the Democratic Sunday Mercury (May 3, 1840, May 17, 1840), writing about art in the Rotunda. 45. For example, Wendy J. Katz, “Undocumented Art Criticism by Whitman in the New York Sunday Dispatch and New York Evening Post,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 32, no. 4 (Spring 2015): 215–29. 46. Lara Langer Cohen, “Democratic Representations: Puffery and the Antebellum Print Explosion,” American Literature 79, no. 4 (December 2007): 643–72. See also John Woolford, “Periodicals and the Practice of Literary Criticism, 1855–1864,” in The Victorian Press: Samplings and Soundings, ed. Joanne Shattock and Michael Wolff (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), 109–42. 47. This seems different from the English dynamic. See Colin Trodd, “Academic Cultures: The Royal Academy and the Commerce of Discourse in Victorian London,” 179–93; and Gordon Fyfe, “Auditing the RA: Official Discourse and the NineteenthCentury Royal Academy,” 117–30, both in Art and the Academy in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Rafael Cardoso Denis and Colin Trodd (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). 48. “Cliqueism,” Evening Mirror, May 14, 1853, p. 2. 49. N. P. Willis, “Pencil Notes on a First Visit to the Gallery,” Corsair, May 4, 1839, p. 121. A weekly Critic was edited by William Leggett in 1828, and The Critic, 1838–1839, was edited by George W. Dixon.

1. The Aristocracy of Art and Bennett’s Herald 1. “The Zombi, or Murillo’s Pupil (transl. from the German for the New York Mirror),” The Emancipator and Free American, October 5, 1843, p. 92. Many papers reprinted this story; e.g., Daily Whig, September 19, 1838; Le Franco-Américain, August 11, 1846, a small six-dollar (four- times-a-week) paper; “From Philo,” Sun, January 19, 1835, p. 1. 2. Sun: December 14, 1833, p. 3; December 23, 1833, p. 3; December 27, 1833, p. 2; September 15, 1834, p. 2. 3. Alexander Saxton, “Problems of Race and Class in the Origins of the Mass Circulation Press,” American Quarterly 36 (Summer 1978): 211–35. 4. Described in the Transcript, May 27, 1834. British-born George H. Evans of the Workingman’s Party edited the Man, 1834–1835, and, with the Democratic politician and lithographer Mike Walsh, the Working Man’s Advocate. The daily Woman was edited by Ann Oddbody (or perhaps Oldbody). 5. Sun: December 31, 1833, p. 2; December 19, 1833, p. 3; February 19, 1834, p. 3. 6. On fire engines, Sun, October 22, 1835, p. 2; October 20, 1847; Transcript, April 29, 1834; Evening Star, April 30, 1834, p. 2; October 20, 1835, p. 2; “National Academy,” May 21, 1839. On sculptors, Sun, December 21, 1839; Transcript, June 7, 1834; Evening

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Star, “National Academy,” May 3, 1834, p. 2; July 10, 1835, p. 2. On Van Patten, see Sun, December 13, 1833, p. 3. On Edmonds’s address to the Mechanics Institute, see Sun, October 13, 1846. 7. Sun, November 7, 1839; Sunday Mercury, March 27, 1842, cites the Transcript saying woodcuts are a bore; the Courier and Enquirer praised Greeley’s New-Yorker for avoiding them; Poe quoted in Barbara Cantalupo, Poe and the Visual Arts (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2014), 126. 8. LD, correspondence, Courier and Enquirer, June 28, 1851. “A Mean Transaction,” Herald, April 9, 1838. On the penny press near Ann Street, see Hy B. Turner, When Giants Ruled: Park Row, New York’s Great Newspaper Street (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999). 9. “A Successful Exhibition,” The Plaindealer, December 31, 1836, p. 77; see Allan Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968); and Curtiss S. Johnson, Politics and a Belly Full (New York: Vantage, 1962). “The Pictures and the Public Taste,” Journal of Commerce, July 31, 1838. “A Precious Specimen of Liberality, Light and Learning,” Sun, June 1, 1837, p. 2, describes a meeting of the Moral Reform Society at the Tabernacle, a hall owned by the Journal of Commerce proprietors and a Congregationalist church on Sundays. 10. London correspondent, Express, January 1, 1846, p. 1; Paris correspondent, Plaindealer, August 5, 1837, p. 566; J. G. Bennett, Herald, July 12, 1839, p. 2. See also Dixon Ryan Fox, The Decline of Aristocracy in the Politics of New York, 1801–1840 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965). 11. Sun, December 5, 1834, p. 3; New York Arena, April 16, 1842, p. 1. 12. Lucius J. Brutus, “Letter to the Editor,” Evening Star, December 26, 1833, p. 2. On Alfred Baker, 8 Wall St., Sun, August 5, 1837, p. 2. 13. “More Developments in Wall Street,” Herald, August 18, 1842. The shops raided were on Wall, Beekman, Ann, and Nassau Streets. See also Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002). The Subterranean, July 22, 1843, p. 13, edited by Mike Walsh. 14. A Man About Town, “Fashionable Lounges,” Paul Pry, March 30, 1839, p. 1. 15. Sun, April 21, 1836. On Jewett’s room, Herald, April 12, 1836, p. 4; interview with Rosina Townsend, Herald, April 19, 1836, p. 1; Bennett groups the Livingstons, Clintons, Schuylers, and Hunters as part of this (Van Buren) set, Herald, July 12, 1839, p. 2. 16. James G. Bennett, “Beginning of the War,” Herald, May 13, 1837, names Townsend as a visitor to the brothel, not a patron of Jewett. 17. On Livingston, see Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett (New York: Vintage, 1998), 115–25. The Commercial Advertiser (in its weekly Spectator, May 2, 1836), in the same issue, praised the comic scenes of rustic people by Mount. 18. Sun: February 2, 1835; August 4, 1834, p. 2. 19. Bennett had compared Helen Jewett’s corpse to the Medici Venus. “Statuary,” Herald, September 21, 1836; “Another Painter in a Scrape,” Herald, November 28, 1835; Monthly Cosmopolite, December 1, 1849, p. 2, a racy paper (twenty-five cents a year, Prentiss, Clarke & Co. Publishers) that died by the end of 1850, when the Weekly Universe took over their subscription list. In “The Miniature Painter,” Herald, September 14, 1836, p. 1, an educated English artist produces “two miniatures of his own dear self ” (babies) with a widow and her daughter, who run a fashionable boarding house, before he

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decamps. D, “Poem,” Commercial Advertiser, June 4, 1833, p. 2, following a rhapsodic description of the Academy of Design exhibition. Boscowen [Robert F. Williams?], “Paris correspondence,” Courier and Enquirer, January 9, 1854, on seduction. 20. “Singular Facts,” Herald, July 1, 1836, p. 2. Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett, 327, states that Bennett was never admitted to Bellevue prison, though the description of Robinson’s cell is in the editor’s usual style. 21. Bennett, Herald, May 30, 1839, p. 2. 22. “Recent Election,” Herald, November 6, 1835, p. 2; “Penny Literature,” Herald, September 30, 1836, p. 2; Herald, September 24, 1836, p. 2. 23. “Quack Literati—New York Mirror,” Herald, November 17, 1836, p. 2; “The Credit System in Literature,” Herald, April 18, 1837; “Loafer Poetry,” Herald, September 12, 1836, p. 2; “Penny Literature,” Herald, September 30, 1836, p. 2. Charles F. Daniels at the Gazette and General Advertiser, John Inman at the Commercial Advertiser; see Homer F. Barnes, Charles Fenno Hoffman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930). 24. Herald, February 20, 1840, p. 2. Bennett noted that Dr. Hart, who wrote theatrical reviews in the Courier and Enquirer, was on the Park Theater payroll. 25. New Era, May 11, 1840. Sun, July 12, 1842; July 18, 1842, p. 2. 26. Herald, November 7–8, 1836. Epes Sargeant, for example, who with his brother John (Jack) O. Sargeant, a Whig lawyer, would join Park Benjamin’s New World, wrote plays for actresses he befriended that were published in the periodicals he edited. 27. See Patricia Cline Cohen, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 34–39; and Miriam Lopez Rodriguez, “Louisa Medina: Uncrowned Queen of Melodrama,” in Women’s Contribution to Nineteenth-Century Theatre, ed. Miriam Lopez Rodriquez and Maria Dolores Narbona Carrion (Valencia: University of Valencia, 2004), 29–41. The campaign against Hamblin came from Polyanthos, July 21, 1838, edited by William Snelling and the occasional blackface performer George W. Dixon, sold for six cents at Henry Robinson’s print store on Wall Street. 28. Herald: on Josephine Clifton, September 2, 1836, p. 2; on Morris, April 11, 1838, p. 2. William Attree, Louis Tasistro, and David Russell Lee (Leah), accused of passing counterfeit bills at brothels, Sunday Flash, October 17, 1841. 29. Herald quoted in Donna Dennis, Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 62, on Polyanthos’s exposure of the auctioneer Rowland Minturn’s adultery. The Minturns subscribed to the Evening Star. It was speculated that the Polyanthos editor had been bribed to plead guilty in a libel case brought by the Episcopalian minister Francis L. Hawkes; Hawkes was part of the Knickerbocker and Sketch Club set. 30. On the Astor House, see the twopenny Plebeian, July 7, 1842. 31. “New York in Slices,” at Burton’s, Sunday Mercury, October 15, 1848. G. G. “Gaslight” Foster wrote New York in Slices as a serial in the penny Whig Tribune. John Nugent and James A. Houston were the reporters. Houston was an Irish Protestant medical doctor, an excellent stenographer, an active abolitionist, and briefly employed at the Knickerbocker before the Herald, where from 1840 forward he was active editorially not only as a Washington correspondent, city editor, or critic but as chief editor while Bennett was in Europe in 1843. 32. New Era, June 4, 1840; see also: “Bennett’s Herald,” and Sic Semper Tyrannis’s letter, New Era, June 6, 1840, “Wall Street Press,” and No Censors, “The Herald and Its

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Foes,” New Era, June 8, 1840. Founded by William Attree, it was edited at this point by Levi Slamm, a locofoco politician regularly attacked by Bennett. 33. Richard R. Wells, “The Making of the New York Penny Press: An Ethnographic History of a Mass Cultural Form,” PhD diss., New School for Social Research, 2004, 169n23. 34. Herald, October 30, 1835, p. 2. 35. For example, Herald, December 5, 1835. The antislavery reformers Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright stood for this strain of thought. Bennett frequently called the Sun the “nigger penny paper,” which Shane White, Prince of Darkness: The Untold History of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire (New York: Macmillan, 2015), 154, ascribes to Day’s and the Sun police reporter Horatio Bartlett’s friendship with Jeremiah Hamilton, an occasional contributor, funder, and regular visitor to the Sun offices. See also Frank M. O’Brien, The Story of the Sun (New York: Appleton, 1928); James Crouthamel, James Watson Webb: A Biography (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1969); and Jonathan Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York: Homes & Meier, 1981). 36. Inman edited the Commercial Advertiser until 1850. The Author’s Club included Morris (Mirror editor) and George Colton (editor of the American Whig). Inman also contributed to the New York Review, the New World (a biography of the artist and Academy founder William Dunlap), the Ladies Companion, and the Democratic Review. He also worked for Harper’s publishing house. 37. Herald, October 29, 1840. Seward made Inman a commissioner of deeds in 1840. 38. “Mr. Bennett’s Letters, No. 14,” Herald, August 20, 1839, p. 2. On anti-Masonry and art, see David Bjelajac, Washington Allston: Secret Societies and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 39. “The Tee-Total Depravity School of Painting,” Herald, May 22, 1839, p. 2. Herald, May 21, 1839, p. 2, notes that the penny press had been called this. On John Inman, Herald, October 24, 1835, p. 2. On Henry Inman, see William H. Gerdts and Carrie Rebora, The Art of Henry Inman (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 1987); William Gerdts, “Henry Inman: Genre Painter,” American Art Journal 9 (May 1977): 39–41; Theodore Bolton, “Henry Inman, an Account of His Life and Work” and “Catalogue of the Paintings of Henry Inman,” Art Quarterly (Autumn 1940): 353–75, suppl., 401–18. 40. On the Knickerbockers, see Lauretta Dimmick, “Robert Weir’s Saint Nicholas: A Knickerbocker Icon,” Art Bulletin 66, no. 3 (September 1984): 465–83; James T. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967); Kendall Taft, Minor Knickerbockers (New York: American Book Company, 1947); Andrew B. Myers, ed., The Knickerbocker Tradition: Washington Irving’s New York (Tarrytown, NY: Sleepy Hollow Restorations, 1974); Stanley Brodwin and Michael d’Innocenzo, eds., William Cullen Bryant and His America (New York: AMS, 1983); Abram Dayton, Last Days of Knickerbocker Life in New York (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1897); James Grant Wilson, Bryant and His Friends (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1886); John W. M. Hallock, The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000). 41. Sketch Club members in 1844 included National Academy stalwarts like Ingham, Cummings, Durand, Edmonds, the Mirror artist John G. Chapman, Cole, Henry P. Gray, and James Shegogue, plus editors and patrons involved in galleries such as Bryant,

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Abraham Cozzens, Charles Leupp, Verplanck, Shepherd Knapp, and Jonathan Sturges. In the next few years a slightly younger cadre of artists joined, including Inman’s student Daniel Huntington, Bryant’s friend H. K. Brown, and Charles Lanman. Guests by 1850 included Charles L. Elliott, Henry T. Tuckerman, L. G. Clark of the Knickerbocker, Evert Duyckinck (invited by Huntington), P. M. Wetmore, William Hoppin, Ogden Haggerty, and Dr. Parmly. 42. Herald, January 29, 1840, p. 2; “Grand Fancy Dress Ball,” Herald, March 2, 1840, p. 1. On the Brevoort ball’s guest list, see Eric Homberger, Mrs. Astor’s New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 139–43. On Mount, see Deborah J. Johnson et al., William Sidney Mount: Painter of American Life (Stony Brook, NY: Museums at Stony Brook and the American Federation of Arts, 1998). 43. Spectator, May 2, 1836, p. 1. 44. Irish American: October 19, 1850; November 9, 1850. 45. “Brilliant Bal Costume,” Herald, March 5, 1840, p. 2; “Fashionables at Saratoga,” Herald, July 22, 1837, p. 2; “Humors of the Election,” Herald, April 12, 1838, p. 1; Herald, July 19, 1839, p. 2; “Blair’s Grand Loco Foco Ball and Cotillion Party,” Herald, January 29, 1840, p. 2. Camblet Cloak, “For the New York Gazette—Ball at Mushroom’s House,” Gazette and General Advertiser, March 1, 1839, p. 2. 46. “Grand Musical Soirée,” Herald, February 27, 1840, p. 2. Elton contributed to (and sold in his shop) the Sunday Atlas, Sunday Times, and Sunday Mercury, which had been critical of the Moral War on the Herald, and racy papers the Wag, Whip, Arena, and Sunday Flash, the last of which also attacked Hamblin. 47. Hone quoted in Schudson, Discovering the News, p. 28. 48. “Bal Costume,” Corsair, February 29, 1840, p. 811. See Thomas N. Baker, Sentiment and Celebrity: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Trials of Literary Fame (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 49. Herald, April 25, 1840, p. 2. Edmonds was a pallbearer at Henry Inman’s funeral. City and Country Beaux is at The Clark, Williamstown, Massachusetts. 50. “National Academy of Design,” New York Spectator, April 25, 1839. The Spectator was the weekly edition of the Commercial Advertiser; the same article appeared April 24 in the Commercial Advertiser. 51. “Opening of the National Academy,” Herald, April 27, 1840, p. 6. 52. “National Academy of Design,” April 21, 1840, Herald, p. 2. 53. John Tryon was also an associate editor. Herald, July 27, 1838, p. 2. See Merle M. Hoover, Park Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948). “Julia E,” Evening Chronicle (short-lived evening edition of the Herald), June 29, 1837; Polyanthos, June 6, 1841. 54. “National Academy of Design,” Herald, May 18 (16?), 1838, p. 2; “National Academy of Design,” Herald, June 1, 1838, p. 2. 55. Lewis Lewis and William M. Watt, 131 Nassau Street, edited the Whiggish Age, May 19, 1838. “Exhibition of Pictures-Criticism,” Daily Whig, May 23, 1838, p. 2, Rufus Dawes, poet and “old school” Whig, and S. J. Burr, eds. 56. An editor, “Diogenes and His Lantern,” Commercial Advertiser, May 1, 1838, p. 2, dismissed James Frothingham’s spiritless portrait of Daniel Webster. ER, “National Academy of Design No. 1,” Commercial Advertiser, May 11, 1838, p. 1; “National Academy of Design No. 4,” May 22, 1838, p. 2; “National Academy of Design No. 5,” May 25, 1838, p. 2.

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57. Parke Godwin had joined as an editor in 1836. Evening Post, April 25, 1838; “For the Evening Post, National Academy,” Evening Post, May 26, 1838, p. 2. 58. Greeley refused to publish a letter from Enzel attacking the Academy, New-Yorker, June 2, 1838, p. 173. “Fine Arts,” New-Yorker, February 2, 1839; “Apollo Association,” New-Yorker, February 16, 1839; “Exhibition at National Academy,” New-Yorker, April 28, 1839, p. 109; “Exhibition at National Academy,” New-Yorker, May 11, 1839, p. 125. 59. “Looking at the Paintings,” Sun, May 17, 1839; Bryant’s initial notice of the exhibition, Evening Post, May 3, 1839, was genially approving. Ultra Marine, “For the Evening Post—National Academy of Design,” Evening Post, May 14, 1839, p. 2. 60. “National Academy,” Paul Pry, May 18, 1839, p. 2; May 25, 1839. Paul Pry, a threecent weekly, edited by Wardle Corbyn, 104 Nassau Street, in 1840 covered the exhibition more seriously. “National Academy of Design,” Sunday Morning Visiter, May 12, 1839, edited by Elbridge Paige, also a three-cent weekly. 61. Bennett, Letters, Herald, July 23, 1838, p. 2 (National Gallery, London); October 2, 1838, p. 2; October 15, 1838, p. 2 (visit to the Louvre). 62. “Exhibition of the National Academy,” Herald, April 15, 1839, p. 2. “National Academy,” Herald, May 4, 1839, p. 2. Attree, or Ariel, the Society Reporter, liked fifty to sixty pictures, “Opening of the Academy,” Herald, April 23, 1839, p. 2. 63. “Fine Arts,” Corsair, July 6, 1839, p. 270. “National Academy of Design,” Paul Pry, May 18, 1839, p. 2. “National Academy,” Herald, May 17, 1839, p. 2. “The Veiled Picture, A Tale of the Fine Arts,” Spectator (weekly Commercial Advertiser), May 23, 1833, p. 4, also in the New Monthly Magazine, Atlas, and Constellation. D. Bronson, the artist whose self-portrait is under discussion, had a portrait of the popular novelist Professor Joseph H. Ingraham in the exhibition. 64. Paul Pry, August 17, 1839. 65. “National Academy,” Herald, May 4, 1839, p. 2. 66. “Hoxie and the Wall Street Coterie,” Morning Herald, September 25, 1837. 67. “The National Academy,” New York Herald, May 4, 1839, p. 2. J. Sutphen owned the painting, along with another by Durand. An 1842 city directory (John Doggett’s) lists Sutphen as a dry-goods merchant, naval office clerk (a Whig political appointment), and ship carpenter. 68. JKF (John Kenrick Fisher), “Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker (June 1839): 545; Ultra Marine, “National Academy of Design,” Evening Post, May 14, 1839, p. 2. 69. “National Academy,” Express, May 18, 1841, p. 1. “World of Art. National Academy of Design,” New World, May 29, 1841, p. 365. J. K. Fisher, “Letter to American Artists,” Mirror, April 4, 1835, p. 318. JKF, “Fine Arts: The National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker, June 1839, p. 545; see also p. 553. 70. H. Inman, “To the Editors,” Commercial Advertiser, May 13, 1839, p. 2. 71. G. B. (Burke; his name identified by the Herald), “To the Editors,” Commercial Advertiser, May 16, 1839, p. 2. “The Exhibition at the National Academy of Design,” New-Yorker, April 28, 1839, p. 109. 72. “Mr. H. Inman and the National Academy,” New-Yorker, May 18, 1839, p. 141. 73. “Amusing,” Herald, May 14, 1839, p. 2; Herald, May 21, 1839, p. 2. 74. Louis Tasistro edited the short-lived four-dollar-a-year weekly. “National Academy: The Tee-Total Depravity School of Painting,” Herald, May 22, 1839, p. 2; and “National Academy,” Herald, May 30, 1839, p. 2. The invaluable guide to artists who exhibited at

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the Academy is the National Academy of Design Exhibition Record, 1826–1860, 2 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1943). Thomas S. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy (Philadelphia: G. W. Childs, 1865), suggests that a “Middle-Tint” wrote “National Academy: The Tee-Total Depravity School of Painting,” Herald, May 22, 1839, p. 2. 75. “Encouragement of the Fine Arts,” New World, August 14, 1841, p. 109. The penny Evening Signal and weekly New World were edited by the college-educated Whig team of Park Benjamin and Rufus Griswold, with John and Epes Sargeant, and lasted about two years. 76. “Standard of Taste,” New York Semiweekly Times, May 2, 1837, p. 2. Salvator, “To the editors,” New York Semiweekly Times, May 13, 1837, pp. 2–3. The Old Serpent (1835) was also the name of a Whig paper. The Times said that Durand had too little expression and what expression there is is caricatured; Morse (Academy President) needed more chasteness, and Cole’s painting lacked the requisite diversity of American scenery. 77. Planet, September 5, 1840; in the same article, the editor praises the “Letter to Critics on the Art of Painting” by Pictor in the September Knickerbocker, which reproached the flippancy of critics; the Planet also liked George D. Strong’s essay on the newsboy in that month’s Knickerbocker. The editor, November 27, 1840, points out that the man who writes their political leaders traces his lineage back to the Revolution. 78. “National Academy of Design: Review of the Exhibition (cont.),” American Repertory, June 1841, p. 353; “National Academy of Design,” American Repertory, May 1841, p. 283. See also Eliot Clark, NA, History of the National Academy of Design, 1825–1953 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954). 79. On these connections, see Ethan Robey, “The Utility of Art: Mechanics Institute Fairs in New York City, 1828–1876,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2000, 134, 137–38. In the February 1840 issue of the American Repertory of Arts, Sciences and Manufactures, “C” (T. S. Cummings?) gives the history of the National Academy and then regularly contributes art items. Mapes himself may been the critic for the Academy’s exhibitions, “Review of the Exhibition,” American Repertory, June 1840, p. 359; July 1840, p. 431; “National Academy of Design,” American Repertory, May 1841, p. 283, June 1841, p. 353; July 1841, p. 419. 80. Mapes owned family portraits by Inman and paintings by Cole, including Titan’s Goblet (1834), which reflected the engineering feat of the Erie Canal. “Letter,” Transcript, October 2, 1835. When the Mechanics Institute gave up its fairs in 1840, the American Institute fairs became instead the showplace for artisanal achievement. Robey, “The Utility of Art.” 81. CW [Charles Wilkins Webber?], “Fine Arts: Exhibition of the Academy,” Arcturus, June 1841, p. 59. WAJ, “Newspaper Criticism,” Arcturus, February 1841, p. 148. William A. Jones wrote for the American Monthly Magazine when it was edited by Park Benjamin and probably for the New-Yorker as well. He also wrote for the Democratic Review. Sunday Mercury, February 7, 1841, p. 2. See, e.g., “Portraits of the People, No. 21, The News Boy,” Atlas, September 6, 1840, p. 1. 82. “Inman Gallery,” Anglo-American, February 14, 1846, p. 402. A. D. Paterson worked for John S. Bartlett’s Albion, the British, colonial, and foreign weekly (published from Cozzens’ American Hotel on Barclay Street), doing drama, music, and fine-arts reviews and political articles in 1838 and 1840–1841, before starting the three-dollar Anglo-American. Educated Foreigner, “National Academy of Design,” Express, May 19,

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1841. Pittoro, “Messrs. Editors,” Spectator, June 18, 1840. Picture dealers and auctioneers active in arts organizations included Henry Riell, Pierre Flandin, Michael Paff, William A. Colman, Henry H. Leeds, and Matteson and William Hayward, 128 Broadway. 83. The National Academy catalog lists it as owned by G. D. Strong. Jonathan Sturges later purchased it. On Sturges, see Christine Oaklander, “Fascinating Information Revealed: The Jonathan Sturges Receipt Books,” Archives of American Art 53, no. 1/2 (Spring 2014): 122–35. George D. Strong, “Limnings in the Thoroughfares: The NewsMan and News-Boy,” Knickerbocker, February 1840, p. 138. Strong was an alderman of the violent Sixth Ward, and the Evening Star, October 13, 1834, p. 2, criticized his hard-money stance, unusual for a banker. “National Academy of Design No. 2,” Mirror, May 22, 1841, p. 167. 84. Herald, March 12, 1840. “Theatres,” Sunday Mercury, June 21, 1840; “Asmodeus, or the Devil in New York,” featured William Mitchell, the owner of the Olympic theater and a large advertiser in the penny papers, as Asmodeus. See also Peter Reed, “Arrant Beggars: Staging the Atlantic Lumpenproletariat, 1777–1852,” PhD diss., Florida State University, 2005; Bruce A. McConachie, “‘The Theatre of the Mob’: Apocalyptic Melodrama and Preindustrial Riots in Antebellum New York,” in Theatre for WorkingClass Audiences in the U.S., 1830–1980, ed. Bruce A. McConachie and Daniel Friedman (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 17–46; Rosemarie K. Bank, “Hustlers in the House,” in The American Stage, ed. Ron Engle and Tice Miller (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 47–64. 85. Pictor, “Letter to Critics on the Art of Painting,” Knickerbocker, September 1840, p. 230; reprinted in the Sunday Mercury, September 6, 1840, p. 1. The Mercury editor Elbridge Paige had been at the New-Yorker, where his coeditor was Samuel Nichols. 86. “Opening of the Academy,” Herald, April 23, 1839, p. 2.

2. Artists, Their Agents, and Press Manipulation 1. John Neal, “Criticism,” Brother Jonathan, May 6, 1843, p. 16. Park Benjamin was the initial editor, but he was replaced by H. Hastings Weld, a former Sun editor. Nathaniel P. Willis joined Weld as country editor in 1840 and briefly became editor in 1843. Neal’s appointment was announced on April 29, 1843. 2. “National Academy of Design,” Herald, May 16, 1838, p. 2; Herald, December 29, 1840, p. 2. Transcript, “American Institute,” October 10, 1834, p. 2; Transcript, April 13, 1835, compared Clarke to Morris rather than Bryant and admired Stout’s bust at the American Institute. 3. Strong, “Limnings,” 140; Herald, January 29, 1841. 4. “Loafer Poetry,” Herald, September 12, 1836, p. 2; “A Literary Fraud,” Evening Post, January 5, 1859; “Atrocious Literary Hoax,” Express, January 8, 1859. 5. “Brackett, the Sculptor,” Herald, January 20, 1841. Brackett entered New York at about the same time as Stout, with advance publicity from E. S. Thomas, a Cincinnati writer who had been promoting Cincinnati sculptors in New York. Brackett shared exhibition space with fellow Westerner the painter-poet Thomas Buchanan Read, whose portrait from life of William Henry Harrison reading the newspaper, like Brackett’s bust of the president, received positive attention (“bold, dashing, original”) from the Herald and the sixpenny Whig press (Commercial Advertiser, Express, Evening Star—whose editor Noah owned a portrait by Brackett). Editor William Stone, “Binding of Satan,”

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Commercial Advertiser, April 29, 1841, p. 2. “Curious Criticisms in the Fine Arts,” Herald, May 1, 1841, p. 2, however, set down Brackett’s Archangel Binding Satan as a “poor affair.” Brackett, like Stout, was an advertiser in all these papers. 6. “Editorial Difficulties, or Wall Street Warfare,” Sunday Morning News, January 24, 1836. Clarke, “Hymn for New Year’s Eve, written from Pattinson’s coffee house,” Brother Jonathan, January 8, 1842. “Stout’s Statue of the Queen,” Herald, May 3, 1839, p. 2. Herald, December 24, 1840, p. 2. Clarke at one point lived in a Grahamite (Sylvester Graham’s special diet to restrict unnatural appetites, which influenced Horace Greeley) boarding house with Stephen Branch, a writer for the Herald. On Clarke, see Wendy J. Katz, “A Newly Discovered Whitman Poem,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 32, no. 1/2 (Summer/Fall 2014): 69–76; Andrew C. Higgins, “MacDonald Clarke’s Adjustment to Market Forces: A Lesson for Walt Whitman,” Mickle Street Review 15, http://msr-archives .rutgers.edu/archives/Issue%2015/essays/Higgins.htm; and Joseph Mediros, “McDonald Clarke, ‘The Mad Poet of Broadway’: His Life and Works,” MA Thesis, Brown University, 1944. 7. New Era, March 7, 1842, Poems of McDonald Clarke (Jared W. Bell, 1836). Samuel Wheelock Parmly’s brother, Eleazar, also a dentist and a poet, was a founder of the Apollo Association, rival to the National Academy; a Dr. Parmly attended the Sketch Club. Eleazar’s daughter married Thomas P. Rossiter, another artist whose uneven reputation may owe something to the politics of newspaper criticism. James McDougall was a miniature painter, 11 Park Row. 8. Willis Gaylord Clark was the brother of Lewis Gaylord Clark of the Knickerbocker. Homer F. Barnes, Charles Fenno Hoffman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1930). Clarke’s mental illness was well known; see also C. Carroll Hollis, “The ‘Mad Poet’ McDonald Clarke,” in Essays and Studies in Language and Literature, ed. Herbert H. Petit (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1964), 176–206. Hoffman too went into an asylum in 1849, and Herbert committed suicide in 1858. Courier and Enquirer, September 13, 1836. On Bryant’s selections, Herald, December 21, 1840, p. 2; the Herald generally praised Arcturus, edited by Knickerbockers Evert Duyckinck and Cornelius Mathews, for its relative severity on Bryant; see “Bryant’s American Poets,” Arcturus 1 (December 1840): 24–29. 9. On Inman and Doane, see William Gerdts, The Art of Henry Inman (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 1987), 41–42, 96, 104. Doane, who had one son become a Catholic monsignor, supported Bishop Onderdonk. On Inman, “National Academy of Design,” Herald, May 2, 1845, p. 2; on Doane (allied with Charles King of the Courier and Enquirer too), “Bishop Doane,” Herald, June 12, 1849, p. 4; Brother Jonathan, n.d., 1852. 10. According to Lewis P. Clover, a Durand student, who like his teacher did a portrait of Clarke. John Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 87–90. 11. Herald, June 25, 1839, p. 2. Ethan Robey, “The Utility of Art: Mechanics Institute Fairs in New York City, 1828–1876,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2000, 601, says his father was James DeForest Stout and gives his years as 1809–1860, though in 1843 the Sunday Mercury said he was born August 11, 1810, to an engraver. The engraver George H. Stout advertised in the Democratic sixpenny Times, February 16, 1836, and had work in the Sunday Morning News, April 3, 1836, p. 4, which had similar tastes to the Herald. The Park Theater artist J. R. Smith was involved in Fourierist meetings, Herald, April 7, 1844.

