Painting Dissent: Art, Ethics, and the American Pre-Raphaelites 9780691239323

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE America’s First Pre-Raphaelite: William James Stillman
CHAPTER TWO The American Pre-Raphaelite Landscape and Thomas Charles Farrer
CHAPTER THREE Architects of Reform: Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis, Jr.
CHAPTER FOUR Pre-Raphaelites in the West: Clarence King and John Henry Hill
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photography Credits

Citation preview

Painting Dissent

Sophie Lynford

Painting Dissent



Art, Ethics, and the American Pre-Raphaelites

Princeton University Press Princeton and Oxford

Copyright © 2022 by Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the progress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to [email protected] Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX press.princeton.edu Jacket illustration: Thomas Charles Farrer, A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm (detail), 1863. Oil on canvas, 11 ¾ × 25 ¼ in. (29.8 × 64.1 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–1865. Illustration on p. ii: detail of fig. 69 All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lynford, Sophie, author. Title: Painting dissent : art, ethics, and the American Pre-Raphaelites / Sophie Lynford. Other titles: American Pre-Raphaelites Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2022] | Revision of the author’s thesis (doctoral)—Yale University, 2019, under the title: American Pre-Raphaelites : an egalitarian ocularity. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021048307 (print) | LCCN 2021048308 (ebook) | ISBN 9780691231914 (hardback) | ISBN 9780691239323 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Pre-Raphaelitism—United States. | Painting, American—19th century. Classification: LCC ND210.5.P67 L96 2022 (print) | LCC ND210.5.P67 (ebook) | DDC 759.1309/034—dc23/eng/20220406 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048307 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021048308 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This publication has been made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art International Publication Program of CAA.

Design by Yve Ludwig This book has been composed in Arno Pro Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in Italy 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents



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Introduction CH A P TER O N E

America’s First Pre-­R aphaelite: William James Stillman

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CH A P TER T W O

The American Pre-­R aphaelite Landscape and Thomas Charles Farrer

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CH A P TER TH R E E

Architects of Reform: Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis, Jr.

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157

CH A P TER FO UR

Pre-­R aphaelites in the West:

Clarence King and John Henry Hill 209 Epilogue 223 Acknowledgments 227 Notes 240 Bibliography 248 Index 256 Photography Credits

Painting Dissent

Introduction

“Art in America has been pursued on wrong principles . . . never to this day has an American painted a line that could be construed into a reproach to American Slavery. . . . And yet, what a work of Art might have been accomplished if there had been a man with a warm heart, and a clear brain, and a skillful pencil, to seize the golden opportunity!”1 The American Pre-­R aphaelites published these impassioned words in their journal, The New Path, in January 1864, as the Civil War raged. The editorial is unprecedented as a collective political statement by a group of American artists, architects, scientists, and critics. In prose both incisive and vehement, the American Pre-­R aphaelites indicted the nation’s painting, sculpture, and architecture as reflecting and fostering a culture “infected” by the “sin of slavery” and “moral cowardice.”2 During the years of their collaborative association, the American Pre-­R aphaelites sought to seize “the golden opportunity” that they had identified by executing paintings, designing buildings, and publishing criticism that married principles of social equity with truth to nature. They were united by a nexus of commitments, devoted to the writings of the British critic John Ruskin, to the painterly and compositional priorities of the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood, and to advancing cultural and political reform through art and architecture. In contrast to their more prominent colleagues in the New York art world, the artists later labeled the Hudson River School, the American Pre-­R aphaelites established themselves as eloquent critics of slavery and antebellum American society.

Detail of fig. 3

The American Pre-­R aphaelites were the United States’ first group of artists to formally band together. Founding the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art in 1863, the group authored articles of organization—­a de facto manifesto—­and established mechanisms of governance, a publishing arm, and a platform that sought to educate the taste of the American public. The Association eventually assembled nearly thirty members.3 Its core group, however, comprised the founders and their close associates: architects Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis, Jr.; critic and writer Clarence Cook; scientists Clarence King and James Gardiner; and painters Thomas Charles Farrer, Charles Herbert Moore, John William Hill and John Henry Hill (father and son), William Trost Richards, and Henry Roderick Newman. Believing the “union of the Arts is necessary for the full development of each,” the Association argued that the “close connection between Architecture, Sculpture and Painting” allowed those arts to find “their highest perfection” and “greatest glory.”4 This book’s focus mirrors the integrated objectives of the American Pre-­ Raphaelites themselves by engaging the range of their output across media, including painting, drawing, photography, and architecture, as well as art criticism and scientific reports. Because American Pre-­R aphaelite paintings and watercolors do not overtly depict slavery, manumission, or war, it can be difficult to identify political messages within their imagery. To apprehend the extent of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ pictorial and political interventions, we must situate their visual productions within the context of their comprehensive and interdisciplinary agenda—­which aimed at nothing less than a radical displacement of established modes of landscape painting, in addition to a reformation of American architecture and criticism. Although formally incorporated as the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, the group’s members referred to themselves by a variety of titles, as Ruskinians, Realists, and, most notably, as “Pre-­R aphaelites,” an appellation also employed by contemporary reviewers.5 The label indicated their aspiration to produce work with the reformist zeal that characterized the early productions of the British Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood, and signaled to their American audience that their project was not untested. Like the Brotherhood, American Pre-­R aphaelite artists renounced established academic traditions governing subject selection and pictorial composition. In pursuing a meticulously executed realism in painting and naturalistic sculptural carving in architecture, the American Pre-­R aphaelites followed the examples of the Brotherhood and actively promulgated Ruskin’s aesthetic doctrines on American soil. While the terms “Ruskinian” and “Pre-­R aphaelite” carried sometimes overlapping but often distinct meanings in the British cultural conversation, in the United States they were synonymous, referring to the minute transcription of botanical and geological elements. In this sense, the Association’s artists followed key stylistic choices made by British Pre-­R aphaelites, but rejected the London artists’ preoccupations with medieval, biblical, and Shakespearean narratives and the compositions of Quattrocento Italian art in favor of landscapes, nature studies, and still lifes of modest dimensions.

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The British Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood had formed in 1848 with the goal of reviving techniques and styles found in Italian art before the later works of Raphael. The Brotherhood believed that reintroducing the vibrant palette, angular linearity, and flattened surfaces they saw in the work of fifteenth-­century Italian painting would herald a reformation of contemporary British art and society. One of the Brotherhood’s strikingly modern innovations, however, and one that their American counterparts emulated, was that each object pictured, whether it was a human figure, a lily, or a goat, had been painstakingly rendered from direct observation. In translating these practices across the Atlantic, the Americans embraced the realist rather than the revivalist elements of the Pre-­R aphaelite project, deploying its principles to upend existing traditions of landscape painting in the United States. Though neither architects nor scientists were among the Brotherhood’s founding members, both professions were represented at the formation of the Association, facilitating from the outset the unification of painting, sculpture, and architecture and engagement with the increasingly rigorous discourse of scientific empiricism. A vital factor in the American movement’s success was the arrival of Thomas Charles Farrer, a British expatriate artist, in New York in 1858. Farrer had witnessed three of the central initiatives of the British movement, including realism in painting, a concerted effort to teach drawing to artists and workers, and a sustained campaign to erect Gothic Revival structures in which painting and sculpture converged. Farrer had attended the Working Men’s College in London, where he was a student of Ruskin and the Pre-­R aphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The experience also provided him an opportunity to observe such visiting faculty as Edward Burne-­Jones and Val Prinsep as they mobilized under Rossetti’s leadership to paint the murals on the bare walls of the Oxford Union, an important Gothic Revival structure. Spurred by Farrer, the American movement adopted many of the strategies that the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood had developed heuristically over a decade, including a posture of dissent, at once genuine and performative, against prevailing artistic traditions and political conditions. Esteemed predecessors were necessarily condemned. Artistic and political protest were linked. While British Pre-­R aphaelite painters William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais attended the Chartist demonstration in London in April 1848, Wight and Sturgis took sustained political action on behalf of the nascent Republican Party. The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ decision to model their most potent strategies after the British experience also extended to their publication. In their Articles of Organization, the American Pre-­R aphaelites determined “to conduct a journal or magazine for general circulation, containing critical notices and essays, with any matter that may tend to advance the cause.”6 In the United States, there had been a direct precedent for the Association’s publishing organ, The New Path, in The Crayon, the first American periodical devoted to the arts. But in conceiving their journal, the Association also intently followed the example of two short-­lived magazines associated with British Pre-­R aphaelitism, The Germ and The Oxford and Cambridge

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Magazine.7 Published by the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood in 1850, The Germ addressed in print many of the issues that the Brotherhood engaged in their paintings, fulfilling the role—­as The New Path did for the Americans—­of a manifesto. Comprising fiction, poetry, essays, reviews, and etchings, The Germ encouraged the production of “pure transcripts and faithful studies from nature . . . seeking after originality in a more humble manner than has been practiced since the decline of Italian Art in the Middle Ages.”8 The journal also championed progressive reform in Victorian culture through a return to medieval art practices and social organization. The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, published in 1856 and edited by William Morris and William Fulford, initially absorbed the influence of The Germ’s artistic progressivism and eventually expanded its own platform to include what Thomas J. Tobin has described as “a proto-­socialist call to action on behalf of the under-­represented and oppressed.”9 While The New Path did not advocate for direct political mobilization, the American Pre-­R aphaelites understood from the earliest days of their Association that their movement would require a publication that blended aesthetic and political protest, and that could confront the “general contagion” that catalyzed their founding.10 Their journal ultimately evolved into one of the most substantive, if eclectic, American art publications of the era. From its pages, the American Pre-­R aphaelites promulgated holistic dissent from traditions of academic painting, endeavoring “to educate the public to a better understanding of the representative Arts,” calling for “complete and faithful study of Nature,” and advocating for the construction of secular Gothic Revival structures that were purpose-­built for the display of both Pre-­R aphaelite painting and sculptural carving.11

An Egalitarian Opticality The American Pre-­R aphaelites were inspired not only by Ruskin’s aesthetic prescriptions, but also by his increasingly pointed cultural and economic critiques that linked the condition of a nation to the condition of its art. The group was convinced that mainstream antebellum art and architecture, executed by “men who did not strike slavery when strokes were needed,” as they wrote in The New Path, had produced a society “beset on all sides by old-­time prejudice and obstinate ignorance.”12 In response, the American Pre-­R aphaelites waged what they deemed was a “most uncompromising war against all deception and untruth.”13 In painting, this revolt was expressed through the repudiation of idealized landscape representation that, they averred, had long disguised a moral corruption threatening the promise of their nation’s democratic experiment. One of the group’s most audacious innovations was their application of an allover mimesis. Borrowed from the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood, this approach, in which foreground and background objects were presented with startling clarity, had aligned the British group’s technical execution with its political dispositions. Fundamental to this alignment of the formal and ideological were strategies that made visible the labor of the artist. The Brotherhood composed their canvases with

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a profusion of minute brushstrokes, conspicuously rendered with vibrant pigments that announced the group’s resistance to academic mandates that called for tonal equilibrium. In her reading of these techniques, Elizabeth Prettejohn has explained how the Brotherhood’s multiple strategies for attaining unprecedented pictorial precision elevated a painting “apparently without political content,” such as John Inchbold’s In Early Spring: A Study in March (fig. 1), into a cognitive “blueprint for a better society, one in which the fragile primrose is not subordinated to the mighty tree.”14 The American Pre-­R aphaelites imported to the United States the Brotherhood’s spatial innovations, bold palette, and arduous facture. Pre-­R aphaelite technical methods, applied to representations of the American landscape, carried a progressive political charge in the United States as they had in Britain. The American landscape genre was already heavily freighted by competing political, social, and economic interests, including campaigns to preserve virgin wilderness and to legitimize westward settlement. Against this backdrop of dramatic tensions, American Pre-­R aphaelite painters innovated a new type of landscape painting. They rejected the formulas of picturesque composition as well as its Romantic and expansionist associations adopted by the previous generation of American artists, including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Frederic Church. Those painters found it culturally resonant and commercially rewarding to present America as a new—­if conflicted—­Eden. The American Pre-­R aphaelites, skeptical of artistic conventions that extolled the New World’s paradisiacal status, instead pursued exacting mimesis that they understood as the sole means to unleash the spiritual and liberative energies that inhered in the natural world. The American Pre-­R aphaelites deployed their paintings and journal to challenge the long-­standing landscape conventions that shaped and regulated the viewer’s experience. The legacy of seventeenth-­century European masters such as Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, mediated through British paintings and prints, had already been absorbed and adapted by a previous generation of American artists. But in the view of the American Pre-­R aphaelites, the hierarchy of genres and the demands for stylistic conformity with well-­established doctrines of the beautiful, the picturesque, and the sublime repressed radical expressions of truth. Their movement renounced traditional spatial configurations, formulaic entry points, forced perspective, and pathways that lured the eye through a composition, devices upon which mainstream American landscape painters consistently relied, visible in such works as Thomas Cole’s View on the Catskill—­Early Autumn (1836–­37, fig. 2). The American Pre-­R aphaelites understood such visual paradigms as inherited schema that sustained the illusion that the viewer could inhabit and take cognitive possession of the pictured, and, by extension, the physical landscape.15 In The New Path, the American Pre-­R aphaelites took the extraordinary step of arguing that contemporary painters who embraced the templates of the picturesque were complicit in an act of visual domination that reinforced a political ethos condoning enslavement. “The moral atmosphere at home has been deadly to all high aspiration or achievement,” they contended. “We utterly deny the value of the

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Fig. 1. John William Inchbold, In Early Spring: A Study in March, exhibited 1855. Oil on canvas, 20 ⅞ × 13 ¾ in. (53 × 35 cm). Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, UK.