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12. “Stout’s Statue of Queen Victoria—Extraordinary Work of Genius,” Herald, April 20, 1839, p. 2; “Stout’s Statue of the Queen,” Herald, May 3, 1839, p. 2. 13. “Statue of Victoria,” Herald, April 22, 1839, p. 2; Epes Sargeant, “Statue of Victoria, by an American artist,” Mirror, April 13, 1839, p. 335. Nathaniel P. Willis, “The Pencil,” Corsair, April 13, 1839, p. 74. 14. “Stout’s Statue of the Queen,” Herald, May 3, 1839, p. 2. A Quispiam later defended the American Art-Union. 15. Epes Sargeant, “To Correspondents and Readers,” Mirror, May 18, 1839, p. 375. The Herald took the poem. Sargeant also declined Titian’s review of that year’s Academy exhibition; he had perhaps himself authored the “Glance at the Exhibition of the Academy of Design,” Mirror, May 11, 1839, p. 367; May 18, 1839. Delta Phi, “On Seeing a Portrait of James Varick Stout, the Sculptor, by Jacob D. Blondell,” Herald, May 1, 1840, p. 8, referred to a painting at the 1840 Academy exhibition. 16. “Statue of Queen Victoria,” American, June 7, 1839, p. 2. “Stout’s Statue,” Herald, June 16, 1839, p. 2. Times and Commercial Intelligencer, April 20, 1839, p. 2. Commercial Advertiser, April 22, 1839; “Victoria,” Courier and Enquirer, April 19, 1839, p. 2. “Stout’s Statue of Victoria,” Gazette and Commercial Advertiser, April 23, 1839, p. 2. 17. See Carrie Rebora Barratt, Queen Victoria and Thomas Sully (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000). “Mysterious Impulse,” Herald, June 14, 1839, p. 2; Herald, June 25, 1839, p. 2; Herald, June 27, 1839, p. 2; Herald, July 1, 1839, p. 2. Times and Commercial Intelligencer, June 10, 1839; June 24, 1839. “Sully’s Portrait of the Queen,” American, June 15, 1839, p. 2. Evening Star, January 11, 1839, argues for Sully, June 12, 1839; Sunday Morning Visiter, June 23, 1839. 18. Herald, July 24, 1839, p. 2. 19. Herald, April 2, 1840, p. 1; “Rivalry of Genius,” Herald, April 4, 1840, p. 2. Quote is from (M)****R, “Our Camera Lucida,” Sunday Mercury, August 8, 1841, p. 1. I, “Letter,” Herald, April 7, 1840, p. 2. 20. Paul Pry, May 9, 1840. See Madeleine B. Stern, Heads and Headlines: The Phrenological Fowlers (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971); and Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Fowler hired A. D. O. Browere. 21. See Henry Wikoff, The Reminiscences of an Idler (New York: Fords, Howard & Hulbert, 1880); Duncan Crow, Henry Wikoff, the American Chevalier (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1963); Allison Delarue, Chevalier Henry Wikoff Impresario, 1840 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968). See also Allison Delarue, Fanny Elssler in America (New York: Dance Horizons, 1976); Maureen Needham Costonis, “The Personification of Desire: Fanny Elssler and American Audiences,” Dance Chronicle 13, no. 1 (1990): 47–67; and Genevieve McCoy, “Fanny Elssler’s Reception: Gender, Class, and Republicanism in the United States, 1840–42,” in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Society of Dance History Scholars (Philadelphia, 2002), 77–82. 22. Herald, December 12, 1840, p. 2. Ivor Guest, Fanny Elssler (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1970); see also the Sun, July 18, 1842. 23. Bennett frequently joined others in mocking his own “deformity,” a squint, Herald, May 18, 1840, p. 4; Herald, May 25, 1840, p. 2. Bennett claimed to have made peace with Benjamin by October 30, 1841. See also Hoover, Park Benjamin. The Republic’s motto (March 9, 1844): “Democratic Energy has been in every age the main spring of Human Improvement.” Wikoff edited it with Duff Green, and it supported John Tyler.

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24. Herald, May 25, 1840, p. 2. 25. Courrier des États-Unis, August 22, 1840. 26. See Duncan Crow, Henry Wikoff: The American Chevalier (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1963). 27. Paul Pry, May 9, 1840; June 13, 1840. Bennett was severe on the competing engraving by Heidemans (an engraver promoted by the sixpenny Evening Star) after Inman’s portrait of Elssler at her dressing table. 28. Libertine, June 15, 1842; Planet, May 18, 1840; Sun, June 15, 1842; Park Benjamin or Epes Sargeant in the Whig Signal, October 3, 1840, said the Bunker Hill Monument in Boston, which had a long and troubled fundraising history, ought to reject Elssler’s donation as “foreign money.” Bennett, Herald, October 8, 1840, p. 2, also cites criticism of Elssler in William Snelling’s Sunday News, David Hale or Gerard Halleck in the Journal of Commerce, and George W. Dixon in the Polyanthos. 29. “Rule of Advertising,” Tribune, May 11, 1841, p. 2. The rule was the paper would accept theatrical advertising but not review the theater. Tribune, June 9, 1841, p. 2. Tribune quoted in Allison Delarue, Fanny Elssler in America (New York: Dance Horizons, 1976), p. 6. 30. “Fanny Divine and the Sculptor,” Sun, July 24, 1841. 31. Guest, Fanny Elssler, p. 149. 32. Sunday Mercury, January 16, 1848, p. 2. L. N. Fowler, The Phrenological Developments and Characters of J. V. Stout, the Sculptor, and Fanny Elssler, the Actress (New York, 1841), iii, 6, 8. 33. “Statue of Elssler,” Express, September 7, 1841, p. 1; Herald, August 20, 1841; Sunday Mercury, January 16, 1848, p. 2. See also Guest, Fanny Elssler, 173–74. 34. Herald, May 15, 1844; “Fanny Elssler in the United States, The Wikoff Correspondence,” Herald, July 15, 1844. 35. “How to get up an Exhibition,” Sunday Atlas, March 8, 1840. M****R (conceals two vowels and two consonants), Stout’s friend, wrote other comic profiles for the Mercury, e.g., “the Collegian,” as well as about art generally (e.g., fresco painters in the city). 36. Biographical information is from the excellent Joshua Taylor, William Page: The American Titian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957). 37. See Bette S. Weidman, “Charles Frederick Briggs: A Critical Biography,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1968; Bette S. Weidman, “The Pinto Letters of Charles F. Briggs,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1979): 93–157; Briggs’ letters as “Elder Brewster,” Independent, January 4, 1877. Page also wrote for the specialized art journal the Crayon. 38. Solyman Brown, “Sonnet,” Mirror, December 5, 1835, p. 179. Brown had apprenticed with Eleazar Parmly, was an artist, and would become a Fourierist and a follower of Swedenborg. See Lawrence Parmly Brown, “New Light on Dental History,” The Dental Cosmos 62 (1920): 936–58. 39. Charles Briggs, February 6, 1845, letter to Page, identifies Hicks as the artist for the engraving of Mirror editors Willis and Morris, “Mi Boy and the Brigadier,” William Page Papers, Archives of American Art. M****R, Sunday Mercury, September 26, 1841. He exempted Inman, Page, and the Academician Frederick Agate (who painted the Democratic stalwart Edwin Forrest as Metamora) from this shallow style. 40. The Mirror, June 25, 1836, did nonetheless say it was a “work of genius.” 41. “National Academy,” Herald, May 9, 1836, p. 2, “National Academy,” Herald, May 14, 1836, p. 1, “National Academy,” Herald, May 17, 1836, p. 1. Page is again adored,

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“National Academy,” Herald, May 21, 1836, p. 1. “Annual Exhibition of the Academy,” Evening Star, May 5, 1836, p. 2. 42. “12th Annual Exhibition of the Academy,” Evening Star, April 25, 1837, p. 2. From an accomplished Italian, “National Academy of Design,” Sunday Morning News, April 30, 1837, p. 2. When Page was in Italy, he was commissioned by the American Art-Union for a Holy Family. 43. Mirror, May 13, 1837, p. 367. In that year, it was edited by Charles Fenno Hoffman, but the Academy reviews may be written by the landscape painter George Harvey. 44. Mirror, May 20, 1837, p. 375; “National Academy (concluded),” New-Yorker, June 17, 1837; “National Academy, no. 5,” Commercial Advertiser, May 25, 1838, p. 2. 45. Herald, May 5, 1838; Herald, June 14, 1838. IK, “Academy of Design,” Express, May 4, 1838, p. 2, praised Page for scorning “fictitious” means to convey the prisoner’s inward agony, relying on nothing but nature, where Inman relies on trickery. “Exhibition of National Academy,” American Monthly Magazine, May 1838, p. 469. [Up and down double arrow], “National Academy of Design,” New-Yorker, May 12, 1838. 46. Commercial Advertiser, May 25, 1838; J. K. F, “Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker (June 1839), p. 545; [James] Otis, “The Pictures at Clinton Hall,” Evening Star, May 8, 1840, p. 2; [By a gentleman], “National Academy of Design,” New York Literary Gazette, May 18, 1839; May 25, 1839. American Repertory, March 1840, p. 114; “National Academy,” April 1840, p. 184; “Review of the Exhibition,” June 1840, p. 359. 47. E, “National Academy no. II,” Commercial Advertiser, May 31, 1839, p. 1. “National Academy of Design,” New-Yorker, June 20, 1840; they also approved the lack of tinsel in Page’s student Edward Mooney. On the comparison of Page to Inman and John Wesley Jarvis, “Mr. Henry Inman and the National Academy,” New-Yorker, May 18, 1839, p. 141. N. P. Willis, “Pencil Notes on a First Visit to the Gallery,” Corsair, May 4, 1839; and N. P. Willis, “The Gallery,” Corsair, May 18, 1839, p. 152. “Page the Portrait Painter,” Evening Signal, October 18, 1840, p. 3. “National Academy of Design,” Herald, April 21, 1840, p. 2, on Page’s Roman Soldier. H, “NAD—No 1 for New York American,” American, May 24, 1839, p. 2. 48. The Whigs said they paid Glentworth to stop the importation of Democratic voters. P. M. Wetmore, in a sonnet reprinted from The Critic in the Daily Whig, February 26, 1838, p. 2, called Page the regenerator of the truly beautiful, comparable to Hiram Powers. 49. Bennett eventually decided Grinnell and Wetmore were innocent. Bennett also included Charles King (American) and James Webb (Courier and Enquirer) as well as James Bowen, who with Blatchford and Draper invested heavily in the Erie Railroad. Blatchford, Draper, and Grinnell were members of Hone’s Whig club. 50. “Splendid Paintings,” New Era, March 22, 1841. Inman’s and Page’s student Edward Mooney portrayed Governor William Seward in 1843, which permitted a contributor to the penny Whig Express, June 14, 1843, p. 1, to say, with innuendo, that they “defy anyone to equal that document under the Governor’s hand for deceptiveness of appearance.” 51. OPQ [signature is on last of three notices, May 6, 1841], “Apollo Exhibition,” Spectator, April 17, 1841, p. 1. OPQ was a common pseudonym. 52. “Apollo Gallery,” Herald, April 24, 1841, p. 1; April 27, 1841, p. 2; April 29, 1841. Alvan Fisher, Letter, Herald, May 6, 1841, p. 1. “National Academy of Design,”

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New-Yorker, June 20, 1840, used the phrase “eye-trap trickery” to distinguish Page from Inman and the English school; they also approved the lack of tinsel in Page’s student Edward Mooney. 53. “National Academy,” Herald, April 21, 1840, p. 2; “National Academy,” Herald, May 1, 1840, p. 4. 54. “The Fine Arts,” Knickerbocker, November 1839, p. 420. 55. “Editor’s Table,” Knickerbocker, March 1842, p. 275. Briggs writes as Harry Franco. 56. Wasp, Sunday Mercury, March 12, 1842; April 10, 1842; August 14, 1842; Rufus Griswold is the quack working with Benjamin. Wasp also, May 15, 1842, profiled Democratic editor Cornelius Mathews (Arcturus). 57. Wasp, Sunday Mercury, April 24, 1842. Harry Franco [Charles Briggs], Sunday Mercury, May 1, 1842, p. 1. “National Academy,” Sunday Mercury, May 15, 1842, p. 2. 58. “Art Union and Apollo Association,” New World, October 1, 1842; Charles Briggs, letter to William Page, 1844, William Page Papers, Archives of American Art. 59. “Art Union and Apollo Association.” The New World is swiping at the contestants Joshua Shaw, who had submitted a discovery scene with Indians, and John B. White, who submitted a Revolution-era period piece set in the South. See Arlene Katz Nichols, “Merchants and Artists: The Apollo Association and American Art-Union,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2003, 316–20. 60. HF [Charles Briggs as Harry Franco], “The Rejected Picture,” New World, May 6, 1843. Briggs concurred with the free-soil Democrat John P. Hale’s view that Greenough’s sculpture should be left uncovered so that the elements might destroy it. “National Academy,” Herald, July 31, 1840, p. 2. 61. “National Academy of Design,” New World, May 6, 1843; HF, “National Academy,” New World, June 10, 1843. Briggs thought Crawford, a clever stonecutter merely, was no friend to Page. 62. NTM, “The Rejected Picture,” New World, May 13, 1843. HF, “National Academy,” New World, May 25, 1843. A. D. Paterson, “Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Anglo-American, May 6, 1843, p. 44, gave Rousseau credit for an ambitious design but found his combination of preternatural agents and modern costumes monstrous. 63. Frederic Gaillardet?, “Chronique artistique: exposition de peinture américaine,” Courrier des États-Unis, May 16, 1843, front page. In “Paris Chronicles,” Courrier, May 27, 1843, that year’s review of the Paris Salon, it was noted that a supplementary exhibition of works had been refused by the salon, which raised the question of why some were rejected and others accepted. EB, AP, and PD were the paper’s usual Paris correspondents. 64. “British and American Art,” New World, May 13, 1843. SW [Samuel Waugh?], “HF and the National Academy,” New World, June 17, 1843. Waugh would soon leave for Italy. HF, “National Academy,” New World, July 15, 1843. He added that SW’s self-portrait exhibits too much green tint and rawness—a dig at the artist’s inexperience. 65. Broadway Journal, April 5, 1845, p. 222. Page contributed to the weekly. 66. “20th Annual Exhibition of Academy of National Design,” Broadway Journal, April 26, 1845, p. 257. 67. F. M. Pinto, Letter, Evening Mirror, September 27, 1847; Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, Letter, Evening Mirror, November 8, 1847. 68. “National Academy,” Evening Mirror, April 6, 1846, p. 2; “National Academy,” Evening Mirror, May 8, 1846, p. 2.

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69. “American Institute at Its Tricks Again,” Dispatch, April 28, 1850; Dispatch, November 17, 1847, p. 2. Peter Funk referred to a shill bidder at an auction, so a swindle. 70. “American Institute Fair,” Evening Mirror, October 7, 1847, p. 2. Fuller, “American Art-Union,” Evening Mirror, December 15, 1846, p. 2. The Knickerbocker landscape painter George Harvey spoke at the American Institute in 1842 to promote sales of his views of American Scenery. He also wrote art reviews for Morris’s Mirror, while it was edited by Charles Fenno Hoffman. The Mirror approved of the American Institute. 71. [James Otis], “National Academy of Design,” Courier and Enquirer, June 5, 1844, p. 1. “National Academy of Design,” Republic, April 26, 1844. Morning News, September 20, 1844. 72. L, “Our New York Painters,” New World, February 10, 1844. The New World’s editors were at the time H. C. Deming and James Mackay. Lanman was a cousin of Charles F. Hoffman, also a Whig political office holder, who edited the Literary World before Duyckinck took it over. On Lanman, see his Haphazard Personalities (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1885); Janice Reed Hellman, “American Art Criticism in the Mid– Nineteenth Century, 1840–1860,” MA thesis, George Washington University, 1972; and Lynn Harris Heft, “Charles Lanman: Cultural Networking in the Nineteenth Century,” PhD diss., Drew University, 1996. 73. Cited in Gail E. Husch, “‘Freedom’s Holy Cause’: History, Religious, and Genre Painting in America, 1840–60,” in Picturing History: American Painting, 1770–1930, ed. William Ayres (New York: Rizzoli, 1993), 81. 74. JI, “Spirit of 76,” Columbian, April 1846, viewed war with loathing and horror. Kirkland attended the inauguration of Franklin Pierce. Jana A. Bouma, “Caroline M. Kirkland: A Literary Life,” PhD diss., University of Nebraska, 2000, 134. See also Cory Pillen, “Debating Domesticity: Gender Roles in Tompkins Matteson’s Now or Never,” Rutgers Art Review 23, no. 2 (2007): 2–25. Lilly Martin Spencer in War Spirit at Home (1863) revised Matteson’s original grouping in order to satirize the Republican press’s (New York Times) aggrandizement of military heroes like Ulysses Grant, according to Jochen Wierich, “War Spirit at Home: Lilly Martin Spencer, Domestic Painting, and Artistic Hierarchy,” Winterthur Portfolio 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 23–42. 75. Day commissioned Matteson to do a peculiar composite portrait of Zachary Taylor’s inauguration; Taylor as orator is surrounded by portraits of dozens of grim-faced politicians in a composition indebted to John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence. Brother Jonathan also published his historical picture of the Capture of Major Andre, which was reused by P. T. Barnum and Moses Beach, both Democrats, to advertise their 1852 periodical the Illustrated News. 76. THM, “Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Morris’ National Press, April 25, 1846, p. 2; May 2, 1846; May 9, 1846, p. 2; May 16, 1846, p. 2; May 23, 1846, p. 2; June 6, 1846, p. 4; June 13, 1846, p. 2; June 20, 1846, p. 4; “The Fine Arts,” Home Journal, November 28, 1846. 77. “The Snobs of the Press,” Evening Mirror, September 14, 1846. 78. “Our Painters,” Evening Mirror, September 24, 1846, p. 2. A correspondent, RHJ, wrote panegyrics to Huntington in the Evening Mirror too, in support of the artist’s bid to take over Inman’s commission for a Capitol rotunda painting. 79. “Poor White Folks,” Emancipator and Weekly Chronicle, June 17, 1846, p. 31. Their clipping from the Standard suggested it should be a companion to August Biard’s Embarkation of Slaves from Africa.

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80. Wesley Ann Riddle, “Culture and Politics: The American Whig Review, 1845– 1852,” Humanitas 8, no. 1 (1995): 50. “Something about Our Painters,” American Whig Review, August 1846, p. 180. The American Whig Review under Colton thought Charles Lanman’s Letters from a Landscape Painter lacked discretion and gave Duyckinck’s friend Cornelius Mathews’s novel a generous review. Rembrandt Peale also seemed a bone of contention between Colton (opposed) and the Evening Mirror (praised). 81. “Hints to Art-Union Critics,” American Whig Review, December 1846, p. 599. 82. “Hints to Art Union Critics,” Evening Mirror, December 11, 1846, p. 2. 83. JB, Correspondence, Evening Post, April 29, 1859, p. 1; Correspondence, Evening Post, October 29, 1859, p. 1; “Fine Arts: William Page’s Last Work,” Herald, October 5, 1859, p. 8; Herald, February 14, 1860, p. 6; “A Grand Chance for the Truly Pious,” “Venus of the Dusseldorf Gallery,” Herald, October 12, 1859, pp. 6–7. 84. “Club Snobs,” Evening Mirror, March 9, 1847, p. 1, “National Academy,” p. 2. The Democrat James T. Brady, writing as Query, “Mr. Snob’s New Year,” Spirit of the Times, January 12, 1850, wrote about Snobs, a man who hangs working-class paintings over the mantel but thinks the Art-Union, which purchased genre paintings, is a humbug; describing a penny press critic, in effect. Brady had been a manager in the Art-Union from 1842 to 1845, with Bryant and Bryant’s friend Charles Leupp. In “National Academy,” Spirit of the Times, April 24, 1847, p. 97, Query refutes the need for artists to make a pilgrimage to Italy to learn precedents and rules and singles out Leutze’s Henry VIII as an abortion for its lack of feeling. 85. Evening Mirror, April 14, 1854, p. 2. John O’Sullivan, “New York Society,” Democratic Review 31 (September 1852): 251–58, attacked newspapers like the Herald for defining those who have made their own fortunes as snobs or codfish aristocracy, as if selling fish is wrong, or more generally as if labor is undignified. 86. Day Book, June 17, 1851. 87. Herald, January 7, 1844; January 12, 1844; February 1, 1844.

3. Old Masters versus Young America 1. The auction houses of Bennett’s enemies Philip Hone and Ogden Haggerty as well as of David Austen (John Haggerty and David Austen partners) were prominent in the American Art-Union. Though the Whig politician Hone may have served mostly as an Art-Union figurehead, David Austen’s sons George (as officer, 1846–1851) and John Haggerty Austen (as manager, 1839–1851) were active. Cornelius Lawrence (as manager, 1848–1849), Bennett’s banker and a Democratic politician, also had connections to the auction trade, while the publisher and manager William Appleton’s brother-in-law James Cooley was a book auctioneer. 2. The Haggertys subscribed to the Evening Star. W. W. Davis, a clerk in the (John) Haggerty & Sons Co. auction (including art) store and an adherent of the reformer Fanny Wright, was involved with the penny Transcript. Herald, December 5, 1835, p. 2. Ogden Haggerty, a Sketch Club attendee, supported the Hamblin benefit. Herald, November 8, 1836, p. 2. In 1837, Haggerty sued Bennett for libel for incorrectly listing John Haggerty & Sons as a bankrupt in the crash of 1837; Hoxie was one of the trial judges. 3. New York Herald, March 6, 1837, p. 2. See Carrie Rebora Barratt, “Mapping the Venues: New York City Art Exhibitions,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825– 1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 47–81.

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4. “Hayward’s Picture Gallery,” Herald, September 13, 1838, agrees it is a superb collection and that Hayward is an excellent citizen and man of taste and the victim of scandalous persecution. 5. True Sun, March 5, 1844. 6. James Aldrich, “Metropolitan Sketches. The Sale of Paintings,” Mirror, November 9, 1839, p. 156; “The Sale of Paintings,” New York Literary Gazette, March 30, 1839, p. 68. The Art-Union’s Jewish secretary, Wellington Solomons, may have had a connection with Evert Duyckinck; see Arlene Katz Nichols, “Merchants and Artists: The Apollo Association and American Art-Union,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2003, 162. Nichols notes that the Art-Union’s founder James Herring’s Masonic involvement may have supported inclusion of Jews; Catholics were excluded from the Masons but, when Herring was no longer involved, were represented by Art-Union managers and the Democrats James T. Brady, Charles P. Daly, and the Jarvises. 7. Thomas Whitley advertised in 1838 that he could paint transparencies, as did sign painters and theatrical-scene painters. Henry Hannington, who produced a long-running series of dioramas, painted them for banquets, processions, and elections. Clever political designs were occasionally described by the papers. 8. Sidney P. Moss, Poe’s Literary Battles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 166. Aldrich was in place at the New World, replacing Epes Sargeant, by February 1842 and left for Europe by November 5, 1842. Henry Cood Watson was finearts critic for much of that year. 9. George Morris was a conservative Democrat who typically hired as more active coeditors Whigs like Nathaniel P. Willis, Charles F. Hoffman, and Epes Sargeant. 10. “Auctions of all kinds,” Herald, July 28, 1838. 11. “Trash to be seen,” Herald, January 28, 1837; “Valuable Paintings for Sale,” Evening Star, February 10, 1837, “Charles del Vecchio auction,” Courier and Enquirer, October 15, 1836. Another dealer guaranteed that if his Guido Reni Madonna was not original, he would pay back the $1,200 price tag. 12. “Gross Humbug,” Herald, February 11, 1837. “Auction of Paintings—Humbug,” Herald, November 25, 1837. 13. Courier and Enquirer, January 13, 1840. 14. “Fine Arts” Spectator, July 23, 1840; Express, July 3, 1841; “Fine Arts,” Mirror, February 22, 1840, p. 279; W, “For the New York American,” American, April 27, 1840. W, “Fine Arts,” April 23, 1840, had praised another auction. Evening Star, January 4, 1840; see also Herald, March 6, 1840. 15. “Old paintings, old humbug,” Herald, February 5, 1840; “Exhibition of Paintings,” Herald, March 24, 1840. On the skeptical gaze at art in an earlier and later period, see Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perceptions in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); and Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 16. Courier and Enquirer, May 27, 1840. 17. “Critics and Paintings,” Herald, April 7, 1840; Herald, November 3, 1844; Courier and Enquirer, May 7, 1844; May 21, 1844; B, letter, Courier and Enquirer, January 13, 1845. 18. “Fine Arts,” Express, December 31, 1846, p. 1. 19. See especially Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); William Thomas Kerrigan, “‘Young

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America!’ Romantic Nationalism in Literature and Politics, 1843–1861,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1997; John Stafford, The Literary Criticism of “Young America”: A Study in the Relationship of Politics and Literature, 1837–1850 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); and Merle Curti, “Young America,” American Historical Review 32 (October 1926): 34–55. 20. Lincoln quoted in Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, 1828–1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 229, who argues that the movement was aimed at bringing the Democratic Party away from agrarianism and toward acceptance of the market revolution, in effect, “modernizing” it by bringing it closer to the Whig Party. See also Mark A. Lause, Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005); Paola Gemme, “Imperial Designs of Political Philanthropy: A Study of Accounts of Antebellum Italian Liberalism,” American Studies International 39, no. 1 (February 2001): 19–51. 21. Otis wrote for Brother Jonathan when N. P. Willis was attached to it. He wrote for the Evening Tattler in 1839 as a Whig Washington correspondent but left in 1840. Otis wrote a National Academy review for the Evening Star in 1840, was a Washington correspondent for the Commercial Advertiser in 1842, and a contributor to John Inman’s Columbian magazine and William Porter’s Spirit of the Times. He would stay at the Express as an editor until leaving for the New Orleans Picayune in 1854, though during his tenure Charles Lanman would also write art criticism (“jottings,” in Willis’s style) for the paper until taking a patronage job in Washington in 1848. 22. On Duyckinck and Young America, see Widmer, Young America; Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1956); Claude Richard, “Poe and ‘Young America,’” Studies in Bibliography, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia 21 (1968): 25–58; Allen F. Stein, Cornelius Mathews (New York: Twayne, 1974); and Robert D. Sampson, John L. O’Sullivan and His Times (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2003). 23. Subterranean, November 15, 1845. Express, August 5, 1845, p. 2. 24. Williams and Fowler’s Temple of the Muses on Canal Street in 1848 exhibited scantily dressed models presenting works of art. Ella M. Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery (New York: Abrams, 1990); Maybelle Mann, “The New-York Gallery of Fine Arts: A Source of Refinement,” American Art Journal 11, no. 1 (1979): 76–86; Abigail Booth Gerdts, “Newly Discovered Records of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts,” Archives of American Art 21, no. 4 (1981): 2–9; Wayne Craven, “Luman Reed, Patron: His Collection and Gallery,” American Art Journal 12, no. 2 (Spring 1980): 40–59; Christine Oaklander, “Jonathan Sturges, W. H. Osborn, and William Church Osborn: A Chapter in American Art Patronage,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 43 (2008): 173–94. 25. Courier and Enquirer, March 28, 1844; Courier and Enquirer, January 10, 1845. “Clinton Hall Exhibition,” Courier and Enquirer, April 19, 1844. In 1850, when the NewYork Gallery of Fine Arts was being revived (in rooms at the National Academy), Gideon Nye’s collection of Old Masters once again was positioned by Whig papers as a competing source for a public gallery. 26. “Apollo Gallery,” Mirror, October 20, 1838, p. 135. 27. William Young, Albion, March 10, 1849, p. 117. He singled out among the Americans then in Italy the artist and interim US consul James Freeman, a Young Italy supporter who, perhaps accordingly, needed restraining influences.

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28. “Art Intelligence,” Evening Post, April 5, 1850, p. 1. His studio was at 298 Broadway. He also had paintings at the Gallery of Fine Arts. 29. “The Press,” Albion, May 1845, p. 47. The same issue featured (from the Foreign Quarterly Review) Peter Paul Palette on the rascality of picture dealers and William Thackeray (writing as the connoisseur Titmarsh) on “Cutting Up,” or picture criticism, and accusing the Art-Union of favoring hysterical, driveling sentimentality. 30. William Young, Albion, April 21, 1849, p. 201. 31. “Modern Art,” Dispatch, August 31, 1856. M. P. Simons, “To the Public,” Photographic Art Journal 4 (November 1852): 320–22. 32. “Review—The Apollo Gallery of Paintings,” Herald, April 28, 1841. In “The Apollo Gallery—Paintings,” April 24, 1841, the Herald performed the old-master-versusthe-modern-artist comparison to the detriment of the new; Thomas Lawrence’s original portrait of Benjamin West is preferred to portraits by Inman as an imitator of Lawrence. On Leutze, see Jochen Wierich, Grand Themes: Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and American History Painting (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012), 34–48. 33. Inman died with the portrait of ex-mayor Harper unfinished. 34. Herald, February 18, 1844. 35. Express, April 10, 1844; Courier and Enquirer, June 7, 1855. 36. “New-York Gallery of Fine Arts,” Broadway Journal, February 15, 1845, p. 102. The “Apollo Gallery,” Commercial Advertiser, July 4, 1839, agreed about art’s appeal to the heart but suggested old masters would nevertheless help the inexperienced recognize the real gems. 37. “Exhibition at the Academy,” Evening Mirror, April 26, 1845, p. 2. Willis lived outside the city, where he wrote for several papers. Morris was mainly the business partner. Thomas Dunn English?, “Our Pigeon Holes,” Aristidean, March 1845, p. 79. English wrote for the Aurora and would go on to edit John-Donkey. He spoke at a Democratic rally in the city park in 1855. 38. Editor, reply to SJ on the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, Broadway Journal, March 22, 1845, p. 187. 39. “Fine Arts: National Gallery Rotunda,” Broadway Journal, September 20, 1845, p. 169. Watson worked for Park Benjamin’s New World in 1841 (as did Briggs) and Bartlett’s Albion in 1844. Watson would follow Briggs in 1846 to the Evening Mirror and then to Duyckinck’s American Literary Gazette and New York Mirror. 40. “20th Annual Exhibition of the Academy of National Design,” Broadway Journal, May 3, 1845, p. 275. If Shegogue’s landscape was a stagnant pool, J. R. Bleecker’s badly hung October Landscape was full of tender feeling—his day will dawn. “National Academy,” Broadway Journal, May 10, 1845, p. 289. 41. HF [Harry Franco], “National Academy,” New World, July 15, 1843. Later, he would in equally grocery-like terms describe a Huntington Italian landscape as having a rivulet of soap suds. 42. HF, “National Academy,” New World, June 10, 1843; HF, “World of Science and Art,” New World, June 17, 1843. 43. Sun, May 3, 1849. The Sun had taken this position at least since 1837, under theneditor Benjamin Day and city editor Edwin W. Davis (Davies). In 1847, Carlos D. Stuart became principal editor, replacing M. M. Noah.