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Fig. 2. Thomas Cole, View on the Catskill—­ Early Autumn, 1836–­37. Oil on canvas, 39 × 63 in. (99.1 × 160 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

greater number of Academic laws, believing that they and the Academies which made and uphold them have done harm, and only harm.”16 There is no evidence to suggest that the idealized productions of nineteenth-­ century mainstream landscape painters intentionally bolstered the institution of slavery. Nearly all the prominent artists impugned by the American Pre-­R aphaelites supported the Union cause. Works by such artists as Church, Sanford Gifford, and Martin Johnson Heade, particularly in the early 1860s, have long been understood to offer multivalent metaphors about the impending Civil War. Once fighting began, several well-­publicized canvases, including Church’s The Icebergs (1861, Dallas Museum of Art) and Our Banner in the Sky (1861, Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection), were read as tacitly or explicitly buttressing the North’s efforts.17 But painted allegories that reflected popular sentiment constituted insufficient social and political interventions and were, for the American Pre-­R aphaelites, active agents of injustice. The movement lamented the lost opportunity to condemn slavery through visual art: “What a splendor of fame, with what consciousness of desert, might have been won by him who should have held this infamy up for our loathing

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and our tears of burning shame, in marble or on the canvas.”18 The American Pre-­ Raphaelites believed that landscape painting, rightly conceived and executed, could propel the abolitionist cause, and that artists who relinquished this obligation, who participated in promoting the national mythos of righteous expansion, were guilty of abetting slavery’s perpetuation. The urgent aesthetic and political issues at stake in American Pre-­R aphaelite painting animate Charles Herbert Moore’s Hudson River, Above Catskill (1865, fig. 3). The canvas exposes a complex relationship between the artist and the works of earlier and contemporary American landscape painters. In Moore’s depiction of a small strip of the Hudson riverfront, painted the month the Civil War ended, he records “every beautiful pebble,” “with equal exactness,” while responding to the grief and anxiety imposed by the national conflict.19 Moore presents the river’s rocky bank littered with antipicturesque detritus. With the precision of a geologist, he renders fragments of rocks with such specificity that they are identifiable as the shales and carbonates that underlie the Hudson River at Catskill. Scattered bones and the remnants of an equine skull have been deposited next to a rib bone, and, next to that, a red apple. A small rowboat, emptied of its oars, appears as if it has recently been dragged onshore. Moore’s stranded boat introduces contemporary associations with abandoned vessels, often read during the period as emblems of the foundered ship of state, connoting, as David C. Miller has written, “fears for and even a loss of faith in the American corporate enterprise during and following the Civil War.”20 Patricia Junker persuasively extends this argument to her reading of Moore’s work, which she interprets as a “private memorial” to Lincoln, assassinated that April.21 She asks, “Is that haunting absence of an oarsman that we feel in Moore’s painting the dead Lincoln, and the oar-­less boat the ship of state?”22 Hudson River, Above Catskill holds this allegorical reading in dynamic tension with its insistence on its extemporaneous origin. Moore’s unusual assemblage privileges the Pre-­Raphaelite allegiance to faithful transcription over the aesthetic and moral compromises that he found in grandiose, idealized landscapes and viewed as the price of a false compositional harmony. The artist’s primary endeavor is to treat his chosen Catskill landscape as still life, as a collection of disparate objects, rather than as unified into a grand Claudean vision. The profusion of botanical, biological, and geological residua, each the product of a discrete observation, conflates the generative act of the artist with the taxonomic discipline of the scientist. But Moore’s commitment to realism did not exempt him from producing imagery that mourned the war’s human carnage. While endowing his work with psychological freight, selecting and painting landscapes that were permeable to political readings, Moore remained steadfast to the American Pre-­ Raphaelite project of rendering seemingly uncomposed natural settings with what this book claims is American Pre-­R aphaelitism’s signature egalitarian opticality. The American Pre-­R aphaelites developed their egalitarian opticality in paintings that refused compositional conventions endorsing rank, class, power, and possession, elevating the humble while eschewing the monumental. Prior to the formation of the Association, Farrer had announced his political commitments through pictorial

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content in early figural works, several of which incorporated likenesses of the abolitionist John Brown.23 In landscapes and nature studies produced after the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ formal association, Farrer and his colleagues eliminated overt political imagery from their work and instead deployed organizational strategies and painterly techniques to propound their reformist priorities by linking them to new habits of perception. Paintings that rejected picturesque arrangement, the American Pre-­R aphaelites believed, and that were completed with meticulous verism, could promote an epistemic shift in art that would in turn foster egalitarian values. Apprehending a work that was executed according to Pre-­R aphaelite prescriptions, such as Hudson River, Above Catskill, would condition viewers to see with an “enfranchised eye,” according to Brotherhood painter William Holman Hunt.24 Viewers who embraced art based on principles of pictorial democracy—­in which each painted object is accorded equal attention—­would more likely nurture a progressive and transformative vision of society. Moore’s chosen subject was painted in open defiance of established American landscape conventions. In picturing the bank of the Hudson in Catskill, a site made famous by Cole, one of the nation’s most revered artists, Moore challenged the standing of Cole and his followers. Hudson River, Above Catskill asserts that these northeastern locales were not the proprietary domain of a cadre of New York–­based painters who had monopolized them for the preceding forty years. Because their movement grew out of New York, American Pre-­R aphaelites could hardly avoid the scenery of the Hudson River Valley, Catskills, Adirondacks, and Connecticut River Valley. Their rebellion would be expressed not through their selection of sketching grounds, but through their aesthetic and stylistic choices. In an early issue of The New Path, the American Pre-­R aphaelites announced the difference between their project and that of their more famous predecessors. The Association referred to the work of mainstream landscape painters as “sentimental, dreamy and struggling after that it calls the ideal,” and their own work as a second school of art, “hard-­working, wide awake, and struggling after the real and true.”25 There is, however, no monolithic form of realism that encompasses all the styles of the American Pre-­R aphaelites. Each artist, while internalizing his own reading of Ruskin and engagement with the British Pre-­R aphaelites, possessed an idiosyncratic sensibility that blended American and British influences. Yet the American Pre-­R aphaelites were united in their belief that realism was the only method of painting that could fulfill Ruskin’s imperative to preserve a visual record of geologic, natural, and human history; it was consonant with the increasing emphasis on scientific accuracy; and it was the indispensable corrective to America’s “spiritual obesity,” specifically to the grandiose settings and idealized representations of academic landscape painters.26 Fig. 3. (overleaf) Charles Herbert Moore, Hudson River, Above Catskill, 1865. Oil on canvas, 10 ⅛ × 16 in. (25.7 × 40.6 cm). Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, 2003.9.

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The architect Russell Sturgis clarified this ideological cornerstone of the Association in an article, “The Conditions of Art in America.” He elucidated a working definition for the realism practiced by the American Pre-­R aphaelites: “Realism . . . is the desire and effort to see everything visible as it truly and essentially is, and to conceive of everything not visible as it might be. . . . It is the effort to avoid affectation, academical laws, and prescribed formulas, and to work for the disciplined natural sense of right alone.”27  Sturgis’s statement demonstrates that the American Pre-­R aphaelites had internalized Ruskin’s valorization of the unique agency of sight as it apprehends “the pure facts” of nature.28 Sturgis pushes his argument from the perceptual into the realm of the moral: optical integrity in the creation of art is an essential precondition to truth. The radicalism of American Pre-­R aphaelite painting lay in the violation of the landscape genre’s traditional spatial relationships and application of hyperrealist facture. Pre-­R aphaelite architects, by contrast, articulated the movement’s agenda by employing the materials, ornamentation, and redemptive semantic of Gothic forms. The American Pre-­R aphaelites believed there was a direct linkage between the imperatives to depict landscape realistically and to construct naturalistic forms in architecture; both led back to the teachings of Ruskin. Beauty in both arts, he argued in Modern Painters III, depended on the apprehension and imitation of the unified forms apparent everywhere in nature, and not on a display of the artist’s subjectivity.29 The American Pre-­Raphaelite architects adopted Ruskin’s romanticizing posture toward the status and effectiveness of medieval guilds as a form of social organization and a generative setting for artistic creativity. In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin argued that in Gothic architecture one could find the communal principles necessary for any civic expression of a high order. He traced the degradation of British culture, art, and politics to the arc of industrialization that the nation had, in his view, suffered since the late eighteenth century, resulting in the diminution of the worker’s role and value. Gothic Revivalism had the potential not only to restore the great building and design accomplishments of the Middle Ages, but to return the worker to a position of autonomy and dignity, necessary conditions to inspire individual and collective creativity. The Association’s architects Wight and Sturgis similarly concluded that medieval designs offered a dynamic paradigm to address their own nation’s contemporary architectural demands. As Wight wrote in The New Path, “There is no reason therefore to doubt that if one is thoroughly acquainted with the needs of the present time, and masters the principles of the medievalists, he will be able to commence at a point only a little anterior to where they left off and his work will approach perfection according to the skill and knowledge of the mind that controls it.”30 The invocation of the Middle Ages, for the American Pre-­R aphaelites, as for Ruskin, constituted an assertion of the best properties of aesthetic imagination, including heightened perception and the privileging of bold color and natural forms. Medieval history offered a living past, characterized by a profusion of artistic expression made possible by communal bonds

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antithetical to the paucity of spirit, commercial aggrandizement, and social alienation that the group feared had beset the American experiment. Within a half decade, Association members had made their mark in multiple arenas of American culture beyond painting, including art collecting, exhibition design, public and private architectural commissions, nationally and internationally circulated newspapers and journals, and higher education. Considering these activities as part of a broad interartistic enterprise allows us to recover the painted, architectural, and critical achievements of the American Pre-­R aphaelites from the margins of nineteenth-­century culture and situate them within vital transatlantic discourses on art, slavery, pedagogy, and politics.

Genealogies American Pre-­R aphaelitism received its earliest institutional recognition in 1985. The Brooklyn Museum mounted The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-­Raphaelites, curated by Linda Ferber and William Gerdts. The show and catalogue presented a wide sampling of American Pre-­R aphaelite paintings and drawings, and narrated, for the first time, the story of the Association’s founding, its proselytizing of Ruskinian doctrine in the United States, and its revolt against the era’s mainstream landscape painters. Reviewers recognized the curators’ major achievement of having “rescued the movement—­most of its works still unlocated—­from near-­oblivion.”31 Ferber and Gerdts wrote of the “particularly maddening” dilemma that the American Pre-­ Raphaelites had presented to art historians: that the locations of many paintings and watercolors by Association members mentioned in contemporary letters and reviews were unknown. Fifteen years seeking lost work led to the important exhibition at Brooklyn. In the decades following the show, the curators’ hope that their “exhibition [would] provide information and stimulus to bring . . . lost works to light” was realized.32 The present study has significantly benefited from the identification and attribution of American Pre-­R aphaelite works made in the intervening years. In their catalogue, Ferber and Gerdts, as well as contributors Kathleen Foster and Susan Casteras, harnessed primary sources that remain crucial to any examination on the topic today.33 The exhibition and catalogue raised important issues that scholars of American art, in the years immediately following, were compelled to address in their histories of nineteenth-­century American landscape painting. Responses to Ferber and Gerdts included attempts to assimilate American Pre-­R aphaelitism into a broader narrative, homogenizing its contributions and thus diluting the significance of its legacy. The most notable critical reaction to the Brooklyn Museum’s show was by the curators of American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, led by John Howat at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987. In his catalogue essay, Kevin Avery countered the assertion of Ferber and Gerdts and argued that the work of the American Pre-­R aphaelites did not represent innovation, much less a radical initiative. Instead, Avery contended, the American Pre-­R aphaelites provoked a meaningful

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dialogue over the value of paintings completed out of doors while simultaneously encouraging increased interest among the era’s artists in rendering nature with greater fidelity. Avery took the position that the American Pre-­R aphaelite standard of truth to nature had been “reflected to a greater or lesser degree in Durand’s art and aesthetic . . . and it was especially visible in the art of Church.”34 Overlooking the American Pre-­ Raphaelites’ social and political interventions, Avery concluded that the aesthetic concerns and pictorial techniques adopted by the group’s artists had been established in the United States the decade before the founding of the Association in 1863. The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ clamorous presence in the nineteenth-­century New York art world was recognized by Angela Miller in The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–­1875 (1993). Miller separated the contributions of the American Pre-­R aphaelites, who represented the “extremes of radical pleinairism,” from those of popular contemporary landscape painters, who executed sketches and studies in nature, but completed largely invented compositions in their studios. Filled with “oedipal rage” for Cole and “struggling for an independent voice,” the American Pre-­R aphaelites, in Miller’s account, were motivated by “a contrary impulse  .  .  . to emphasize the foreground,” as opposed to the distant vistas and recessional space associated with prospect or picturesque views.35 But this aspect of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ enterprise was neither its only nor its most notable project. Miller demonstrated how representations of northeastern locales by Cole, Church, and Durand, and later South American and western scenes by Church and Albert Bierstadt, were imbued with social and political content that served “the multiple and shifting needs of nationalist sentiment.”36 Painting Dissent explores how the American Pre-­R aphaelites wrestled with these same tensions. As the first cohort of artists in formal association working in the United States, they put forth interdisciplinary proposals to effect social, cultural, and political reform that were ultimately far more ambitious in scope than the primarily visual output of their better-­known contemporaries. In 2007, the Fogg Art Museum organized The Last Ruskinians: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Herbert Moore, and Their Circle, which accepted the major claims of the Brooklyn exhibition but interrogated the narrative surrounding the movement’s dissolution.37 Curated by Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., and Virginia Anderson, The Last Ruskinians centered on Norton, first professor of history of the fine arts at Harvard, and Moore, who, at Norton’s invitation, became Harvard’s first drawing instructor in 1874. One of Stebbins’s and Anderson’s most salient additions to the scholarship was their argument that, following the disbandment of the Association, the Ruskinian pedagogical model, through the teachings of Moore, was transmitted to a second generation of American painters who worked into the early twentieth century.38 In 2019, the American Pre-­R aphaelite artists received renewed attention in the exhibition The American Pre-­Raphaelites: Radical Realists, guest curated by Linda Ferber at the National Gallery of Art on the occasion of the bicentenary of Ruskin’s birth. The exhibition showcased a large oeuvre of American Pre-­R aphaelite painting

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and drawing, a significant portion still privately held, including many works that had not been located at the time of the Brooklyn show. Essays in the accompanying catalogue investigated dimensions of American Pre-­R aphaelite imagery unaddressed in the earlier display. For instance, Barbara Gallati examined how Association painters inserted allegorical references into otherwise uncomposed landscapes, and Mark Mitchell considered the American Pre-­R aphaelite still-­life project within the larger history of the genre in the nineteenth-­century United States. The essay I contributed to the National Gallery’s catalogue, “Abolitionism and the American Pre-­R aphaelite Experiment,” highlighted a vital dimension of the Association, comprehensively discussed here: the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ productive embrace of dissent, and their mission to “stir up strife,” “breed discontent,” and “pull down unsound reputations.”39

Contours of Dissent This book is the first to examine the nature and development of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ transatlantic dialogue. Beyond acknowledging the importance of Ruskin’s doctrine of “truth to nature” and the eponymous affiliation with the Pre-­ Raphaelite Brotherhood, past scholarship has largely left unexplored the influence of British textual and visual sources on the development of American Pre-­R aphaelitism. By employing an Atlanticist perspective, I argue that the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement challenges the dominant narrative of nineteenth-­ century American painting. That historiography has traditionally advanced the view that the new nation’s cultural, spiritual, and commercial aspirations were formally expressed in the landscape imagery of the Hudson River School. I demonstrate how the American Pre-­ Raphaelites disrupt this account. By importing British models of theory and praxis, the movement generated public debate over the merits and deficiencies of idealized landscapes. The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ vehement participation in these period conversations revises our understanding of the often-­antagonistic forces at play in picturing America during the nineteenth century’s most turbulent decades. This study also considers the ominous shadow cast over the Association’s inaugural moment in January 1863, just weeks before the passage of the Draft Act, which subjected all the young men present to conscription. Of the Association’s core members, only Farrer, a British expatriate, enlisted in the Union army. It is not known whether the others formally purchased commutations or hired substitutes, a common practice, but their limited financial resources may well have made this course unavailable.40 Two of the Association’s scientist members, Clarence King and James Gardiner, ventured west, joining the California Geological Survey in 1863. Clarence Cook and John Henry Hill both conveniently planned trips to England to view the works of J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood during the war years. This behavior, especially in light of the devoutness of the group’s religious faith, and the nature of their subsequent expressions of dissent, should not be understood solely as a strategy to avoid the battlefield. It should also be distinguished from the