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44. See Louis Dow Scisco, “Political Nativism in New York State,” in Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law 13 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1901), 199–259; Thomas J. Curran, “Know Nothings of New York State,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1963; Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 139–88. 45. *, “Paintings of Old Masters,” Freeman’s Journal, May 27, 1848, pp. 380–81; for example, on Fuller, see Freeman’s Journal, June 24, 1848. 46. Widmer, Young America, 52. “New-York Gallery of Fine Arts, from the Commercial Advertiser,” Evening Mirror, November 15, 1847, p. 2. 47. “Row in Rome,” Herald, May 17, 1852. 48. W, “What we should like to see at the World’s Fair of 1905,” Asmonean, July 22, 1853. W’s short term as editor started around September 1852 and ended in September 1853. 49. “Artistic Intelligence,” Evening Mirror, March 9, 1847, p. 2; “City Items: National Academy of Design,” Tribune, May 28, 1847; “National Academy of Design,” Dispatch, May 14, 1848. Wendy Greenhouse, “Imperiled Ideals: British Historical Heroines in Antebellum American History Painting,” in Redefining American History Painting, ed. Patricia Burnham and Lucretia Giese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 263–76, argues that scenes of virtuous British womanhood (whether Protestant Jane Grey or Catholic Queen Mary) beset by cruel men present Britain as an environment hostile to enlightened values, unlike America. 50. “Fine Arts: Cole’s Pictures at the National Academy,” Anglo-American, December 23, 1843, p. 214; “Second Notice,” Anglo-American, December 30, 1843, p. 238. “Fine Arts,” Anglo-American, May 8, 1847, p. 69. X, “Influence of the Fine Arts upon the Condition of Society,” Anglo-American, April 19, 1845, p. 617. “National Academy of Design,” Albion, May 6, 1848, p. 225. A. D. Paterson of the Anglo-American worked for the Albion, the Constellation, and published one issue of the American Journal of Fine Arts (November 1844). 51. “Huntington Pictures,” Evening Post, April 1, 1850. Signing the call, among the press, were John Inman, Evert Duyckinck, Henry W. Bellows, Richard Grant White, and George Putnam. 52. See Wendy Greenhouse’s excellent “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 31, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 1996): 103–40. 53. Dispatch, November 28, 1847. “National Academy of Design continued,” Evening Mirror, May 7, 1852, p. 2, dislikes the pompous portrait of a bishop but suggests Huntington’s style is better suited to such pictures than to producing soft and sickly Christs. 54. Dewey Fay, “American Art,” Dispatch, April 2, 1848, p. 4; April 9, 1848, p. 1, was critical of the United States as no Athens, and Pericles (J. K. Fisher had used Jonathan Pericles), “American Art,” Dispatch, April 16, 1848, p. 4, advocated that American artists copy old masters (to avoid bad imported “daubs”). W, Correspondence, Dispatch, May 21, 1848; Young America, Letter, Dispatch, October 1, 1854. 55. Gideon Nye, Catalogue of the Pictures forming the Collection of the Works of the Old Masters, with a list of the engravings, now being exhibited at the Gallery of the

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Lyceum Bldg, 563 Broadway, 2nd ed. (New York: George F. Nesbitt, Stationer and Printer, Wall and Water Streets, 1849). Among the critics quoted are John Ruskin and Mrs. Anna Jameson of the London Art-Union. 56. “Exhibition of ‘old masters,’” Evening Mirror, February 26, 1848, p. 2. Musical Times quoted in Nye, Catalogue of the Pictures. Dispatch, May 14, 1848. 57. Dispatch, November 28, 1847; “New Pictures,” Evening Mirror, February 12, 1847. 58. William Cossel Allan, a young American artist in Paris, correspondence, Evening Mirror, March 23, 1846, p. 1; “American School,” Evening Mirror, March 24, 1846; Evening Mirror, July 19, 1856. 59. “American School of Art,” American Whig Review, August 1852, p. 138. 60. A. J. Williamson and William Burns, eds., Sunday Dispatch, May 23, 1847, p. 2; June 6, 1847; “National Academy of Design,” June 23, 1850, p. 4; December 20, 1846. 61. “Mayor Clark and His Portrait,” Truth-Teller, September 29, 1838. “The Presentation of the Mayor’s Portrait,” Sunday Morning News, September 23, 1838, p. 2. The locofoco New Era, March 31, 1841, called the banker Aaron Clark a “thing who sold lottery tickets for a living.” 62. The Peoples’ Art Union on Broadway advertisement, December 27, 1846. 63. Evening Mirror, July 19, 1856; William Cossel Allan, a young American artist in Paris, correspondence, Evening Mirror, March 23, 1846, p. 1; “American School,” Evening Mirror, March 24, 1846. 64. See Ruth L. Bohan’s groundbreaking Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850–1920 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); and Wendy J. Katz, “Undocumented Art Criticism by Whitman in the New York Sunday Dispatch and New York Evening Post,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 32, no. 4 (Spring 2015): 215–29. 65. [Walt Whitman], “American Art = Jesse Talbot,” Dispatch, May 19, 1850, p. 1. See also Barbara D. Gallati, “Jesse Talbot,” in Making American Taste, ed. Barbara Dayer Gallati (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2011), 284–86. 66. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” Herald, April 20, 1846, p. 1. 67. “National Academy of Design—Cutting Criticism not Biting,” Herald, June 13, 1842, p. 1. 68. “National Academy of Design,” American Repertory, May 1841, p. 283. The critic for this journal often signed his articles C, though this one is unsigned. He said that Talbot’s Happy Valley had “many beauties,” and the previous year’s National Academy review described a Talbot landscape as unobtrusive and true: “Review of the Exhibition,” American Repertory, June 1840, p. 359. 69. “Landscape paintings,” Commercial Advertiser, December 19, 1840, p. 2. David H. Williams included Talbot with William Page and Park Benjamin in Token 6 (1842): 101. The Token had been edited by Samuel G. Goodrich, a.k.a. Peter Parley, a popular author of cheap children’s literature. The Fourierist Freeman Hunt in his Merchant’s Magazine gave the annual gift book a good review. 70. Jessica Skwire Routhier’s unpublished manuscript, “Works of Beauty and Talent: Jesse Talbot in Walt Whitman’s New York,” suggests that Talbot got caught in conflicts between the National Academy and the Art-Union; certainly Whitman’s commentary accused the Academy of partiality (for excluding Talbot) in its role as “artistical steward” for the city.

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71. “The National Academy,” Dispatch, May 2, 1852, p. 2; Carlos D. Stuart, “American Fine Art and Artists,” Republic, June 1851, pp. 259–62. 72. Sunday Mercury, September 1, 1850, referring to the Day Book, then edited by G. G. Foster. In September, Elbridge G. Paige left the Mercury, and William Cauldwell, for many years with the (Democratic) Atlas, replaced him. 73. Sunday Mercury, January 22, 1854, p. 1. “Criticism,” Mercury, March 20, 1853, p. 2. 74. “Paintings of the Old Masters,” Courier and Enquirer, May 11, 1835; Evening Mirror, January 13, 1853, p. 1. “A Correspondent,” Evening Post, February 7, 1859. The committee would have three artists and two amateurs. The historian of the Evening Post, Allan Nevins, also wrote the history of the Century Club. 75. Holden’s Dollar Magazine, February 1848, edited by Charles W. Holden, a good friend of the Sun’s editor Alfred E. Beach. Lotsa Nuffin, New York correspondence, Home Journal, February 6, 1858. Evening Post, February 7, 1859, p. 2. See also “Art News,” Herald, January 24, 1857, p. 3. The original seven founders of the Century Club included Durand, Kensett, Bryant, Bryant’s friend Charles Leupp, William Appleton (publisher for many Tribune writers), William Kemble, and Gulian Verplanck. The Unitarian chemistry professor Oliver Gibbs also joined. 76. Art-Union managers who were members of the Century Club included Appleton, the editor William J. Hoppin, the auctioneer George W. Austen, George Allen, William A. Butler (a writer for the Bulletin and Literary World), Daniel Eliot, John R. Bartlett, James W. Beekman, Bryant, F. W. Edmonds, Frederick Coe, David Colden, A. M. Cozzens, George Curtis, Charles Daly, John Gourlie, Townsend Harris, Robert Kelly (a Fernando Wood ally; Huntington painted his portrait), William Kemble, Charles Leupp, John R. Murray, Samuel Ward, Daniel Seymour, Eleazar Parmly, H. J. Raymond, M. O. Roberts, Charles Stetson, Jonathan Sturges, and Benjamin R. Winthrop. Associates of the Art-Union included Century Club members H. W. Bellows, Sidney Brooks (agent for Hiram Powers), Frederick Cozzens, and the publisher J. C. Derby. Nichols, “Merchants and Artists,” 188. 77. “Pictures for the Alms House,” Weekly Yankee, May 12, 1849, p. 2; May 19, 1849. The Yankee was edited by the fiction writer Oliver B. Bunce and would become the weekly version of the Metropolitan, edited by Park Benjamin and G. G. Foster. G. G. Foster, “Fine Arts,” Weekly Yankee, June 2, 1849, p. 3; June 9, 1849. Foster seems to have left by October 1849. 78. Cornelius Mathews, “Fine Arts,” Yankee Doodle, October 10, 1846. Sigma, Correspondence, Courier and Enquirer, May 6, 1848. 79. “The Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Tribune, March 30, 1854, p. 6; “National Academy of Design no. 3,” Evening Post, April 12, 1856; “National Academy of Design no. 3,” Evening Post, May 8, 1858, p. 1. 80. [G. W. Curtis], “Mr. Bryan’s Gallery,” Tribune, November 22, 1852, p. 6. Thomas J. Bryan was educated at Harvard, and his collection included some authentic old masters. Richard Grant White wrote the catalog for his Gallery of Christian Art. Bryan donated his collection to the New-York Historical Society, which also became the home for Reed’s. “Mr. Curtis’s Lecture,” Evening Post, January 28, 1851. 81. Mace Sloper (Charles G. Leland), “Observations of Mace Sloper, Esq.,” Evening Post, March 16, 1861, p. 1. Leland’s article was published in L. G. Clark’s Knickerbocker

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and reprinted in the Evening Post. Clark, though hostile to abolition, was a founding member of the Century Club. On Leland, see Charles I. Glicksberg, “Charles Godfrey Leland and Vanity Fair,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 62 (July 1938): 309–23. 82. Blanche d’Artois [Mrs. Julia H. Layton], “Art and Artists: Voyage from Tenth St. to Wall Street for Native Art,” Leader, May 5, 1860, p. 6. Douglas advocated for popular sovereignty to determine whether slavery should exist in new territories. 83. M. Edmund Farrenc, “Young America: Its Doctrines and Its Men,” Times, April 1, 1854, p. 8. Edmond Farrenc joined the New York Sketch Club in 1853, published in the Democratic Review in 1852 and started the Republican L’Epoque in 1859. Mrs. Wetherell was also included in his list. Evening Mirror, November 3, 1854, p. 2. 84. A Modern Brush, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” Emerson’s Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly, February 1858, p. 170. 85. Editors, Emerson’s Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly, November 1858, p. 494. 86. LM, “A Woman’s Protest,” Evening Post, March 22, 1861, p. 2; responding to “Fine Arts,” Evening Post, March 20, 1861, p. 2. 87. Pittoro, “For the Commercial Advertiser,” Spectator, June 18, 1840. Both pass the unpretending masterpieces of Titian, Raphael, and Correggio with leaden looks, while seeking novel subjects, painted with brilliant lights, sparkling touches, and dreamy sweet effects, easily obtained by any artist. 88. Deane (Julia Deane Freeman), “Modern Criticism,” Emerson’s and Putnam’s, February 1858, p. 82. Deane’s cruel critic may have been Rufus Griswold, a Whig editor and minister who, despite publishing an early anthology of women authors, was hostile to Oakes Smith. Deane’s major book was Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861). Catherine Kunce, The Correspondence of Sarah Helen Whitman and Julia Deane Freeman (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2014).

4. The Penny Press’s Utopian Alternative 1. The Seventh Ward Bank was controlled by Tammany Democrats; the future Art-Union clerk Joseph Monk petitioned the legislature to revoke the Van Buren “pet” bank’s charter. In 1832, its commissioners assigned the stock to family connections and public officials, leaving only forty of 3,710 shares to outside subscribers. Davis R. Dewey, State Banking before the Civil War (Washington, DC: National Monetary Commission / Government Printing Office, 1910), 25–26. 2. He arrived at least a year earlier, apparently with training as an artist or engraver, as he published the Whig cartoon The people putting responsibility to the test, or, The downfall of the Kitchen Cabinet and Collar Presses (New York: T.W. Whitley, 1834); also Court of Public Opinion, State of New Jersey Whigs versus Tories (New York: T. W. Whitley, n.d.), Harry T. Peters collection, Smithsonian Museum of American History. Spectator, November 17, 1836; Spectator, April 21, 1838. 3. The Evening Post, June 7, 1839, says his landscapes have spirit, his portraits fidelity and taste. 4. “National Academy,” Evening Star, May 5, 1836, p. 2; [James F. Otis], “The Pictures at Clinton Hall,” Evening Star, May 20, 1840, p. 2; “Great Fourierite Festival at the Apollo Saloon,” Herald, April 8, 1844. On Parke Godwin, see Edward Spann, Ideals and Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1972), 142–54.

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5. William Page’s student Lewis P. Clover (1819–1896) was apprenticed as an engraver to Durand and did a bust of McDonald Clarke in 1835. He was priest for a church in Springfield, Illinois, and did a portrait of Lincoln in 1860. His father in part thanks to his military service in 1812 would receive Democratic patronage for a job in the Customs House. 6. “National Academy,” Herald, July 2, 1840, p. 2; “National Academy,” Herald, July 4, 1840, p. 2; “National Academy,” Herald, April 21, 1840, p. 2. Mapes, “National Academy,” American Repertory, April 1840, p. 184. 7. “National Academy,” Paul Pry, May 25, 1839. Wardle Corbyn in 1851 would write a theater column for the Spirit of the Times and run a saloon. Whitley may have written for Corbyn’s Figaro or Corbyn’s Chronicle (1850–1851). 8. “Fine Arts,” Herald, February 2, 1839, p. 2; “The Apollo,” Herald, March 5, 1839, p. 2, listed A. D. O. Browere, who worked for the phrenologist L. N. Fowler, among the meritorious in the exhibition and as known to the writer personally. The Browere family of artists had a history of criticizing the National Academy. 9. “Apollo Association,” Herald, April 5, 1839, p. 2. Ariel, Letter, Herald, April 27, 1840, p. 7. Essential guides to the American Art-Union are Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-Union, 2 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1953); and Arlene Katz Nichols, “Merchants and Artists: The Apollo Association and American Art-Union,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2003. See also Kimberly Orcutt, with Allan McLeod, “Unintended Consequences: The American Art-Union and the Rise of a National Landscape School,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 18, no. 1 (Spring 2019), https://doi.org/10.29411/ncaw.2019.18.1.14. 10. Whitley’s sketch of the Sylvania Association (Waving Fields of Grain, 1842) seems lost, but his view of the North American Phalanstery, founded in 1843, is in Barnum and Beach’s Illustrated News, April 25, 1853, a weekly that was edited at one point by Charles G. Leland, later of Vanity Fair. 11. Log Cabin, November 6, 1841. “American Socialisms,” Oneida Circular (Brooklyn), March 8, 1869, p. 404. 12. Godwin’s Path Finder, March 11, 1843, p. 34, says Sylvania’s president is an artist of great merit, a man of remarkable abilities and high character. 13. “Sylvania Association,” Herald, January 30, 1843; “Millennium at Last,” Herald, May 8, 1843; “Most Singular Meeting of the New Association for Regenerating Creation at the Croton Hall,” Herald, May 13, 1843; “Great Movement of the Fourierites,” Herald, February 27, 1844. Godwin’s Path Finder had died by February 1844. On Greeley, see James Parton, The Life of Horace Greeley, Editor of the New York Tribune (New York: Mason Brothers, 1855); and Lurton D. Ingersoll, The Life of Horace Greeley (New York: Beekman, 1974). 14. “Fourierism—Regeneration of the Whole World, Convention of the Friends of Association,” Herald, April 5, 1844; “Great Fourierite Festival,” Herald, April 8, 1844. The artist may have been John Rubens Smith, whose students included Vincent Colyer, who quarreled with the National Academy in 1850, and Edwin White. Thomas Hicks painted Colyer’s portrait as well as C. P. Cranch’s and Jasper Cropsey’s. 15. “National Academy,” Tribune, April 25, 1844, p. 2, said that Whitley, now in Ohio, was well known and esteemed as a man and an artist. William Page’s student Edward Mooney painted Whitley’s portrait, McDonald Clarke’s, and Jasper Cropsey’s. Mooney never sold a painting to the Apollo or American Art-Union.

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16. T. W. W., “Temperance, Art, and Improvement,” Log Cabin, August 31, 1841, p. 1; T. W. W., “Art, Temperance and Improvement,” Log Cabin, September 3, 1841, p. 1. There may have been an additional essay in between these dates. 17. [T. W. Whitley—my identification; Greeley says an Artist], “Public Patronage of the Fine Arts,” New Yorker, February 2, 1839; “Apollo Association,” New Yorker, February 16, 1839. 18. “The Apollo Association,” Tribune, May 10, 1841, p. 2; Tribune, June 14, 1841, p. 2. 19. J. K. Fisher was born in Massachusetts, entered the Royal Academy in 1827, and died in New York City in 1874. In 1843, he wrote via the Young America poet and editor William Gilmore Simms to the Democrat John Calhoun, hoping to interest him in a public gallery. 20. Sun, September 17, 1840, p. 2. Jonathan Pericles [J. K. Fisher], “Letters on the Fine Arts,” Sun, September 17, 1840. The letters were initially published in the Evening Signal and New World, August 8, 1840, which did not agree that the Apollo was doomed. The letters and other articles also appeared in the New-Yorker: August 15, 1840; September 12, 1840; October 3, 1840; October 31, 1840; and February 6, 1841. 21. Tribune, June 9, 1844, p. 3. The name is given as J. Herrick Fisher. The Tribune, January 28, 1845, p. 2, supported Harper’s veto. A Tribune reader, February 10, 1845, wrote that a gallery is a school and so is for the public good. 22. “Fourierism, the Star Spangled Banner, and Horace Greeley,” Herald, July 12, 1843, that the gentlemen of the Custom House are all good Tyler men and that Thomas W. Whitley, president of the Sylvania Association, worked there. Subterranean, March 23, 1844, that Whitley was still there. Evening Post, February 28, 1844, says that Whitley, 25 Pine Street, is about to leave town to cultivate the vine on Forrest’s property in Kentucky. Whitley exhibited in the 1849 National Academy (including views of Ohio, Kentucky, and Hoboken) and listed an address at 136 Amity Street, a neighborhood near the Academy officer Durand. 23. Western, also Western Scribe, wrote a series of letters to the Herald from Cincinnati in 1848, most focusing on the Whig presidential candidate Zachary Taylor, whom the Herald supported. Whitley also campaigned for Taylor: Cincinnati Signal citing the Sandusky Commercial Register, July 18, 1848. Western, “Correspondence,” Herald, February 25, 1848, praises John P. Frankenstein’s true genius. 24. T. W. Whitley, “Letter from a Painter Turned Planter of the Vine,” Tribune, May 13, 1845, p. 1. 25. E. Maurice Bloch, “The American Art-Union’s Downfall,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly 37 (1953): 331–59. Worthington Whittredge, “American Art Union,” Magazine of History 7, no. 2 (February 1908): 63–68. 26. Both an anonymous editorial in the International Monthly Magazine (January 1852) and the author (he says he has not had any artworks in the market for ten years) of “Art Unions: Their True Character Revealed,” International Monthly Magazine, January 1, 1851, pp. 191–93, have been attributed to Kellogg. The magazine’s first issue of July 1850 carped at the Western Art Union, and “True Character” focuses on that art union’s bad behavior to Hiram Powers, whom Kellogg had assisted until a falling out in 1851. The International Monthly Magazine was antislavery and pro–Daniel Webster and featured authors in the Democrat Richard Stoddard’s circle, with overlap with the Tribune, including Bayard Taylor, George W. Curtis, and Elizabeth Oakes Smith. Kellogg was called an artist uniformly regarded with respect and affection. If Kellogg was not

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writing for them, someone with connections to Ohio likely was, as Robert Duncanson, an African American artist rarely noticed in New York, is mentioned. The magazine was unenthusiastic about Dusseldorf. 27. Evening Post, March 13, 1847. By 1850 and at least through 1852, an Artists’ Union operated a Gallery of Paintings and Engravings in Thomas Faris’s Daguerrian Rooms in Melodeon Hall, with, among others, pictures by Godfrey Frankenstein, Whittredge, and Duncanson. This Artists’ Union also held a lottery drawing of original artworks, distributed steel engravings and lithographs, and published the Artists’ Journal in 1851–1852. On artists in Cincinnati, see Wendy Katz, Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002). 28. “Artistic Intelligence,” Evening Mirror, March 16, 1847, says that T. W. Whitley, Fourierite of New York, has started an opposition association to Cincinnati’s Art Union, subscriptions to which would help pay for a drawing school. 29. Arlington, “Art and the Artists,” Herald of Truth, July 1847; Maria Varney, “Letters from the Queen City,” Herald of Truth, September 1847; Sarah Mallory, Herald of Truth, March 1848. On Frankenstein and Beard, see Gail Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2000); Elisabeth L. Roark, “John Frankenstein’s ‘Portrait of Godfrey Frankenstein’ and the Aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller,” American Art 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 74–83. 30. “Editor’s Place,” Herald of Truth, March 1848; Hine became editor in that month. Charles Anderson, An Address on Anglo-Saxon Destiny (Cincinnati: Thorpe, 1850). See also William A. Baughin, “The Development of Nativism in Cincinnati,” Bulletin of the Cincinnati Historical Society 22 (1964): 240–55. 31. T. W. Whitley, “Western Art Union,” Herald of Truth, July 1848. 32. The “westward-ho” artist was perhaps William Ranney, who sold twenty-six paintings to the American Art-Union, three engraved. McConkey, June 14, 1847, Durand Papers, Archives of American Art, corresponded with Asher Durand and Thomas Cole, speaking of Lilly Martin Spencer as talented but an “ignorant savage.” 33. Harbinger, September 30, 1848; “Mrs. L. M. Spencer’s Paintings,” Harbinger, December 16, 1848, p. 54. 34. The author dismisses the landscapes in that year’s distribution as weak and worthless. “American Art Union,” Harbinger, December 18, 1847, p. 53. Leupp owned works by Leutze, Mount, Inman, Cole, Kensett, Gray, Page, Durand, Inness, Huntington, Rossiter, Brown, and Edmonds, among others. “New Publications,” Tribune, August 30, 1848. The pamphlet was published by J. S. Redfield, Nassau and Beekman Streets, one of the few publishers to advertise steadily in the Phalanx. 35. Evening Post, September 19, 1848; Whitley’s pamphlet sold at E. De Chaux, Broadway. 36. He was City Items editor from 1845 until October 1847. In Foster’s Celio (1850), he suggests that he, like his newspaper-critic hero, was a Fourierist. “New York in Slices,” Tribune, August 12, 1848, p. 1. In addition to art criticism in City Items, GGF wrote on “Modern Artists” in 1848. See also Stuart M. Blumin, introduction to George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 1–61. 37. W (later TWW), “The Progress of the Fine Arts no. 1,” Tribune, October 3, 1848, p. 2; October 16, 1848, p. 1; November 15, 1848; December 6, 1848, p. 3.

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38. Like Tribune writer Henry Tuckerman, Curtis wrote for the Art-Union Bulletin. Dana, “Weir’s Merchant of Amsterdam,” Tribune, October 24, 1848, p. 2; Dana, “Fine Arts in Common Council,” Tribune, November 3, 1848, p. 2; Dana, “Our Art-Union,” Tribune, November 17, 1848, p. 2; Dana, “Notice of Schools of the National Academy,” Tribune, December 2, 1848, p. 2; Dana, “City Items: International Art-Union,” Tribune, December 4, 1848; Harbinger, December 2, 1848; Dana, “City Items: Mrs. L. M. Spencer,” Tribune, December 5, 1848, p. 2. 39. Editor’s Table [Stephen M. Chester], “Gray’s New Picture,” Columbian Magazine 9 (October 1848): 480. Chester took over in May of that year. 40. DLS, “American Art Union,” Tribune, December 12, 1844, p. 1. A Member, “American Art-Union,” Tribune, January 3, 1845, p. 4. Gray’s eulogist for the Century Club, Charles Patrick Daly, was an active Democrat who presided over the Astor Opera House riot trials. 41. CAD, “The American Art-Union,” Tribune, November 27, 1850, p. 4; J. K. Fisher, “Art-Union and Its Assailants,” Tribune, November 30, 1850, p. 7; [George W. Curtis?], “The Fine Arts—Pictures in Town,” Tribune, October 30, 1851, p. 6; GWC, “The Fine Arts: National Academy of Design, VI,” Tribune, July 4, 1850, p. 1; GWC, “The Fine Arts: National Academy of Design, IV,” Tribune, May 29, 1851, p. 6. “City Items: American ArtUnion,” Tribune, February 13, 1852, p. 5. On the Tribune’s politics, see Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War-Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009). 42. The Literary World, October 18, 1851, notes Whitley is a friend of Godwin’s; Bloch, “The American Art-Union’s Downfall,” p. 335, notes Bryant chose a Whitley landscape as a prize at the Philadelphia Art-Union. 43. “The Art-Union Gallery from a Contributor,” Evening Post, November 13, 1848. 44. “National Academy,” Evening Mirror, April 6, 1846. 45. Crayon (Thomas W. Whitley), “Art Unions,” Evening Post: July 20, 1850, p. 2; July 28, 1850; August 2, 1850, p. 2; August 9, 1850, p. 1; August 17, 1850, p. 2. 46. Osgood was married to the popular poet Fanny Osgood. Also in attendance were Edmonds, F. Church, T. A. Richards, Edwin White, Inness, and R. Gignoux. [Henry C. Watson?], “The Fine Arts,” Broadway Journal, August 23, 1845, notes the three-monthold Art Re-Union had been founded by John P. Ridner, the gallery owner involved with the Apollo Association. Ridner, a Democrat, was the agent for the Western Art Union and the London Art Union, and in 1847 he was running an Artists’ Exchange (a.k.a. Art Repository) in the Art-Union building for the sale of art and artists’ materials. Cropsey gave a talk to the Re-Union, as did C. Cranch, published in the Harbinger, “On the Ideal in Art,” August 23, 1845. 47. “At Stoppani’s building, American Artists’ Association,” Evening Mirror, March 12, 1851, p. 2. The poet and artist John C. Hagen and George W. Flagg were also involved. Prosper Wetmore, March 25, 1849, Duyckinck Papers, Archives of American Art. 48. “American Artists Association Meet,” Evening Post, August 26, 1850, p. 2; “The Artists Association,” Evening Post, October 19, 1850; J. K. Fisher, “The Art-Union: Its Property,” Evening Post, June 17, 1852, p. 4; J. K. Fisher, “Letter to the Editor,” Evening Post, February 3, 1854, p. 1. There are other letters and articles on this, including September 24, 1850; October 7, 1850; and December 16, 1850. Walcutt has a poem in the Evening Post on October 10, 1850.

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49. A label given him by John Van Buren, trying to undermine him as a witness during Forrest’s divorce trial. The anecdote, Frank Leslie’s, July 23, 1859, was reprinted in the context of Whitley’s response reminding Van Buren of his by then embarrassing earlier free-soil position. 50. Gabriel Harrison, Photographic Art Journal, February 1851. Fisher was also a contributor. Harrison, from a well-connected New York family, also wrote on photography as art, and in March, S. J. Burr published a biography of him. During Edgar A. Poe’s flirtation with the Democratic Party, in 1844, he wrote an ode to Polk for Harrison’s White Eagle Club. 51. On Osgood, see Emily Halligan, “Art Criticism in America before The Crayon: Perceptions of Landscape Painting, 1825–1855,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2014, 177–80; and John Dillenberger, The Visual Arts and Christianity in America (New York: Crossroad, 1984), 46–47. On Whitman and Harrison, Ruth L. Bohan, “‘The Gathering of the Forces’: Walt Whitman and the Arts in Brooklyn,” Mickle Street Review no. 12 (1990): 10–30. 52. “Art Union Glances,” Evening Post, March 1852, p. 1; Evening Post, March 22, 1852, p. 2. 53. L. G. Clark, “Gossip with Readers and Correspondents,” Knickerbocker, November 1848, seems to have been receiving letters from Fisher and Whitley. In “American ArtUnion,” Knickerbocker, November 1848, p. 442, he says that it is a good institution but that they should pay higher prices for better pictures. 54. “American Art Union,” Evening Mirror, January 3, 1852, p. 2; see also “American Art Union,” Evening Mirror, May 31, 1847, p. 2. Katz Nichols, “Merchants and Artists,” 47, suggests that his insinuation about inside dealing had merit. Wetmore through his Whig brother Robert had ties to Seward’s Whigs, who included Roberts, Moses Grinnell, and Simeon Draper. Roberts, P. Wetmore, and George Law incorporated the US Mail Steamship company, and Law used its stock to bribe the New York City Council in 1852 to give him a city railway franchise. Roberts and Wetmore arguably were involved in the scheme, and Wetmore was said to bribe legislators. 55. Herald, April 25, 1842; Herald, July 8, 1842; Herald, March 8, 1844; and see also January 6, 1846, where the cornering of Erie stock is blamed on the Union Club. Herald, April 26, 1851. The Herald and Wetmore were, however, on opposite sides of the 1847 controversy over whether New York’s ship pilots had a monopoly. 56. “The Art-Union—How It Spends Money,” Day Book, March 26, 1852, p. 2; “The Art-Union Again,” Day Book, March 8, 1852, p. 2; “What Is a Lottery?” Day Book, March 25, 1852, p. 2; “Art-Union,” Day Book, March 13, 1852. Fisher contributed to the Day Book. “American Art-Union,” Evening Mirror, January 3, 1852, p. 2. “Art-Union Lottery and Its Movements,” Herald, January 4, 1852; “Art-Union in Trouble,” Herald, January 5, 1852. 57. “Art-Union and Its Apologists,” Herald, February 20, 1852; “A Word about Certain Hirelings of the Press,” Sunday Mercury, June 17, 1849, p. 2; “American Art-Union and the Fine Arts,” Herald, January 27, 1852. The Albion, April 7, 1849, p. 165, and “National Academy,” May 6, 1848, p. 223, added that most readers would recognize the Bulletin’s intrinsic conflict of interest as soon as they saw it praising A. H. Wenzler’s servile copying of nature. 58. “The Art Union Again,” Day Book, March 8, 1852, p. 2; “Art-Union,” Day Book, December 21, 1852, p. 2; “Opening Festival of the American Art-Union,” Herald,

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September 23, 1851, p. 4. John Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand (New York: Da Capo, 1970) 170, blames the Art-Union’s war with the National Academy on Wetmore. 59. Herald, January 6, 1852. 60. Herald, January 17, 1852; “American Art-Union Illegal,” Herald, June 12, 1852. 61. “Art Union,” Sunday Mercury, January 2, 1848. “Oh! How very conscientious,” Sunday Mercury, January 16, 1848, p. 2. “American Art-Union and the Fine Arts,” Herald, January 27, 1852. Until 1854’s Nebraska Act, the Mercury was Stephen Douglas Democratic. A Mercury editor had worked for Tyler’s postmaster John Lorimer Graham, a Democrat turned Whig who had beaten up Bennett, a fellow Tylerite. 62. Sunday Mercury, January 12, 1851. 63. “Editorial,” Republic, August 1851, pp. 81–82. The Republic was Whig and Sabbatarian, but perhaps due to the presence of Frederick West, formerly an editor at the Sunday Atlas, or contributors like Carlos D. Stuart of the Sun, it retained a critique of wealthy hypocrisy. See also Herald, January 29, 1852, which gets in digs at the transcendentalists and the Unitarian minister Orville Dewey (a speaker at the Art-Union) as well. Sunday Mercury, June 29, 1851. 64. Mercury, June 29, 1851; March 16, 1851, p. 2, credited Walcutt for the Association’s success. Walcutt contributed to Thomas R. Whitney’s Republic (1851–1853?), a monthly magazine so hostile to Catholic immigrants that the editor suggested African Americans were preferable as citizens. The Republic took the side of the Artists’ Association. 65. Sunday Dispatch, April 28, 1850. 66. “Art Union,” Sun, November 26, 1847, p. 3; Sun, December 27, 1847; “Art Union,” Sun, December 28, 1847. “Art and Artists,” Sun, January 11, 1849; “Art and Artists,” Sun, January 12, 1849; Sun, January 19, 1849; “Art and Artists,” Sun, January 31, 1849. 67. “American Art-Union,” Dispatch, January 4, 1852; “American Institute Meeting,” Dispatch, December 24, 1848; “Abuses of the Art-Union,” Dispatch, March 11, 1849. The Day Book’s first editor was Francis Bacon, a Henry Clay Whig; Nathaniel P. Stimson supported the Compromise of 1850, Daniel Webster, and Millard Fillmore. Under its last editors, Dr. John H. Van Evrie and R. G. Horton, it supported Fernando Wood in 1856. The former Tribune editor G. G. Foster briefly joined the masthead in 1851. Day Book, September 1, 1855, p. 4, complained of the haughtiness of bankers and singled out Edmonds, prominent in both the Academy and the Art-Union, as one who tries to humiliate customers. Day Book, January 19, 1852, p. 4. 68. “National Destructiveness,” Weekly Account, September 23, 1848. The Account was the dollar weekly version of the Day Book. Day Book, June 9, 1851. 69. Day Book, March 13, 1852, p. 2; Day Book, March 17, 1852, p. 2; “Art-Union— Further Points of Its Defense,” Day Book, May 11, 1852, p. 2. 70. “The Art-Union on Lotteries,” Day Book, June 10, 1851, p. 2. 71. “By Express,” New York Times, January 9, 1852, p. 2; in order to condemn the Herald for endorsing such a scheme. “Fine Arts,” Herald, January 8, 1852, endorses Whitley’s plan. 72. J. K. Fisher, “The Art Union and Its Assailants,” Courier and Enquirer, November 8, 1850, in reply to Courier and Enquirer, October 30, 1850. 73. Sunday Mercury, November 25, 1849. He also published in Sartain’s Union Magazine in 1852. John Sartain was a fellow Englishman and former Fourierist. 74. “Literary Notices,” Sunday Atlas, August 12, 1849, p. 3. “Industrial Journal,” Sunday Atlas, February 24, 1850, p. 2; T. W. Whitley, “Letter to Editors,” Sunday Atlas,

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March 10, 1850, p. 3; “Journal of Progress,” Sunday Atlas, March 31, 1850, p. 3. Evening Post, February 15, 1850, also noticed his new weekly and that he had landscapes for sale at (his studio) 290 Broadway: Evening Post, November 5, 1849. Whitley’s studio was connected with the Gallery of the Old Masters. 75. “American Art Union,” Sunday Atlas, September 9, 1849; Sunday Atlas, October 7, 1849, p. 2. On Judson, Sunday Atlas, October 14, 1849; on Forrest, Sunday Atlas, November 11, 1849. Sunday Atlas, June 17, 1849. 76. “Fine Arts,” Literary World, October 18, 1851, reported that Godwin and Whitley were visiting the White Mountains. 77. Richard Moody, Edwin Forrest: First Star of the American Stage (New York: Knopf, 1960), 245–56. “Forrest philosophy,” Herald, January 3, 1852, cites the letters from Mrs. Forrest to Mr. Lawson; January 12, 1852; January 28, 1852. 78. Willis, Home Journal, October 7, 1848. 79. “Forrest testimony,” Home Journal, April 6, 1850; Lady, Correspondence, Home Journal, May 25, 1850; Herald, April 17, 1850; Evening Post, July 13, 1852, p. 1. 80. Onderdonk ordained ministers who did not follow established doctrine. John Duer was the backer. Charles King would become president of Columbia. Herald, April 1, 1844. Courier and Enquirer, December 22, 1852; Wasp, “Charles Anthon,” Sunday Mercury, March 12, 1842; Sunday Mercury, September 11, 1859. See also Charles Rosebault, When Dana Was the Sun (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1931), 26. 81. Mount did a portrait of his relative and Churchman editor Reverend Samuel Seabury, too. William A. Jones wrote a biography of the artist for the American Whig Review, a journal friendly to Duyckinck. In 1857 Jones suggested Onderdonk’s portrait be moved to a theological seminary. 82. Courier and Enquirer, January 10, 1845; February 7, 1845. 83. Courier and Enquirer, May 19, 1851; May 22, 1851; May 23, 1851; “American Art-Union,” Courier and Enquirer, May 31, 1851. 84. “The Fine Arts,” Home Journal, December 5, 1846. “American Art-Union,” Knickerbocker, November 1848, p. 442. “A New Gallery of Art,” Home Journal, July 15, 1848. 85. NPW, “The Two Art Unions,” Home Journal, October 13, 1849; NPW, “Art-Union Controversy,” Home Journal, October 20, 1849; “Crushing of the National Academy and True Art by the Amateur Merchants of the Art Union,” Home Journal, October 27, 1849; “How the American Art-Union Belies Its Charter,” Home Journal, November 3, 1849. See also Erika Schneider, The Representation of the Struggling Artist in America, 1800–1865 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2015), 75–104. Durand was a longtime favorite of Willis. 86. Quispiam, “Home Artists and the Home Journal,” Tribune, October 16, 1849, p. 6. 87. “Art Union Weapons,” Home Journal, October 27, 1849. 88. “Town Gossip,” Home Journal, November 10, 1849; Message Bird, “The Fine Arts,” Home Journal, November 10, 1849. J. K. Fisher contributed articles on art to the Journal of Art, formerly titled the Message Bird, in 1851. 89. “Nudity in Art,” Home Journal, January 5, 1850. Brown did Bryant’s portrait in 1847. 90. Churchman, quoted in Courier and Enquirer, July 24, 1847. “Beautiful Statuary,” Evening Mirror, November 14, 1846. 91. Evening Post, January 8, 1850.

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92. N. Cleaveland, “Henry Kirke Brown,” Photographic Art Journal, October 1851, reprinted from the Evening Post, was balanced by editorial criticism that said the only position in which one could possibly view Brown’s statue of De Witt Clinton with any pleasure was from the southeast, where the deformities of the front, hand, and arm were hidden. 93. “Off-hand Gossip,” Home Journal, April 20, 1850; Advertisement, Home Journal, July 20, 1850; Whitley says he has studied and traveled in England, Canada, and the United States and will do commissions for hotels too; “White Street Correspondent,” Home Journal, September 7, 1850. 94. *, “The Artists and the Art Unions,” Home Journal, October 5, 1850. “Art and Artists prepared for the Home Journal,” Home Journal, December 21, 1850. The first issue I spotted in this series was “Domestic Items prepared for the Home Journal” and “Fine Arts prepared for the Home Journal,” November 30, 1850. The column appeared weekly thereafter (on July 5, 1851, its title was “Art and Artists prepared for the Home Journal by an Artist”) and the National Academy exhibition review for 1851 was also “by an Artist.” By September 1851, this format seems to have disappeared. 95. “Art and Artists,” Home Journal, August 9, 1851; March 22, 1851. 96. “National Academy,” Irish News, June 27, 1857, p. 185; “Academy of Design,” Evening Mirror, April 18, 1854, p. 2. He started the Gazette by November 1853, and it failed at the end of 1855, after which Whitley became involved in Young Sam, a short-lived vehicle for the Know-Nothing presidential candidate George Law, whose title suggests the nativist effort to capitalize on Young America sentiments. 97. Vanity Fair, April 28, 1860, p. 278. He briefly published a trade journal, the Circuit Judge. 98. See especially the insightful accounts in Patricia Hills et al., Perfectly American: The Art-Union and Its Artists (Tulsa, OK: Gilcrease, 2011); Rachel Klein, “Art and Authority in Antebellum New York City: The Rise and Fall of the American Art-Union,” Journal of American History (March 1995): 1534–61; and Patricia Hills, “The American Art-Union as Patron for Expansionist Ideology in the 1840s,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and Will Vaughn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 314–39.

5. The Genteel and the Bohemian 1. “Fine Arts for the Home Journal,” Home Journal, December 7, 1850. 2. CRE, correspondence from Cincinnati, Express, January 9, 1846, p. 1. Edward Mansfield, a member of the Presbyterian Lyman Beecher’s congregation, edited the Chronicle. Lanman was born in Michigan, and he wrote for his cousin Park Benjamin’s New World, plus the Evening Post, Democratic Review, and Literary World (“jottings” rather than exhibition reviews), as well as for the Express (art critic from 1847 until he left for Washington). A lengthy and personal article in Cincinnati’s Herald of Truth shredded Lanman’s book of Summer Travels in the West as entirely inauthentic; he certainly knew artists with links to Fourierism. 3. Sunday Dispatch, October 29, 1848. “Fine Arts,” Literary World, November 18, 1848, concentrated its praise on her nongenre designs, especially the female nude. 4. “City Items,” Tribune, December 5, 1848. Charles A. Dana had been city editor until he left for Europe in June 1848. Bayard Taylor, who may have filled in after Dana,

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left in November of that year for Graham’s Magazine. Franklin J. Ottarson, a printer who had briefly worked at the Dispatch and would be profiled in the Phrenological Journal in 1859, might be a City Items writer, though he did not become Tribune city editor until 1850. Other candidates: Whitley wrote on the Progress of the Fine Arts in 1848–1849; G. G. Foster, City Items editor before Dana, had Fourierist sympathies and starting November 30, 1848, wrote profiles of Modern Artists (signed “GGF”). Thomas Ewbank wrote on Artists of the Ideal and the Real. 5. “Art and Artists,” Sun, January 31, 1849. Charles or Carlos D. Stuart was principal editor at the Sun (he went to Europe early in 1849), following M. M. Noah in 1847. He knew Greeley from his 1840’s New-Yorker and contributed to the mildly radical American People’s Journal. William N. Dunnel, the Dispatch engraver, had previously worked for Willis’s and Morris’s New Mirror. 6. “National Academy of Design,” Herald, May 7, 1849; “National Academy of Design,” Albion, April 14, 1849, p. 177. 7. “Exhibition of the National Academy,” Evening Mirror, April 6, 1848, p. 2. Gove’s husband, Thomas Low Nichols, had worked at the Herald. See also Bertha-Monica Stearns, “Two Forgotten New England Reformers,” New England Quarterly (January 1933): 59–84. 8. “Artistic Intelligence,” Evening Mirror, August 4, 1847. 9. “Exhibition of the National Academy,” Evening Mirror, April 6, 1848, p. 2; “American Art-Union,” Evening Mirror, June 13, 1849; in April of 1849, “Carlos” wrote their National Academy review. 10. “The Fine Arts: Exhibition of the National Academy,” Tribune, March 30, 1854, p. 6. Bayard Taylor was writing for the Tribune at this time. He had written for the Literary World under C. F. Hoffman in late 1847 and Kirkland’s Union magazine from April to October 1848. He’d written for the Tribune at least since 1844; by November 1848 he had left, returning in the 1850s. 11. “Academy of Design, 4th article,” Evening Mirror, April 1, 1854. The critic also defended Elliott and Huntington, both of whom were attacked by the Tribune. 12. Day Book, September 24, 1852, p. 2. Spirit of the Times, January 7, 1860. Schaus was the first director of the Goupil, Vibert & Co. gallery on Broadway, arriving February 1848. In 1852, he resigned and opened his own gallery. 13. “National Academy of Design,” Evening Mirror, April 30, 1852, p. 3. The Albion, May 15, 1852, p. 237, was no admirer either, as cited in Jochen Wierich, “War Spirit at Home: Lilly Martin Spencer, Domestic Painting, and Artistic Hierarchy,” Winterthur Portfolio 37, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 23–42. The Mirror elsewhere noticed Schaus positively. 14. “City Intelligence: Opening of the National Academy of Design,” Evening Post, April 16, 1853, p. 2; Bryant was traveling, and Godwin had started editing Putnam’s with Charles F. Briggs and George W. Curtis of the Tribune. “National Academy of Design no. 2,” Evening Post, May 1, 1858, p. 1. “The Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Albion, April 24, 1858. 15. Clarquo, “Fine Arts,” Independent, November 23, 1854, p. 376. Clarquo in this Presbyterian newspaper also criticized other artists associated with transcendentalism or Associations, like Page, Hicks, and Cropsey. 16. See John Ott, “How New York Stole the Luxury Art Market: Blockbuster Auctions and Bourgeois Identity in Gilded Age America,” Winterthur Portfolio 42, no. 2/3 (Summer/Autumn 2008): 133–58.

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17. Evening Mirror, December 16, 1853, p. 2. This phrase was a dig at the former editor N. P. Willis, who had described himself as irreproachably moral in his own attack on the Art-Union. “Art-Union,” Photographic Art Journal, January 1853. They also interpreted the Art-Union’s engraving of John Vanderlyn’s half-naked, muscular Roman hero Marius as a device to win support for Greenough’s sculpture of Washington. 18. The Art-Union paid more for Spencer’s Hamlet and Ophelia than for Jolly Washerwoman. One exception to the pattern of high price and low auction was Frederic Church’s New England Scenery, bought for $500 and sold for $1,300 to the merchant George Daniels, one of the biggest spenders at the auction. 19. “Academy of Design, 4th Article,” Evening Mirror, April 3, 1854, p. 2. 20. Blanche d’Artois [Mrs. Julia H. Layton], “World of Art: Pictures at Schaus,” Leader, August 20, 1859, p. 4. “Fine Arts,” Evening Post, January 28, 1860. Evening Post, September 3, 1859. Bennett regularly called David Hale, editor of the Journal of Commerce, “the dog-killer,” for full-throatedly endorsing the city’s policy. The Herald, June 27, 1859, called it an abominable system, and the Sunday Dispatch at times objected. 21. “National Academy of Design 2nd notice,” Times, April 4, 1854, p. 2. “National Academy of Design,” Express, April 8, 1854, p. 1. Lover of Art, “National Academy of Design,” Express, April 23, 1858, p. 2. “The National Academy—33rd Exhibition,” Spirit of the Times, June 12, 1858, p. 230. “Art and Artists,” Sunday Atlas, December 30, 1860, p. 3. George Wilkes, a flash-paper editor who had partnered with the former police chief and antinativist George Matsell on the National Police Gazette, which published sensational true-crime stories, had been editing the Spirit of the Times since 1856. 22. Sunday Mercury, December 18, 1852; “Table Talk,” Sunday Mercury, February 13, 1859, p. 1. “Fine Arts,” Herald, September 12, 1860, p. 3. “World of Art,” Leader, December 10, 1859, p. 3. 23. “World of New York,” Putnam’s, October 1856, p. 444. 24. “Studios of American Artists, 3rd Sketch,” Home Journal, February 16, 1856. Her studio was on Bleecker Street. H. W. Parker, the author, was a New England college graduate and pastor of the Central Congregational Church of Brooklyn, 1852–1856. His 1850 book of poetry and prose was well reviewed and included a poem reprinted in the Literary World that mocked summer visitors to the Berkshires like Oliver W. Holmes, Melville, Hawthorne, and Sedgwick. He also published in the Knickerbocker and Colton’s American Whig Review. “Topics Astir: National Academy,” Home Journal, March 22, 1856. “The Fine Arts,” Home Journal, January 22, 1859. 25. “National Academy of Design,” Home Journal, April 30, 1859; Home Journal, May 14, 1859; “Topics Astir,” Home Journal, April 5, 1856. “Grammar of Art Gossip,” Vanity Fair, March 16, 1861, p. 132. 26. The Democrat Sylvester S. Southworth also wrote as John Smith Jr. of Arkansas. “National Academy of Design—Thirty-fifth Exhibition,” Sunday Mercury, March n.d., 1860, p. 3. 27. On New York’s bohemian circles, see especially Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley, Whitman among the Bohemians (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 2014); Justin Martin, Rebel Souls: Whitman and the First Bohemians (New York: Da Capo, 2014); and Mark Lause, The Antebellum Crisis and America’s First Bohemians (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2009). 28. “We Visit the Academy of Design,” Vanity Fair, April 28, 1860.

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29. Lewis Gaylord Clark, the Knickerbocker’s editor, hosted Cropsey, Elliott, Whitley, and Francis Carpenter (who did a portrait of Elliott’s friend William S. Mount and Tammany boss William M. Tweed, as well as Lyman Beecher) at his estate in 1854. See Theodore Bolton, “Charles Loring Elliott: An Account of His Life and Work,” Art Quarterly 5 (Winter 1942): 39–96. 30. “Public Meeting,” Daily Times, March 5, 1852, p. 2, listed as among those supporting Webster for president F. Boyle, J. M. Cafferty, C. B. Dana, A. Kneeland, J. N. Falconer, J. Wenzler, W. R. Page, W. J. Hoppin, Chas C. Elliott, G. M. Fuller, [G.?] Curtis. “Academy of Design,” Evening Mirror, May 16, 1853, p. 1. 31. “Art and Artists,” Leader, April 28, 1860, p. 3. “National Academy,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, September 1860, p. 81; “National Academy of Design, Thirty-fifth Exhibition,” Sunday Mercury, n.d., 1860, adding that the solution was to have a federal school of art. 32. An Amateur Observer, Letter, Evening Post, April 18, 1860, p. 2. JST, Letter, Evening Post, April 19, 1860. “Fine Arts in New York,” Herald, November 24, 1860, p. 6. Rufus Griswold owned Elliott’s portrait of Bryant. 33. “Art Matters: Academy of Design,” Sunday Dispatch, April 28, 1860, p. 8. Editorial, “National Academy,” Leader, April 21, 1860, p. 4. 34. “Art Matters: Academy of Design: A Brief Visit and Conversation,” Sunday Dispatch, April 28, 1860, p. 8; May 12, 1860, p. 4. Rosenberg did miscellaneous designs (e.g., the masthead for the Democratic Constellation in 1859) and painted in a topographical style, including a view of Wall Street with James Cafferty for a Herald editor. 35. “National Academy of Design No. 3,” Spirit of the Times, May 14, 1859. The portrait superior to Church’s was Elliott’s of ex-governor Enos T. Throop, a Jacksonian Democrat. 36. “National Academy of Design,” Evening Mirror, May 22, 1852, p. 4. The terriers are by W. J. Hays. 37. See Annette Blaugrund, “The Tenth Street Studio Building: A Roster, 1857–1895,” American Art Journal 14, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 64–71; Annette Blaugrund, The Tenth Street Studio Building: Artist-Entrepreneurs from the Hudson River School to the American Impressionists (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997). 38. “Sunday Table Talk,” Sunday Mercury, February 13, 1859. Herald, December 17, 1851, added Charles King, formerly of the Courier and Enquirer, Butler of the Journal of Commerce, and Simeon Draper; Mercury added Charles Brace of the Tribune and Independent and Cornelius Mathews. Augustus, a brother of William Hoppin, editor of the Art-Union Bulletin, worked with Curtis at Putnam’s and Harper’s Weekly and without Curtis at Yankee Notions. Another brother, Thomas Frederick Hoppin, who designed art for Trinity Church, sold five pictures to the Art-Union and had drawings published in the Bulletin. 39. “Art Items,” Tribune, October 23, 1860, p. 3. Cosmopolitan Art Journal, December 1860, p. 185. Genio Scott condemned the fossilized committee (mostly Republican) who organized a ball for the visiting Prince of Wales in Wilkes’s Spirit of the Times. 40. “Artists Receptions,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, March 1860, p. 34. 41. “Horse Fair,” Emerson’s, November 1857, p. 640; “National Academy of Design,” Emerson’s and Putnam’s, July 1858, p. 104. One of Oakes Smith’s sons wrote for her magazine and may have contributed art criticism. Oakes Smith knew Fowler and Wells,

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the phrenologists and publishers, as well as David Bigelow, the older brother of John Bigelow of the Post. Nathaniel Orr was the engraver for her novel The Newsboy (New York: J. C. Derby, 1854) and worked for her magazine. See also Mary Alice Wyman, Two American Pioneers: Seba Smith and Elizabeth Oakes Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1927). 42. See Augustus Maverick, Henry J. Raymond and the New York Press (repr.; New York: Arno, 1970); Francis Brown, Raymond of the Times (New York: Norton, 1951); John Rothman, The Origin and Development of Dramatic Criticism in the New York Times, 1851–1880 (New York: Arno, 1970). 43. Evening Mirror, September 11, 1854, p. 2. Fletcher Harper was a funder of the Times. 44. For example, the Unitarian minister, drama critic, art collector, and Stephen Douglas supporter William Henry Hurlbert wrote editorials for the Times from 1857 to 1860, then joined Manton Marble (a Post editor) at the by then Democratic World. 45. Day Book, January 31, 1857. The Richard Stoddard–Thomas Bailey Aldrich circle was somewhat bohemian and Democratic. Stoddard wrote for Vanity Fair. Aldrich was an editor at the Home Journal. The artists Launt Thompson, Sanford Gifford, and A. D. Shattuck were part of the circle. See Eleanor Harvey, “Tastes in Transition: Gifford’s Patrons,” in Hudson River School Visions: The Landscapes of Sanford R. Gifford (New York: Metropolitan Museum of New York, 2003), 75–89; Charles E. Samuels, Thomas Bailey Aldrich (New York: Twayne, 1965); Ferris Greenslet, Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908); Jennifer Putzi and Elizabeth Stockton, eds., The Selected Letters of Elizabeth Stoddard (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012). 46. Day Book, January 31, 1857; Day Book, September 3, 1853, p. 4. 47. “Art and Artists: Richards’ Bubble Blower,” Sunday Atlas, May 12, 1861, p. 3. Herald, December 20, 1851. These Puritan descendants were now often Unitarians, and the Hungarian liberator Louis Kossuth spoke at H. W. Beecher’s Plymouth Church. 48. “The Newsboy,” Evening Mirror, October 7, 1854, p. 2; “Art Doings,” Evening Mirror, January 26, 1855. See also Ezra Greenspan, George Palmer Putnam (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 49. On Cook, see JoAnne Mancini, Pre-Modernism: Art-World Change and American Culture from the Civil War to the Armory Show (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 99–131; on Cook and Stillman, see John P. Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America,” PhD diss., Ohio State University, 1952. Also Karen Georgi, Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of NineteenthCentury Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013); Gordon Milne, George William Curtis and the Genteel Tradition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1956); Edward Cary, George William Curtis (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894); Stephen L. Dyson, The Last Amateur: The Life of William J. Stillman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2014). 50. F.J.O’B., “Art and Art Critics,” Daily Times, November 27, 1852, p. 3. O’Brien in these years also wrote for the Picayune, Evening Post, Putnam’s, Vanity Fair, the Home Journal, and the Saturday Press. See also Francis Wolle, Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the 1850s (Boulder: University of Colorado, 1944); and Wayne R. Kime, ed., Fitz-James O’Brien: Selected Literary Journalism, 1852–1860 (Susquehanna University Press, 2003). 51. Under Cozzens, a Curtis became active in the Art-Union, as did Curtis’s childhood friends the Hoppin brothers. Arlene Katz Nichols, “Merchants and Artists: The Apollo

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Association and American Art-Union,” PhD diss., City University of New York, 2003, suggests Curtis joined the Art-Union as a manager in March 1850, on his return from Europe. Given his youth, it may have been his father. 52. Cited by Emily Halligan, “Art Criticism in America before The Crayon: Perceptions of Landscape Painting, 1825–1855,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2014, 185, who also cites a Curtis review of the National Academy in that paper, June 5, 1852. GWC, “Politics and Art in Paris,” Tribune, July 1850, p. 3. 53. “Contemporary Art in Europe: Mr. Curtis’s Lecture,” Evening Post, January 28, 1851. 54. “Dusseldorf Gallery-Koehler’s Germania,” Evening Post, August 9, 1850, p. 2. “The Dusseldorf Gallery,” Courier and Enquirer, August 7, 1850. 55. “Bryant’s letter from Rome,” Morning News, November 6, 1845. 56. “Foreign Correspondence of the Tribune, Glances at Modern Germany, by a Young American, no. VI, Present State of the Arts,” Tribune, November 17, 1846, p. 1. Curtis sent sketches on German artists like Peter Cornelius to the Art-Union Bulletin. The Tribune in 1846–1847 was running a series “Rambling Notes on the Old World,” which has comments on art, especially the desirability of free public galleries, where the “herd” can catch graceful “thoughts and sentiments,” even on Sundays. 57. Evening Post, October 4, 1850, p. 2. See also Courier and Enquirer, September 5, 1850. JWE, “The School of Art at Dusseldorf,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union, April 1, 1850, p. 5. 58. Evening Post, December 11, 1850; Philip Hone, Letter, Evening Post, December 14, 1850. 59. Evening Post, December 4, 1850; “City Items,” Tribune, December 6, 1850, p. 7. 60. “Lessing’s Huss,” Albion, December 7, 1850, p. 585. John Boker, Card, Courier and Enquirer, December 3, 1850. Herald, January 17, 1852; see also December 20, 1851. 61. “The Fine Arts: Dusseldorf School,” Tribune, January 17, 1851, p. 6. Curtis forgot to say that the “gentleman temporarily employed in the City department” erred. Pictor, “The Tribune and the Dusseldorf Gallery,” Tribune, February 14, 1851, says that Curtis’s views are shared by every artist. 62. “Lessing’s Martyrdom of Huss,” Evening Mirror, December 10, 1850, p. 2. 63. Spirit of the Times, April 4, 1857, p. 77. Herald, April 14, 1858. John Dean was her husband. 64. Letter to the editor from Dr. Koerner, Evening Post, February 15, 1851, pp. 1–2. 65. “The Fine Arts: Lessing’s Martyrdom of Huss,” Tribune, February 27, 1851, p. 6. The name is spelled “Korner,” and he is identified as a friend of Lessing. 66. The Tribune’s City Items editor, often critical of the Commercial Advertiser’s prurient prudery, ran reviews that were more positive and less analytical than Curtis, as in “Festival of the National Academy,” Tribune, April 7, 1851, p. 5; and “National Academy,” Tribune, April 23, 1851. CAD (Dana) wrote the Art-Union review, Tribune, November 27, 1850, p. 4, and identifies himself as the author of the National Academy reviews that year. GWC also writes for that issue. See Charles J. Rosebault, When Dana Was the Sun (New York: Robert M. McBride & Co., 1931); Janet E. Steele, The Sun Shines for All: Journalism and Ideology in the Life of Charles A. Dana (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993). 67. “National Academy of Design, 1st article,” Tribune, May 1, 1850, pp. 5–6; “National Academy of Design, 2nd article,” Tribune, May 15, 1850, p. 1; “National Academy of

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Design, 3rd article,” Tribune, June 18, 1850, p. 1; “National Academy of Design, 4th article,” Tribune, June 20, 1850, p. 1; “National Academy of Design, 5th article,” Tribune, June 22, 1850, p. 1; “National Academy of Design, 6th article,” Tribune, July 4, 1850, p. 1. Dana suggests he’s indebted for his views on color to Page. 68. GWC, “The Fine Arts: The Private View of the Academy,” Tribune, April 10, 1851, p. 5; GWC, “The Fine Arts: The National Academy—I,” Tribune, April 16, 1851, p. 6; GWC, “The Fine Arts: The National Academy, No. 2,” Tribune, April 26, 1851, p. 5; “The Fine Arts: National Academy, No. 111,” Tribune, May 10, 1851, p. 5; GWC, “The Fine Arts: National Academy IV,” Tribune, May 29, 1851, p. 6; GWC, “The Fine Arts: National Academy—V,” Tribune, June 16, 1851, p. 6; GWC, “The Fine Arts: Exhibition of the National Academy VI,” Tribune, June 21, 1851, p. 6. 69. “National Academy of Design,” Sunday Dispatch, May 14, 1848. That critic makes Huntington the bearer of the sentimental or emasculated style; in 1850, it is Thomas Rossiter. “Going down Broadway,” Sunday Dispatch, May 21, 1848. Cephas Thompson also painted Oakes Smith, and Deane Freeman promoted him as an outsider, Mary Forrest, Evening Post, January 20, 1860, p. 1. 70. “The Fine Arts: Reviewers Reviewed,” Tribune, June 12, 1852, p. 5; “The Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Tribune, April 17, 1852, p. 6; GWC, “The Fine Arts: Exhibition of the National Academy VI,” Tribune, June 21, 1851, p. 6; Washington didn’t need brass buttons or lace cravats, nor did Homer need to be shown blind. 71. A Press Club formed in spring of 1852, including: Cornelius Mathews, Charles Briggs, Charles Dana, Carlos D. Stuart, John Bigelow, H. J. Raymond, Parke Godwin, George Ripley, Charles King, Thurlow Weed, Moses Grinnell, and Simeon Draper, among others. 72. See Susan P. Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism and Its Reception in the Nineteenth Century (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990); David Howard Dickason, The Daring Young Men: The Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites (repr.; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1970); Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). 73. Evening Post, May 4, 1850; Evening Post, June 24, 1850; Evening Post, April 1, 1850. 74. “The Arts in France,” Evening Post, May 17, 1852, p. 4; WJS, “Modern Schools of Art no. 2, France,” Evening Post, October 7, 1852, p. 2; WJS, “Modern Schools of Art no. 3, Belgians,” Evening Post, October 8, 1852, p. 1; WJS, “Modern Schools of Art no. 4, Dusseldorf,” Evening Post, October 13, 1852, p. 1. 75. “Leutze’s Washington at Monmouth,” Evening Post, October 7, 1854. 76. W. J. Stillman, Autobiography of a Journalist, 2 vols. (London: Grant Richards, 1901), 1: 96–97. He also preferred the portraitist Ferdinand Boyle, an Inman student known for his grand 1849 portrait of Bishop Hughes. 77. “Powell’s De Soto,” Evening Post, October 12, 1853; “A Day in Washington continued,” Irish News, February 21, 1857, p. 313; Clarence Cook, letter, Evening Post, November 16, 1853, p. 1. The Tribune had similarly published praise of the picture before “The Fine Arts: Powell’s Discovery of the Mississippi,” Tribune, December 10, 1853, p. 6. “Editorial Notes—Fine Arts: Powell’s Picture of De Soto,” Putnam’s, November 1853, pp. 574–76. “The Vacant Panel,” Evening Mirror, March 6, 1847, was the first of that paper’s series of criticisms of Powell’s selection as a political job, but Fuller’s own review was positive, as was the Herald’s.

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78. “National Academy of Design,” Times, April 12, 1855, p. 4, is critical of the artists’ painful minuteness. “National Academy of Design—31st annual exhibition, 3rd article,” Times, April 12, 1856, p. 4; “National Academy of Design, concluding article,” Times, April 21, 1856, p. 4. 79. “National Academy of Design,” Irish News, June 27, 1857, p. 185. In 1856, the editors of the Times differed from Cook’s evaluations (except they all mocked Hicks’s portrait of Bayard Taylor). CC, “National Academy of Design—1st article,” Times, March 24, 1856, p. 2; CC, “National Academy of Design—2nd article,” Times, April 4, 1856, p. 2; “Thomas Francis Meagher,” Times, April 9, 1856, p. 8; CC, “National Academy of Design—31st annual exhibition, 3rd article,” Times, April 12, 1856, p. 4; CC, “National Academy of Design—concluding article,” Times, April 21, 1856, p. 4. Dearinger identifies Cook as the author of the 1857, 1858, and probably 1859 reviews as well: CC, “National Academy Exhibition,” Times, May 27, 1857, p. 2. 80. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, no. 1,” Irish News, April 19, 1856, p. 27. “Academy of Design,” Evening Mirror, May 16, 1853, p. 1. Blondell, a William Page student, portrayed the editors John Savage and Meagher (in military costume), James Stout, and T. B. Read. He also painted the Young America advocate and New York Sketch Club member Cornelius Mathews in 1854, the same year as Meagher. The Whig Courier and Enquirer, Evening Signal, and Express thought Blondell’s portraits were miserable; the Irish News praised his subduing Art in looking after Nature. 81. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, no. 1,” Irish News, April 19, 1856, p. 27; “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, 2nd article,” Irish News, May 3, 1856, p. 60. Meagher spoke on the Fine Arts of Athens for the Touro (Jewish) Literary Institute in 1856. 82. Evening Post, December 29, 1854, p. 2. 83. As Janice Simons has demonstrated in “The Crayon, 1855–59: The Voice of Nature in Criticism, Poetry, and the Fine Arts,” PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1990. 84. “American Painters,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, June 1857, p. 116; “Supplement,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, December 1857, pp. 53–64. 85. John Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand (New York: Da Capo, 1970), 170–72. 86. “Academy of Design Exhibition,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, March–June 1858, p. 148. James T. Brady, “An Art Homily,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, June 1860, p. 66; Query [James T. Brady], “Our Own Art-Union,” Spirit of the Times, June 2, 1849, p. 175. 87. “Art about Town,” Saturday Press, May 12, 1860, p. 2; “Art Items,” Saturday Press, January 1, 1859, p. 2; “Art Items,” Saturday Press, November 12, 1859, p. 2. See also Tice Miller, Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1981). 88. “Whitman and American Art,” Saturday Press, June 30, 1860. “Art,” Saturday Press, July 7, 1860, p. 2. G. H. Avery did their Art Items. 89. Willis, Letter, Home Journal, January 22, 1859. “Exhibition of the National Academy, 2nd article,” Irish News, May 3, 1856, p. 60. “Topics Astir—National Academy of Design,” Home Journal, April 5, 1856. “Editor’s Table,” Knickerbocker, May 1856, p. 547. 90. Spencer’s men and women are often based on her and her husband. Benjamin Rush Spencer is usually identified as an English immigrant, a tailor or “cloth merchant.” A passenger list shows that a Benjamin Spencer arrived in New York on June 6, 1833, on the

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George Clinton, age 20, profession a tailor, born in and place of departure, Ireland. The dates of this Benjamin Spencer’s immigration and birth date (1813) match those usually assigned to Lilly Martin’s husband. 91. “Vulgar Error Anglo Saxonism,” Irish News, January 10, 1857, p. 217; “Dr. McEleheran on the American Race at the Tabernacle,” Irish News, November 1, 1856, p. 2; “Journal of Commerce,” Irish News, October 3, 1857, p. 408. “Howls of the Servile Press,” Weekly Anglo-African, January 14, 1860. 92. See Emmett Redd and Nicole Etcheson, “‘Sound on the Goose’: A Search for the Answer to an Age Old ‘Question,’” Kansas History 32 (Autumn 2009): 204–17. 93. Charles Gayler was born in New York but worked for the Whig Cincinnati Dispatch from 1846 to 1849. He wrote local color plays and collaborated with G. G. Foster of the Tribune in New York. His fellow New York Sketch Club members Cafferty and Kyle both painted his portrait. The magazine publisher, engraver (he worked for the Herald, among others), and stationer Thomas W. Strong also published Gayler’s Young America, which had contributions from John McLennan and the British art critics Charles Rosenberg and Fitz James O’Brien. It merged with Cornelius Mathews’s Yankee Doodle. 94. “National Academy, Criticism, No. 7,” Sun, May 26, 1849; the same writer (speculations were on whether it was an amateur, editor, or artist) admired Jared Flagg’s Shakespeare, Church’s lack of convention in Plague of Darkness, but not the meaninglessness of Boyle’s portrait of Bishop Hughes. “National Academy of Design, 3rd Article,” Tribune, April 19, 1856, p. 8. 95. Mrs. Eliza Greatorex was also a member. Additional editor members included Thomas B. Thorpe (Spirit of the Times), Carlos D. Stuart (Sun, Republic), Cornelius Mathews (a book illustrated by Dallas), James F. Otis (Express), Charles Burkhardt (Dispatch), and John Brougham (Lantern). The Ohioan engraver John McLenan was also a member. The Cincinnati poets William W. Fosdick (painted by member and Stillman friend Ferdinand Boyle) and Phoebe Cary (painted by Blondell, along with her sister Alice) were also members. James Cafferty, its longtime president, had been active with other members on behalf of Kossuth. 96. “Art and Artists,” Sunday Atlas, December 30, 1860, p. 3. A Spencer painting sold at the Art-Union auction to the conservative Whig John J. Herrick, a flour merchant who survived Democratic rioters to build a castellated estate called Ericstan in 1855. He ran against the Democrat Fernando Wood for mayor.