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more familiar term, coined in the eighteenth century, “conscientious objection”; it may be more reasonably construed as “conscientious evasion,” a concept of political resistance set forth by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice (1971).41 Characterized by covert disobedience, conscientious evasion suggests personal reflection and modesty often absent from more public displays of dissidence, a posture also reflected in the humble natural motifs in American Pre-­R aphaelite imagery. Their decision to abstain from service, however, neither undermines the sincerity of their abolitionist, pro-­ Union views nor diminishes the conviction with which they advanced a movement to oppose cultural norms that they believed were long complicit in oppression. Indeed, their most aggressive collective struggle to alter the aesthetic taste of the American people occurred during the war years. The group aligned the North’s campaign on the battlefield with their own efforts to defeat the cultural hegemony persistently on display in the galleries of the National Academy of Design. “Wonderful revolutions are going on at present,” Moore wrote in The New Path. Not only “physical wars between nations,” but “mental wars . . . producing far more serious results: they are shaking the dogmas of men to their very foundations.”42 Comprising four chapters and an epilogue, this book is organized around key figures whose careers emblematize both Pre-­R aphaelite aesthetics and the reformist aspirations that endowed the movement with intensity and momentum. I consider the contributions of the Association’s artists, architects, critics, and scientists, and feature members whose Civil War–­period output was in active dialogue with contemporary British art and criticism. Though he never crossed the Atlantic, Ruskin is a leading protagonist throughout this study. His writings on painting, architecture, and political economy were consumed voraciously by the American Pre-­R aphaelites and often quoted in The New Path. Several members maintained personal correspondence with him, visited him in England, and followed his suggested European travel itineraries. These relationships were facilitated by Norton, Ruskin’s American friend, who became a leading patron of the American Pre-­R aphaelites. As the United States’ first professor of art history, as coeditor of the North American Review, the nation’s first literary magazine, and as Ruskin’s closest confidant and executor, Norton is a pivotal character in the history of art and political reform in the nineteenth-­century United States. He, too, reappears in each chapter as a figure who linked the movement to deeper intellectual traditions, held it to higher standards of aesthetic discourse, and provided its members with financial support as well as painting and architectural commissions. The roles of the patrons of American Pre-­R aphaelitism and Gothic Revivalism in the United States are crucial to understanding the movement’s trajectory. Most integral were Norton and his friend and colleague at Yale, Daniel Coit Gilman, a professor of political geography at the Sheffield Scientific School. Though Gilman is less well known, he was among the most respected educators and public intellectuals of his era. After years promoting the sciences at Yale, a vital member of the group who raised the status of scientific study at the college level, Gilman became the founding president of Johns Hopkins University and pioneered graduate education across the

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sciences and humanities. Both Norton and Gilman were indispensable spokesmen within elite circles on behalf of the movement, leveraging the standing of Harvard and Yale to legitimize the Association’s message and projects. Reinserting these major figures into what has been considered a minor movement elevates the status of American Pre-­R aphaelitism within the history of nineteenth-­century American art. Further, recognizing the formerly unknown roles played by Norton and Gilman in the expansion of American Pre-­R aphaelitism has opened new avenues for research. Norton’s and Gilman’s archives have not been mined in previous considerations of the movement. Correspondence between the American Pre-­R aphaelites and their supporters recovers the network of contacts that gave rise to the Association and reveals how its members tapped patrons with cosmopolitan sophistication, academic credentials, and prestigious institutional affiliations. The theoretical schema of Pierre Bourdieu, in which the matrix of institutional power and aesthetic essentialism is profitably dissected, provides a useful methodology for examining the unique collocation of “agents” that converged and attempted to enact the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ agenda. Specifically, Bourdieu’s elucidations of cultural capital and agents within the field of cultural production assist our understanding of how the founding members of American Pre-­R aphaelitism, and their patrons, with their disparate economic, educational, and social backgrounds, assembled into a coherent and, for a short time, powerful aesthetic and political movement. While Bourdieu’s notion of structural homologies across class has explanatory power with respect to the formation of the Association, this book argues that the support the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ patrons offered the movement served not only to preserve and grow their financial and cultural capital. Instead, a shared conception of dissent—­expressed most fervently in a hatred of slavery and mercenary greed—­ generated affinities between the American Pre-­R aphaelites as cultural producers and the more dominant class represented by their patrons. One objective of this book is to reconstruct how the movement advanced causes in which its leading patrons and artists had mutual vested interests, and to identify the value of a dissenting visual realism in a moment of national schism. As respected professors and public intellectuals with substantial wealth, Norton and Gilman possessed broader platforms from which to pursue social distinction than those offered by the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement. Nevertheless, they ardently supported the Association. The clustering of mutual interests energized players within the overlapping fields of art, science, education, and politics, particularly during the fraught years of the war. Such a dynamic is recognizable within Bourdieu’s schema of the site of cultural production. He explained, “The fact remains that the cultural producers are able to use the power conferred on them, especially in periods of crisis, by their capacity to put forward a critical definition of the social world, to mobilize the potential strength of the dominated classes and subvert the order prevailing in the field of power.”43 While the landscape paintings and nature studies of the American Pre-­R aphaelites may not at first glance represent the most

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politically charged of artistic enunciations, the collaborative and subversive energy of the Association’s aesthetic and imagery, their architecture, and their critical writings, once placed into the hands of their socially skilled and culturally well-­capitalized patrons, carried “a critical definition of the social world.” An invocation of Bourdieu’s sociology of the arts, particularly as it aligns the interests of the patron class with the avant-­garde aspirations of its artist-­practitioners, risks advancing an excessively generous characterization of the true motives of powerful patrons. It can be presumptively acknowledged that both Norton’s and Gilman’s support of American Pre-­R aphaelitism and Gothic Revivalism served in some measure to preserve and grow their economic and political capital. And yet, I eschew Michel Foucault’s construct of “power-­knowledge” and Bourdieu’s related formulations, which portray virtually all acts of political liberalism or solidarity with the less fortunate as little more than socially encoded displays performed to preserve established hierarchies.44 Rather, I build upon more recent scholarly investigations pursued by intellectual historians, including Leslie Butler, Linda Dowling, and Mark Rennella, in order to assert that figures such as Norton and Gilman developed a vital alliance between visual and political reform, while unceasingly promoting their campaigns against slavery, corrupt politics, and imperialist incursions.45 Previous characterizations of Norton as the leading exemplar of the “genteel tradition” too easily dismiss nineteenth-­century reformers as ignoring Gilded Age America’s key economic and political issues, particularly the clash between rapidly emerging capital and the labor required to sustain industrial development.46 But Norton’s and Gilman’s involvement in the abolitionist cause—­which comprised the most politically radical activities of their era—­places them within the most progressive movements of their time. Within the realm of the arts, Norton’s and Gilman’s patronage practices can be interpreted as endorsing the genuine reformist objectives of the American Pre-­R aphaelites. As Patricia Hills has written, “One way to control the art of the country was to patronize those artists whose art expressed ‘the great national interests.’ ”47 Yet Norton and Gilman consciously chose to avoid patronizing artists such as Bierstadt or Thomas Moran, whose idealized landscapes, in yoking concepts of terrain and expansion with the pursuit of individual and national wealth, would have constituted a more lucrative and socially advantageous collecting strategy than did their purchases of the diminutive nature studies and small-­scale landscapes of the American Pre-­R aphaelites.

The Movement in Context The following chapters proceed chronologically. Chapter 1 begins around 1850, with William Stillman’s first trip to England and meeting with Ruskin, while chapter 4 ends in the first half of the 1870s, with John Henry Hill launching an alternative vision of the American West, one Pre-­R aphaelite in sensibility. Of all the individuals under examination in this book, Stillman has received the most scholarly attention for his journalistic, photographic, and diplomatic activities. But his contributions

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to the development of a robust American Pre-­R aphaelite movement have not been documented. A significant corpus of unpublished correspondence reveals how he fostered the movement’s ultimate cohesion; moreover, contemporary accounts linked Stillman’s efforts in the 1850s to those of the Association in the 1860s. When The New Path began publication in 1863, no less an authority than Norton himself reviewed the journal in the North American Review, recognizing the importance of placing the American Pre-­R aphaelites in a lineage that had been initiated in the United States during the previous decade. Norton praised the journal’s “intrinsic merits,” asserting that “in truth there has been no discourse or criticism upon matters of Art in America so valuable as its pages contain, since the essays by Mr. Stillman in the earlier volumes of ‘The Crayon.’ ”48 Scholarship on Stillman has tended to look at his output retrospectively and through the lens of his Autobiography of a Journalist, published one year before his death in 1901. By contrast, I engage his paintings directly. Stillman himself modestly believed that he “influenced some of my contemporaries and gave a jog to the landscape painting of the day.”49 But his actual achievement was far greater. His paintings were in conversation with his early photographs, and in both media he offered influential models of realism for the American Pre-­R aphaelites of the 1860s. Documents and correspondence untangle the intricate twists of Stillman’s relationship with Ruskin. They reveal the British critic’s mentorship and doctrinal authority, his role as arbiter of aesthetic and moral truth; but they also unveil the crisis—­at least in the view of his American disciples—­brought about by Ruskin’s ethical betrayal during the Civil War. Previously presented primarily as a journalist, or even a “dilettante” and “amateur,” Stillman appears here as a fundamental catalyst of the Association’s aesthetic and political agenda.50 Key to a reconceptualization of the American Pre-­R aphaelites through the lens of their political ideology generally, and specifically with respect to their abolitionism, is the group’s leader, Thomas Charles Farrer, the subject of chapter 2. Farrer’s arrival in New York galvanized the movement. His enrollment at the Working Men’s College as a student of Ruskin has been noted, as the artist announced his educational pedigree on some of his early drawings, signing them “Drawn by Ruskin’s pupil” (see fig. 70).51 But Farrer’s participation in another art program in London has been previously unknown. Before he joined Ruskin’s class, Farrer was a student at the Government Schools of Design, a program similarly targeted to the working classes, but with divergent pedagogical aims and ideological investments. This chapter examines the lessons he absorbed in classrooms at both the Government Schools and the Working Men’s College and argues that it was in the United States that Farrer synthesized these otherwise discordant practices to develop a singular American Pre-­R aphaelite style. Farrer’s ideals of political justice were nurtured during his art training at the Working Men’s College, whose founders advocated on behalf of the laboring classes by offering educational opportunities previously reserved for the wealthy.52 Farrer brought these values to the United States, encountering the heated polemics over the

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extension of slavery, which had been abolished across the British Empire in 1834.53 Shortly after his arrival in New York in 1858 and subsequent to his enlistment in the Union army in 1862, Farrer executed drawings and paintings that picture the mobilization of Union troops, Union war heroes, and leading abolitionists. But it was in landscape painting that Farrer found a platform from which he could criticize the current state of his adopted country’s politics and art. His most accomplished paintings confront and repudiate the legacy of another British-­born landscape painter, Thomas Cole, and reveal how Farrer grappled with ethically picturing the young nation at the moment when its ground served as the site of separatist conflict. The progressive politics of the American Pre-­R aphaelites cannot be fully grasped without recognizing the critical contributions—­both ideological and aesthetic—­of the Association’s architects Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis, Jr., the subjects of chapter 3. For the American Pre-­R aphaelites, Gothic Revival architecture was an especially powerful conduit of political ideas, in large measure owing to the associations that Ruskin had bound to medieval guilds, which, he argued, granted craftsmen independence and respect. Lamenting the absence of egalitarian values in American culture, Wight and Sturgis envisioned new architectural landscapes, populated with secular Gothic structures, that could edify their morally bankrupt society. The architects’ conviction that their country could “rise again with increased glory” by “reviv[ing] that which is lost and dead,” can be gleaned from their wartime and postbellum designs in the Italian Gothic Revival style, including the National Academy of Design, the Yale School of the Fine Arts (now known as Street Hall), and Sturgis’s proposed design for a Civil War memorial at Harvard.54 The patronage of Norton and Gilman is central to this discussion, as both professors arranged exhibition and publishing opportunities for members of the Association in conjunction with architectural commissions. Wight followed Ruskin in the critic’s belief that “the prosperity of our schools of painting and sculpture . . . depends upon that of our architecture.”55 To that end, two of Wight’s most important commissions during the Association’s tenure were the National Academy’s and Street Hall’s purpose-­built galleries, where his American Pre-­R aphaelite colleagues exhibited their work and achieved their aspiration to unite painting, sculptural carving, and architecture. Their mission was thus impressed into the built environment of New York and New Haven, making permanent the convictions they expressed in their writing and painting. Street Hall’s inaugural exhibition in 1867 would be the last collective endeavor of the American Pre-­R aphaelites, with ten members participating in various activities, including designing the building, contributing paintings for exhibition, and hanging the show. In 1868, however, a smaller subset of the original Association came together again, this time in the West, for a decidedly different collaboration. Chapter 4 examines the scientist members of the Association, Clarence King and James Gardiner, and their partnership with their American Pre-­R aphaelite colleague the painter John Henry Hill. There is abundant literature on the geologist Clarence King, topographer James Gardiner, and their command of the Geological Exploration of

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the Fortieth Parallel. None, however, considers the roles of King and Gardiner as founders of an Association dedicated to the arts. I argue that the presence of trained scientists within the Association had a marked effect on the group’s commitment to linking scientific and aesthetic empiricism as a powerful force for social transformation. The chapter focuses on the second season of the Fortieth Parallel Survey in 1868, when King employed Hill, whose participation as the survey’s staff artist has long been overshadowed by the well-­documented imagery produced by Timothy O’Sullivan, the survey’s photographer. The watercolors that Hill produced on the survey—­modest in scale, dispassionately empiricist—­reveal a mode of picturing the American West alternative to that of better-­known survey artists Bierstadt and Moran, who championed narratives of territorial expansion and Manifest Destiny. Hill’s work reveals that an allegiance to Ruskinian and Pre-­R aphaelite aesthetics offered the artist a set of tools that could reframe the goals of a government survey. American Pre-­R aphaelitism, when transported to the West, subverted the jingoistic and commercial propaganda that dominated many postbellum representations of the American landscape.