6. Rearing Statues amid Gothic Spires 1. Sun, December 19, 1833, p. 3; December 13, 1833, p. 3; July 11, 1834. 2. “The Yankee and the Greek Slave,” Sun, September 2, 1847. See Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), Wendy Katz, Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2002), 137–71; Lauren K. Lessing, “Ties That Bind: Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave and Nineteenth-Century Marriage,” American Art 24 (Spring 2010): 41–65. 3. The Universe, November 13, 1847. The dollar “cosmopolitan hebdomadal” shared content and publishers/editors with the Sunday Dispatch. 4. Horace Kneeland’s bust of George Washington was exhibited in 1851. “Niceties of Art,” Picayune, January 3, 1852.

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5. Evening Mirror, September 16, 1847 p. 2; October 28, 1847, p. 2; Courier and Enquirer, January 26, 1848; Evening Mirror, January 25, 1848, p. 2; Evening Mirror, April 29, 1848; Holden’s Dollar Magazine, April 1848, p. 255. 6. HP (Henri Picard), “Le Sculpteur Garbeille,” Franco-Américain, May 5, 1847, p. 2; June 11, 1847, p. 3. “Mr. Garbeille’s Statuettes,” Evening Mirror, April 17, 1848. 7. Herald, March 22, 1837, p. 1; April 29, 1848, p. 4. “Statue Smashing,” Sunday Mercury, December 23, 1848. See also Mark N. Grant, Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). The Courrier’s music critic, de Trobriand, was more liberal. 8. “Opera and Criticism,” Herald, February 4, 1848. Art-Union supporters G. G. Foster of the Whig Tribune and James Otis of the Whig Express wrote publicity. 9. Globe, October 11, 1847, p. 2. Emily Halligan, “Art Criticism in America before The Crayon: Perceptions of Landscape Painting, 1825–1855,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2014, identifies him as an art reviewer for the Democratic Review and Whig Review in the late 1840s. He contributed to Yankee Doodle, where he was an editor starting in February 1847, following G. G. Foster and Cornelius Mathews. As an editor at the Gazette and Times before Yankee Doodle, White presumably also wrote reviews there. Before joining the Courier and Enquirer in 1851, he may have worked at Noah’s Sunday Times. In 1859 he left the Courier and Enquirer to join his fellow Courier editor James Spaulding at the World. At various times he came into conflict with the music and art critic Henry Cood Watson, a colleague of Briggs at the Broadway Journal and Evening Mirror, who also wrote for the Albion. 10. Enoch Easel, Evening Mirror, February 16, 1856. By 1856, “red Republican” referred to a socialist, as compared to a “black Republican,” who was an abolitionist. Easel was a Washington correspondent and “distinguished literary gentleman” who wrote on art for Raymond’s Times as well as the Evening Mirror. Easel, Evening Mirror, January 14, 1856, who disliked Greenough’s Washington, adds that Levy became a real-estate investor in New York. As a literary man, Easel may have known Charles G. Rosenberg (pseudonym Q), who used the phrase “Red Republican” to describe the sculptor in his book You Have Heard of Them (New York: Redfield, 1854), 164. Rosenberg was an English artist who exhibited at the National Academy and a theater/music critic best known as an agent for Jenny Lind, working with Barnum on her 1850 tour. 11. From ’76, “Letter to the Editor: Statue of Jefferson,” December 4, 1840, Times and Evening Star, p. 2. The paper’s editor was N. T. Eldredge, another former Jacksonian who had merged his Times with Noah’s Evening Star. 12. ****, “Correspondence from Washington,” Times and Evening Star, December 3, 1840; “Scenes in Wall Street,” Herald, May 11, 1837, p. 2. 13. Express, March 30, 1844. Other supporters were Louis Tasistro at the Aurora, Mike Walsh’s Subterranean, and Levi Slamm’s New Era. Among the guests were Robert C. Wetmore and George D. Strong. Levy relied on brutal humiliation rather than flogging, which seemed worse to some in his command. He was court-martialed six times. 14. Washington correspondence, Herald, May 29, 1842; Washington correspondence, Herald, May 10, 1842, p. 1. The Herald listed as seeking political appointments editors from the Express, Courier and Enquirer, Evening Signal, New World, and Commercial Advertiser. See also Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire: The Politics of Ethnicity in the United States Capitol, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).

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15. “Statue of Washington,” New Era, December 4, 1841, citing Alexander Everett. Telescope, New World, December 11, 1841. 16. X, “Correspondence from Washington,” Evening Post, December 6, 1841, p. 2. “Greenough’s Washington,” Evening Post, November 27, 1841, p. 2. Bryant cited Greenough’s letter to the editor describing where the statue should go. Washington correspondence, Herald, December 6, 1841, p. 3. The editor was Peter S. Townsend, often called “Peter Simple” by Bennett, Herald, December 26, 1841. 17. W. C. Bryant, “Letter from Rome,” Evening Post, November 4, 1845, pp. 2–3, courtesy of Merl Moore. Mrs. J. G. Bennett, “Notes from Abroad,” Herald, June 20, 1847, p. 2; “Greek Slave,” Herald, September 13, 1847; CL of L, “Ode to the Greek Slave,” Herald, September 27, 1847, p. 1; “Art and Artists,” Herald, November 3, 1847, p. 2. See also Linda Hyman, “The Greek Slave by Hiram Powers: High Art as Popular Culture,” Art Journal 35 (Spring 1976): 216–23. Caleb Lyon Jr. of Lyonsdale in 1847 was appointed by Polk as consul to Shanghai. He was elected to the New York legislature as an independent but supported Henry J. Raymond for speaker. The Evening Mirror in 1854 was enthusiastic about C. L. Elliott’s portrait of him. 18. Alexander Everett, “Greenough’s Statue of Washington,” Democratic Review, June 1844, pp. 618–21, was the older brother of the cotton Whig and Washington hagiographer Edward Everett. Emancipator and Weekly Chronicle, July 3, 1844, p. 38. “Holly Monument,” Emancipator and Weekly Chronicle, May 15, 1844, p. 10. Myron Holly, the founder of the Liberty Party, had an unostentatious shaft and profile as a memorial. 19. E. T. letter, Commercial Advertiser, May 3, 1834, p. 1, argued for the Pointed style instead of heathen temples. Commercial Advertiser, June 18, 1834, p. 1, series on architecture, rebuts ET on the Gothic on June 2. Commercial Advertiser, September 11 and 25, 1838. 20. “Religion and Art,” Herald, May 24, 1846. The cuts were on the 22nd. “The Book of Wall Street,” Sunday Dispatch, December 7, 1856, p. 1. See also Jeanne Halgren Kilde, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 21. On art galleries in a Gothic style, see Anne McNair Bolin, “Art and Domestic Culture: The Residential Art Gallery in New York City, 1850–1870,” PhD diss., Emory University, 2000, who notes this replaced the model of Jefferson’s Monticello. See also David Schuyler, Apostle of Taste: Andrew Jackson Downing, 1815–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and David Wall, “Andrew Jackson Downing and the Tyranny of Taste,” American Nineteenth-Century History 8, no. 2 (June 2007): 187–203. 22. “Rural Architecture,” American Agriculturist, March 1843; “Villas,” American Agriculturist, September 1844. J. E. Cropsey was involved in the American Institute. 23. “Mr. Mapes’ address to Mechanics Institute,” Evening Mirror, May 1, 1845. The paper had supported Clay in 1844. Moses Grinnell and Marshall O. Roberts owned the steamship. Willis married into the Grinnell family. 24. Harry Franco, New World, July 15, 1843. James was often published in New York papers. He was an admirer of the sculptor Thomas Crawford and a defender of Southern society. 25. “National Academy of Design,” Express, May 24, 1841, p. 1. 26. “Club-life in New York,” Tribune, May 2, 1855, p. 5; Herald, July 25, 1838, p. 1, 2. 27. Nimrod, “Architecture,” New York Times, September 9, 1835, p. 2; September 11, p. 2; Sunday Dispatch, September 26, 1847. Greeley wanted the school to teach the

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trades. The Tribune would call Launt Thompson’s sculpture Grizzly Adams a “Nimrod,” and the World called Eastman Johnson’s central figure in Husking (1860) a “rustic Nimrod.” 28. [Cook] “The Fine Arts,” Putnam’s, July 1855, pp. 107–10. Evening Mirror, March 15, 1847. “Robert Dale Owen,” Holden’s Dollar Magazine, May 1849, p. 439; “Topics of the Month,” Holden’s Dollar Magazine, April 1848, pp. 250–51. The socialist and politician Owen supported James Renwick’s Gothic Smithsonian in Washington, DC. Charles W. Holden, an antislavery admirer of William Page, left his namesake magazine in February 1849, and Charles Briggs took over editing by 1850 if not before. 29. “Ruskin’s Modern Painters,” Evening Mirror, May 2, 1856, p. 2; “Ruskin the TasteReformer,” Home Journal, November 20, 1858; Ik Marvel, “How to Look at Pictures,” Tribune, August 6, 1858. 30. “Ruskin’s Seven Lamps,” Albion, June 30, 1849. [Clarence Cook], “House-building in America,” Putnam’s, July 1857, 107–11. 31. “Correspondence—Our European Letter no. 3,” Vanity Fair, September 1, 1860, p. 115. W. B., Paris correspondence, Commercial Advertiser, September 18, 1851. 32. Sun, January 17, 1842, p. 2. The best men were mostly the Knickerbocker set: Washington Irving, John Trumbull, Samuel F. B. Morse, Fitz-Greene Halleck, Reverend Francis L. Hawkes (no fan of Jefferson), Henry Brevoort, Benjamin F. Butler, J. K. Paulding, William C. Bryant, Valentine Mott, Moses H. Grinnell, Rev. Benjamin Onderdonk, Theodore Frelinghuysen, F. A. Tallmadge, Maturin Livingston, Theodore Sedgwick, Edwin Forrest, N. P. Willis, William Duer, Charles Anthon, and others. 33. The Washington Monument Association incorporated in 1843, and its supporters overlapped with Stout’s. James Harper also joined the board, and it was promoted in nativist papers like the American Republican. Morse had founded the National Academy of Design in rebellion against Trumbull’s Academy of the Fine Arts. 34. Washington correspondence, True Sun, March 5, 1844. Sunday Mercury, September 3, 1843, p. 1. 35. Vitruvius, letter to the editor, Courier and Enquirer, April 14, 1848, pp. 1–2. True Sun, March 5, 1844; the previous month the paper criticized the Gothic for private villas, though generally it supported Anglo-Saxonism. “Washington Monument,” True Sun, November 23, 1848. 36. The Washington correspondent (occasional), Journal of Commerce, October 24, 1850, p. 1. The Herald’s preferred design, by William Ballard, like Frazee’s and Wallace’s, did not follow regular classical orders but had an “American” design. 37. “Frazee and the Washington Monument in Washington,” Albion, August 19, 1848, p. 405. The article refers to his DC design, which had the same Indian capitals. See also Jacob Landy, “The Washington Monument Project in New York,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 28, no. 4 (December 1969): 291–97. 38. Sunday Dispatch, October 24 and 31, 1847. They noted that General George P. Morris (of Home Journal) had written a Gothic poem to Pollard’s design, saying this allied him with the old Hunker (conservative) Democrats of Trinity Church. Instead of Gothic villas, they illustrated P. T. Barnum’s Iranistan, an eclectic Orientalist mansion. 39. “Washington Monument,” Sun, October 20, 1847, November 23, 1847, November 25, 1847; Eureka, letter, Sun, December 18, 1847. 40. “Washington Monument,” Sun, November 4, 1847; True Sun, May 16, 1848; Brother Jonathan, September 2, 1843. H. Hastings Weld left the Sun in 1839 for the

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Morning Dispatch, which merged with Brother Jonathan, the weekly of the Evening Tattler; Day, also formerly of the Sun, had a financial interest. 41. “Pollard’s Design,” Sun, January 7, 1848, p. 2; James Stout, “For the Sun,” Sun, February 18, 1848; James Stout, letter, Sun, March 9, 1848. In addition to Pollard, the architect Joseph C. Hart, who had also submitted a plan, was on the board. 42. “Washington Monument,” Sun, October 26, 1847. The hallowed and darling styles characterization is from F. P., “Letter to editor, Washington Monument No. 2,” Tribune, December 2, 1848, p. 1, writing against William Walcutt’s proposed monument. 43. Sun, December 22, 1849; “Another Washington Monument,” Sunday Mercury, April 2, 1848, p. 2. S, Sunday Mercury, January 16, 1848, p. 2. “Washington Monument,” Sun, October 20, 1847. The Journal of Commerce also called women’s rights a humbug. 44. Dunnel, with Matteson, was a member of the Art Re-Union and later in the 1850s advertised in the Day Book. Stuart’s short-lived New Yorker in 1850 was praised in the Evening Mirror. 45. F. P., “Letter to editor, Washington Monument No. 2,” Tribune, December 2, 1848, p. 1. 46. Dispatch, October 22, 1848, p. 2. 47. Mathews’s Moneypenny quoted in Allen F. Stein, Cornelius Mathews (New York: Twayne, 1974), 98–99; Mathews, “The Inequalities of Equality,” Yankee Doodle, 1846, quoted in Stein, Cornelius Mathews, 145–46. “Moneypenny,” True Sun, December 19, 1848. Yankee Doodle was edited by George G. Foster, Richard G. White, and Evert Duyckinck; Mathews took over the journal in July 1847. Other contributors included Parke Godwin, C. F. Hoffman, Caroline Kirkland, and Herman Melville. 48. See Landy, “The Washington Monument Project.” 49. J. V. Stout, “An Artist’s Revery, original,” Sunday Mercury, January 30, 1848, p. 1; J. V. Stout, “An Artist’s Revery, original,” Sunday Mercury, February 6, 1848, p. 1; J. V. Stout, “An Artist’s Revery, original,” Sunday Mercury, February 13, 1848, p. 1. Park Benjamin was also an Odd Fellow. 50. Willis’s Idyllwild was built by Calvert Vaux, a partner of Downing. J. V. Stout, “An Artist’s Revery, original,” Sunday Mercury, February 20, 1848, pp. 1, 4. 51. Ajax Rounds, “Yankee Letter,” Weekly Yankee, November 20, 1847, p. 3. Edited by Henry L. Williams, four cents. Patience preferred to be straight as a rail post. 52. “Powers’ Greek Slave,” Monitor, September 4, 1847, p. 2. It was a conservative, two-dollar Whig paper, edited by William Chase Barney, who was friendly with the editors at Yankee Doodle. In November he changed the name of the paper to the Aristocratic Monitor, to avoid being thought a religious paper, arguing that in the United States everyone thought themselves an aristocrat, so he was writing for the people. Picayune, July 4, 1857, p. 229. The illustrator Frank Bellew and Mortimer Thomson (a Tribune correspondent) took over the three-cent weekly Picayune on June 20, 1857. 53. “Beautiful Statuary,” Evening Mirror, November 14, 1846, p. 2. 54. “Fine Art Exhibitions,” Herald, December 5, 1859, p. 6. 55. The commission was originally given to Greenough and Brown. Herald, July 3, 1852. William Ross Wallace, “The Unveiling of the Washington Statue in Union Square,” Daily News, December 12, 1856. Donors included August Belmont, Hamilton Fish, Moses H. Grinnell, Robert B. Minturn, Charles Leupp, Jonathon Sturges, William J. Astor, Edward K. Collins, Shepherd Knapp, and James Lenox. The pro-Buchanan paper published poems by George P. Morris, and on Elliott’s portrait of Bryant.

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Wallace, a college-educated lawyer and Presbyterian, also published in the Irish News, Knickerbocker, Journal of Commerce, New York Ledger, and Harper’s. “Inauguration of the Washington Statue on Fourth of July,” Irish News, July 5, 1856, p. 221. Cosmopolite (St. Louis correspondent), Irish News, July 26, 1856, p. 249. 56. Evening Post, February 21, 1851. “Poem to Brown’s Statue of Washington,” Weekly News and National Democrat, August 23, 1856, p. 3. The National Democrat was the weekly version of the Daily News. 57. “The Fine Arts,” Putnam’s, March 1855, p. 334. Evening Post, December 1, 1854, p. 1. Apple Blossom, “On Brown’s Statue,” Evening Post, November 17, p. 2. The Herald, July 6, 1856, p. 1, a Buchanan supporter and Young America expansionist, focused without sarcasm on Washington’s call to the nation to move westward. XYZ, “The Statue of Washington,” Times, July 9, 1856; KA, Letter to editor, Times, July 10, 1856, p. 6. 58. Wendy Bellion, Performing Iconoclasm: British Monuments and American Revolution (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2020), 12, suggests showing a statue yet to be overturned evoked monarchs still to be overthrown. 59. Walcutt’s parents were Virginians and he traced his ancestry to “old Albion.” French notebooks, p. 137, Walcutt Papers, Archives of American Art. His wife’s stepfather—they married immediately after his return from France in 1854, the year of his first version of the painting—was the Rev. Samuel D. Burchard, an antislavery Presbyterian minister in New York who after the Civil War would become famous for the slogan “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion,” to describe the Democratic Party. Johannes Oertel’s 1852–1853 painting of the same scene featured a Native American family as observers and a black man with a pair of white yeomen at the base of the statue. See Kimberly Orcutt, “Johannes Adam Simon Oertel,” in Making American Taste, ed. Barbara Dayer Gallati (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2011), 262–63; and Bellion, Performing Iconoclasm, who emphasizes that the rise of white democracy in these scenes was paired with the erasure of nonwhite Americans. 60. Express, January 27, 1857; Evening Mirror, December 11, 1856, p. 1. See also Arthur S. Marks, “The Statue of King George III and the Iconology of Regicide,” American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (Summer 1981): 61–82, on the painting as a response to European revolutions. 61. Webster, Erastus D. Palmer, gives Palmer’s letter, with no name for an addressee. Webster cites it being published in the Home Journal, December 20, 1856, p. 3, a period when Thomas Bailey Aldrich was assistant editor; it may have been written to him, as Aldrich and Palmer were both part of Richard Stoddard’s literary circle. The Sunday Dispatch, December 21, 1856, p. 6, copied it, and shortly afterward praised Morris, Willis, and Aldrich of the Home Journal. 62. “A Ramble in Union Square,” Sunday Dispatch, July 12, 1857, p. 2. Rosenberg also worked for Frank Leslie’s and the Englishman, Catholic, and Punch cartoonist William Newman’s short-lived New York Momus. The art and music critic Henry C. Watson also wrote for Young Sam. “Art Matters,” Sunday Dispatch, October 25, 1857, p. 8. “National Academy of Design,” Leader, April 17, 1858, p. 5. Home Journal, January 2, 1858; “National Academy,” Spirit of the Times, June 12, 1858, p. 230. 63. Morning News, November 16, 1844. O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review featured Charles Sumner’s account of Crawford’s Orpheus. O’Sullivan was responding to a movement to erect a monument to Henry Clay in the wake of his loss of the presidency. He also proposed monuments to (quoting Whigs) the “cursed foreigners” Lafayette,

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Kosciusko, De Kalb, and Pulaski. See also Kirk Savage, Monument Wars: Washington, D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 79–80. 64. Globe cited in Sun, October 1, 1845; see also Sun, August 18 and 19, 1845. Herald, November 23, 1845; see also Washington correspondence, Herald, August 17, 1845, p. 3; Herald, August 18, 1845, p. 2 and (Washington correspondence) p. 3. 65. True National Democrat and Morning Star, January 7, 1853; “Inauguration of the Equestrian Statue of General Jackson,” True National Democrat and Morning Star, January 10, 1853, p. 2. Its editor, C. C. Childs, had been a Tammany supporter for years. 66. “Equestrian Statue of Jackson,” Illustrated News, January 15, 1853, p. 41. The House passed the bill in the same month as the inauguration of the Jackson statue. Washington was to be shown at the battle of Princeton. 67. “The Exhibition at the Crystal Palace,” Tribune, July 16, 1853, p. 5. 68. “Crystal Palace,” Express, July 30, 1853. 69. “Crystal Palace,” Home Journal, July 23 and July 30, 1853. They noted that copies of Kiss’s Amazon were being sold by Italian vendors on the streets. “Editorial Miscellany: The Exhibition,” Home Journal, August 27, 1853, p. 2. Home Journal, September 10, 1853. 70. Henry Greenough, brother of the sculptor, did interior ornaments that America’s Own, July 23, 1853, p. 2, considered merely decorations of the construction. William Ross Wallace wrote an ode to the Crystal Palace. 71. L. O’Connor, Spirit of the Times, December 4, 1853, p. 494. “Statuette of Jackson,” Courier and Enquirer, February 8, 1859; probably a puff for reproductions at the picture dealer Williams & Stevens. It called Jackson a rough-featured, lanky old soldier, but a hero. 72. Bubble, “The Inauguration of the Jackson Statue,” Spirit of the Times, January 22, 1853; HFR, letter from Washington City, Spirit of the Times, February 19, 1853, p. 7. Bubble, “The Jackson Equestrian Statue,” Spirit of the Times, February 26, 1853, p. 19. HFR, Reply, Spirit of the Times, March 5, 1853, p. 30. On Read, see also Spirit of the Times, October 1, 1853, pp. 386–87; and March 11, 1854; and on Brown, April 23, 1859, p. 129. 73. Her Dramatic Poems (Boston, 1848) included ones on Medea, Spanish colonialism in Haiti, and doomed love in Florence. During the Civil War she was a nurse in Washington hospitals. 74. The South Carolinian Philip Reid, an expert at bronze casting, is the best known of Clark Mills’s eleven slaves. Mills also inherited from his wife a member of the Rolf family and owned eight members of the Howard family and two of the Thomas family. 75. Washington correspondent, Herald, February 26, 1860. Express, February 23, 1860, p. 3. 76. Vanity Fair, March 3, 1860, p. 157. “Art in the Senate,” Vanity Fair, February 25, 1860, p. 133, mocked the former Democratic, antiflogging, and antislavery Senator John P. Hale for liking Mills’s “equestrian insult,” suggesting Hale would prefer to see Washington standing on his hind legs too. 77. “Art Commission,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, June 1859, p. 134. 78. WMD, “The Jackson and the Washington Statues in D.C.,” Tribune, March 13, 1860, p. 6. “Art Items,” Tribune, March 21, 1860, p. 6. John Kensett and the Philadelphian James R. Lambdin joined Brown on the short-lived Commission. “Art,” Saturday Press, July 7, 1860, p. 2. “Art about town,” Saturday Press, May 12, 1860, p. 2.

NOTES TO PAGES 223–32

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79. “Art in Washington, no. 1,” Tribune, April 28, 1860, p. 4; and “Art in Washington, no. 2,” Tribune, May 5, 1860, p. 5. 80. See Peter Marzio and Milton Kaplan, “Lithographs as Historical Documents,” Antiques 102 (October 1972): 669–74. Alfred G. Holcomb (partnered with John Parker Davis) was the engraver. Bellew also illustrated for John Brougham’s Lantern, as did Thomas Butler Gunn, who also illustrated for Cornelius Mathews’ Reveille and was a proprietor of the Picayune. 81. Inauguration of the Perry Statue, p. 127. “Wallcut and the Cleveland Press versus O’Brien and the Perry Statue,” The Phoenix, September 29, 1860. William Ross Wallace wrote a poem for the inauguration. 82. Inauguration of the Perry Statue, 41–45, 53–54. Harvey Rice, on Cleveland’s City Council in 1857 (Thomas Jones Jr. of the marble firm joined the City Council in 1863), initiated the project. A New Englander, he served as a Democratic state senator in 1851, where he was an advocate for public schools. He founded the state’s first Democratic newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer. William T. Coggeshall, Poets and Poetry of the West (Columbus, OH: Follett, Foster and Company, 1860), 265–69. 83. “Inauguration of Perry Monument,” Herald, September 11, 1860, p. 10; John O’Brien, “Perry Statue at Cleveland,” Herald, September 23, 1860. 84. T. Jones and Sons, “Perry Statue at Cleveland,” Herald, October 22, 1860. Powers and Palmer turned down the commission as not paying enough. Vanity Fair, November 3, 1860, p. 228.

Conclusion. Art and Politics 1. See Jerome Mushkat, Fernando Wood: A Political Biography (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990); and Iver Bernstein, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 2. “$500 for a Portrait of Mayor Wood,” Times, January 9, 1857, p. 8. “That $500 Portrait—Money for Nothing,” Dispatch, January 11, 1857, p. 4. The City Council, which hired the artist, was dominated by nativists and Republicans. 3. On Washington’s tight clothes emphasizing his masculinity in statues, Sportsman, July 22, 1843, p. 1. 4. Brother Jonathan, July 24, 1858. Day Book, April 6, 1861; “Art Triumphant in the Board of Aldermen,” Evening Post, November 20, 1860. “Art Patrons,” World, December 11, 1860; “Maecenas in the Common Council,” World, November 21, 1860. 5. Vanity Fair, December 8, 1860; Pro Patria et Gloria, “Brown Stone What is it,” Vanity Fair, December 22, 1860, p. 314. Subterranean, July 29, 1843, p. 18. See also Ruth L. Bohan, “Vanity Fair, Whitman, and the Counter Jumper,” Word & Image 33, no. 1 (2017): 57–69. 6. “The Age of Wood,” Dispatch, January 25, 1857, pp. 1, 7, casts the Old Testament invaders as Jewish financiers. August Belmont was a noted Jewish banker and Democrat. 7. “Powells’s De Soto,” Universe, December 3, 1853, referring to Putnam’s criticism of William H. Powell’s De Soto’s Discovery of the Mississippi for the Capitol Rotunda. 8. Times, September 21, 1861. 9. Henry Derby helped found the Democratic Cincinnati Enquirer, bought the Cincinnati Times, sold the Ohio Statesman to Democratic congressman Samuel S. Cox,

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and partnered with Fletcher Harper in 1854. His brother Chauncey owned the Cosmopolitan Art Association, and his brother George Derby published Metta Victor’s novels before she married Cosmopolitan Art Journal editor Orville Fuller. Henry’s brother James Cephas published the Herald correspondent G. Douglas Brewerton’s account of the war in Kansas, Henry Wikoff’s memoirs, a life of George Law, Mary Forrest’s Women of the South, Oakes Smith’s Newsboy, and a Life of Stephen Douglas. He told one of his bestselling female Confederate writers that Southern rights could have been obtained within the Union, so secession was unjustified. J. C. Derby was forced out of the publishing business in 1861 but restarted in 1864 with an entirely Republican list and received a Seward appointment in 1862. Melissa Homestead, “The Publishing History of Augusta Jane Evans’s Confederate Novel Macaria: Unwriting Some Lost Cause Myths,” Mississippi Quarterly 28, nos. 3/4 (2005): 665–702. 10. Home Journal, October 6, 1860. As consular agent to Dusseldorf by 1865, Derby is said to have brought Lessing’s Huss back to Germany. 11. “Fine Arts in New York,” Herald, November 24, 1860, p. 6. The architect J. R. Hamilton included emblematical female figures, and Reshner & Saxton did six statues of celebrated artists in niches. 12. “Opening of the Institute of Fine Arts,” Times, November 20, 1860, p. 4. “Art Items,” New York Leader, January 5, 1861. The Young America consul C. Edwards Lester spoke, as did Senator John A. Dix, a Democrat whose son was a successful artist. Bennett, Belmont, and Wilkes attended. 13. “Opening of Derby’s Institute of Fine Arts,” World, November 20, 1860; “Gallery of Old Masters,” World, December 1, 1860, p. 6; and a series on “Old Masters at Derby Gallery,” December 8, 1860, p. 5; December 15, 1860, p. 5; December 22, 1860; January 28, 1861; February 11, 1861. “Jarves Gallery,” Express, January 23, 1861, p. 2. 14. “Fine Arts in New York,” Herald, November 24, 1860, p. 6. “Private View at Derby’s Institute of Fine Art,” Tribune, November 20, 1860. Jarves’s collection was removed at about the same time Peter Rothermel’s Declaration of Independence was installed at the Institute, around July 4, 1861. Barbara Dayer Gallati, “Taste, Art, and Cultural Power in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Making American Taste, ed. Barbara Dayer Gallati (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2011), 11–122, describes a similar change culminating in Jarves; see also Francis Steegmuller, The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951). 15. “Art Items,” Tribune, December 8, 1860, p. 6. 16. Evening Mirror, July 25, 1855, p. 2. Putnam’s review of Art Hints, “American Literature,” September 1855, p. 318, as inconsistent in its principles, was in the same issue as its review of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which it found curious and lawless. The editor suggests that the Crayon is to be admired for seeking deeper principles of artistic philosophy, despite over-reliance on Ruskin. 17. “The Satanic Press,” The Age of Reason, March 18, 1849, pp. 88–89, ed. P. Eckler. 18. Herald, January 10, 1861; January 14, 1861, p. 5.