The Ruskin Dilemma From the moment of their founding, the American Pre-­R aphaelites sealed what in essence became a Faustian pact between Ruskin and their movement. The consequences of this pact, addressed in each chapter, would have profound ramifications in the ensuing years. In exchange for the aesthetic and political inspiration that Ruskin offered his American acolytes, which in turn provided a corona of intellectual authority in the United States, the movement would enjoy a short-­lived burst of productivity and standing that would come at a high cost to its sustainability and success. Ruskin’s imprimatur was considered indispensable, a position made clear by the editorial decision to publish a letter from him in The New Path’s first issue, in which the critic reassured his American followers that he had not abandoned the principles on which they were building their Association. By 1863 rumors were circulating on both sides of the Atlantic that Ruskin had experienced “an entire change of views and renunciation of old opinions, accompanied with the most poignant regrets for the delusions into which the author of Modern Painters had led so many well-­meaning people.”56 One public charge had been levied in 1861 by an anonymous reporter in London writing for the New-­York Commercial Advertiser: “Ruskin, while showing me one of this [Pre-­ Raphaelite] School upon the wall of his dressing-­room, confessed that he did not look at it with the same idea which had at first attracted and perhaps blinded him.”57 The New Path eagerly provided Ruskin a forum to quash these reports: “I believe, at this moment, the Pre-­R aphaelite School of painting, (centered in England, but with branches in other countries,) to be the only vital and true school of painting in Europe.” In his letter he restated his passion for the “secret power” of Turner and his “contempt” for Claude, and dispatched the notion that his beliefs were under stress

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or had shifted over the years. “It is seldom that falsehoods are so direct, pure, and foundationless as those which you have given me this opportunity of contradicting.”58 Despite temporarily empowering the American Pre-­R aphaelites, Ruskin’s state­ ments of unqualified support for his past opinions did not address the complexities and tensions that he had been negotiating since the late 1850s. By 1863, though unknown to his American followers with the exception of Norton, Ruskin was in considerable emotional and intellectual turmoil on multiple fronts. While this turmoil may not have undermined the edifice of his aesthetic beliefs, Ruskin was disturbed that the Evangelism he had imbibed as a boy no longer sustained his understanding of the world’s spiritual, social, or aesthetic needs. His experience of nature had also been altered, now encompassing its inevitable attritions and death—­“even the mountains are not what they were to me,” he lamented in 1858.59 Ruskin was disappointed in what he perceived as the wavering of the British Pre-­R aphaelites’ devotion to their initial agenda. By his lights, they had deviated from their commitment to verisimilitude, particularly in their representations of nature, as they indulged an obsession with the sensuous expression of legends and the female form. The American Pre-­R aphaelites, however, had internalized a prophetic Ruskin largely untroubled by the doubts that came over him in the years leading up to the formation of the Association. His letter to The New Path confirmed that he shared the surge of optimism that attended the birth of their mission. It sanctioned the Americans to go forth with the certitude that Ruskin’s name and the deeply held convictions they shared with him would offer a protective penumbra under which their movement could flourish. But as Ruskin simultaneously pursued what he believed was his most noble calling—­to offer solutions for the disastrous tenets of accepted political economy—­he was also driven to articulate positions that would have punishing consequences for the American Pre-­R aphaelites. Ruskin’s most objectionable views and vituperative expressions, especially as they pertained to his American followers, were not apparent in his early years as social critic. Little could have prepared the reader of Unto This Last for some of the pronouncements Ruskin would make in a series of articles he wrote for Fraser’s Magazine in 1862 and 1863. Ruskin had published Unto This Last in 1860 as essays in the Cornhill Magazine that have long been understood as an indictment of the evils of laissez-­ faire capitalism propounded by his rival John Stuart Mill. Yet a close reading of Unto This Last reveals many of the paternalistic predicates that would ultimately undergird the more overtly offensive arguments of Ruskin’s later essays in Fraser’s. In his earlier Cornhill essays, the economic relationships that Ruskin dissects include those of the master-­servant, officer-­soldier, and merchant-­worker, all of which involve some monetary remuneration and do not depend upon physical coercion. Each requires, Ruskin makes clear, the subordinate’s abdication of judgment to the will of the master. Most significantly, Ruskin introduces what he perceives is the foundation of just labor relations: not fair compensation, but affection. “The largest quantity of work will not be done by this curious engine for pay. . . . It will only be done when the motive force, that

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is, the will or spirit of the creature, is brought to its greatest strength by its own proper fuel: namely, by the affections.”60 In the context of the United States, however, where the dominant economic engine was linked to the institution of slavery, the notion of “affection” between a master and his laborer could not be successfully transplanted. Two years later, in Fraser’s, in his “Essays on Political Economy, being a sequel to papers which appeared in the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ ” Ruskin abandons the measured tone of Unto This Last and makes his most strident pronouncements in support of slavery, directly alienating not only abolitionists, but much of the American progressive movement. All of Ruskin’s moral equivalences between slavery and other forms of authoritarian and paternalistic labor relations broke down under the weight of his straightforward enunciations: “If, however, by slavery, instead of absolute compulsion, is meant the purchase, by money, of the right of compulsion such purchase is necessarily made whenever a portion of any territory is transferred, for money, from one monarch to another: which has happened frequently enough in history.”61 If Ruskin was making a point about the justification of servitude by reference to historical precedents, he did little to disguise his specific contempt for the American abolitionist movement, further inviting denunciation by his most ardent followers. “The republican institutions in America” are a “failure” and “the greatest railroad accident on record.”62 Both in theoretical terms and specifically in the American context, each of Ruskin’s postulates seems to become more objectionable. In a repugnant crescendo, Ruskin writes, “it is better and kinder to flog a man to his work, than to leave him idle till he robs,” and with a certainty akin to biblical conviction he asserts, “The fact is that slavery is not a political institution at all, but an inherent, natural, and eternal inheritance of a large portion of the human race.”63 Such displays of authoritarian reasoning would blur for the American Pre-­R aphaelites the boundaries between the inspirational in Ruskin’s unprecedented fusing of art, morality, and the broader culture, and what had descended, they believed, into a stream of unscrupulous bile that ultimately invited public condemnation of their enterprise. Ruskin would continue to hold these views a decade later, choosing to republish the four Fraser’s essays in 1872 as Munera Pulveris. Though limited scholarly attention has been paid to the “Essays on Political Economy,” Ruskin’s arguments and rhetoric follow a tradition that included the writings of Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Charles Kingsley. Far from being either unorthodox or visionary, Ruskin was adopting a common trope that regarded campaigns for abolition as a squandering of the political will necessary to confront domestic issues related to industrialization and the seemingly inevitable poverty it created in its wake.64 Nonetheless, the conventions of his discourse and method aside, Ruskin’s antipathy for abolition and apologia for slavery were visible both in his published work of the 1860s and in his private correspondence. Stillman and the critic William Michael Rossetti, brother of the Pre-­R aphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, exchanged letters about Ruskin’s “absurd . . . defence of slavery” in Fraser’s, wondering “where our friend’s north pole has got to.”65 Within days of the Association’s founding in January 1863, weeks after the

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Emancipation Proclamation was issued, Ruskin wrote one of several letters to Norton that prompted a breach in their friendship: “As soon as I’ve got a house I’ll ask you to send something American—­a slave perhaps. I’ve a great notion of a black boy in a green jacket and purple cap—­in Paul Veronese’s manner.”66 Over the next two years, it became increasingly impossible for the American Pre-­R aphaelites to accept the fact that their aesthetic and moral prophet had raised the unrivaled eloquence of his voice in the role of Confederate sympathizer. In the following chapters I examine how each of the American Pre-­R aphaelites under consideration reckoned with Ruskin’s assertions of authoritarian and proslavery dogma. This book proceeds from the thesis that the movement, inconceivable without the early succor of Ruskin’s reputation and ideas, could not survive the taint of ethical instability and treachery that he stamped onto the public face of American Pre-­R aphaelitism.

“The True School” As followers of Ruskin, as vociferous rivals of the era’s established landscape painters, and as published critics of national culture and politics, the American Pre-­R aphaelites occupied a far more conspicuous role in American art than has previously been recognized. Their dynamic presence in period accounts complicates the dominant narrative of what was considered mainstream art in the nineteenth century, a historiography long monopolized by studies of those artists whose paintings were hung, year after year, “on the line” at the National Academy. The prominence of those Academicians has contributed to both scholarly and popular misperceptions that such painters as Cole, Durand, Church, and their followers, in the century’s middle decades, organized into a cohesive school. Indeed, several scholars have observed that the label assigned to painters associated with Hudson River locales was applied, retrospectively and pejoratively, in the 1870s. But the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ role in defining their rivals as the “Hudson River School” in the historical imagination has never been considered.67 Perhaps ironically, in spite of their near invisibility in histories of nineteenth-­century art, the American Pre-­R aphaelites had the most determinative impact on the manner in which the period’s mainstream painting has been documented and understood. It was the American Pre-­R aphaelites, and not a Hudson River School, that attained recognition as a unified faction. Persuading Americans to “turn their backs upon the rubbish of the past” was one of their central objectives.68 The American Pre-­ Raphaelites cast the rejected artists as a “school,” and thereby initiated the enduring misconception that Cole, Durand, and their followers possessed a shared mission. From its earliest issue in May 1863, two months before Gettysburg, The New Path abounds with references to “old King Cole and his school,” “the school of Durand and Cole,” and, most pointedly, to the “old fogies.” By recycling exhausted picturesque conventions in their depictions of the Hudson Valley over forty years, these artists,

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the American Pre-­R aphaelites believed, had committed a “great national sin,” “apparently, leagued together by a silent compact to utter no word of remonstrance, rebuke or complaint . . . towards the sin of slavery.”69 Though the painters whom the American Pre-­R aphaelites targeted had never formally joined together, contemporary critics like those for the New York Times and The Round Table stood up for the maligned artists as if they were a collective.70 The notion was reified during the 1870s, when the label “Hudson River School” was employed by several critics in print. Though there is no consensus on the individual who coined the sobriquet, Clarence Cook, The New Path’s founding editor, has long been among the most prominent contenders.71 The American Pre-­R aphaelites succeeded in creating a lasting impression of their foes. An article, “Two Phases of American Art” (1890), published in the popular Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, helped to calcify the narrative of a “band of artists, all men representative of their period, who gathered in the Catskills in answer to Cole’s summons.” The second phase was presented as “that band of American pre-­R aphaelites who entered into their work with characteristic force and enthusiasm.”72 The American Pre-­R aphaelites should be recognized as passionate opponents of the artistic and political status quo. They shared the conviction that works of art forged by acts of devoted, even fanatical, mimesis could alter both perception and consciousness through the truthful depiction of nature. Denouncing their predecessors, the American Pre-­R aphaelites attributed to them the collective failure of perpetuating an idealized, and thus sanitized, vision of America. Those artists, argued the American Pre-­R aphaelites, whose false and overwrought landscapes participated in promoting the national mythos of Manifest Destiny, were complicit in extending the nation’s stain of compromise in their representations of the American narrative. Instead, the Association’s painters and architects cultivated an acuity of vision sustained by unstinting exertions that they understood as prerequisite to truth, in which the arts of realistic painting and sculptural naturalism could converge. Defiant in their refusal to be implicated in the moral evasions of artistic precedent, the American Pre-­ Raphaelites produced strikingly innovative works predicated on their unshakable belief that aesthetic and sociopolitical dissent were inextricably allied in the pursuit of democracy.

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chapter one

CHAPTER ONE

America’s First Pre-­R aphaelite: William James Stillman

In November 1863, six months after the American Pre-­R aphaelites launched their journal The New Path, the group published “The Work of the True and False Schools,” an article in which it asserted its claim to a transatlantic heritage. Likely authored by the founding editor of the journal, the critic Clarence Cook, the piece separated the American Pre-­R aphaelite productions and practices of the “true school” from those of the “false school,” who were otherwise regarded as “the old school men who yearly cover the walls of the Academy with canvasses, six or eight feet long.” As the example of a vital contemporary school, the article cited the success of the British Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood and considered its efforts to be the foundation upon which American practitioners built their movement. The members of the young Association also began to construct their own history, bolstering their fledgling status by placing their project in an established lineage commencing with William James Stillman. An American respected by the nation’s cultural leaders, Stillman was singled out as the forerunner of Cook’s “new school men”: “Less than ten years ago there was but one man in America, W. J. Stillman, who practically understood and believed in the new art. To-­day it counts its believers by tens instead of units . . . we cannot despair of the cause in America.”1 Stillman, by his own account, had been named the country’s first “American Pre-­ Raphaelite” in 1854.2 Over the course of his professional life, he was known in many guises: as journalist, diplomat, and photographer. Though his career as a painter lasted only from 1848 to 1860 and has received little scholarly attention, Stillman’s laboriously

Detail of fig. 4

painted studies of the Adirondack wilderness were some of the first works to introduce Ruskinian and Pre-­R aphaelite technique and practice to American audiences. He reinforced these visual contributions with articles in the journal he cofounded with John Durand in 1855, The Crayon. In his painting and writing, and later in his photography, Stillman negotiated his deepening commitment to Ruskinian doctrine and the teachings, both contradictory and complementary, of Ralph Waldo Emerson and American Transcendentalism.3 Stillman’s project of the 1850s was cultivating a mode of landscape realism in American art that surpassed in its mimetic precision all previous efforts in this style. The veneration of nature would be the beating heart of this endeavor, but the injunctions of Ruskin’s “truth to nature” and Emerson’s idealism—­ “in which the poet animates nature with his own thoughts”—­would demand distinct formal expression that Stillman would strive to resolve in his visual and verbal output.4 Ultimately, Stillman offered a model of how an artist could go to nature, uniting the transcendental with the empirical, simultaneously exploring the subjective self and the “pure facts” of the physical world. As the first “American Pre-­R aphaelite,” Stillman can be considered a transitional artist within a larger movement whose reformist ambitions would become progressively codified as national schism loomed. Founded in the midst of the Civil War, the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art adopted a far-­reaching agenda that sought to address the exigencies of sectarian strife, combat, and the fight for abolition. By contrast, the previous decades’ campaigns for social amelioration—­including Transcendentalism and Spiritualism, to which Stillman was exposed—­attempted to advance the cause of self-­improvement. Among the most popular practices were phrenology, hydropathy, animal magnetism, and vegetarianism, all of which were, as Philip Gura has argued, “anchored in a faith in the individual’s fundamental goodness.”5 Notably absent from the organizing principles of these movements were the large-­scale structural reforms that would be required to address the harsh poverty that followed the era’s economic panics or the seemingly intractable institution of slavery. Comparing the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ progressive initiatives of the 1860s to those of the antebellum reform movements in which Stillman participated reveals what is perhaps most notable about the Association’s radicalism: its ambitious scope to effect change across multiple cultural, social, and political spheres, in contrast to the ethos of individualism privileged by an earlier generation of American reformers. This chapter argues that through his engagement with transatlantic intellectual and artistic currents in the 1850s, Stillman created the conditions out of which a robust American Pre-­R aphaelite movement could emerge during the following decade. Stillman’s multiple avocations, his relationships with the era’s luminaries in literature and art on both sides of the Atlantic, his participation in the United States’ Spiritualist craze, his extensive writings, and his body of painted and photographic imagery expose the cluster of antebellum aesthetic and political forces that the American Pre-­ Raphaelites would cohere into a blueprint for reform.

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This chapter brings together key artifacts of Stillman’s career. His three major extant paintings—­Study on Upper Saranac Lake (1854), Mount Chocorua (1856), and the The Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks (1858)—­are considered alongside his published writings in The Crayon and contemporary periodicals, his extensive unpublished correspondence with Charles Eliot Norton, and his first major photography project, Photographic Studies. Part I. The Forest. Adirondac Woods (1859). These works capture the forces that would engender a shift from the reform efforts of the 1850s, focused on the improvement of the individual, to those of the 1860s, which sought broader systemic interventions. Stillman’s project demonstrates that landscape realism could be used both as a vehicle for individual self-­culture and as a catalyst for the cultural and social reform espoused by the American Pre-­R aphaelites less than a decade later.

Double Stars of a Binary System From their first meeting in 1850, Ruskin and Stillman’s relationship was marked by discord. By 1888 Stillman would write of Ruskin, “His art criticism is radically and irretrievably wrong.”6 This censure, published in Century Magazine, marked the culmination of his long-­standing disillusionment with his mentor’s teachings. Stillman’s doubts about Ruskin’s methods had begun years earlier and were on display during a trip the two men took to the Alps in the summer of 1860. Stillman’s opinion deteriorated to public hostility in the following decades. His lifelong tendency to place blame on others for his own failings extended to Ruskin, whom Stillman charged with derailing his painting career. In 1900, the year of Ruskin’s death, Stillman wrote that “all that his influence had done for me had to be undone before any true progress could be made.”7 The Century article, however, reveals that the early years of Stillman’s relationship with Ruskin were far less negative. In the piece, Stillman introduces a concept that had directed his early encounters with Ruskinian doctrine. Labeling this concept “the double stars,” Stillman explained how one’s intellectual development could be guided by two thinkers whose teachings exercise both congruent and dueling influences on a young mind. The double stars were “two minds not personally related but forming a binary system, revolving simultaneously around each other and around some principle which they regarded in different lights.”8 Though Stillman uses the construct in his Century article to examine the impact of both Turner’s oeuvre and Ruskin’s critical writings on contemporary British art, the conceit can also be interpreted through the prism of Stillman’s own experience. As a young artist, he had gravitated to the double stars of Ruskin and Emerson, developing friendships with both men and absorbing the implications of their binary systems. Stillman’s paintings, often antipicturesque in composition, stand apart from those of his contemporaries, yet his initial aspiration—­unlike that of the American Pre-­ Raphaelites of the 1860s—­had been to integrate himself into the world of mainstream academic painting. Prior to his graduation from Union College in 1848, he made plans

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to enter Cole’s studio. But the dream to study with “the leading painter of landscape in America” was crushed when Cole died that same year.9 Stillman then set his sights on apprenticing with Durand, who declined his request. He would ultimately become Church’s first student. It was in Church’s studio during the winter of 1848–­49 that Stillman came upon the first volume of Modern Painters. He cites the discovery of Ruskin’s text as the most valuable outcome of his tutelage with Church—­a purposeful slight to his teacher, whom Stillman came to believe was guilty of perpetuating the public’s taste for composed landscape scenes, a view later shared by the American Pre-­Raphaelites. Of Modern Painters, Stillman wrote that he “received from it a stimulus to nature worship.”10 Upon leaving Church’s studio, Stillman spent the summer of 1849 in upstate New York, where he made his first studies from nature and that fall sold his first painting, View of Catskill Creek (unlocated), to the American Art-­Union. With the thirty dollars he earned from the sale, he purchased a passage to Europe. Within a year of discovering the work of Ruskin, Stillman made the acquaintance of both the British critic and the protagonist of Modern Painters, Turner. He also saw for the first time the works of the British Pre-­ Raphaelite Brotherhood, including those of John Everett Millais, whose early paintings would have a pronounced effect on Stillman’s subsequent production. Stillman’s European journey was also transformative with respect to his political evolution. His appearance in London coincided with the aftermath of the failed Chartist demonstration at Kennington Common in April 1848, and the many revolutionary movements that broke out on the Continent throughout that year. The uprising in France garnered the most attention, in both England and the United States, when King Louis-­Philippe was overthrown and a short-­lived French Second Republic was established. Many unsuccessful liberation movements followed across Europe. Stillman found London crowded “with political refugees from the Continent, who have gathered here to wait the renewal of the struggle between the people and those who stand between them and their birth-­right.” Swept into the populist maelstrom, he implored, “Heaven help them to succeed.”11 Stillman’s letters from the period suggest that he was alert to injustices and suffering stemming from disparities in social class. As he spent time in London, his political awareness became rapidly more acute. He developed a practiced eye for recognizing the power of long-­established rituals, symbols, and architecture, reinforced by constabulary and military power, that served to repress the impoverished and protect the landed: “The more destructive servility with which the whole nation hugs to its heart and idolizes a system which, like some beautiful monster, is tearing its vitals—­the gorgeousness of the civil establishments—­the sentry boxes, and the red-­coated automata standing at the door of the palaces and institutions—­it is this pomp, this show and glitter, that makes the English nation endure the Promethean life they hold.”12 The American Pre-­Raphaelites of the Association, striking out with their own agenda of aesthetic and political reform a decade later, would assimilate much of Stillman’s revolutionary sensibility. While Stillman’s political awakening in 1850 would direct much of his subsequent career as artist, diplomat, and journalist, upon his return to New York he began a

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process of tending to his spiritual life, exhibiting intense interest in Spiritualism and Transcendentalism. He sought out a milieu in which he could meet like-­minded artists and reformers. He attended salons hosted by the well-­known Spiritualist medium Lydia Brown, the wife of the sculptor Henry Kirke Brown, whose “house was the meeting place of a school of transcendental thinkers.”13 There, Stillman met Amos Bronson Alcott, an educator whose writings on self-­expression had been formative to Emerson’s development, and debated Transcendentalism and political issues of the day. Alcott exposed Stillman to a model of how Transcendentalism could be used to advocate for American causes, and specifically for abolitionism. These early encounters with Transcendentalist thought stimulated Stillman’s aesthetics while he simultaneously continued the conversation that he had begun with Ruskin in London. A letter from Ruskin to Stillman in late 1850 documents the young artist’s attempt to incorporate Transcendentalist ideas into his artistic practice while also allowing Ruskinian principles to exert their spell. “I do not know,” Ruskin asked his friend, “whether you only have a strong conviction that there is such a message to be received from all things, or whether in any sort you think you have understood and can interpret it, for how otherwise should your persuasion of the fact be so strong?”14 Ruskin had concluded that Stillman, increasingly under the sway of Transcendentalist theory, had embraced one of its central and paradoxical tropes: that “the natural world works, moves and rests obediently to the living spiritual world,” but that successfully apprehending the correspondence between those two realms depended on the consciousness of the individual observer.15 Stillman was developing an exalted view of the artist’s subjectivity, which Ruskin believed was an indulgence of individual ego that inevitably dulled one’s powers to observe external forms. By steeping himself in the rhetoric of American Transcendentalism, Stillman was, to Ruskin’s disapprobation, veering from the right path and detouring into a mode of inquiry indebted to German metaphysics.16 Stillman was attracted to Transcendentalism’s dynamic philosophical method, which encouraged the individual mind’s capacity to know itself, and he was especially drawn to the notion that artists have the ability to see nature and spirit transparently. Ruskin, however, had by 1850 begun to move away from the Romanticism that had accented his early writings. He had not yet fully rooted his aesthetic and cultural views in the pronounced empiricism that would come to the fore in Modern Painters III, but he was clearly skeptical of the idealist cast that had infiltrated Stillman’s thinking. Honoring nature as ardently as Stillman and Emerson, Ruskin had embarked on a different path to realizing its truths. He had moved beyond the personal concerns of self-­conscious awareness and toward voracious observation as crucial to the revelation of an object’s form and inherent beauty. Ruskin attempted to persuade Stillman to ignore the sirens of subjectivity and to embrace the potency of “ordinary watchfulness”: “I can only imagine that by rightly understanding as much of the nature of everything as ordinary watchfulness will enable any man to perceive, we might, if we looked for it, find in everything some

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special moral lesson of type or particular truth.”17 Devotion to the beholder’s experience, to the unexaggerated and literal aspects of nature, rather than to the subjectivity of the artist, would bestow great rewards on Stillman and on the viewers of his work. For Ruskin, seeing clearly meant going beyond recognizing and replicating the mere contours and colors of an object, to identify its essential structural laws. Avoid, Ruskin counseled Stillman, treating “Mystery in the Thing or Inspiration in the Person,” but instead “accustom yourself to look for the spiritual meaning of things just as easily to be seen as their natural meaning.”18 Ruskin is firm that excess “headwork”—­the subjective rumination at the center of Transcendentalism—­would “agitate” or “grieve” the artist, yielding only “imaginative studies” instead of the “pure” nature studies that were the product of perceptual alertness and a trained eye and hand. But throughout the 1850s Stillman would vacillate between adhering to Ruskinianism and, upon his deepening relationship with Emerson, incorporating his own interpretation of Transcendentalism into his painting and criticism.

The Spirit of Saranac Lake Study on Upper Saranac Lake (1854, fig. 4) reveals the range of transatlantic influences that Stillman integrated into his landscapes. The product of a summer of isolation in the Adirondack wilderness, the painting was completed over three months of direct observation of the motif, following Ruskinian principles. Stillman acknowledged that his commitment to the primacy of foreground was due to the example of Millais, whose work he had seen in London during his visits of 1850 and 1853. The title, Study on Upper Saranac Lake, and the subject—­a modestly sized nature scene executed out of doors—­challenged the supremacy of Durand, who had pioneered and promoted the genre in the United States.19 Finally, Stillman’s deepening commitment to both Transcendentalism and Spiritualism is expressed in the work’s depiction of shadow and light. The earliest of his surviving landscapes, Saranac Lake captures the confluence of aesthetic forces that Stillman synthesized at mid-­decade. Stillman had returned from his second trip to England inspired to produce a work that highlighted foreground objects. In London in 1853, he saw Millais’s The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 (1853, fig. 5) at the Royal Academy and envisioned a direction for his future work. He was particularly affected by the radical spatial arrangement of Millais’s canvas, describing it as “mainly foreground.”20 In The Proscribed Royalist, Millais’s entire composition practically abuts the picture plane. The hollow tree trunk is placed directly on the diagonal that bisects the rectangular canvas, dividing the work into two right triangles. A strategy often used to separate foreground from background, such bifurcation was not unusual in landscape painting; however, what sets Millais’s work apart is that his division does not delineate recessional space. With the exception of bits of pale blue sky peeking through the leaves at the top left corner, the viewer is trapped in the grasses and shrubs of both triangulated areas, denied access to the rest of the landscape.

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Fig. 4. William James Stillman, Study on Upper Saranac Lake, 1854. Oil on canvas, 30 ½ × 25 ½ in. (77.5 × 64.8 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Dr. J. Sydney Stillman.

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Fig. 5. John Everett Millais, The Proscribed Royalist, 1651, 1853. Oil on canvas, 40 ½ × 28 ½ in. (102.9 cm × 72.4 cm). Private collection.

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Stillman’s first attempt to create a work with such emphasis on foreground and a partial occlusion of pictorial space was The Forest Spring, completed in 1853 and now unlocated. An anecdote in connection with the painting is the earliest known reference to Stillman’s acknowledgment of photography’s relationship to his work. A photograph had been made of The Forest Spring and shown to one of his critics. Mistaking the photograph of the painting for a photograph of the scene in nature after which the work was based, the critic apparently exclaimed, “What is the use of Stillman making his pre-­R aphaelite studies when we can get such photographs from nature as this!”21 This story, perhaps apocryphal, nonetheless links photography and Pre-­R aphaelite attention to detail, a connection that artists and critics would revisit for decades. Stillman’s detractor suggests that paintings with such heightened detail were obsolete when a camera could produce a similar result with minimal human effort. Upon taking up photography at the end of the decade, Stillman would agree that the camera’s capacities could sometimes exceed those of the brush, writing to Norton in 1859 from Florida that he was “very glad that I have brought my photographic apparatus as much of what is most peculiar and charming in the scenery here is . . . scarcely paintable.”22 But in 1854, the criticism The Forest Spring received—­that the work’s finish rivaled that of current photographic processes—­emboldened Stillman in his endeavor to master Pre-­R aphaelite and Ruskinian mimesis. When he painted Saranac Lake that summer, Stillman remained under the spell of Millais’s innovative spatial arrangements. The work can also be described as a picture of “mainly foreground,” as most of the composition is devoted to foreground passages, including the trees, rocks, fallen trunks, and leaf litter. Stillman’s trees do not function as repoussoir devices, but as independent, iconic, and highly energetic features of the uncomposed setting, its naturalism heightened by imperceptible facture. Over a half century later, Stillman laid claim to an originary contribution, noting that his “fidelity and completeness . . . even in comparison with Durand’s, was something which the conventional landscape known then and there never approached.”23 Until Stillman’s debut at the National Academy in 1854, the American artist most committed to working directly from nature was Durand, whose studies had been the benchmark against which the verism of American landscapes was measured. His In the Woods (1855, fig. 6) was painted shortly after Saranac Lake, and both works were exhibited at the academy in 1855. Though In the Woods also depicts and carefully distinguishes between deciduous and coniferous trees, Durand’s execution did not approach Stillman’s exacting realization, as is apparent in a comparison of their rendering of bark. Thick and scaly, Stillman’s pine, at the far left of the composition, is identifiable by its hallmark intersecting deep grooves; his two beech trees are silver-­ gray, mottled with bosses and lumps. Such commitment to botanical accuracy was present in the work of the British Pre-­R aphaelites. In The Proscribed Royalist, Millais is attentive to his oak’s gray-­brown, craggy bark, dusted with moss. Similar passages are present in John Inchbold’s Bolton Abbey (1853, fig. 7), which Stillman also saw

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Fig. 6. Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855. Oil on canvas, 60 ¾ × 48 in. (154.3 × 121.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Fig. 7. John William Inchbold, Bolton Abbey, 1853. Oil on canvas, 25 ½ × 33 in. (64.8 × 83.8 cm). Northampton Museums and Art Gallery, UK.

at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1853. The broken masonry piers in Inchbold’s foreground are dotted with a diversity of lichen that can be differentiated by the spectrum of green tones and varying textures. Durand, by contrast, working in a tradition that privileged idealization, treated the same species of bark as did Stillman, but in a decidedly more painterly manner. Durand achieves the appearance of textured bark through the juxtaposition of discernible brushstrokes that demonstrate his comparatively limited interest in precise arboreal taxonomy. The individual scales on Durand’s pine are far less articulated, and the smoothness of his beech bark erases the trees’ characteristic fungal peeling, imperfections that Stillman accentuates. Conversant with Ruskin’s writings, Stillman would have been aware that the British critic regarded highly realized bark as a crucial element in conveying botanical truth. In Modern Painters I, Ruskin asserted, “All forms are understood and explained chiefly by their agency: the roughness of the bark of a tree, for instance, is not seen in the light, nor in the shade: it is only seen between the two, where the shadows of the ridges explain it.”24 Stillman follows this prescription: his trees obtain their