INDEX

’76: 194–95, 283n11 abolitionism. See antislavery Academy of Fine Arts: 29, 32 African Americans: and Africa, 90, 169; as artists, 131, 191, 269n26; and immigrants, 185, 203, 272n64; mentioned, 203; in New York, 29, 42, 62, 108, 220, 248n35; as subjects in art, 78, 87, 152, 163, 184, 214, 287n59 Agate, Frederick: 64, 255n39 Age: 46, 249n55 Age of Reason: 234 Albani, Francesco: 101 Albion: art criticism in, 159, 203, 208; contributors, 106, 194, 200, 262n39, 263n50, 283n9; on decorum, 101–2, 175, 200, 203, 285n37; and editors, 101, 244n38, 251n82, 261n27; mentioned, 17, 262n29, 271n57, 275n13 Aldrich, James: 93–95, 242–43n23, 243n34, 260n8 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey: 278n45, 287n61 Allan, William C.: 264nn58,63 Allston, Washington: 115, 242–43n23 Amazons: 208, 218, 221, 288n69

American: 65, 96, 148, 241n26, 256n49, 260n14 American Agriculturist: 198–99 American Artists Association: 138–39, 143, 153, 270n48, 272n64; members of, 138–39, 206, 270n47 American Art-Union: advertising of, 141, 143–44, 149–50, 193; campaign against (as antislavery, 144; as commercializing art, 92, 101–2, 114, 145, 159; as injuring artists, 131, 144, 153; as monopolistic, 21, 83, 119, 139, 140–45, 159; as privileged, 112–14, 143–45, 161, 276n18, 282n96); and defense of, 83, 136–37, 140, 143, 145–46; favored styles (cultural nationalism, 9, 84, 87–88, 153, 259n84; European tradition, 92, 101, 113–14, 131); and free gallery of, 113–14, 139, 144–45, 151–52, 190; managers of, 103, 119, 137, 141–42, 259n1, 265n76 (Bryant, 114, 135, 259n84; Cozzens, 113, 140–41, 157, 159; Duyckinck, 101, 141, 260n6; Edmonds, 84, 135, 144; Grinnell, 112, 114; Wetmore, 74, 114, 140); and National Academy, 113, 135, 137–38, 149, 183, 264n70;

291

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INDEX

American Art-Union (continued) purchases of, 84, 109–10; 110, 138–39, 145 (artists least patronized, 136, 137, 139; artists most patronized, 102, 117, 133, 137, 138, 141; high prices paid, 110, 113, 141, 145, 159, 256n42; low prices paid, 137–38, 146, 149, 159, 276n18); structure of, 22–23, 124–25, 129, 150, 152, 266n1. See also Apollo Association; Bulletin of the American Art-Union American Hotel: 251n82 American Institute: annual fair, 54, 59, 125, 202, 251n80, 252n2; and artisans, 54, 66, 94, 125, 202, 251n80; as monopolistic, 54, 82–83, 143, 198, 245n44; and National Academy artists, 54, 116, 258n70, 284n22 American Journal of Fine Arts: 263n50 American Literary Gazette: 262n39 American Monthly Magazine: 30, 73, 241n23, 243n34, 251n81 American Repertory: 53–54, 74, 116, 251n79, 264n68 American Republican: 100, 285n33 American Republican Party: 104–5 American Whig Review: art criticism in, 86–88, 113; and editors and contributors, 87–88, 141, 273n81, 276n24, 283n9 America’s Own: 206, 219–20, 288n70 Anglo-African: 185 Anglo-American: 55, 251n82, 257n62, 263n50 Anglo-Saxonism: 56, 90, 132, 185, 285n35. See also nativism Anthon, Charles: 76, 285n32 anticlericalism: 13, 25–26, 109–10, 115, 121, 175 antislavery: and art, 86–87, 197, 198, 214, 225; and editors, 62, 129, 144, 181, 196 (at the Sun, 37, 248n35); and evangelical Protestantism, 105, 109, 235, 287n59; and newspapers, 9, 170–71, 183, 207, 217, 220 (Independent, 71, 200; Tribune, 135, 166); and party politics, 9, 63, 115, 225, 231; and transcendentalism, 48, 71, 83, 139, 170, 182

Apollo Association: exhibitions, 77–79, 92, 96, 130, 257n59; and managers of, 75, 76, 78, 79, 127, 138, 253n7; mentioned, 243n33; as predecessor to the American Art-Union, 74, 87, 92, 127; as rival of National Academy, 17, 71, 75, 127, 130; and structure of, 92, 127–28, 130 Applegate Printers: 47 Appleton, William: 259n1, 265nn75,76 Arcade Baths: 92 Arcturus: 54, 100, 253n8, 257n56 Arena: 29, 249n46 Ariel: 128. See also William Attree Aristidean: 106 Aristocratic Monitor: 209, 286n52 Armstrong, John: 118 art, American: 1, adheres to an aesthetic standard, 183, 199, 200 (the ideal, 87, 111, 152, 178–79, 182); as concerned with contemporary life, 72, 82, 106, 107, 153–54, 180 (and national subjects, 54–55, 64–65, 78, 88, 121–22, 259n84); as controlled by an aristocracy, 15, 35–37, 83, 128–29, 135; as democratic, 111, 183 (adhering to American nature, 64–65, 75, 80, 115, 186, 209–10); as free from rules (to represent the self, 15, 16, 57, 91, 117, 233; to show the truth, 134, 181, 200); as following tradition, 61, 80, 149, 101–2; and histories of, 23, 155, 222–23; as Protestant, 110, 121–22, 172, 182 art auctions: advertising for, 4, 25, 28, 91, 93; and attendees, 91, 93, 94–95, 96–99, 102–3, 115 (connoisseurs, 91, 93–95, 97, 112; women, 92, 120–21); as commodifying art, 93–98, 159, 161, 174; and contemporary art, 91–92, 127, 252n82, 259n1; mock, 92, 96, 120, 135, 145 (fraud in, 17, 92–98, 115, 258n69). See also old master paintings art criticism: censorship of, 51–52, 118, 170, 265n74; compared to Europe, 81, 242n32, 243n35; in the penny press, 1–2, 20–21, 25; as politicized, 9–10, 47, 86–87, 231, 234; professionalized, 9–10, 121–23, 183; and standards for,

INDEX

52, 53–54, 76, 117, 141, 149; style of, 19–20, 25, 47, 49–50, 75 (satirical, 44, 58, 165–65, 167–68; slashing, 79, 81); as superior perception, 163, 169, 172, 177, 179, 200 art critics: as consumers, 53, 66–67, 91, 121, 129; and cultural nationalism, 64–65, 91; favoritism of, 47, 52, 58, 167–68, 172, 178; as independent, 141, 172, 193, 227, 234–35; mentioned, 146, 54, 75, 88; as outsiders, 47, 73; in the penny press: 8, 13, 20–21, 47, 169; as professional, 23, 143, 159, 225–26, 227, 231; qualifications of, 20, 47, 49–50, 52, 54, 183; as snobs, 59, 86–87, 89, 122–23, 165, 259n84; speaking for the people, 54, 56–57, 121, 123, 179, 235; as theater and music critics, 34, 58, 191–94, 267n7, 282n8, 283n10; as uninformed, 10, 47, 112, 118, 180; and women, 8, 16, 120–23, 163–64, 189. See also individual critics and newspapers art exhibitions: commercial, 65, 70, 161–62, 163, 174, 217; of contemporary, 77, 130; cooperative, 130, 138–39, 153, 269n27, 270n46; and free public (at art-unions, 114, 144; of old masters, 47, 76, 92, 112, 118, 279n56); as news, 2, 13, 53, 91; as urbane, 29, 53, 120–21, 143, 151, 233; and working class viewers of, 56, 123, 144, 161, 217–18. See also specific venues art patrons: aristocratic nature of, 8, 19, 26, 40, 62, 92; and commercial, 158, 174; and corporate, 9, 65, 100–11, 134, 228; and government as, 222–23, 228–30; as journalists, 54, 55–57, 86; for monuments, 210; as profligate, 28–29, 31–32, 34–35, 169 artisans: 54, 105, 219–20, 251n80; and role in penny press, 23, 26–28, 36, 202, 241n22 (printers, 2, 6) artists: as amateurs, 14–16, 54, 128, 162, 166, 262n40; as artisans, 27, 32, 54, 153 (and manufacturing, 94, 121; and sculpting, 63, 66–67, 206, 217, 222, 225); compared to Europeans, 25–26,

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293

66; as engravers, 27–28, 80, 89, 157; as seducers, 32, 69–70, 207–8, 246–47n19; and studios of, 92, 120, 207–8, 276n24 (as salesrooms, 71, 127, 153, 272–73n74); and travel to Europe, 64, 81–82, 153, 172, 246–47n19, 256n42; and women, 15–16, 48, 122, 166, 182 Art Re-Union: 138, 270n46, 286n44 Asmodeus. See Satan Asmonean: 109, 263n48 Associationism: and art cooperatives, 130–32, 137–39, 141, 145, 153; and artisans, 125, 128, 129, 153, 267n14, 268n22; and influence of, 22–23, 71–72, 124–26, 128–34, 155–56; and newspapers, 108, 134–35, 156–58, 166, 269n34 (in Ohio, 132, 146) Astor House Hotel: and newsboys, 54–56, 59, 77; as Whig headquarters, 34–36, 51, 59, 64, 247n30 Astor Opera House: 112, 192; and riot of 1849, 9, 112, 119, 132, 146–47, 194, 270n40 Astor, John J.: 39, 243n37 Astor, William: 34, 286–87n55 Atlantic Monthly: 9 Attree, William: and Courier and New York Enquirer, 35; and Herald, 35, 40–42, 44, 250n62; and New Era, 247–48n32; and Sunday Flash, 249n46; and Transcript, 35 Aurora: 7, 262n37, 283n13 Austen, David: 259n1 Austen, George: 259n1, 265n76 Austen, John: 259n1 Author’s Club: 37, 248n36 Baker, Alfred: 29 Bancroft, George: 224 bankers and stockbrokers: and artists, 14, 27, 199, 272n67; in the press, 12, 19, 252n83, 259n1, 264n61, 289n6; serving elite interests, 28, 32–37 passim, 129, 143, 172, 266n1, 271nn54,55 banknotes: 76, 121 Barlow, Joel: 31 Barney, William C.: 286n52

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INDEX

Barnum, P. T.: 169, 230, 283n10, 285n38; and Illustrated News, 208, 219, 258n75, 267n10 Bartlett, Horatio: 248n35 Bartlett, John S.: 251n82 Battery: 203–5 Beach, Alfred E.: 265n75 Beach, Moses Y.: 26, 258n75, 267n10 Beard, James: 131, 157; North Carolina Emigrants, 86–87, 88; Poor Relations, 134, 161 Beecher, Henry Ward: 164, 166, 278n47; and Crayon, 182; and Independent, 108, 169, 200, 235 Beecher, Lyman: 274n2, 277n29 Bell, Jared: 61 Bellew, Frank: 165, 286n52, 289n80 Bellows, Henry W.: 182, 263n51, 265n76 Bell’s Auction house: 92 Belmont, August: 219, 234, 286–87n55, 289n6, 290n12 Benjamin, Park: and American, 242n33; and American Monthly Magazine, 251n81; and Brother Jonathan, 252n1; and Commercial Advertiser, 116, 242n33; and Herald, 34, 68, 80, 242n33, 254n23; mentioned, 243n34, 286n49; and Metropolitan, 265n77; and New World, 34, 76, 80, 257n56, 262n39, 274n2; and New-Yorker, 34, 130, 242n33; and Token, 264n69 Bennett, Henrietta A. (Mrs. J. G. Bennett): 41, 42, 189 Bennett, James Gordon: and American ArtUnion, 124, 142; as art critic, 10–11, 22, 66, 290n12; art criticism of, 29, 47–48, 75, 96, 192 (Bleecker, 13–15; Stout, 64–65, 70, 255n27); on art critics, 47, 64, 197; on decorum, 35, 210; on elites (as hypocritical, 35, 41–44, 276n20; licentious, 30–32, 34–36, 39–40; selfinterested, 33–34); on imitation, 33–34, 43, 57, 60–61, 199; life of, 11, 36–37, 67, 199, 247n20, 259n1 (family, 41–42, 105; portraits of, 29, 191–93, 230; religion, 13, 40, 104–5, 235; style of, 11–12, 19–20, 43–44, 50, 79, 254n23;

travels of, 44, 247n31); on market monopolies, 12, 33–34, 155; mentioned, 23, 50, 73, 75, 92, 124; and National Academy, 32–33, 37–39, 43–44, 51; personal enemies of, 69, 172, 259n1, 272n61 (editors, 11–12, 248n35; P. Benjamin, 68, 242n33; J. Hoxie, 48, 92, 259n2; J. W. Webb, 36, 127, 193); and political stances, 69, 89 (Jacksonian Democrats, 28, 31, 36–37, 40–42, 68–69; Seward supporters, 37, 74, 256n49; Young America, 105, 115); on the press (as deceptive, 95–97; dependent on patronage, 59, 247n24; protecting elites, 32–34, 42–43);on tradition, 57, 61, 199, 220, 246n19. See also Herald Biard, August: 258n79 Biddle, Nicholas: 37, 74 Bierstadt, Albert: 165 Bigelow, John: 159, 277–78n41, 280n71 Bird, Robert Montgomery: 241n23 Black Hawk: 27 blackface minstrelsy: 192, 247n27 Blackwood’s Magazine: 11 Blatchford, Robert M.: 74, 256n49 Bleecker, Anthony J.: 242n30 Bleecker, James W.: 14, 242n30 Bleecker, John R.: milieu of, 13–16, 54, 96, 107; works by (American Scenery, 15; Dutch Sentinel, 243n34; Meeting of the Locofocos in the Park, 14, 28; October Landscape, 262n40) Blondell, Jacob: 181, 254n15, 281n80, 282n95 blue laws: See Sabbatarianism Bocock, Thomas: 221–22 bohemians: influence of, 1, 23, 58, 156, 168, 179; and Picayune, 165, 209; and Saturday Press, 187, 222; and Times, 170; and Vanity Fair, 230, 278n45 Boker, John G.: 172–76 passim, 182 Bonaparte, Joseph: 28 Bonaparte, Pauline: 64 Boston: 9, 66, 71, 76, 255n28 Bowen, James: 256n49 Bowery Theater: 28, 34–36, 69, 147

INDEX

Boyle, Ferdinand: 277n30, 280n76, 282nn94,95 Brace, Charles Loring: 185, 277n38 Brackett, Edward: 60–61, 66, 69, 252n5 Brady, James T.: 183, 259n84, 260n6 Brady, Mathew: 102 Brevoort ball: 39–43, 52, 61, 249n42 Brevoort, Henry: 39–40, 44, 52, 285n32 Briggs, Charles F.: and art criticism, 81, 161, 168, 199, 255n39, 262n41; and Broadway Journal, 16, 83, 106–7, 243n35, 283n9; and Crayon, 182; and Evening Mirror, 81–82, 87, 168, 191, 262n39, 283n9; and Holden’s, 285n28; and Independent, 71; and Knickerbocker, 71, 76, 257n55; milieu of, 71, 72, 280n71; and New World, 78, 79–81, 83, 107, 257nn60,61,64, 262n39; and William Page, 63, 71–73, 76–81, 86, 168; and Putnam’s, 139, 171, 275n14; and Sunday Mercury, 76–77; and Times, 170, 180 Britain: 109, 159, 169, 206, 212–13, 263n49 British: art, 25–26, 32, 47, 49, 179, 232; imitation of, 33–34, 43, 103, 116, 215; literature, 7, 11, 19, 79, 95, 112; theater, 9, 11, 119 Broadway Belle: 7 Broadway Journal: 16, 83, 106, 243n35, 257n65, 262n40 Bronson, D.: 250n63 Brook Farm: 71, 128, 172 Brooklyn Art Union: 139–40 Brooks, Erastus: 99 Brooks, James: 59, 99 brothels: 30–32, 44, 223, 247n28; and prostitutes, 28, 51, 80, 143, 228; and theaters, 34, 44, 69, 147 Brother Jonathan: and editors, 58, 125, 252n1 (contributors, 84, 258n75, 261n21, 285–86n40); style of, 61, 62, 204, 244n42 Brougham, John: 193, 282n95, 289n80 Browere, A. D. O.: 254n20, 267n8 Brown, Henry Kirke: and Crayon, 182; criticism of, 177, 222, 225; and milieu of, 180, 183, 248–49n41, 269n34;

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295

works by (Bryant, portrait of, 273n89; Calhoun, bust of, 221; DeWitt Clinton, statue of, 179, 274n92; Indian Hunter, 150–52, 151, 180, 210, 230; George Washington, statue of, 209–12, 211, 214–15, 286–87n55, 287n57) Brown, Julia: 44 Brown, Solyman: 72, 128, 255n38 Bryan Gallery of Christian Art: 265n80 Bryant, William C.: as art critic, 20, 47, 52; art criticism of, 120, 173–74, 175, 179, 197; and art unions, 114, 149, 175, 259n84; and artist friends, 110, 197, 284n16 (Durand, 27, 46, 177; Whitley, 127, 137, 270n42); and Evening Post, 7, 20, 168–69, 179, 275n14; and milieu of, 13, 134–35, 147, 182 (clubs, 119, 265nn75,76; literary circle, 33, 38–39, 248–49n41); and National Academy, 44, 51, 250n59; as poet, 37, 59–61, 207, 212, 252n2, 253n8; and portraits of, 273n89, 277n32, 286–87n55 Buchanan, James: 162, 216, 286–87n55, 287n57 Bubble: 7 Bulletin of the American Art-Union: and editors and contributors, 174, 270n38, 277n38, 279n56; as monopolistic, 140–42, 144, 153, 182, 265n76, 271n57 Bunce, Oliver B.: 265n77 Bunker Hill Monument: 255n28 Bunyan, John: 110–11, 117 Burke, G. B.: 50, 250n71 Burkhardt, Charles B.: 164, 165–66, 282n95 Burns, William: 108 Burr, S. J.: 249n55, 271n50 Burton’s Theater: 193, 247n31 Butler, J. J.: Locofoco Rally, 14, 27–28; Newsboys, 55 Butler, William A.: 141, 265n76 Butt-Enders: 68 Byron, George G.: 30, 32, 44 Cafferty, James: genre paintings, 154; milieu of, 154, 166, 277n34; works by (Newsboy Selling the New York Herald,

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INDEX

Cafferty, James (continued) 17–19, 18; Portrait of Burkhardt, 166, 282n93; Portrait of Charles Gayler, 282n95; Wall Street, half past two, October 13, 1857, 19, 277n34) Calhoun, John: 7, 190, 197, 216, 268n19; and portraits of, 221, 231–32 Canova, Antonio: 64 capitalism: 1, 6–7, 21, 261n20; and criticism of, 22, 103, 128 Capitol: art in, 79, 223; and for Rotunda, 180, 194, 196–97, 245n44, 258n78, 289n7 Carew, John: 217 Cary, Alice: 282n95 Cary, Phoebe: 282n95 Cass, Lewis: 108, 231 Catholic Church: 40, 104, 107, 108, 111; and the Pope, 26, 42, 81, 98, 108, 109; and the Vatican, 81, 98, 107, 109 Catskill Mountain House: 90, 105 Catskill mountains: 90, 134; and in art, 15, 90, 106, 134 Cauldwell, William: 265n72 Century Club: 118–19, 155, 182, 265n74, 270n40; and members of, 166, 265nn75,76, 265–66n81 Chapman, John G.: 194–95, 248n41 Chatham Street: 29, 37, 40, 96, 135, 197 Childs, C. C.: 288n65 Chinese: 42, 73, 109, 203 Church, Frederic: compared to C. L. Elliott, 168, 177, 277n35; milieu of, 180, 270n46; works by (Andes of Ecuador, 181; Heart of the Andes, 168; New England Scenery, 276n18; The North (Icebergs), 9, 241n19; Plague of Darkness, 282n94) Churchman: 148, 273n81 Cincinnati, Ohio: artists and patrons, 131–32, 156–57, 268–69n26, 269nn27,28; and Forrest divorce, 146–47; and writers from, 186, 252n5, 268n23, 282n93, 289–90n9 City Council: 228, 271n54, 289n2; and the arts, 104, 105, 119, 131, 197; statues of George Washington, 201, 214, 229–30

City Hall: 2, 77, 103, 139, 231; art at, 194, 197 City Hall Park: 114, 231; rallies at, 14, 17, 28, 228–29, 262n37 Civil War: 9, 52, 88, 232, 241n19 Clarendon, Matilda: 34 Clark, Aaron: 113, 195–96, 264n61 Clark, Lewis Gaylord: art criticism of, 271n53; and Knickerbocker, 244n42; and milieu of, 76, 140, 166, 248–49n41, 265–66n81, 277n29; and national subjects in art, 76–77, 78, 84 Clark, Willis Gaylord: 61, 253n8 Clarke, John: gallery of, 96–97, 272–73n74 Clarke, McDonald: poetry, 59–61, 63, 252n2, 253nn6,8; and portraits of, 59, 66, 253n10, 266n5, 267n15 Clarquo: 185, 275n15 Clay, Henry: and portrayals of, 44, 187, 205–6, 216, 231, 287–88n63; as Whig leader, 29, 100, 185, 196, 199, 242n29 Cleveland, Ohio: 223, 289n80 Clifton, Josephine: 247n28 Clinton, DeWitt: 27, 179, 246n15, 274n92 Clinton Hall: 92, 204 cliques: and art criticism, 21, 58, 123, 167–69, 170–71; controlling art, 32, 51, 64, 121, 142–44; and controlling the press, 37, 42, 74–75, 96, 129; as an elite practice, 61, 127, 193, 210; as personal and political, 11–13, 58, 105; and precluding competition, 16, 54, 82, 140 Clover, Lewis P.: 126, 127, 253n10, 267n5 clubs: and art organizations, 152, 169; as undemocratic, 39, 89, 143, 199, 271n55 Cole, Thomas: criticism of (compared to J. Talbot, 115–17; as imitating European art, 103, 106, 120, 134, 251n76; as poetic, 44, 81, 82, 115, 177; as Protestant, 107–8, 110; as realist, 90, 105–6); and milieu of, 248–49n41 (National Academy, 46, 54, 269n32; patrons, 54, 55, 100, 103, 251n80, 269n34; students, 180) Collins, Edward K.: 286–87n55; and steamship line, 219 Colman, William: 252n82

INDEX

Colman’s: 29 Colt, Roswell L.: 228 Colton, George H.: 87, 248n36, 259n80 Columbia University: 12–13, 149, 165, 242n29, 273n80 Columbian Magazine: 37, 84, 261n21, 270n39 Columbus: 165, 166, Colyer, Vincent: 267n14 Commercial Advertiser: as allied with Wall Street, 3–4, 32, 37, 74; art criticism in, 108, 116, 246n17, 249n56 (H. Inman and W. Page, 56, 65, 73, 75); on art critics, 123; and editors, 33, 48, 283n14 (contributors, 127, 242n33, 261n21); on historic styles, 201–2, 284n19; and John Inman, 59, 248n36 (and Henry Inman, 34, 37–40, 43–44, 46, 50–51, 73); and National Academy, 37–38, 42, 43–44, 46, 50–51, 246–47n19; and political stances, 37, 59, 74–75, 248n36; as a Protestant paper, 13, 17, 105, 108, 198, 279n66; on tradition in art, 96, 262n36 Compromise of 1850: 142, 167, 231–32, 272n67 Confederates: 88, 221, 289–90n9 Cook, Clarence: art criticism of, 171–72, 180–81, 182, 200; and Evening Post, 180; and Independent, 171, 185, 200; and Putnam’s, 181; and Times, 180, 281n79 cooks: 76, 160, 162, 163, 189 connoisseurs: 11, 20, 52–53, 107, 120, 123; as profit-seeking, 103; as requiring European experience, 86, 91–95, 97; satire of, 47, 120–21; and women, 149, 189 Constellation: 263n50; editors and contributors, 277n34 Corbyn, Wardle: 250n60, 266n7 Cooley, James: 259n1 Cooper, James Fenimore: 208, 212, 216, 243n34 copyright, international: 82, 150, 174, 191 Corsair: art criticism in, 19, 47–48, 64; and editors, 244n41; and style of, 33, 57, 70, 150, 241n26

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297

Cosmopolitan Art Association: 289–90n9; and Dusseldorf gallery, 174, 176, 182–83, 233 Cosmopolitan Art Journal: 160, 169, 182–83, 222, 289–90n9 Courier and New York Enquirer: art criticism in, 65, 172, 173, 191, 281n80; on art critics, 118, 177; and editors, 19, 142, 145, 148–49, 170, 253n9 (contributors, 35, 36, 61, 118, 172, 243n34); on historic styles, 202–3; mentioned, 242n30, 246n7; as moralizing, 17, 70, 148–49, 150, 244n42; and political stances, 191, 283n14; and theater critics, 191, 247n24, 283n9; on tradition in art, 97, 112, 118, 120; as typical sixpenny, 5, 33, 47, 193 Courrier des États-Unis: 7, 57, 68, 80, 257n63; editors and contributors, 192, 283n7 Cox, Samuel: 289–90n9 Cozzens, Abraham: 113, 140–42, 159, 248–49n41, 265n76, 278–79n51 Cozzens, Frederick; 157, 166, 265n76 Cozzens, William: 105, 251n82 Cranch, Christopher P.: 102, 137, 262n28; and Crayon, 182; and Harbinger, 137, 270n46; and transcendentalism, 102, 172, 267n14 Crawford, Thomas: 80, 216, 225, 257n61, 284n24, 287–88n63 Crayon: art criticism in, 10, 163–64, 182–84, 290n16; and editors, 9, 171–72, 187, 233 (contributors, 255n37) Crean, Henrietta: 41. See also Bennett, Henrietta A. crime: 8, 10, 26, 27, 30 Critic: 21, 256n48 Cropsey, Jasper: and Associationism, 138, 267n14, 270n46, 275n15; milieu of, 141, 267n15, 277n29; as rival to Cole, 82, 284n22 Crystal Palace (New York): 217–20, 218, 221, 288n70 cultural nationalism: and contemporary urban life, 72, 78–79; as democratic, 76, 87–88, 149; in the penny press, 57; and

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INDEX

cultural nationalism (continued) sensational styles, 65, 72, 83, 204; and Young America, 89, 91, 106, 121, 177 Cummings, Thomas S.: criticism of, 54; and National Academy, 38, 46, 64, 248n41, 250–51n74; and New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, 100–1 Cunard line: 219 Curtis, George W.: art criticism of, 175–82, 234, 279n61; and artistic tradition, 120, 279n52; and Bulletin, 141, 270n38, 279n56; and Crayon, 182; and critical principles, 171–72, 175, 177, 182, 279n66; milieu of, 169, 265n76, 268–69n26, 278–79n51 (Associationism, 138, 172); and Putnam’s, 139, 171, 275n14, 277n38; and Tribune, 135–37, 155, 170, 183, 280n70 Dallas, Jacob: 187, 282n95 Dana, Charles: art criticism of, 136–37, 177, 279n66, 279–80n67; and Tribune, 135, 169, 172, 274–75n4, 280n71 Daniels, Charles F.: 247n23 d’Artois, Blanche (Julia Layman): 121–22, 183 Day, Benjamin: and Brother Jonathan, 62, 84, 258n75, 285–86n40; and Sun, 26, 37, 262n43, 248n35 Day Book: editors and contributors, 265n72, 271n56, 272n67, 286n44; mentioned, 149, 158, 272n68; on monopolies, 140–41; on the people, 144–45; political stances of, 7, 89, 122, 170, 241n19 Daily News: 119, 211, 228, 241n19, 286–87n55, 287n56 Daily Whig: 46, 245n1, 249n55, 256n48 Daly, Charles: 260n6, 265n76, 270n40 d’Angers, David: 194–95, 195, 223, 283n10 David, Jacques-Louis: 32, 179 Davis, Alexander J.: 198, 199 Davis, Edwin: 262n43 Davis, W. W.: 259n2 Dawes, Rufus: 249n55 Deane, Julia (Mary Forrest): 123, 266n88, 280n69, 289–90n9

Delta Phi: 254n15 Deming, H. C.: 258n72 Democratic papers: and antislavery, 9, 42n29; and bohemians, 23, 156, 170; and immigrants, 194; mentioned, 70; and nativism, 105; as opposed to decorum, 100, 181; as opposed to protectionism, 52, 174; as working class, 32, 35, 145, 175–76, 227 Democratic party: and corporate monopolies, 10, 91; and immigrants, 68–69, 224; mentioned, 271n50, 285n38; policies, 78, 84, 100, 194–96, 227, 230. See also locofocos; Workingmen’s party Democratic Review: editors, 259n85, 287–88n63 (contributors, 248n36, 251n81, 266n83, 274n2, 283n9); mentioned, 86, 244n38; and territorial expansion, 195, 197 Derby, Henry W.: 232–33, 289–90n9, 290n10 Derby, James Cephas: 122, 244n38, 265n76, 289–90n9 Derby’s Institute of Fine Arts: 232–34, 290nn11,12 Desmond, William C.: 215 Dickens, Charles: 83, 140 Dickinson, Daniel: 232 Dix, John A.: 290n12 Dixon, George W.: 247n27, 255n28 Doane, George W.: 62–63, 253n9 dogs: in art, 134, 161–62, 163, 168, 214, 277n36; and in the city, 161–62, 168, 178, 207–8, 276n20 Doughty, Thomas: 162 Douglas, Stephen: 216, 266n82, papers supporting, 121, 163, 272n61, 278n44, 289–90n9 Downing, Andrew J.: 198, 200, 286n50 Downing’s: 29 Draper, Simeon: 74, 112, 119, 256n49, 271n54, 277n38, 280n71 Dubufe, Claude-Marie: 28, 29, 121, 220 Duer, John: 273n80 Duer, William: 285n32 Duganne, Augustus: 232 Duggan, Paul, 138

INDEX

Duke: 220 Duncanson, Robert: 131, 268–69n26 Dunlap, William: 35, 248n36 Dunnel, William N.: 205, 275n5, 286n44 Durand, Asher B.: and American ArtUnion, 138, 149, 183, 268n22, 273n85; and artistic tradition, 111, 120, 149, 269n32; collectors of, 55, 250n67; and Crayon, 163, 182; criticism of, 48, 120, 177–78, 180–82, 207, 251n76; and imitation of European art, 81, 101, 102; milieu of, 27, 51, 119, 248–49n41, 265n75; and National Academy, 27, 38, 43, 46, 51, 138; students of, 253n10, 267n5 Durand, John: 163, 271–72n58; and Crayon, 179, 182, 183 Dusseldorf: 131, 133, 154, 290n10; style of, 172–79, 180, 268–69n26 Dusseldorf gallery: 172–77, 182, 232; and women, 175–76, 177–78 Dutch school: 93, 94, 100, 161–62, 163, 207. See also Dusseldorf Duyckinck, Evert: and American ArtUnion, 88, 144, 260n6; and American Literary Gazette, 262n39; and Arcturus, 54–55, 100, 253n8; as art critic, 83, 240n16, 273n81; and Literary World, 101, 141, 144, 150, 220, 258n72; milieu of, 71, 84, 102, 248–49n41, 259n80, 263n51; and Yankee Doodle, 286n47 E: 242n32, 256n47 Easel, Enoch: 283n10 Edmonds, Francis: City and Country Beaux, 43; criticism of, 100, 107, 134, 178; milieu of, 135, 144, 249n49, 265n76, 269n34, 270n46 (banker, 27, 56, 140, 272n67; Democrat, 27, 84, 140, 219, 245–46n6); and National Academy, 27, 248–49n41 Ehninger, John: 165, 166, 174 Eldredge, Nathaniel P.: 242n31, 283n11 Elliott, Charles Loring: criticism of (and Henry Inman, 87; as natural, 89, 117, 166, 177, 179, 275n11; and William Page, 82); and critics of art institutions,

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299

138, 166–69; milieu of, 166, 177, 183, 248–49n41, 277n29; works by (Portrait of Bryant, 277n32, 286–87n55; Portrait of Caleb Lyon, 284n17; Portrait of Governor Throop, 277n35; Portrait of Mayor Wood, 228) Elssler, Fanny: performer, 61, 73, 80, 208, 255n28; and portrayals of, 44, 67, 67–70, 80, 208, 255n27 Elton, Robert: 29, 35, 41, 47, 69, 249n46 Emancipator: 25, 86, 197–98, 258n79, 284n18 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: 16, 100, 165 English, Thomas Dunn: 106, 262n37 engravings: 14, 35, 55, 133, 134, 162; for art unions, 110, 124, 137, 138, 141, 276n17 Enzel: 250n58 Episcopalian newspapers: 16, 139, 148, 242n30 Episcopalians: in elite circles, 13, 62, 144, 148, 198; and ministers, 126, 139, 148, 247n29, 242–43n33 ER: 46, 242n32 Erie Canal: 142, 228, 229, 251n80 Erie Railroad: 128, 140, 256n49, 271n55 E. T.: 284n19 Evans, George H.: 100, 245n4 Evening Mirror: and American Art-Union, 137, 140, 141, 159; art criticism in (favored artists, 166, 258n78, 259n80, 284n17; historical styles, 199–200, 207; imitation of Europe, 81–82, 112–13; realism, 86–88, 154, 158–59, 175–76, 210, 263n53; satires, 191); on art critics, 21, 86, 89, 168, 171, 234; and editors, 158 (contributors, 106, 169, 193, 199, 283nn9,10); and political stances, 88, 113, 191, 284n23 (nativism, 122; Young America, 121–22, 170, 181, 280n77); and viewers of art, 152, 161, 214 Evening Post: as allied with National Academy, 16, 46, 137–40, 167, 177, 207; as allied with Wall Street, 3, 33, 46, 96, 118, 143; art criticism in, 110–11, 120, 135, 152, 212 (from Crayon, 163, 171, 179, 182; on Dusseldorf, 172–77,