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dimensionality in the space between light and shade, their trunks’ discrete textures legible in the contrast between shady obfuscation and dappled illumination. While Stillman literally highlights his embrace of Ruskinian praxis, the illuminated areas also display the artist’s simultaneous interest in visually exploring his deepening engagement with Emersonian thought, as well as his contemporaneous involvement in Spiritualist practices. Stillman’s attraction to both Transcendentalism and Spiritualism was unusual. The two movements largely appealed to different demographics—­Transcendentalism to an erudite elite, and Spiritualism to the masses. Each focused on distinct existential challenges and offered distinct strategies for surmounting them. One important overlap between Transcendentalist and Spiritualist thought was the former’s assertion that the mind was capable of penetrating the deceptive, often beguiling surface of reality in its quest to discover the spiritual essences that found form in all matter. Transcendentalists relished abandoning the world of rational experience in favor of pursuing an intuitive search for essence. Spiritualism was a reform movement that centered on the belief that the soul survives the destruction of the body and remains communicative as it progresses through multiple planes of ethical development. Spiritualists believed that the souls of ghosts and specters resided in natural forms, such as rocks, trees, and water. While the two movements can be differentiated descriptively, it can be difficult to isolate the visual correlatives in Stillman’s work that speak singly to the influence of Transcendentalist or Spiritualist inclinations. A more fertile avenue of inquiry is to identify the natural features that Stillman introduced into his composition that held resonance for both Transcendentalists and Spiritualists. Saranac Lake offers an opportunity to examine how an artist fluent in both doctrines visually consolidated the two movements’ key precepts. Shortly before decamping to the Adirondacks, Stillman attempted to communicate with the deceased by participating in séances, or spiritual “circles.” His autobiography recounts that during the middle years of the 1850s, his artistic aspirations were entwined with his spiritual ones. In his most affecting Spiritualist experience, Stillman claimed he had communed with Turner’s ghost. Believing “the human being possesses spiritual senses, parallel with the physical, by which it sees what the physical sense cannot see, and hears what is inaudible to the physical ear,” Stillman retreated to the Adirondack wilderness in “the hope that going into the ‘desert’ might quicken the spiritual faculties so tantalized by the experiences of the circles.”25 Alone in the last unexplored mountain range in the Northeast, Stillman determined to immerse himself in the productive solitude that was exalted by writers and philosophers of the period, notably Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. In and around Saranac Lake, Stillman developed his own spiritual acuity, refined his powers of observation, and became attuned to spiritual phenomena he was seeking in natural forms and light, and especially in their intersection. In Saranac Lake Stillman captures the dispersal of light and its interplay of densities not only to reveal “the roughness of

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the bark . . . its inward structure and outward form,” as Ruskin advised, but to adduce visually the vigorous and ongoing dialogue between his artistic practice and contemporaneous experiments in Spiritualism.26 In Stillman’s painting, modest beams of light penetrate a canopy of unseen branches. The areas of illumination on the pine and beech trunks are clearly circumscribed, even circular in several places. Their shape and staggered placement are reminiscent of levitating glowing orbs, a staple in the visual vocabulary of Spiritualism that were believed to constitute a “quasi-­material, vital fluid.”27 In his study of the relationship between Spiritualism and American art, Charles Colbert writes that floating light, “ ‘corpse lights’ or ‘corpse candles,’ which referred to the mysterious, luminescent glow that often hovered over graves, especially those of the recently interred, [were] usually seen only by clairvoyants but at times they were visible to all.”28 During séances, when deceased individuals were summoned, glowing disembodied heads were expected to emerge from the darkness and move among the sitters. As a devotee of séances, Stillman may have come to associate bobbing light with the arrival of spirits. The areas of sunlight on Stillman’s trees do not constitute a rare feature in contemporary productions. However, among a group of eight other landscape paintings on view alongside Saranac Lake in the National Academy exhibition of 1855, in no other work is light depicted in areas with such idiosyncratic and concentrated intensity as in Stillman’s painting.29 Such focused sunlight can be read as one of Stillman’s primary tools in accessing emblems of spirit. Spiritualism and Transcendentalism were equally active influences in Stillman’s artistic consciousness, mutually reinforcing in their opposition to a purely empirical view of nature. Though Stillman did not meet Emerson until fall 1854 following his summer in the Adirondacks, he was already familiar with the Transcendentalist’s writings when he painted Saranac Lake. In Nature, the philosopher introduced his central theory that divine forces permeate nature, and that through its close study humans could access that divinity. In Emerson’s formulation, the artist apprehended “nature as a phenomenon, not a substance,” a position that Ruskin directly opposed. Emerson believed that the artist’s first responsibility was “to relax this despotism of the senses, which binds us to nature as if we were a part of it, and shows us nature aloof, and, as it were, afloat.”30 The antagonism between Ruskin’s empiricism as the foundation of aesthetic creation and Emerson’s privileging of nature’s inherently invisible spiritual qualities posed a challenge for Stillman as he confronted the scenery of Saranac Lake. He was in pursuit of both mimetic truths and, in Emerson’s words, the “spirits . . . seen through them.”31

Negotiating Emerson and Ruskin on the Page As summer turned to fall in 1854, Stillman began speaking with John Durand about founding the country’s first critical journal devoted to the “graphic arts and the literature related to them.”32 During his eighteen months as editor of The Crayon, Stillman

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assumed a range of responsibilities, including authoring a majority of the articles, soliciting literary contributions, and raising funds for the venture. Through James Russell Lowell, Stillman was introduced to Boston and Cambridge’s intelligentsia, including George Curtis, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Charles Eliot Norton. By November he was writing to Emerson. He explained his lofty goals in terms that would ingratiate his project with the philosopher. The Crayon, Stillman hoped, would “enforce the claims of Beauty and of Art as its gospel upon a world as yet all too unheeding.” Stillman was not shy in announcing his primary reason for his letter: “We want the weight of your name and feel that the earnestness and disinterestedness of our purpose justifies us in asking it and hoping for it if it be not interfering with its use in directions higher and nobler.”33 Stillman’s request marries cardinal concepts of both Emerson and Ruskin to vitalize his appeal on behalf of The Crayon. “Use” was a crucial category for Emerson and held implications far beyond its utilitarian associations. Early in Nature, he explained, “Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Commodity; Beauty; Language; and Discipline.”34 For Emerson, “use” possessed an entelechous force, a vitalism that directs growth and life, and that unites potentiality to actuality. Animate or inanimate, nominal or transcendental, a thing’s “use” offers a conduit that allows both man and nature to progress, and ultimately to realize what Emerson referred to as its spiritual “prospects.” For Ruskin, the “noble” was the cynosure of aesthetic and cultural accomplishment, as well as the apogee of nature’s expressiveness. Famously, as he claimed in Modern Painters I, “The picture which has the nobler and more numerous ideas, however awkwardly expressed, is a greater and a better picture than that which has the less noble and less numerous ideas, however beautifully expressed.”35 Stillman’s letter is powerful evidence of the dualities actively at work within his sensibility at this transformative moment in American landscape art. Intuiting that Emerson might find a disconnect between The Crayon’s artistic project and his own intellectual one, Stillman preemptively yokes the two: “It is true that we cannot call on you as a professed art writer but there is a likeness in all inner principles and he who has penetrated so deeply into the ‘open secret’ as you, must have found something which we can claim as fit for our purposes[,] ‘Deep answers unto deep’ and in those hidden labors you must have heard some sound from the ‘deep’ of Art.”36 Stillman speaks from experience, having just spent a summer in the wilderness encountering firsthand how Emerson’s theories could be realized through the production of art. His use of the biblical expression, “Deep answers unto deep” was strategic, as it is a phrase Emerson himself appropriated in Nature: “In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.”37 Stillman solicited the support of America’s foremost public intellectual not only by quoting Emerson’s own words back to him but by uniting them with concepts that he associates with Ruskin’s discourse. Stillman has absorbed the teachings of both philosopher and

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critic and seamlessly splices Emersonian and Ruskinian imperatives into a singular statement of his mission, which can be termed “noble use.” In his subsequent writings, Stillman holds in suspension the two thinkers’ complementary and contesting understandings of God’s presence in nature. There is some scholarly debate as to whether Emerson adhered to the classical definition of pantheism—­that God is everything and everything is God—­or whether he held a more nuanced panentheist view that, as Samantha Harvey contends, “emphasizes instead that God is in all things,” rather than the sum of all things.38 Regardless of this distinction, Emerson’s belief that God illuminates the universe necessitated visual correlatives to pictorialize the spiritual energies that dwell in nature. But these spiritual energies were inherently invisible and invite, in Ruskin’s view, idealization, symbolism, and false treatment. Owing to the influence of Emerson, however, Stillman is more open than the following decade’s American Pre-­R aphaelites would be to the link between literal mimesis and idealized depiction. As an artist, Stillman struggled to reconcile the competing approaches of transcribing nature faithfully (representing “facts”) versus depicting it with a generalized cast (picturing “truths”). Over the course of his articles for The Crayon, Stillman came to the conclusion that only through the apprehension of facts can an individual glean nature’s truth. “There is indeed a broad distinction to be drawn . . . between facts and truths,” he reasoned. “The peculiar form of a single oak-­leaf is a fact; but the universal angularity of oak-­ leaves, their general obedience to one law of formation, is a truth.”39 Though The Crayon is sometimes described as a mouthpiece for Ruskin in America, Stillman’s early articles show him responding to and modifying Ruskin and incorporating many of the lessons he learned in his study of Transcendentalism. The Crayon offered Stillman the platform to promote his own approach to painting and to synthesize a range of aesthetic, spiritual, and theoretical source material, as he had in Saranac Lake. The American Pre-­R aphaelites who followed him would argue that, as subjects, small corners of nature were preferable to wide vistas, but Stillman’s view a decade earlier was less narrow: “There is place for the little as well as the great—­there are subordinate as well as chief offices in the economy of Nature, and minute truths as essential to the completeness of her revelation as greater ones.”40 Stillman was careful, though, not to condone the practice of generalizing nature as the sole method for the landscape painter. “This is the license of laziness,” he deemed the approach, “that which neglects to give specific truth where it is consistent with the broader qualities.” This critique would become one of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ central rebukes of Cole and his followers. Though he does not single out Cole, Durand, and Church as representing an inferior branch of painting as do the American Pre-­R aphaelites of the next decade, Stillman characterizes lesser artists as those “who paint rocks, but neglect all indication of their kind, and trees, without caring whether they keep the marks of the species; who draw mountains, without the slightest thought whether the geologic truth be conveyed or not. . . . Let us have none of it.”41 On the page, Stillman easily differentiates the two methods in

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question—­a student begins by literally copying nature, and then, having mastered that step, graduates to imaginative interpretation. In practice, even for Stillman, the transition was more difficult. Around the same time he so confidently condemned the “license of laziness,” Stillman confided to Norton that he was struggling to heed his own prescriptions: “I know I have artistic powers . . . which I should now be developing by close and assiduous study instead of elaborating the crude half formed ideas of my inexperienced brain.”42 Such rhetorical confidence was difficult to transfer to the canvas. In 1856 Stillman quit The Crayon editorship, and hastened, he told Norton, “to establish a new school of Art—­not speculating but demonstrating, proving by my works that Art is a holy God-­given, heaven-­lit thing, a revelation of immortal beauty.”43

Mount Chocorua: Avoiding the Pathetic Fallacy Following the conclusion of Stillman’s editorial responsibilities, the next summer took him to the White Mountains. He had previously planned to “meet the elder Durand there” for “an excursion into those artistically unexplored sections in the Northern part of the White Mountains region.”44 The trip with Asher Durand never transpired, so Stillman visited the region alone. Mount Chocorua (1856, fig. 8) is a record of that expedition, his only extant painting of a prospect.45 The summit in New Hampshire’s White Mountains was practically a required subject for the successful midcentury landscape artist. Stillman’s friend Gifford had exhibited a well-­received canvas of Mount Chocorua in the National Academy show of 1855. Many contemporary painters contributed versions of the peak, including Cole, Durand, Bierstadt, John Frederick Kensett, John William Casilear, Jasper Cropsey, Samuel Colman, and Aaron Draper Shattuck.46 The idea of painting in the White Mountains appealed to Stillman precisely because the locale received such frequent attention from artists. In summer 1855 Stillman wrote Norton, “I saw Kensett this morning. He had just returned from the White Mts. and had some very pretty late studies. The artists have given that region a pretty thorough overhauling and brought many beautiful sketches away but not one of them has yet painted a mountain right to my mind.”47 The subject thus allowed Stillman to publicly announce his singular aesthetic vision by creating a unique representation of an immediately recognizable landscape. Completed after eighteen intense months leading The Crayon—­during which he wrote that “I feel constantly that I should be painting”—­Mount Chocorua is evidence of Stillman’s redoubled efforts to achieve recognition among his mainstream colleagues.48 Stillman’s version sets the mountain in the distance, its peak defined by gray tones, above which are horizontal bands of cumulus clouds. The countryside is cleared, but no current human activity is pictured. The only sign of habitation is a cottage roof that appears just above the tree line in the middle distance. Mount Chocorua showcases Stillman’s preferred methodology, adapted from that of the British Pre-­R aphaelites, of part-­by-­part execution, a process by which individual portions of the canvas were

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completed separately, before other areas were even begun—­the entire composition was thus built incrementally. Contrasting colors were applied side by side with little blending, a practice that produced famously luminous effects, exemplified in Hunt’s Our English Coasts (1852, fig. 9), which Stillman saw at the Royal Academy in 1853. In The Crayon two years later, Stillman explained this “true method of study”: “to take small portions of scenes, and there to explore perfectly and with the most insatiable curiosity, every object presented, and to define them with the carefulness of a topographer.”49 Stillman committed to this Pre-­R aphaelite strategy in Mount Chocorua. He explores his small portions fully, executing them to scale and with clarity that extends to objects lying in the composition’s middle ground and background, despite their ever-­increasing remove from the viewer. A comparison with another Pre-­R aphaelite landscape, completed by John Brett two years after Mount Chocorua, testifies to the circulation of Ruskinian theory and practice on both sides of the Atlantic in the latter years of the 1850s. Like Mount Chocorua, Brett’s Val d’Aosta (1858, fig. 10) pictures a mountain range in the distance, a middle ground occupied by the valley below, and a foreground occluded with three erratic boulders. Brett’s subject in the Italian Alps was suggested by Ruskin, and parts of the painting were completed in the presence of the critic. Though Stillman’s own experience with Ruskin in the Alps would not take place until 1860, Mount Chocorua displays many of the features that Ruskin had controlled in Brett’s composition and would later demand of Stillman. In Val d’Aosta and Mount Chocorua both Stillman’s and Brett’s perceived vantage points are rocky foregrounds. Though Stillman’s implied view is not a promontory, the bottom left of both his and Brett’s canvases are comprised of highly naturalistic studies of boulders, with Ruskin’s favored mica glinting with daubs of white against dark patches of moss. Moving upward from the canvases’ bottom edges, both artists proceed to middle-­ground pastures studded with rocks, treetops, a lone cottage, and alternating swaths of green and mustard-­toned fields, which distinguish cultivated from uncultivated land. The top thirds of both compositions are populated with clouds, undulating slopes, and a snowy peak whose crags, tinged with lavender, display the trademark glimmer of the Pre-­R aphaelites. The Pre-­R aphaelite devices that Stillman employs are most apparent when his work is considered alongside earlier and contemporary depictions of the mountain. Over the 1820s and 1830s, Cole painted Chocorua at least a dozen times.50 His compositions are filled with blasted trunks, Native American staffage figures, and signs of incipient domestication—­insertions that speak to his attempt to communicate through metaphor. Cole invokes a popular local legend by filling Autumn Twilight, View of Corway Peak [Mount Chocorua], New Hampshire (1834, fig. 11) with both overt and subtle references to the landscape’s historical associations and the pathos linked Fig. 8. (overleaf) William James Stillman, Mount Chocorua, 1856. Oil on canvas, 12 ⅛ × 18 in. (30.8 × 45.6 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

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Fig. 9. (above) William Holman Hunt, Our English Coasts, 1852 (“Strayed Sheep”), 1852. Oil on canvas, 17 × 23 in. (43.2 × 58.4 cm). Tate Britain, London. Fig. 10. (right) John Brett, Val d’Aosta, 1858. Oil on canvas, 34 ½ × 26 ⅞ in. (87.6 × 68.3 cm). Private collection.

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Fig. 11. Thomas Cole, Autumn Twilight, View of Corway Peak [Mount Chocorua], New Hampshire, 1834. Oil on wood panel, 13 ¾ × 19 ½ in. (34.9 × 49.5 cm). Collection of the New-­York Historical Society. Gift of the New-­York Gallery of the Fine Arts, 1858.42.

to the geography. At the lower right, an Indigenous figure rows toward the canvas’s edge, holding the viewer’s gaze. Cole intended this figure to be identified as Chocorua, an eighteenth-­century Abenaki chieftain. Following the death of his son, Chocorua was believed to have jumped to his own end from a peak in the White Mountains after being pursued by European settlers, cursing, as he leaped, the land and those who were colonizing it.51 The Native figure and a baldly symbolic blasted tree serve as “natural memento mori,” as Robert McGrath has observed, and confer multi­ layered tragic associations—­the simultaneous deaths of a child, a leader, a people, and a wilderness.52 Ruskin objected to such intense emotional responses, both in the artist’s creation of a painting and in the viewer’s experience. Cole’s allegorical works can be read as visual manifestations of Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, often described as the practice in poetry or painting of attributing human emotion to inanimate objects, natural features, and animals. Ruskin advocated shunning the kind of “temperament which admits the pathetic fallacy . . . that of a mind and body in some sort too weak to deal fully with what is before them or upon them; borne away, or over-­clouded, or over-­

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dazzled by emotion.”53 Overwrought emotion, the cause of pathetic fallacy, suffuses Autumn Twilight, suggested by the warm light that bathes the canvas, the even distribution of the season’s fiery red leaves, and the deliberate placement of the tortured trunk and Indigenous figure on the same plane, together in agony. Cole’s emotional hyperbole finds formal expression in his thick, impastoed surface, his brushstrokes visible on the writhing trunks and in each umber and crimson leaf. With Ruskinian fervor, Stillman revisits the mountainside twenty years later. Desolate by comparison, his version of the locale omits the hallmarks of the landscape that Cole and his followers prominently featured. Stillman’s painting is absent a scatter of vermillion leaves, framing devices that guide the viewer’s eye, and the atmospheric perspective that granted the mountain an ethereal mauve cast. Further heightening this antipicturesque effect is the repeated insertion of elements that interrupt the viewer’s entry into the scene: first with the felled trunk in the immediate foreground and then with the hedge-­like row of trees. The lack of human presence and the straightforward rendering of natural objects sap Stillman’s canvas of both narrative and emotive potential. Where focused sunbeams and reflections on the water’s surface in Saranac Lake record Stillman’s attempt to attain enlightenment through solitude in the wilderness, two years later, in the White Mountains, he rejects the lure of metaphor, refusing to merge the subjective and objective, instead aspiring to Ruskin’s description of the model landscape painter: “the whole of his power depends upon his losing sight and feeling of his own existence, and becoming a mere witness and mirror of truth, and a scribe of visions.”54 Stillman’s return to painting that summer of 1856 did not bring him critical success. At least two of the six paintings he exhibited the following spring at the National Academy in 1857 were White Mountain scenes.55 Save for John Durand, who covered the annual show for The Crayon, that year’s reviewers were not impressed with Stillman’s display. One critic wrote of Stillman’s “affected mannerism,” while Durand countered that The Stepping-­Stones, Kearsarge Brook, N[orth] Conway (unlocated) was a “remarkably fine study from Nature . . . a picture of too great intrinsic excellence to be hung so low, that nobody can see it.”56 The censure Stillman received for his summer of Ruskinian devotion made him question whether his turn to strict mimesis had been misguided. Certainly he could not ignore the star of the 1857 exhibition, Church’s The Andes of Ecuador (1855, fig. 12), about which critics rhapsodized. In what was implicitly a hostile review of Stillman’s own work, the New York Times praised The Andes of Ecuador precisely because its overall effect was antithetical to that of Pre-­R aphaelite productions. The passage ranks the two categories of landscape painting that Stillman had been navigating, placing a work like The Andes of Ecuador, which solicited an emotional response, above one that only conveys “pure facts”: Your first thought on gazing into the picture [The Andes of Ecuador] (for so luminous and real is the atmosphere that it is really almost a misuse of language to talk of gazing

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Fig. 12. Frederic Edwin Church, The Andes of Ecuador, 1855. Oil on canvas, 48 × 76 ½ in. (121.9 × 194.3 cm). Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Affiliated with Wake Forest University. Original Purchase Fund from Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation, Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, ARCA, and Anne Cannon Forsyth.

upon it) is of the wonderful expanse before you. By slow degrees you come to feel the sentiment of altitude and majesty growing out of your fuller sense of this expanse, and relieving it by the harmonious contrast and balance of emotions. . . . The truth of such a picture as this is not the truth which has been made a lie by the Pre-­R aphaelites . . . but pure, pictorial truth.57

Church’s hyperrealistic and panoramic canvas satisfied public expectations, consistent with Emerson’s directive that “Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist.”58 But Church’s commercial and critical successes rankled Stillman, who wrote Norton from London in 1860: “Nobody likes the Heart of the Andes here that I have seen, they all consider it clap trap.”59 Three years later, Stillman publicly explained why viewers “cannot depend upon the fidelity of [Church’s] pictures of South American” landscapes. Church’s grandiose canvases were not, he clarified, “faithful portraits of any scenery,” but instead were imagined

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compositions “painted from studies, and . . . put together in New York.”60 Stillman’s reactions anticipate the hostility that the American Pre-­R aphaelites of the following decade would direct toward Church. As Church too, especially in the 1850s, bore the influence of Ruskin and deployed a degree of precision that rivaled the work of many Pre-­R aphaelites, one might expect the Association’s members to have felt a certain kinship with Church’s project. But the American Pre-­R aphaelites who succeeded Stillman recognized Church’s “elaborate work” to be “wholly superficial” and offered not “for a worthy purpose.” They differentiated their own mimesis from Church’s. Theirs was “elaboration” that “express[ed] truth,” while Church’s was “elaboration . . . given without knowledge” as a “display of mechanism.”61 The confrontation of The Andes of Ecuador with Mount Chocorua and Stillman’s response to his former teacher laid the groundwork for the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ rejection of the operatic realism adopted in the grand-­manner landscapes of Church, Bierstadt, and Moran.

Objectivity and Subjectivity in the Adirondacks During the summer of 1857, Stillman returned to the Adirondacks with James Russell Lowell, Samuel G. Howe, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Lowell’s nephews. With critical approval eluding his Ruskinian efforts at the National Academy earlier that spring, Stillman, stimulated by the wilderness, interrogated fully the Transcendentalist leanings that had inflected his thinking for at least a decade. The product of that trip, an essay, “The Subjective of It” (1858), can be read as his most engaged experiment with Emersonian thought—­a marked departure from the Ruskinian precepts he had incorporated into Mount Chocorua the previous summer.62 Tapping into his painterly and literary experiences up to that point in his career, “The Subjective of It” dramatizes Stillman’s efforts to harmonize his Transcendentalist, artistic, and literary enterprises. The essay is a confrontation in which an artist engages in heated dialogue with himself over his inchoate ideas about the ultimate nature of reality. In “The Subjective of It,” Stillman’s fluency in both visual and poetic language is on display: “Line for line, tint for tint, the noble mountain that lifts itself at the east, robed in primeval forest to its very summit, and now suffused with rosy light from the sun, already hidden from us by a low ridge in the west, was reproduced in the void below us.”63 The natural elements that were resonant features in Saranac Lake are again highlighted. In both painted and written accounts, radiating light, thickly forested mountains, and their reflected aqueous doubles emerge as key agents. To the untutored eye, the wilderness is composed of mountains, trees, and lakes, but Stillman the artist also perceives the scene before him in units of lines and tints. His verbal and visual senses on full alert, Stillman would, in “The Subjective of It,” accumulate a vast body of objective observations and subjective impressions in his quest for personal transcendence. “The Subjective of It” is governed by two narrative conceits. Stirred by his Spiritualist practice, Stillman structures the essay around a conversation he has with a

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disembodied voice that speaks to him in the wilderness. He labels the voice his “daemon,” who, with scorn and condescension, returns over a period of days, repeatedly asking: Is Stillman’s experience “Subjective or objective”? With this query, Stillman positions “The Subjective of It” as a direct response to Ruskin’s chapter, “Of the Pathetic Fallacy,” published in Modern Painters III the previous year. Ruskin opened that section with a dismissal of “two of the most objectionable words that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians—­namely, ‘Objective’ and ‘Subjective’. No words can be more exquisitely, and in all points, useless.”64 Stillman disagrees, and “The Subjective of It” reveals where he finds value in a dialectical tension that Ruskin rejects. As Stillman attempts to resolve the contest between the two regimes gnawing at his psyche, the daemon’s questions incite elevated states of anxiety: “The universe is subjective to Deity, objective to me; but if I am His image, what is in me which corresponds to the Creator in Him?”65 Stillman believes that his aesthetic progress has been stymied by his wavering between a Transcendentalism that privileges idealized forms and a Ruskinian mimesis predicated on the delineation of visible facts. By means of the essay’s second narrative trope, his recurring sightings of “the procession of the pines,” Stillman embraces the potency of the transcendental consciousness. In quiet moments, while in conversation with his daemon, Stillman witnesses a “procession” of a group of North American white pines. They become animated with a “supernatural vitality,” swaying, growing, and moaning in the wind, transforming into “phantoms of some antediluvian race  .  .  . marching in silence.”66 Stillman’s synesthetic experience is accompanied by his daemon’s repeated whispers: “The procession of the Anakim!” (The Anakim were a race of giants mentioned in the Old Testament.) This fusion of the empirical—­close observation of trees studied for the purpose of their faithful representation—­with their anthropomorphic and biblical associations shows Stillman struggling with the valence between fact and emotion, while submitting to the allure of the pathetic fallacy. To Ruskin, trees in motion were simply windswept—­certainly they did not walk. He would have labeled Stillman’s procession “a fallacy caused by an excited state of the feelings, making us, for the time, more or less irrational.”67 Under the burden of opposing aesthetic regimes and overwhelmed in a moment of Transcendentalist exaltation, Stillman writes, “My eyes, my ears, were opened anew to Nature . . . I had never before felt as I now felt, that I was a part in the landscape, and that it was something more to me than rocks and trees.”68 Stillman’s essay proposes a heightened allegiance to subjective experience as a necessary component of right living and artistic creation. It suggests that, at least in the summer of 1857, Stillman had settled, if somewhat uncomfortably, into Transcendentalism as his preferred mode of apprehending nature. Over the following winter, Stillman wrote Norton that he hoped the painted product of that summer’s encounter, The Procession of the Pines, would communicate the “magic power and the spirit of nature . . . glimmerings of the great secret which I have studied for so long.”69 Eager to share these glimmerings, Stillman exhibited

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his now-­unlocated painting in 1858 at the Boston Athenaeum, which purchased the work the following year and displayed it in its permanent collection through 1863. Reported to have elicited positive responses from many who viewed it, The Procession of the Pines was a particular favorite of Emerson, whose son later described it as featuring “huge Norway pines on a high promontory standing black against the orange twilight glow, and reflected in the still lake.”70 Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in 1870 that Stillman’s painting had “identified his fame with that delightful forest region,” and in 1893 Wendell P. Garrison called it “his best-­known and most poetic piece.”71 Despite these laudatory recollections, and though it was on display for six years, there is no known record of the contemporary public reception to the work. By 1867, it was for sale in New York, where Clarence Cook recognized its importance in the history of the movement, but lamented, “It is hardly a picture that would make much talk to-­day, it is somewhat coarsely painted, and the color has not stood well, but it is interesting to see it again after the lapse of several years, and to remember the old days of excitement and controversy, in the midst of which, and out of which, it was produced.”72 Cook’s muted response suggests that Stillman’s early Ruskinian efforts, softened by the artist’s interests in transcendental idealism, had not kept pace with the more vehement realism of the Association. Stillman’s surviving painting from that era, which commemorates the activities of the summer of 1858, is The Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks (1858, fig. 13). The artist’s best-­known work memorializes the camping expedition he took with nine of his eminent friends to the Adirondacks in the summer of that year, a trip precipitated in part by Emerson’s response to The Procession of the Pines and his desire to see the majestic trees in person. The Philosophers’ Camp presents a communal gathering of the group, its horizontal orientation contrasting with the frieze-­like wall of starkly vertical trees. The tableau is a vibrant record of the retreat Stillman led to Follensby Pond accompanied by members of the Boston Saturday Club: Emerson, Lowell, scientist Louis Agassiz, doctors Estes Howe and Amos Binney, naturalist Jeffries Wyman, writer John Holmes, Judge Ebenezer Rockwood Hoar, and lawyer Horatio Woodman. There is a sizable literature that chronicles the camping trip, which was reported on by the press as soon as the luminaries departed for the woods. A journalist who happened upon the group during his own trek wrote a story of his encounter with the “philosophers.”73 The most famous account, published in 1867, was Emerson’s long poem, “The Adirondacs: A Journal. Dedicated to my Fellow-­Travellers in August, 1858.” Several of the club members themselves, including Emerson, kept diaries during their time in the Adirondacks. What has received less attention, as Karen Georgi has recently noted, is the manner in which The Philosophers’ Camp aspires to a landscape genre in which motifs and formal choices born of empirical and transcendental impulses coexist.74 Stillman depicts his fellow philosophers in a range of camping activities. Agassiz dissects a fish in front of the tent at left, surrounded by Wyman, Holmes, and Howe. Beside the shed at the right, Hoar, Lowell, Stillman, Binney, and Woodman stand