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INDEX

Evening Post (continued) 179–80; favored artists, 27, 51, 150, 162, 165, 197; influence of aestheticism, 121, 159); coverage of art, 96 (professional, 16, 49, 172); and editors, 34, 125, 159, 168, 179, 250n57 (contributors, 130, 138–39, 154, 171, 215, 217); and political stances (antislavery, 211–12, 229–30; Democratic, 33, 140, 152, 174, 211, 217; Republican, 227, 229–30; Young America, 108, 110–11, 173–75, 181); as Protestant, 13, 104–5, 108, 242n29; on role of critics, 52, 118, 122–23, 163–64, 179–80, 182 Evening Signal: 61, 251n75, 255n28, 281n80, 283n14. See also New World Evening Star: art criticism in, 16, 72, 73, 125, 194–95, 254n17; and editors, 34, 42, 194, 197, 242n31, 284n16 (contributors, 34, 261n21); mentioned, 252n83, 252–53n5; and style of, 33, 37, 95–96, 197, 255n27; and subscribers to, 16, 42, 242n30, 247n29, 259n2 Evening Tattler: 261n21, 285–86n40. See also Brother Jonathan Everett, Alexander: 197, 284nn15,18 Everett, Edward: 17, 284n18 Expositor: 51 Express: art criticism in, 157, 162, 177, 233, 256n45, 281n80; and editors, 31–32, 50, 59, 99–100, 283n14 (contributors, 167, 241n26; Charles Lanman, 157, 274n2; James Otis, 34, 99, 261n21, 283n8); on imitating European art, 49–50, 96, 97–98, 100, 102, 199; on newsboys, 56, 243n37; nativist, 7, 99, 107, 122, 214, 229; and political stances (antislavery, 99–100, 256n50; Tyler, 196; as Unionist, 233, 241n19; as Whig, 6, 28, 100, 105, 239n4); on viewers of art, 217–18 Farrenc, M. Edmund: 121–22, 266n83 Fay, Dewey: 263n54 Fillmore, Millard: 83, 231, 272n67 Fine Art Commission (Washington): 222, 288n76 Fisher, Alvan: 75

Fisher, Clara: 34 Fisher, John K.: and Day Book, 271n56; as Jonathan Pericles, 263n54, 268n20; and Journal of Art, 273n88; and Knickerbocker, 47, 50, 73, 140, 271n53; and Literary World, 101; and Photographic Art Journal, 139, 271n50; on public galleries, 131, 138–39, 268n19; and Sun, 130–31; and Tribune, 136–37, 268n21 Flagg, Jared: 178, 282n94 Flandin, Pierre: 252n82 flash press: editors of, 29, 275n21; exposure of private lives, 36, 42, 44, 48–49, 76, 249n46; and newspapers, 7, 35, 69, 246n19, 249n46 foreign-language papers: 7, 52, 68 Foreigner, Educated: 49–50, 242n32, 251n82 Forrest, Edwin: as Associationist, 128, 131–32, 146, 268n22; as Democrat, 139, 146, 152, 194; divorce of, 146–48, 150, 271n49, 273n77; milieu of, 34, 69, 134, 255n39, 285n32 Fosdick, William W.: 282n95 Foster, George G.: and Day Book, 265n72, 272n67; and Metropolitan, 265n77; milieu of, 220, 269n36; and Tribune, 135, 247n31, 274–75n4, 282n93, 283n8; and Weekly Yankee, 265n77; and Yankee Doodle, 283n9 Fourier, Charles, and Fourierism: adherents of, 22–23, 156, 165, 253n11, 255n38, 269n36; and newspapers, 132–35, 157–59, 203, 264n69, 272n73, 274n2; as reform movement, 124–29, 145–47, 172. See also Associationism Fowler, Lorenzo: 66–67, 69, 220, 254n20, 267n8, 277–78n41 Franco-Américain: 7, 25, 191, 245n1 Frank Leslie’s: 223–24, 224, 271n49 Frankenstein, Godfrey: 131, 269n27 Frankenstein, John: 131, 268n23 Fraser’s Magazine: 11, 241n26 Frazee, John: 66, 202–3, 285n37 Freeman, James: 261n27 Freeman’s Journal: 107–8, 110–11

INDEX

Frelinghuysen, Theodore: 13, 76, 242n29, 285n32 Fremont, John C.: 88, 115, 170, 185, 244n41 French art: Barbizon, 179; as commercial, 75, 95, 97–98, 103, 174; and French press, 80–81, 191–92; as licentious, 28, 80, 89, 150, 220; as republican, 32, 179–80, 193–94, 204, 212, 218; as unidealized, 47, 120, 191, 234 French Revolution: 1, 28–29, 32 fresco painters: 223, 255n35 Frothingham, James: 249n56 Fuller, Hiram: on art criticism, 21, 89, 141, 168, 171, 193; on decorum, 152; milieu of, 88, 115, 166, 280n77; on monopolies, 82–83, 140–141, 271n54. See also Evening Mirror Fuller, Margaret: 108, 178, 263n45 Fuller, Metta Victor: 169, 182, 289–90n9 Fuller, Orville: 182 Gaillardet, Frederic: 257n63 Galignani’s Messenger: 52 Garbeille, Philippe: 190–93, 192 Garibaldi, Giuseppe: 233 Gayler, Charles: 186, 282n93 Gazette and Times: 194, 283n9 genre painting: as contemporary, 16, 17, 76, 159, 178, 259n84; versus historical painting, 77–79, 154, 161, 176, 186; and as political, 10, 72–73, 86, 134 German art: and as commercial, 161, 234; as republican, 108–9, 172–77, 218, 232, 279n56, 290n10 German immigrants: 68, 93, 94, 108, 224, 242n32 George III: 212–14 Gibbs, Oliver: 12–13, 242n29, 265n75 Gifford, Sanford: 278n45 Gignoux, Regis: 270n46 Giotto: 25–26 Glentworth, James M.: 74–75, 112 Globe: 7, 203, 216 Godwin, Parke: as art critic, 125; and Evening Post, 125, 159, 179, 250n57; and Literary World, 270n42, 273n76; milieu of, 125–29 passim, 138, 147, 168–69,

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301

172, 280n71; and Path Finder, 128, 267nn12,13; and Putnam’s, 139, 171, 275n14; and Yankee Doodle, 286n47 Goldsmith, Oliver: 181 Goodrich, Samuel [Peter Parley]: 264n69 gossip: as a conversational style, 19–20, 56, 75, 187, 244n42; as exposing private life, 25, 35–36, 193 Gothic: admirers of, 180, 285n28; as AngloSaxon, 185, 198–99, 200; as anticlassical, 198, 200, 201; for churches, 172, 198, 199, 200, 228; as conservative, 198–99, 202; versus Egyptian, 56, 199, 202, 203, 207; as feudal, 198–99, 202, 203, 204; for galleries, 149, 284n21; as Protestant, 198, 200, 235, 284n19, 285n38; as radical, 200, 201, 209; for schools, 198, 199, 200, 235; for villas, 147, 198–99, 207, 285n35. See also Washington Monument Goupil’s International Art-Union: 149–50, 158, 174, 193, 233, 275n12 Gove, Mrs. (Mary Gove Nichols): 158, 275n7 Graham, Sylvester: 129, 253n6 Granite Building: 92, 96 Grant, Ulysses: 258n74 Gray, Henry P.: milieu of, 138, 145, 168, 248n41, 269n34, 270n40; and style of, 78, 102, 113, 179; Wages of War, 113, 118, 136 Great Republic: 122 Greatorex, Eliza: 282n95 Greeley, Horace: as art critic, 20, 73, 250n58; on exclusivity, 15, 46; and Jeffersonian, 239n6; and Log Cabin, 7, 130; milieu of, 128, 147, 168–70, 250n58, 253n6; and New-Yorker, 73, 130, 246n7, 275n5; and social reform, 86, 89, 99, 253n6, 284–85n27 (antislavery, 62, 230; Associationism, 128–29, 130–31, 145); and Tribune, 6, 68, 86, 89, 133, 135 Green, Duff: 254n23 Greenough, Henry: 288n70 Greenough, Horatio: and Home Journal, 178; mentioned, 183, 283n10; works by (Chanting Cherubs, 208; portrait

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INDEX

Greenough, Horatio (continued) of J. F. Cooper, 214; Rotunda statue of Washington, 79, 194–98, 200, 214, 257n60, 276n17; statue of Washington in New York, 286–87n55) Grinnell, Moses: as art patron, 74, 112, 114, 147, 286–87n55; milieu of, 256n49, 271n54, 280n71, 284n23, 285n32 Griswold, Rufus: and Evening Signal/New World, 76, 251n75, 257n56; milieu of, 61, 266n88, 277n32 Gunn, Thomas B.: 289n80 H: 15–16, 242–43n33, 256n47 Haggerty, Ogden: 74, 249n41, 259nn1,2 Haggerty & Sons: 92, 95, 259n2 Hale, David: 42, 144, 255n28, 276n20 Hale, John P.: 198, 257n60, 288n76 Halleck, Gerard: 255n28 Hamblin, Thomas: 28–29, 34–36, 69, 247n27, 259n2 Hamilton, Alexander: 188 Hamilton, Jeremiah: 248n35 Hannington, Henry: 260n7 Harbinger: 134, 137, 157, 269n34, 270n46 Harper & Brothers: 82, 234, 248n36 Harper, Fletcher: 105, 278n43, 289–90n9 Harper, James: 103–4, 105–6, 262n33, 268n21, 285n33 Harper’s Weekly: and critical consensus, 9, 123, 155, 170; and editors and contributors, 21, 105, 277n38, 286–87n55 Harrison, Gabriel: 139–40, 271n50 Harrison, William Henry: portrayals of, 34, 66, 177, 191, 196, 252–53n5; as Whig leader, 7, 56, 59, 69, 196, 242n31 Hart, Dr.: 247n24 Hart, Joseph C.: 286n41 Harvey, George: 162, 256n43, 258n70 Hawkes, Francis: 44, 247n29, 285n32 Hawthorne, Nathaniel: 71, 83, 276n24 Haydon, Benjamin: 32 Hays, W. J.: 277n36 Hayward, William: 93, 252n82, 260n4 Heade, Martin: 165, 166 Healy, T.C.R.A.: 50

Herald: and art criticism in, 25, 44, 116, 197, 200, 212, 260n4 (favored artists, 16, 60, 72–73, 252n5, 255–56n41; T. W. Whitley, 126–27); and art critics, 20, 34, 72, 164; and artisans, 225; and art organizations, 22–23, 141–42, 144, 233; business model (advertising, 4, 40, 56, 68; circulation, 2, 15, 26, 37, 243n37; engravers, 27–28, 29, 44, 47; nonpartisan, 6, 69, 216, 283n14); and editors, 19 (contributors, 36, 40, 131, 247n31, 249n53, 289–90n9; former contributors, 47, 165, 247n28, 253n6, 275n7); and Knickerbocker set, 75, 86, 197, 253n8, 262n32; locale of, 92; and monopolies, 127, 142, 271n55; Moral War on, 34, 36, 42, 57, 68, 249n46; and political stances of, 191, 196, 241n19, 287n57; readers of, 33, 34, 36, 51; and social reform movements, 128–29, 175, 176, 272n63, 273n77 (antislavery, 62, 88–89, 168–71, 185, 271n55, 277n38; Young America, 89–90, 103–5, 108, 114, 280n76); style of (democratizing, 1, 16–21, 22, 39–44, 244n41; satirical, 39, 41, 193, 198, 284n20; sensational, 10–11, 27, 35–36, 57); and the Wall Street press, 95–96, 149, 170, 243n34. See also Bennett, James Gordon Herald of Truth: 132–34, 146, 153, 269n30, 274n2 Herbert, Henry W. (Frank Forester): 61, 243n34, 253n8 Herrick, Anson: 228 Herrick, John J.: 282n96 Herring, James: 71, 127, 260n6 Hicks, Thomas, criticism of, 177, 281n79; milieu of, 138, 168, 255n39 (Associationism, 72, 128–31, 134, 267n14, 275n15); and the Tribune, 137, 166, 172 Hildebrand, Ferdinand: 173 Hine, Lucius: 132–33, 269n30 historical painting: 77–78, 87, 161, 174 Hoboken, New Jersey: 22, 154, 166; and Hoboken Gazette, 154, 274n96 Hoe, Robert: 2

INDEX

Hoffman, Charles Fenno: and Literary World, 258n72, 275n10; milieu of, 33–34, 61, 253n8; and Mirror, 243n34, 256n43, 258n70, 260n9; and Yankee Doodle, 286n47 Hoffy, Alfred M.: “The Innocent Boy,” 30 Hogarth, William: 162, 163 Holcomb, Alfred G.: 289n80 Holden, Charles W.: 265n75, 285n28 Holden’s Dollar Magazine: 265n75, 285n28 Holdrige, H.: 4 Home Journal: art criticism in, 152–54, 156, 163–64, 214, 215, 274n94; as cosmopolitan, 147–49, 232; and editors, 84, 170, 278n45, 285n38 (contributors, 167, 274n93, 276n24, 287n61); on privilege, 119, 147; and women, 121, 147, 169, 218–19, 240n12 Hone, Philip: milieu of, 42–43; as Wall Street auctioneer, 92, 127, 172, 174, 256n49, 259n1 Hoppin, Augustus: 169, 277n38, 278–79n51 Hoppin, Thomas F.: 277n38 Hoppin, William J.: and Bulletin, 141–42, 277n38, 278–79n51; and Knickerbocker, 149; milieu of, 249n41, 265n76, 277n30 Hoxie, Joe: 46, 48, 49, 92, 259n2 Houston, James A.: 247n31 Hudson, Frederic: 36, 241n26 Hughes, Ball: 188 Hughes, John: as bishop of New York, 40, 104, 107–8, 115, 176, 280n76; portraits of, 282n94 humbug: as artifice, 13, 84, 140, 159; as eliminating competition, 82, 95, 123, 143–44, 166, 227; as hidden manipulations, 8, 32, 58; as old master worship, 112–13, 132, 217; as pretense, 4, 95, 143, 205; as publicity, 4, 17, 34, 68, 71, 82; and social movements, 126, 220, 286n43 Humbug: 7 Hunt, Freeman: 264n69

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Huntington, Daniel: and Crayon, 182; criticism of, 75, 177, 275n11, 280n69; and the ideal, 87, 111, 115, 120, 179, 180; Death of Lady Jane Grey, 109–10, 110; and Henry Inman, 86, 248–49n41, 258n78; milieu of, 119, 138, 141, 163, 242–43n33, 265n76; students of, 113; and Protestant art, 109–11, 181, 263nn51,53; Sybil, 107, 262n41; and Young America, 111, 163, 263n53 Huntington, Jedidiah: 242–43n33 Illustrated News: art criticism in, 208, 210, 215, 218; editors and contributors, 258n75, 267n10; and political stances, 216, 219 immigrants: Democratic hostility to, 68, 84, 229; sympathy toward, 78, 185, 204, 227, 229; Whig hostility to, 43, 94, 99, 107, 205, 272n64 Independent: 71, 159, 169, 171, 185, 235 Indians. See Native Americans Indomitables: 68 Ingham, Charles: as artisanal, 138, 179; and imitating European art, 49, 81; milieu of, 248n41; as National Academy officer, 38, 46, 51, 138 Ingraham, Joseph H.: 250n63 Inman, Henry: criticism of (imitative of European art, 101, 103, 207, 262n32; genre, 54, 56, 162; portraits, 46, 74, 81, 83, 162, 255n39); and D. Huntington, 86, 248–49n41, 258n78; milieu of, 34–35, 37, 142, 149, 249n49, 269n34; as National Academy officer, 37–39, 43, 50–52, 54; students of, 40, 46, 256n50, 280n76; works by (Children of Bishop Doane, 61–63, 62; Newsboy, 53, 53–57, 59, 78; portrait of Fanny Elssler, 80, 255n27; portrait of James Harper, 103–4, 262n33; Portrait of John Inman, 38, 40; portrait of William Macready, 831n80; portrait of Governor Seward, 81; portraits of Mapes family, 25; Valentine, 207–9, 209, 256n45)

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INDEX

Inman, John: and Columbian Magazine, 37, 84, 258n74; and Commercial Advertiser, 13, 34, 37, 43–44, 50–51, 59, 61, 247n23; milieu of, 248n36 and 37, 263n51; and Mirror, 51; Portrait of, 38 Inness, George: 108, 165, 269n34, 270n46 International Monthly Magazine: 268–69n26 Inveterate: 7 Irish: as constituency, 108, 224, 227, 229; newspapers, 113, 119, 166, 181, 224; prejudice against, 107, 113, 207, 225; satires of, 40–42, 94, 166; as viewers of art, 166, 215, 218, 229–30; and Young Ireland, 102, 134, 175, 181–82, 185, 202 Irish News: art criticism in, 166, 181–82, 184, 185; editors and contributors, 286–87n55; and political stances, 186, 211; and Young Ireland, 181–82, 185 Irish Vindicator: 119 Irving, Washington: 39, 138, 243n34, 285n32 Italian, accomplished: 73, 256n42 Italian: culture, 98, 194; immigrants, 288n69; and nationalism, 99, 108, 111, 233 Italian art: historical, 25–26, 47, 96, 228; in the US, 32, 223, 233 Jackson, Andrew: policies of, 27, 195–96; portrait of, 192; statues of, 162, 191, 192, 288n71 (by Clark Mills, 215–22, 230); and symbols of, 212 James, G. P. R.: 199, 284n24 James, Henry: 138 Jameson, Anna: 263–64n55 Jarves, James J.: 233–34, 290nn14,16 Jarvis, Benjamin and Nathaniel: 260n6 Jarvis, John Wesley: 256n47 Jefferson, Thomas: and neoclassicism, 198, 284n21; policies of, 207, 285n32; statue of, 194–97, 195, 216, 228, 230 Jewett, Helen: 30–32, 40, 48, 223, 246n19 John-Donkey: 262n37 Johnson, Eastman: 165, 166, 167, 284–85n27

Jones, Thomas: 225, 289n82 Jones, Thomas D.: 131, 132, 138, 157, 205–6 Jones, William A.: 149, 251n81, 273n81 Journal of Commerce: editors, 144, 255n28, 276n20 (contributors, 277n38, 286–87n55); as moralizing, 17, 246n9; and political stances (expansionist, 203; nativist, 42, 185; pro-Southern, 228, 241n19; social reform, 188, 205, 286n43; Whig, 7) Judson, E. Z. C.: 132, 146 Kellogg, Miner: 131, 268–69n26 Kemble, William: 265nn75,76 Kensett, John: as landscape painter, 137, 181; milieu of, 138, 172, 265n75, 269n34, 288n78 Ketchum, Hiram: 208–9 King, Charles: 148–49, 256n49, 273n80, 277n38, 280n71 Kingsland, Ambrose: 143 Kirkland, Caroline: 84, 258n74, 275n10, 286n47 Kiss, August: 218, 288n69 kitchens: 33, 147, 150, 178, 198. See also cooks Knapp, Shepherd: 248–49n41, 286–87n55 Kneeland, Horace: 282n4 Knickerbocker: and antislavery, 220; art criticism in, 50, 73, 76; on art critics, 47, 251n77; and art institutions, 47, 140, 271n53; editors, 61, 76 (C. Briggs, 71, 76; contributors, 37, 154, 242–43n33, 265–66n81, 276n24, 286–87n55); national subjects in art, 76, 87, 149; style of, 30, 33, 56–57 Knickerbockers: as an aristocracy, 30–43, 48, 61, 127, 162; as imitative of Europe, 33–34, 43, 57, 121, 198, 285n32; as Jacksonian Democrats, 30–31, 36–37, 40–41; members of, 51, 54, 76, 78, 247n29, 258n70; mentioned, 22, 71, 75, 140, 175 Know-Nothings: and art, 84, 122, 221, 230; mentioned, 108, 155, 232; newspapers, 99, 100, 132, 139, 185, 274n96

INDEX

Koerner, Dr.: 176–77, 279n65 Kohler, Christian: Awakening of Germania, 173 Kossuth, Louis: 180, 278n47, 282n95 Kyle, Joseph: 187, 282n93 Kyle, Mary: 187 Ladies’ Companion: 30, 248n36 land reform: 100, 132, 145–46, 203 Lanman, Charles: and Express, 157, 261n21; and Herald of Truth, 274n2; milieu of, 83, 248–49n41, 259n80; and New World, 83, 258n72 laundresses: 32, 160, 162, 178, 189, 214 laundries: 33, 42, 178 Launitz, Robert: 66 Law, George: 230, 271n54, 274n96, 289–90n9 Lawrence, Cornelius: 259n1 Lawson, James: 150, 273n77 lazzaroni. See loafers Leader: 20, 121–22, 161, 163, 183–84, 215 Leather Manufacturers’ Bank: 27 Lee (Leah), David Russell: 247n28 Leeds, Henry H.: 252n82 Leland, Charles G.: 265–66n81, 267n10 Leslie, Frank: 218 Lessing, Karl: Martyrdom of Huss, as Protestant, 108–9, 290n10; style of, 172–77, 173, 178, 180, 182 Lester, C. Edwards: 166, 290n12 Leupp, Charles: as art patron, 134, 269n34, 286–87n55; milieu of, 135, 140, 248–49n41, 259n84, 265nn75,76 Leutze, Emanuel: criticism of, 83, 86–87, 165, 166, 259n84; and Dusseldorf, 174, 180, 182; milieu of, 141, 269n34 Levy, Aaron: 93–96, 97 Levy, Uriah P.: 194–97, 283nn10,13 Lincoln, Abraham: 99, 163, 170, 186, 232, 266n5 Linen, George: 44 Literary Gazette: 92–93, 242–43n33 Literary World: art criticism in, 21, 274n3; and contributors, 142, 265n76, 274n2, 275n10, 276n24; editors (Duyckinck

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and Mathews, 101, 141, 144, 220; C. F. Hoffman, 258n72) Livingston, John R.: 31–32, 246n15 Livingston, Maturin: 285n32 LM: 122–23, 266n86 loafers: as a literary style, 59–60, 60, 64; as wealthy idlers, 33, 35, 39, 44, 75, 89; as working class, 14, 53, 86 locofocos: 6, 100, 146, 194, 207; newspapers, 61, 125; satires of, 14, 40, 41, 41–42. See also Democratic party Log Cabin: 7, 130, 268n16 London: 57, 88, 199, 208 Longworth, Nicholas: 131, 157 Lossing, Benson J.: 63 Lotsa Nuffin: 119, 265n75 lotteries: as gambling, 113–14, 143–44, 264n61; as injuring artists, 131, 138, 139, 149, 269n27 lounges: 29, 30, 53, 92, 130, 151. See also loafers Lyceum Building: 92 Lyon, Caleb: 197, 284n17 M****r: 254n19, 255nn35,39 Mackay, James: 258n72 Macready, William: 9, 83, 146–47, 194 Mapes, James Jay: 53–55, 74, 251nn79,80 Man: 26, 245n4 Mansfield, Edward: 156, 274n2 mannerism: 21, 162, 177 Marochetti, Carlo: 217, 218, 218–19 Marsiglia, Gerlando: 242–43n33 Marx, Karl: 124, 175 Mason, Stevens T.: 19, 46 Masons: 37, 207, 260n6 Mathews, Cornelius: and American Whig Review, 259n80; and Arcturus, 54, 100, 253n8; and Literary World, 101; milieu of, 54, 100, 280n71, 281n80, 282n95; and nativism, 100; and Reveille, 289n80; and Spirit of the Times, 220; style of, 81; and Sunday Mercury, 257n56, 277n38; and True Sun, 206–7; and Yankee Doodle, 119–20, 282n93, 283n9, 286n47 Matsell, George: 29, 275n21

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INDEX

Matteson, Tompkins: 84–86, 138, 153, 162, 286n44; works by (Scarlet Letter, 165; Spirit of ’76, 84–85, 85, 122, 136, 231, 258n74; Union Portrait, 231–32, 232, 258n75) McConkey, Benjamin: 133–34, 269n32 McDougall, James A.: 63, 253n7 McLenan, John: 186, 282nn93,95 Meagher, Thomas F.: 181–82, 281nn80,81 Mechanics’ Bank: 27 Mechanics’ Institute: 66, 246n6, 251n80 Melville, Herman: 244n38, 276n24, 286n47 Mercantile Library Association: 33 Metropolitan Museum: 118 Mexican War: 99–100, 113–14, 191, 197, 205; as subject in art, 84, 136 Michelangelo: 93, 94, 177–78, 225, 241n26 Middle Tint: 250–51n74 Mills, Clark: 217; and slavery, 221, 225, 288n74; statue of Andrew Jackson, 212, 215, 215–22, 288nn66,76; statue of George Washington, 221–22, 288n66 Milton, John: 60, 66, 81 Minturn, Robert: 48, 247n29, 286–87n55 Mirror: art criticism in, 16, 56, 72, 73, 101, 255n40; editors and contributors, 64, 72, 74, 93, 128 (J. Inman, 37, 51; C. F. Hoffman, 243n34, 258n70); style of, 42 (aristocratic, 30, 57; imitative of Europe, 64–65, 72, 96; sentimental, 33–34, 127); and New Mirror, 275n5 Mitchell, William: 252n84 model artists: 70, 261n24 Monk, Joseph: 119, 266n1 Monk, Maria: 105 Monthly Cosmopolite: 246n19 Mooney, Edward: 256nn47,50, 257n52, 267n15 More-Anon, John: 72, 245n44 Morning News: 83, 100, 174, 215 Morris, George P.: and Evening Mirror, 262n37; and Home Journal, 147, 240n12, 285n38, 287n61; milieu of, 33–35, 42, 84, 86, 147, 248n36; and Mirror, 68, 72, 93, 147, 255n39, 260n9;

and National Press, 84, 153, 240n12; and New Mirror, 275n5; style of, 33, 43, 59–61, 86, 252n2, 285n38 Morris, Robert H.: 74–75 Morris’ National Press: 84–86, 240n12 Morse, Samuel B.: 71, 201–2, 251n76, 285n32; and the National Academy, 38, 44, 46, 285n33 Mott, Valentine: 193, 285n32 Mount, William S.: milieu of, 40, 54, 55, 134, 269n34, 277n29; style of (comic, 55, 100, 102, 162, 186, 246n17; truthful, 88, 107, 178); works by (Eel-Fishing, 87; Portrait of Bishop Onderdonk, 148, 148–49, 273n81; Power of Music, 149; Raffling for the Goose, 40) Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban: 25, 96 Musical Times: 112 Mutual Admiration Society: 9, 167–70, 171, 277n38. See also cliques Napoleon, Louis: 212 Nathan, Benjamin: 93 National Academy of Design: and American Art-Union, 75–76, 137–138, 153, 253n7, 271–72n58; annual private reception of, 43, 45, 122–23, 168; as commercial, 14, 38, 46, 65, 76–77; criticism of annual exhibitions, 19, 59, 72–74, 85, 113 (as exclusive, 44–52, 79–80, 164–68, 212; as too democratic, 46, 177–80; as too imitative, 16, 153–54); as injuring art, 76–77, 81–82, 135, 167, 267n8; mentioned, 63, 87, 155, 207, 220; as monopolistic, 25, 32–52 passim, 57, 121, 166–68 (protectionist, 79, 82–83, 89); officers and members, 27, 44, 93, 100, 157, 248n41 (as mediocre, 82, 89; praised by allies, 54, 74, 77, 251n79, 256n43; as tyrants, 37–38, 43, 46, 51, 59); as professionals, 14–15, 122; prominence of portraits at, 46–51, 79–80, 92, 107, 160–61; as a school, 16, 49 (and artistic tradition, 81, 92, 93, 111, 119); and women viewers at, 44, 92, 178 National Gallery, London: 47

INDEX

National Theater: 44 Native Americans: and cultural nationalism, 76, 78, 87, 165, 210, 257n59; and decorum, 42, 151–52, 180, 183, 185; and territorial expansion, 27, 90, 202–3, 218, 221 Native Americans (party): 107, 202, 220 nativism: and artisans, 139, 206, 213–14; and Democrats, 68–69, 104, 220; and religious art, 107, 111; as a third party, 40, 89, 225, 230; and George Washington, 195, 202, 211; and Whigs, 43, 105, 113, 132, 195. See also American Republican Party; Know-Nothings; Native Americans Neal, John: 58, 252n1, 125 Ned Buntline’s Own: 132. See also E. Z. C. Judson New England: and antislavery, 75, 112, 171, 175, 208–9, 278n47, 289n82; in art, 84, 111, 160, 165, 231, 276n18; ties to England, 132, 171, 185; writers from, 17, 26, 64, 71, 76, 99, 244n41, 275n7, 276n24. See also Puritans; Yankees New Era: art criticism in, 57, 61, 74–75, 196–97; editors and contributors, 227, 247–48n32, 283n13; political stances, 36, 264n61 Newman, William: 287n61 New York City: 7, 9, 13, 28, 227; as cultural center, 57, 88–89, 152, 154; as Gotham, 97–98, 105; satire of, 10, 36, 60 New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts: creation of, 100–1, 114; and National Academy, 100–1, 103, 113, 261n25; as public gallery, 103–8, 104, 112 New-York Historical Society: 155, 265n80 New York Literary Gazette: 73 New York Sketch Club: 154, 166, 186–87, 266n83, 281n80, 282n93; members of, 206, 282n95 New York University: 13, 76, 100, 198, 202, 242n29 New-Yorker (1836): art criticism in, 15, 46, 50–51, 73, 256n47, 256–57n52; editors of, 51, 242n33, 251n81, 252n85, 268n20, 275n5; mentioned, 246n7; on

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organizations for exhibiting art, 130, 250n58 New World: art criticism in, 50, 79–81, 107, 196–97, 242n32; and cultural nationalism, 55–56, 78–79, 87, 257n59; editors, 34, 76, 242–43n33, 251n75, 283n14 (James Aldrich, 95, 260n8; contributors, 241n26, 247n26, 248n36, 262n39, 268n20; Charles Lanman, 83, 258n72, 274n2); mentioned, 7 newsboys: and the penny press, 2, 17–19, 77, 77–79, 229; pictures of, 18, 53, 55, 55–57, 77; war on, 17, 88–89, 143, 243n37; and the working class, 11, 15, 29, 53–56, 59, 78, 229 Niblo’s: 29 Nichols, Samuel: 252n85 Nichols, Thomas Low: 29, 275n7 Nimrod: 199–200, 284–85n27 Noah, Mordecai M.: and Evening Star, 36–37, 42, 95–96, 197; milieu of, 34–35, 252n5; and Sun, 69, 262n43, 275n5; and Sunday Times, 283n9; and Times and Evening Star, 194, 283n11 Norton, Caroline: 148 nudes: and aristocratic taste, 28–32, 64, 88–89, 147, 150; and decorum, 29, 63, 69–70, 152, 189; and style of, 79–81, 151–52, 178, 183, 196–97, 210; and viewers of, 29, 47–48, 68, 121, 150–51, 218 Nugent, John: 247n31 Nye, Gideon: 111–13, 114, 261n25, 263–64n55 Oakes Smith, Elizabeth: and Emerson’s and Putnam’s, 277–78n41; and Great Republic, 121–22; and Newsboy, 17, 121–22, 171, 244n38, 277–78n41, 289–90n9; and Tribune, 178, 268–69n26; and women, 122–23, 169, 266n88, 280n69 O’Brien, Fitz James: 171, 282n93; and the Times, 171 O’Brien, John: 225 O’Connell, Daniel: 99, 202 Oddbody, Ann: 245n4

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INDEX

Odd Fellows: 108–9, 203, 207 Oddie, Walter Mason: 14, 16, 199, 242n31; View across the Catskills, 15 O’Dogherty Fancy Ball: 40–41 Oertel, Johannes: 287n59 old master paintings: advertising for, 28, 94 (as authentic, 95–97, 111, 260n11); buyers of, 40, 94–95, 96–98, 112–13, 161, 262n36; as Catholic, 98, 107–8, 110–11, 113; as commodities, 93–95, 102–3, 107, 113; compared to contemporary art styles, 22, 91, 98–99, 105–8, 110, 233–34 (photography, 102–3); copyists of, 73, 93, 101–2, 115, 242–43n33; cost of, 93–95, 97, 112, 118, 260n11; and cultural nationalism, 76, 83, 100–2, 112, 118–19, 175; galleries of, 96, 172, 233–34 (museums, 47, 98, 100–1, 111–12, 118–19, 120); imitation of, 101, 113, 115–18, 263n54 (hindering progress in art, 85, 87, 102–3, 105–7, 111–13, 120); sellers of, 93–95, 111–12, 120, 153, 233–34; shown with contemporary art, 96, 100–1, 120, 233–34 (at art unions, 114, 131, 133) Old Serpent: 251n76 Olympic Theater: 57, 252n84 O’Mahony, John: 225 Onderdonk, Benjamin: milieu of, 285n32; portrait of, 148, 148–49, 273n81; scandal over, 148–49, 152, 253n9, 273n80 Orr, Nathaniel: 277–78n41 Osgood, Samuel (minister): 139–40, 182 Osgood, Samuel S. (artist): 138, 270n46 O’Sullivan, John: and Democratic Review, 173–74, 259n85, 287–88n63; and Morning News, 100, 215–16, 287–88n63 Otis, James F.: and Evening Star, 125–26, 261n21; and Express, 34, 99, 261n21, 283n8; milieu of, 34, 59, 261n21, 282n95 Owen, Robert Dale: 248n35, 285n28 oysters: 29, 122, 142, 187, 193; and oyster cellars, 20, 60, 168 Paff, Michael: 93, 94, 96, 252n82 Page, William: and Broadway Journal, 257n65; and Crayon, 255n37; criticism

of, 71–81, 83–84, 86–88, 179, 180; and decorum, 57, 61, 72, 79, 255n39; mentioned, 168, 255n41, 269n34; milieu of, 34, 63, 71, 257n61, 264n69, 285n28 (Associationism, 134, 157, 172, 177, 275n15); students of, 256nn47,50, 267nn5,15, 281n80; style of (coloring, 72, 75, 80–81, 83–84, 86–88, 279– 80n67; akin to C. Elliott, 82, 88; versus neoclassicism, 77, 80–81, 256n48; as realist, 48, 73, 87; rival to Henry Inman, 61, 72–74, 78, 83, 256n45, 256–57n52); works by (Cupid and Psyche, 79, 79–81; Mother and Child, 159, 256n42; Portrait of Charles Briggs, 76; Portrait of Colonel William Stone, 21–22, 46, 48–49, 49, 75; Portrait of Governor Seward, 81; Portrait of Robert Morris, 74–75; other portraits, 34, 48, 83; Venus, 63, 88–89, 121; Young Traders, 77, 77–79) Paige, Elbridge: 250n60, 252n85, 265n72 Palmer, Erastus: 214–15, 287n61, 289n84 panics: of 1837, 7, 26, 42, 43, 195; of 1857, 19, 227 Paris: 57, 120, 257n63, 264n58 Park Theater: 69, 129, 247n24, 253n11 Parmly, Dr.: 249n41, 253n7 Parmly, Eleazar: 253n7, 255n38, 265n76 Parmly, Samuel W.: 253n7 Path Finder: 128, 267nn12,13 Paterson, A. D.: 240n11, 251n82, 257n62, 263n50 Paterson, New Jersey: 125, 228 Paul Pry: 47, 48, 127, 250n60 Paulding, James Kirke: 199, 243n33, 285n32 Peale, Rembrandt: 259n80 Peale’s Museum: 138 Peck, George: 141 penny press: business model of, 2–8, 19, 26, 34, 51, 91–92; compared to Britain and Europe, 7–9, 11, 241n26, 245n47; coverage of art in, 8–9, 10–11, 13, 79; criticism of elites, 12, 35, 188; criticism of monopolies, 21, 51, 82, 140 (controlling art, 17, 37–38, 91; as

INDEX

corporations, 23, 124–25, 129, 140–43, 150, 177; harming the public, 25, 39, 57, 144–45; serving special interests, 21, 37, 43, 170, 198); editors, 6, 11, 20, 26, 58; identification with white working class, 1–2, 10–11, 26, 36 (newsboy, 15, 56, 78; reforms, 99–100, 130, 160; viewpoint on art, 19–20, 25, 57–59); ideology of, 10, 26; neighborhood of, 6, 27, 29, 92, 246n13; as nonpartisan, 6–8, 10, 16, 105; style of, 10–12, 15, 35, 19–21, 58–59, 234–35; ties to engravers (as democratic, 44, 55, 84–85; fellow publishers, 29, 47, 205–6, 277–78n41, 289n80; as sensational, 14, 27, 223, 246n7). See also specific newspapers and editors Peoples’ Art Union: 113 Pericles: 263n54 Perry, Oliver: 223–25, 224 Persico, Luigi: 216 Peter Funk: 44, 82, 143, 258n69 Philippe, Louis: 192, 207 Phoenix: 224, 225 Photographic Art Journal: art criticism in, 152, 274n92; editors and contributors, 139–40; on imitation, 102–3; on monopolies, 159, 276n17 Philo: 242n29, 245n1 phrenology: 66–67, 69, 126, 220, 274–75n4 Picayune: art criticism in, 164, 164–66, 190, 209, 222–23, 223, 228–29, 229, 230; editors and contributors, 165–66, 190, 286n52, 289n80; mentioned, 169 Pictor: 251n77, 252n85, 279n61 picture dealers: and artists, 127, 158, 161–63, 252n82; and artists’ cooperatives, 127, 130, 131; as commodifying art, 56, 93–94, 123; window displays of, 161, 233. See also printsellers Pierce, Franklin: as President, 170, 185–86, 220, 258n74; and statue of Andrew Jackson, 216–18, 219 Pittoro: 55, 123, 252n82, 266n87 Plaindealer: 28 Planet: 52, 251n77 Plebeian: 7

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309

Plymouth Church: 278n47 Poe, Edgar Allan: as art critic, 20, 27; and Broadway Journal, 16, 243n35; as poet, 61, 95, 168, 271n50 Polk, James: policies, 84, 100, 187, 197, 216; mentioned, 187, 271n50, 284n17 Pollard, Calvin: 202–4, 285n38, 286n41 Polyanthos: 247nn27,29, 255n28 Porter, T. Olcott: 244n41 Porter, William: 220 portrait painting: and penny press, 21–22, 46, 47–51, 52–53, 77; as elite practice, 61–62, 72, 246–47n19 Post, Israel: 84 Powell, William: 134, 158, 180, 280n77, 289n7 Powers, Hiram: milieu of, 265n76, 268–69n26; style of, 70, 80, 183, 208–9, 228, 256n48; viewers of, 68, 151, 188–89, 197, 210; works by (America, 217, 222; Greek Slave, 109, 150, 176, 182–83, 193, 208–10, 210, 234; Perry statue, 225, 289n84) Pre-Raphaelites: and Crayon, 9, 182, 187; influence of, 120, 121, 171–72, 181, 187, 233 Press Club: 21, 280n71 Prince of Wales: 169, 277n39 printsellers: as licentious, 29, 54, 89; window displays of, 29, 56, 127, 150, 168, 192. See also picture dealers proslavery: and art, 185–86, 230; newspapers, 7, 9, 144, 170, 211 Providence, Rhode Island: 11 puffs: and advertiser influence, 4, 20, 11, 34, 59, 60, 151; as favoritism, 44, 47, 54, 61, 141, 144, 168, 288n71; as fraudulent, 33, 93–95, 96, 193 Puritans: as antislavery, 171, 175, 235, 278n47; as intolerant, 111, 200; as moralizing, 17, 42, 144. See also New England Putnam, George: 139, 171, 263n51 Putnam’s: art criticism in, 21, 163, 181, 211–12, 289n7; editors and contributors, 139, 171, 275n14, 277n38; and political stances, 9, 163, 290n16

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INDEX

Q: 64–65, 283n10 Quispiam: 150, 254n14 Ram’s Horn: 7 Ranney, William: 269n32 Raymond, Henry J.: and Courier and New York Enquirer, 142, 144–45, 149–50, 170; milieu of, 169, 265n76, 280n71, 284n17; and New-Yorker, 130; and New York Times, 23, 142, 144–45, 162, 169–70; and Tribune, 150, 170 Read, Harriet Fanning: 221, 288n73 Read, Thomas Buchanan: 252n5, 281n80 Redfield, J. S.: 269n34 Reed, Luman: 100–1, 265n80 Regenerator: 7 Reid, Philip: 225, 288n74 religious prejudice: among elites, 12–13, 98, 111, 194, 260n6; in the penny press (against Catholics, 26, 40, 104–5, 272n64; against Jews, 37, 289n6; against Unitarians, 47–48); in Protestant papers, 107–8, 175 Republic (1844): 68, 70, 83, 254n23 Republic (1851): 139, 272nn63,64 Republican newspapers: art criticism in, 162, 171, 185, 222, 225, 227; as monopolistic, 9, 118, 120–21, 156, 168–69; as moralizing, 170, 235, 258n74 Republican party: formation, 9, 23, 88, 89, 115; and nativism, 100, 225; and as sectional, 154, 187, 231, 232 Revolutionary War: 31, 78, 84–85, 212–14, 251n77 Revolutions of 1848: and artists, 32, 157, 172–75, 287n60; opinions of, 7, 108, 120, 180, 185, 192 Reynolds, Joshua: 81 Rice, Harvey: 289n82 Richards, David: 171 Richards, T. A.: 153, 270n46 Ridner, John P.: 138, 270n46 Riell, Henry: 252n82 Ripley, George: 157, 280n71 Roberts, M. O.: 140, 265n76, 271n54, 284n23

Robinson, Henry: 29, 35, 247n27 Robinson, Richard P.: 30–31, 32, 247n20 Robinson, Solon: 198 Roman art: 188, 197, 206, 212 Rome: 81, 109, 149, 209 Rosenberg, Charles G.: criticism of, 167– 68, 215, 283n10; and Frank Leslie’s, 287n62; works by (Columbus, 165, 166; Constellation masthead, 277n34; Statue of Washington in Union Square, 215; Wall Street, half past two, October 13, 1857, 19, 277n34); and Young America, 282n93; and Young Sam, 215 Rossiter, Thomas P.: 253n7, 269n34, 280n69 Rothermel, Peter: 290n14 Rousseau, Edmé: 80–81, 257n62 Ruskin, John: and convention, 183, 200–1; and Crayon, 290n16; and Gothic style, 180, 200; and imitation, 156, 171–72, 179, 181, 263–64n55 Sabbatarianism: hypocritical, 88–89, 143, 165; and newspapers, 7, 17, 243n37, 272n63; as state-imposed, 13, 108, 115, 228 Sadd, Henry S.: 85, 232 Salon, Paris: 52, 57, 80, 88, 120, 257n63 Sands, George: 146 Saratoga, New York: 33, 40, 42 Sargeant, Epes: and Mirror, 64–65, 243n34, 254n15, 260n9; and New World, 247n26, 251n75, 255n28, 260n8 Sargeant, John O.: 247n26, 251n75 Sartain, John: 272n73 Satan (the Devil): in art, 60, 66, 252–53n5; and elites, 12, 42, 207; and the satanic press, 27, 57, 234–35, 252n84 Saturday Press: 183–84, 187, 222 Savage, John: 181, 186, 281n80 Scott, Walter: 33, 199, 202, 204, 207 Scott, Winfield: 231 Schaus, William: gallery of, 161, 233, 275n12 and 13; paintings for, 158, 162, 163, 184

INDEX

Scott, Genio C.: 167, 277n39 sculpture: color of, 151, 197, 210, 230; materials of (bronze, 150–52, 193, 194–95, 217–19, 288n74; local stone, 229–30; marble, 194, 217, 225, 233; plaster, 66–67, 191, 195; wax, 59); modern style of versus antique, 64–65, 151, 212; political value, 190, 194–96, 214, 222; and portraits, 190–93, 197, 215, 217–18, 229–30; as public, 188, 210–11, 228; viewers of, 152, 188–89 Seabury, Samuel: 273n81 Sedgwick, Theodore: 219, 285n32 Seventh Ward Bank: 125, 266n1 Seward, William: as antislavery leader, 37, 74–75, 140, 142, 271n54; and newspapers, 142, 144, 145, 220; patronage of, 142, 248n37, 289–90n9; portraits of, 81, 256n50; and religion, 104–5 Shakespeare: 81, 193; and Shakespeare Hotel, 196 Shattuck, A. D.: 278n45 Shaw, Joshua: 257n59 Shegogue, James: 248n41, 262n40 Sigma: 118, 120, 265n78 Simms, William Gilmore: 268n19 Sinclair, Catherine: 146–47, 273n77 sixpenny papers. See Wall Street press Sketch Club (1828): artist members, 37, 46, 119, 242n31; and elite privilege, 39, 44, 46, 119, 248–49n41; guests of, 140, 259n2; literary members, 119, 243n34, 247n29 Slamm, Levi: 14, 227, 248n32, 283n13 slavery: as American, 199; defenders of, 7, 144; and Democrats, 197, 221, 227, 231; effects of, 86, 90, 258n79; and immigrants, 176; and preserving the union, 83, 142, 166–67, 227; and territorial expansion, 78, 202, 266n82 Smith, Alvin: 19, 46 Smith, John R.: 63, 129, 253n11, 267n14 Smith, Samuel Jenks: 14 Snedecor’s Gallery: 161, 171 Snelling, Anna P.: 139 Snelling, Henry: 139

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Snelling, William: 247n27, 255n28 Society Library: 103 Solomons, Wellington: 260n6 Southworth, Sylvester S. (John Smith, Jr., of Arkansas): 276n26 Spectator. See Commercial Advertiser Spencer, Lilly M.: criticism of, 134–36, 156–63, 184–87, 274n3, 275n13 (compared to Dusseldorf, 174, 177–79, 183); milieu of, 281–82n90 (Associationist, 132, 134, 156; Ohio, 131, 157, 186, 269n32; New York, 167, 170, 187, 276n24, 282n96); works by (Fi Fo Fum! 159, 162; The Forsaken, 161–63; Future President, 159, 163; Jolly Washerwoman, 159–160, 160, 161, 177–78, 276n18; Life’s Happy Hours, 132–33, 133; Pat a Cake, 163; Portrait of an Infant, 158–59, 162; Shake Hands?, 160; Thoughts on a Flower, 158; War Spirit at Home, 258n74; Young Husband, 163, 184, 184–86; Young Wife, 163) Spirit of the Times: art criticism in, 162, 168, 215, 220–21, 259n84, 277n35; on commercial galleries, 158, 220; editors, 166, 220, 244n41, 261n21, 276n21 (contributors, 167, 183, 221, 241n26, 267n7, 277n39); and political stances, 176, 220 Splifincator: 7 St. George Society: 65 Standard: 258n79 star (pseud.): 108, 263n45 Stearns, Junius Brutus: 166, 177, 178 Stetson, Charles (Ohio): 133 Stevens family: 154 Stewart, Alexander T.: 233 Stillman, William: and Crayon, 163, 171–72, 179, 182, 233; and Evening Post, 171–72, 179–81, 183; milieu of, 280n76, 282n95 Stoddard, Richard: 268–69n26, 278n45, 287n61 Stone, Lucy: 209 Stone, William L.: and Commercial Advertiser, 4, 13, 44, 51; milieu of,

312 ·

INDEX

Stone, William L. (continued) 37, 42, 51, 127; portrait of, 21–22, 46, 48–49, 49, 75 Stoppani Hall: 92, 270n47 Stout, James Varick: as artisan, 59, 63, 66–67; and decorum, 57, 65, 70, 72; milieu of, 253n11, 281n80; portrait of, 63; and Sunday Mercury, 71, 72, 207–8, 255n35; works by (bust of McDonald Clarke, 59–61, 66, 252n2; statue of Fanny Elssler, 67, 67–70, 73; statue of George Washington, 201–4, 207, 285nn32,33; statue of Queen Victoria, 64–67, 92, 208, 222) Stowe, Harriet Beecher: 109 Strong, George D.: 56–57, 251n77, 252n83, 283n13 Strong, Thomas W.: 282n93 Stuart, Carlos D.: art criticism of, 117–18, 272n63; milieu of, 275n5, 280n71, 282n95; and New-Yorker, 286n44; and Sun, 157, 206, 262n43, 275n5 Sturges, Jonathan: 248–49n41, 252n83, 265n76, 286–87n55 Stuyvesant Institute: 64, 67, 92, 138, 153 Subterranean: 7, 100, 125, 230, 283n13 Sue, Eugene: 204 Sully, Thomas: 65–66, 254n17 Sumner, Charles: 216, 287–88n63 Sun: art criticism in, 107, 157–58, 186, 282n94 (Washington monument, 203–6); editors and contributors, 117, 157, 252n1, 262n43, 265n75, 275n5 (founders, 26, 84, 248n35, 262n43, 285–86n40; mentioned, 22, 243n37; and political stances, 13, 28); as typical penny paper, 2–3, 3, 6, 26, 56 (on art, 25–26, 30, 69, 188–89; elite privilege, 143–44; public galleries, 130) Sunday Atlas: art criticism in, 145–46, 162, 165, 171, 187; favored artists, 70–71; editors and contributors, 164, 196, 249n46, 265n72, 272n63; and political stances, 55, 145, 160, 196, 228 Sunday Dispatch: art criticism in, 158, 215, 231, 274n3, 287n61; on corporate privilege, 113–14, 143–44, 198; favored

artists, 167–68, 205–6; and editors and contributors, 6, 108, 165–66, 166, 274–75n4, 275n5; and imitation, 111–13, 115; on labor, 160–61, 161; and modern art, 102; political stances of, 108–9, 122, 157, 203, 228; on style, 199–200, 203; and women viewers, 178, 189 Sunday Flash: 35, 249n46 Sunday Mercury: art criticism in, 118, 162–63, 255n35, 277n31(satirical, 164–65, 192–93); editors and contributors, 149, 164, 170, 245n44, 252n85, 265n72 (artists, 61, 63, 207, 208, 209); favored artists, 71–72, 76, 149, 202, 204, 207–8; on labor, 145, 160; on monopolies, 141, 168–69, 277n38; and political stances, 7, 13, 162, 249n46, 272n61 Sunday Morning News: 14, 61, 73, 253n11 Sunday Morning Visiter: 47, 65–66, 92, 250n60 Sunday Times: 249n46, 283n9 Sutphen, J.: 250n67 Swedenborg, Emanuel, and Swedenborgianism: 22, 71, 129, 132, 138, 145, 255n38 Sylvania Association: 128–29, 130, 267nn10,12, 268n22 Tabernacle: 72, 144, 246n9 Talbot, Jesse: milieu of, 125, 126, 179, 264nn69,70; style of, 115–18, 120, 177; works by (Christian at the Cross, 117; Happy Valley, 115–16, 116, 264n68) Tammany (Hall): and social reform, 171, 231, 216; mentioned, 266n1, 277n29, 288n65; and working-class taste, 78–79, 94, 95, 210–11, 214 Tappan, Lewis: 42, 188 tariffs: 54, 82–83, 89, 174 Tasistro, Louis: 247n28, 250n74, 283n13 Taughner, J. M.: 137 Taylor, Bayard: and Anglo-African, 185; and Literary World, 275n10; and Times, 281n79; and Tribune, 185, 268–69n26, 274–75n4, 275n10; and Union Magazine, 275n10

INDEX

Taylor, Zachary: 131, 191, 258n75, 268n23 Teniers, David: 88, 100 Tenth Street Studio building: 155, 167–70 Texas, annexation of: 69, 100 Thackeray, William M.: 241n26, 262n29 theater: advertising for, 34, 35, 255n29; and the arts, 28–29, 34, 58, 71, 247n26, 253n11; political influence on, 9, 34, 69, 83, 247n24; as sensational, 10–11, 17, 34–36, 64, 76–77, 80, 241n23 Thom, James: 228–31 Thomas, E. S.: 252n5 Thomson, James: 127 Thomson, Mortimer: 165, 286n52 Thompson, Cephas: 280n69 Thompson, Launt: 278n45, 284–85n27 Thorpe, Thomas: 166, 282n95 Times (1834): 52, 245n44, 251n76, 253n11 Times (1851): art criticism in, 162, 170, 183, 212, 228 (Cook, 281n79; O’Brien, 171–72); on decorum, 118; editors and contributors, 71, 168–69, 180, 278nn43,44, 283n10; mentioned, 2, 23, 121, 155, 179; and political stances, 9, 144–45, 169–70, 217, 258n74 Times and Commercial Intelligencer: 65, 245n44 Times and Evening Star: 194–95, 242n31, 283n11 Tippecanoe, Battle of: 34 Titian: imitation of, 78, 101, 113, 136; as pseudonym, 166–67, 254n15; works by, 28, 207, 266n87 Token: 264n69 True American: 100 True Sun: 93, 202, 204, 206, 285n35 Tryon, John: 249n53 Townsend, Peter S.: 42, 284n16 Townsend, William B.: 31, 246n16 transcendentalism: and decorum, 16, 63, 72, 83, 102, 158; and the ideal, 176–77, 182; and social reform, 71, 86, 100, 178, 275n15 (antislavery, 48, 83, 139); and Unitarians, 48, 125, 180, 272n63, 278n44 Transcript: art criticism in, 252n2; criticism of privilege, 4, 28, 31, 33; editors and

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313

contributors, 26, 35, 241n22, 246n7, 259n2 Tribune: and aestheticism, 123, 155, 159, 183, 186, 207; art criticism in, 121, 155, 171; and the art market, 134–35, 233–34; and decorum, 129, 158, 230; favored artists, 136–37, 138; and the ideal, 118, 135, 158–59, 174–75, 180; and imitation, 109, 120, 199, 275n11; editors and contributors, 141, 142, 170, 180, 185, 247n31 (Associationist, 23, 71, 131, 157, 172; bohemians, 268–69n26, 275n10; city items, 135, 165, 274–75n4, 279n66; women, 108, 178); mentioned, 2, 9, 68, 122, 178; as moralizing, 69, 143, 150, 255n29, 279n56; and political stances (anti-war, 136, 205, 206; immigration, 222–23; liberation movements, 108, 174–75; Republican, 155, 228; Whig, 6, 89, 130–31, 174, 239n4); political views of art, 162, 179, 217–18, 268n21, 280n77; and rules for art, 157, 162; and social reform, 207, 220 (antislavery, 156, 166, 168–69; Associationism, 128–29, 157–58, 166, 172). See also Greeley, Horace Trinity Church: as conservative, 148, 198, 285n38; as privileged, 13, 86, 207, 242n30; style of, 198, 200, 202–4 (ornaments, 228, 277n38) True National Democrat: 216, 288n65 Trumbull, John: 202, 258n75, 285nn32,33 Truth-Teller: 113 Tuckerman, Henry T.: 155, 249n41, 270n38 Turner, J. M. W.: 103, 116, 201 Tyler, John: and newspapers, 254n23; patronage of, 131, 268n22, 272n61; support for Democratic policies, 69, 81, 196; as Whig, 7 Ultra Marine: 46, 52, 250nn59,68 Union Magazine: 84, 275n10 Union Square: 89, 185, 209, 211 Unionist (party): adherents of, 154–55, 172, 187, 221, 227; influence of, 167, 231–33; newspapers, 215

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INDEX

Universe: 7, 246n19, 282n3. See also Sunday Dispatch Unitarians: 12, 47 Upjohn, Richard: 198, 200 Upper Tendom: 8, 33, 40–41, 176, 193, 207 urban culture: 9, 20, 52–53, 54–55, 72, 160. See also New York City Van Buren, John: 40, 69, 147, 271n49 Van Buren, Martin: in art, 56, 192; and formation of the Whigs, 7, 33, 42, 195–96, 242n31, 266n1; satires of, 28, 30–31, 41, 246n15 Vanderlyn, John: 31, 276n17 Vanity Fair: art criticism in, 164–66, 165, 200–1, 201, 230–31, 288n76; editors and contributors, 170, 230–31, 267n10, 278n45, 278n50; and political stances, 154–55, 222, 225 Varney, Maria: 132 Vatican: 81 Vaux, Calvert: 286n50 Venus, Medici: 246n19 Verplanck, Gulian: 33, 39, 248–49n41, 265n75 Victoria, Queen: 44, 64, 134, 199, 208 Vitruvius: 202, 285n35 Waddell, W. C. H.: 219 Wag: 249n46 Walcutt, William: and artists’ cooperative, 138–39, 143, 272n64; milieu of, 131, 140, 157, 220, 270n48; works by (Henry Clay medal, 206; Perry statue, 223–25, 224; statue of Washington, 205, 205–7, 209, 286n42; Toppling of the Statue of George III, 212–13, 213, 287nn58–60) Wall Street press: allied with mercantile elite, 10, 12, 33, 35, 39, 57; and artistic tradition, 57, 100, 177, 188, 191, 261n25; business model, 3–6, 95–97, 252n5; critique of penny press, 1, 6, 25, 32, 36, 42–43, 51; editors of, 11, 19, 37, 244n41, 252n5; style of, 33–34 Wallace, William Ross: 202–3, 286–87n55, 288n70, 289n81

Walsh, Mike: 100, 207, 245n4, 283n13 Ward, J. Q. A.: 180, 184 Washington, D.C.: 215, 221–22, 288n73. See also Capitol Washington Divan: 92 Washington, George: and nativism, 185, 195–96, 211, 230; popular appeal of, 27, 188, 190–91, 196–97, 230–31, 282n4; as subject in art, 78, 165, 188, 289n3. See also specific sculptures Washington Monument (Union Square): 185, 209–18, 211, 218, 225, 286–87n55, 287n57 Washington Monument Association (New York): competition for the monument, 198, 201–15, 205, 228, 285nn36–38, 286n42; members of, 219, 285n33, 286n41 Washington Square: 172 Wasp: 76, 257n56 Watson, Henry Cood: and Albion, 106, 262n39; and American Literary Gazette, 262n39; and Broadway Journal, 106, 243n35; and Evening Mirror, 262n39; and New World, 242n32, 260n8, 262n39; and Young Sam, 287n62 Watt, William M.: 249n55 Waugh, Samuel: 257n64 Webb, James Watson: and Courier and Enquirer, 19, 34–36, 127, 145, 193; milieu of, 37, 41–42, 86, 142, 256n49 Webster, Daniel: and conservative Whigs, 7, 83, 88, 185, 268–69n26, 272n67, 277n30; portraits of, 187, 192, 208, 217, 231, 249n56 Weekly Yankee: 119, 208–9, 286n51 Weir, Robert: 78, 111, 242n31 Weld, H. Hastings: 252n1, 285–86n40 Wellington, Duke of: 32, 215 Wenzler, A. H.: 271n57 West, Benjamin: 115, 262n32 West, Frederick: 272n63 West Point: 82 Western: 268n23 Western Art Union: managers of, 132–34, 158, 268–69n26; structure of, 131–35, 150, 161, 269n28, 270n46

INDEX

Wetmore, Prosper M.: as buyer of art, 78, 137–38, 146, 150, 271–72n58; milieu of, 75, 114, 127, 248–49n41, 256n48, and politics, 74, 139–40, 256n49, 271nn54,55 Wetmore, Robert: 74, 256n49, 271n54, 283n13 Whig papers: names of, 4, 286n52; as partisan, 65, 66, 142, 217, 252–53n5; on rules for art, 51–52, 112, 261; as serving the elite, 35, 46, 130, 143, 191, 199. See also Wall Street press Whig party: as fogies, 16, 99, 115; formation and dissolution of, 7, 36, 89; immigrants in, 68; policies, 142–43 Whip: 249n46 White, Edwin: 166, 270n46 White, John B.: 257n59 White, Richard Grant: and Albion, 194; and Courier and Enquirer, 145, 191, 193; and Evening Mirror, 193; and Gazette and Times, 194; milieu of, 263n51, 265n80, 283n9; portrait of, 190–94; and Putnam’s, 171; and Yankee Doodle, 206, 283n9 White Man’s Newspaper: 7 Whitehorne, James: 81–82 Whitley, Thomas Worth: as art critic, 134, 152–54, 156, 172; as artisan, 125, 132, 135, 260n7; cooperative ventures of, 128–32, 138–46 passim, 153, 267n10, 272n71; critique of art market, 22–23, 124–25, 130–35, 269n28, 272n67; as editor, 145–46, 154, 269n35, 272–73n74, 274nn96,97; and Evening Post, 23, 138, 154; and Figaro, 267n7; and Herald, 22–23, 124, 268n23; and Herald of Truth, 133–34; and Home Journal, 23, 152–54, 274n94; and Knickerbocker, 154, 271n53; milieu of (Associationist, 267n12, 272n73; in New Jersey, 125–26, 154–55; in New York, 137, 140, 146–47, 271n49, 273n76, 277n29; in Ohio, 131, 267n15, 268n22); and Tribune, 23, 135, 274–75n4; and Young Sam, 215; works by (Gipsey Camp, 154; literary paintings, 127; New

·

315

Jersey landscapes, 125–27, 266n3; Passaic Falls, 126; political cartoons, 266n2; Tappan Bay with Fonthill Castle, 146; View of Bryant’s Roslyn, 137; View of Elliott’s house, 138, 166; View of New York, 154) Whitman, Walt: as art critic, 20, 126, 161, 240n16, 264n70; and Aurora, 7; and Brooklyn Freeman, 140; and Evening Post, 179; and Putnam’s, 290n16; and Saturday Press, 183; and Subterranean, 230; and Sunday Dispatch, 115–17, 166; and Vanity Fair, 230–31 Whitney, Thomas R.: 139, 272n64 Whittredge, Worthington: 131, 133, 155, 269n27 Wikoff, Henry: 67–70, 83, 254n23, 289–90n9 Wilkes, George: 275n21, 290n12 Williams, David H.: 264n69 Williams, Henry L.: 286n51 Williams and Stevens: 163, 233, 288n71 Williamson, Amor: 108–9 Willis, Nathaniel P.: addressing women, 147, 149–53; as art critic, 210, 240n16, 273n85; and Brother Jonathan, 252n1, 261n21; and Corsair, 19–22, 47–48, 64–65, 241n26, 244n41; and Evening Mirror, 262n37, 276n17; and Herald, 149, 192; and Home Journal, 84, 210, 214, 240n12, 287n61; milieu of, 142, 145–50, 185, 192, 285n32, 286n50; and Mirror, 74, 147, 244n41, 255n39, 260n9; and New Mirror, 275n51; style of, 19–20, 33–34, 43, 193, 207 Willis, Richard S.: 112, 147 Windust’s saloon: 58 Woman: 245n4 women’s rights: rejection of, 118, 146, 176, 209, 286n43 (by women, 220–21); support for, 58, 148, 152, 176 Wood, Fernando: 227–28, 265n76, 272n67, 282n96 Working Man’s Advocate: 26, 245n4 Workingmen’s party: artists, 202; newspapers, 7, 26, 100, 241n22, 245n4; and politicians, 227

316 ·

INDEX

World: 7, 20, 230, 278n44, 283n9, 284–85n27 Wright, Fanny: 216, 248n35, 259n2 Yankee Doodle: 119–20, 282n93, 283n9, 286nn47,52 Yankee Notions: 186, 277n38 Yankees: 55, 94, 103, 188–89 Young America: 100, 186, 282n93 Young America: on accessible art, 114, 119–21, 268n19; as childish, 114, 170, 222; as commercial, 120, 156, 182–83; editors, 150, 153, 164, 170, 186, 206; as inclusive, 106, 115–18, 161, 171, 181– 83; and modern progress, 98, 99, 106; newspapers, 100, 113, 166, 174, 220, 223; as a political movement, 89–90, 91,

98–99 (antislavery, 115, 166–67, 202; compromise with the South, 115, 167, 221, 231–32; Democratic, 99–100, 112, 132, 222, 261n20; Stephen Douglas, 121, 216; expansionist, 22, 114, 216; nativist, 104–5, 132, 139; religious tolerance, 109–11; Republican, 225; supporting European revolutions, 108, 111, 175; Unionists, 221–22); as rejection of past, 102–3, 106–11; style of, 99, 111, 115, 157–58, 202–7, 223; subjects for, 177, 180, 210; and women, 120–23, 158, 160, 177–78, 187 Young American: 174, 279n56 Young Sam: 274n96, 287n62 Young, William: 101–2, 109, 244n38, 261n27

Wendy Jean Katz is Professor of Art History at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. She has explored distinctive regional networks for supporting art in The Trans-Mississippi and International Expositions of 1898–99: Art, Anthropology, and Popular Culture at the Fin- de-Siècle and Regionalism and Reform: Art and Class Formation in Antebellum Cincinnati.

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