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Fig. 13. William James Stillman, The Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks, 1858. Oil on canvas, 20 ⅛ × 30 in. (51.1 × 76.2 cm). Concord Free Public Library.

at target practice. The two groups of men form a pyramidal arrangement, directing the viewer’s eye to the center of the composition, where Emerson stands alone, as solitary and upright as the tree bisecting the canvas on its vertical axis. This placement visualizes the memory of Emerson that Stillman later recalled “stands out” from their time together in the wilderness: “this image of Emerson claiming kinship with the forest.”75 As they had for Stillman, the pines held a particular power over Emerson, who requested that Stillman bring him to the spot where the artist had witnessed their procession the previous summer. James Schlett explains that the swaying pines were not just a figment of Stillman’s imagination. The shore of Follensby Pond in the Adirondacks was lined with centuries-­old white pines, many of which were over two hundred feet tall, a height double that of neighboring trees. Schlett points out that lacking reinforcement of other species of the same stature, the pines were susceptible “to the full force of the Follensby’s dominant west wind, making them lean to the east.”76 The effect of this natural anomaly inspired awe. Witnessing Emerson commune with the pines was, as Stillman recollected, “as if I had stood for a moment on a

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mount of transfiguration, and seen, as if in a vision, the typical American, the noblest in the idealization of the American, of all the race.”77 Where Stillman’s earlier painted and written works attempted to actualize Emerson’s teachings, The Philosophers’ Camp also apotheosizes Emerson the man. The same stylistic and compositional strategies that Stillman employed in Saranac Lake to aesthetically synthesize his Transcendentalist and Spiritualist practices—­focused light on natural objects rendered with veridical precision—­return in The Philosophers’ Camp. The addition of human figures, however, adds a narrative dimension to the painting, a feature more common to British Pre-­R aphaelite landscapes. While at work on The Philosophers’ Camp, Stillman wrote to Norton, “I have been painting a picture of our camp and its inhabitants[,] an experiment in historical painting.”78 Indeed, Stillman’s canvas features many of the hallmarks of history painting: the work commemorates a specific event attended by noteworthy figures; those included are identifiable, each pictured with recognizable portraits; and the environment includes symbolic elements, such as the American flag. Emerson is inserted into the middle of this composition, between the world of science on the left and that of politics on the right—­those at target practice portend the violence that will, in less than three years, unfold under the banner of nationalism. Participating in neither activity, Emerson instead engages in contemplative repose, his mind open to the mingling of spirit and matter in nature, a condition congenial to advancement through self-­culture. A further departure from Ruskinian practice was Stillman’s decision to reconstruct the scene of The Philosophers’ Camp from memory, rather than executing it directly from nature. While working on the painting, Stillman concluded “that there is but one way for me to paint landscape as such and that is not to paint it from nature. I must work out by the slow process of self-­expression.”79 Yet some of Ruskin’s prescriptions remained active. Surrounding the figures are characters as visually prominent as the painting’s human protagonists, the tall trees occupying the shallow foreground and middle ground. The viewer’s access to the background is occluded by a wall of foliage, a density Emerson described as “sovran [sic] with centennial trees.”80 Stillman’s trees catch the raking light as they did in Saranac Lake, further evidence that sunlight still possessed for him a somatic presence, its materiality as palpable as the work’s human subjects and surrounding trees and rocks. Stillman’s imagination, catalyzed by late-­afternoon light, associates this refulgence with an opening between his immediate surroundings and the world of spirits, who “people it if even with shadows.”81 The Philosophers’ Camp emerges as a visual memorial to a moment in American history when the worlds of art and Transcendentalism converged.

Photographic “sujets intimes” Disappointed by his lack of critical success, Stillman stopped exhibiting his painting professionally in 1860, and photography was promoted to his central artistic outlet.82 Stillman’s surviving oeuvre does not contain sketchbooks, drawings, or preparatory

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documents that illustrate his artistic process, but the photographic project he undertook in the Adirondacks in 1859 provides a corpus of visual material that further clarifies his ongoing negotiation between Ruskinian fidelity to nature and Emersonian spiritual vision. Photographic Studies by W. J. Stillman. Part I. The Forest. Adirondac Woods (1859; no part II ever appeared) is a collection of fifteen untitled photographs that Stillman made at Ampersand Pond during the summer of 1859 after the second Philosophers’ Camp expedition and subsequently circulated to each member of the Adirondack Club. The most recent scholarship on Stillman’s photography emphasizes the technical and scientific aspects of his project.83 Focusing primarily on Stillman’s later photographic series, often his Acropolis of Athens (1870), several scholars maintain that Stillman’s innovations in camera design and photographic practice ultimately subsumed his aesthetic interests as a landscape painter. The summer of 1859, however, was a complex transitional moment when Stillman ventured into landscape photography while he simultaneously pursued painting. Though there are no located paintings from the trip, the Adirondac Woods series traces Stillman’s experimentation with compositional styles, formal arrangements, and media that he hoped would more seamlessly integrate the various intellectual and aesthetic challenges he had long held in suspension. During a period when painters often felt threatened by photography, Stillman’s engagement with both media is striking. Subject always to the tug between mimetic and transcendental urgencies, Stillman possessed a canny sense for which medium was most appropriate to his motif, and did not hesitate to utilize the camera to forward his artistic and spiritual aspirations. In 1855, he had promoted its benefits to fellow artists in one of the earliest issues of The Crayon: “ ‘What effect have daguerreotypes on Art,’ [we] have as often answered ‘No effect that artists should deplore.’ . . . [They] compel painters to be more conscientious and studious. Studies from nature that would once have been considered satisfactory, when placed by the side of a photograph become poor things, and the artist must improve or be neglected.”84 Stillman’s answer blends advocacy with admonition. While artists should neither condemn nor fear photography, he warns that certain subjects, nature studies specifically, may be eclipsed by photographic innovations. His counsel that the “artist must improve or be neglected” may be directed at himself. One senses in Stillman’s earliest photographs that he understood that the struggle was occurring on a larger field than just his personal ambitions. Stillman’s photographs of 1859 are places of convergence and imbrication, places where the visible world of material phenomena is shadowed and overlaid by the invisible. The significance of Stillman gifting his friends a copy of Adirondac Woods lies in the gesture’s affirmation of the metaphysical orientation that he had come to share with figures such as Emerson and Lowell. His carefully manufactured artifact was a testament to his belief that photography could serve as a “great means of developing the Ideal-­visible,” the grand ambition announced in the epigraph to the

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Fig. 14. William James Stillman, Photographic Study, 1859. Albumen silver print, 7 ½ × 5 ⅝ in. (19.1 × 14.3 cm). From the portfolio The Forest: Adirondac Woods. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, 1993.34.11.

prospectus of the second volume of The Crayon.85 As Janice Simon has persuasively argued, Adirondac Woods offered Stillman the opportunity to unite visually the Transcendentalist aesthetics he had explored in his writings for The Crayon with his lived experience in the wilderness.86 Simon contends that in both choice of subject and formal treatment, Stillman was directly addressing the Emersonian challenge to locate in one’s mind the psychic equivalent of any perceived natural object. “Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of mind,” Emerson wrote, “and that state of mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”87 Simon identifies attributes of Stillman’s Adirondacks photographs that express the mental “appearances of nature,” and argues that they catalogue “nature’s humble, democratic diversity as a means of asserting nature’s bounteous divinity.”88 Together, the fifteen photographs offer a “sea of forms radically alike and even unique,” a pictorial inventory of Emerson’s ideal nature.89 Stillman’s photographs attest to his manual and subjective dexterity, his ability to produce studies of nature with an intensity and from a perspective that had been inaccessible to him as a painter. Among the most resonant of his choices are disruptions of original scale, in which comparatively massive objects like trees attain a delicacy and angularity of line (fig. 14). This combination of effects promotes an aestheticized

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quality while retaining textural fidelity to the arboreal originals. Stillman reimagines trees by means of camera angle and lighting, transforming recognizable natural objects, like moss, twigs, and a cascade of roots, by locating them in a fresh visual syntax. He grafts an a priori set of visual protocols from his experience as a painter onto a new medium with its own technical demands, limitations, and opportunities. Evidence of this transfer can be found in figure 15, in which Stillman concentrates his attention on a tree highly reminiscent of the one in Millais’s The Proscribed Royalist (see fig. 5). One of Stillman’s photographs in his series and Durand’s Study of a Wood Interior (figs. 15 and 16) portray similar subjects. Both artists selected moss-­covered boulders as their focal points, surrounded by trunks of various heights and girths set against forest walls through which peek patches of sky. Yet differences abound: though Durand’s nature studies were purportedly painted in the presence of the motif, he consistently depicts wild nature in a more polished state than does Stillman in his photographed vignettes.90 Anne Ehrenkranz has concluded that Adirondac Woods is Stillman’s photographic response to Durand’s painted nature studies. But Stillman’s photographs must also be viewed through an alternative artistic tradition. The work of the Barbizon artists, and especially photographs taken in the Forest of Fontainebleau in the 1850s, exerted a persistent influence on him. Though Stillman’s formative experiences with Ruskin and his encounters with British art are central to the narrative of his career, he is transparent in his autobiography about the time he spent in Paris in the 1850s, his return to the city in 1860, and the relationships he established there with French painters. Acknowledging this crucial period in Stillman’s artistic development clarifies the stylistic conventions he adopted in Adirondac Woods. Stillman traveled to Paris in 1853. After Eugène Delacroix declined to accept him into his studio, he became the student of Adolphe Yvon, a painter of historical battle scenes. During this period Stillman made the acquaintance of Barbizon artists Théodore Rousseau, Jean-­François Millet, and Constant Troyon, and it was with their work, rather than with Yvon’s, that Stillman felt aesthetic kinship. Stillman regarded Rousseau as “the greatest of the French landscape painters,” visiting him often in his Paris studio and later at his home in Barbizon.91 He admired the way in which Rousseau “concentrated all his feelings and labor on what he used to call ‘sujets intimes,’ the picturesque nooks of landscape one can always find in a highly cultivated country, where nature . . . struggles against the invasion of culture, as in the borders of the forest of Fontainebleau.”92 Painted between 1852 and 1854, Rousseau’s The Edge of the Woods at Monts-­Girard, Fontainebleau Forest (fig. 17) would have appealed to Stillman when he likely encountered it in the artist’s studio. Such compositions visualize Stillman’s preference for works in which “nature withdraws farther and makes a wider margin for art,” where “the wedding and welding of the two become more subtle and playful.”93 Rousseau was also prolific in drawing from nature, and Stillman would have seen the artist’s many graphite and charcoal sketches. In one of Stillman’s photographs (fig. 18), the multiple planes of overlapping trunks achieve an effect similar to that in

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Fig. 15. (right) William James Stillman, Photographic Study, 1859. Albumen silver print, 7 ¾ × 6 ¼ in. (19.7 × 15.9 cm). From the portfolio The Forest: Adirondac Woods. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, 1993.34.13. Fig. 16. (below) Asher B. Durand, Study of a Wood Interior, c. 1855. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 16 ½ × 24 in. (41.9 × 61 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA.

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Fig. 17. Théodore Rousseau, The Edge of the Woods at Monts-­Girard, Fontainebleau Forest, 1852–­54. Oil on wood panel, 31 ½ × 48 in. (80 × 121.9 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Rousseau’s Trees in a Thicket (1845, fig. 19), each tree delineated from the next by the sharp contrast between the trunks’ dark verticals and the background’s bleached sky. During Stillman’s time in Paris, the Fontainebleau Forest, previously a magnet for painters, began to attract photographers with more ambitious artistic aspirations. Landscape photography in particular, separated from the commercial associations of portraiture, quickly gained recognition as an art form and received official sanctioning by the Société française de photographie, founded in 1854.94 Stillman’s sanguine attitude toward the camera, expressed in the above quotation from The Crayon in 1855, can be viewed as an absorption, and restatement in an American vernacular, of Barbizon aesthetics. In contrast, the British press frequently pitted photographers against Pre-­ Raphaelite painters. One reviewer of an exhibition of photographs, exhausted by the conflict, wrote, “It will hardly do any longer for . . . the pre-­R aphaelite and painter after nature . . . to pat the photographer condescendingly on the head.”95 In France, however, as Sarah Kennel writes, “by the 1850s, landscape was one of the most discussed, practiced, and theorized genres within both French painting and photography.”96 Two albums distributed widely, Photographic Studies and Studies and Landscapes (1853–­54), published by Louis Désiré Blanquart-­Evrard, popularized the romanticized idiom of Barbizon landscape photography. Its successful execution was dependent on an eye

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Fig. 18. William James Stillman, Photographic Study, 1859. Albumen silver print, 7 ¼ × 5 ⅛ in. (18.3 × 38.4 cm). From the portfolio The Forest: Adirondac Woods. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, 1993.34.6.

Fig. 19. Théodore Rousseau, Trees in a Thicket, 1845. Conté crayon on paper, 12 ¼ × 16 ⅛ in. (31.1 × 41 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Fig. 20. Ernest Benecke, Groupe de Cedres du M. Liban, c. 1852. Blanquart-­Evrard process salt print, sheet: 8 ⅝ × 6 ⅞ in. (21.9 × 17.4 cm). Art Gallery of Ontario, Malcolmson Collection. Gift of Harry and Ann Malcolmson in partnership with a private donor, 2014. 2014/486.

for the telling detail, as well as on technical acumen in calibrating exposure times to accent selected elements within dense forest foliage. In circulation while Stillman was in France, images from Blanquart-­Evrard’s series feature stylistic and compositional choices that Stillman would later emulate in Adirondac Woods. One photograph included in Blanquart-­Evrard’s volume, Ernest Benecke’s Groupe de Cedres du M. Liban (c. 1852, fig. 20), displays formal elements that Stillman would employ: a tightly cropped view of a small wooded recess and a diaphanous focus paired with passages of extreme clarity. The concept behind the “sujet intime” accorded with Stillman’s prior Ruskinian endeavors, even if the softer execution and facture of the Barbizon painters were anathema to Ruskin himself. Each of Stillman’s Adirondac Woods images except one depicts a tree or group of trees, a boulder, or some other collection of natural objects at the close range required for Ruskinian study, a compositional structure Ruskin employed in his own drawings such as Rocks and Ferns in a Wood at Crossmount, Perthshire (1847, fig. 21). Stillman’s Adirondack photographs offer the viewer an intimacy at odds with the contemporary symphonic depictions of the American continent that proliferated at the turn of the new decade. Viewed alongside his three extant landscape paintings, Stillman’s photographs seem engaged in an early and quiet conspiracy to undermine the grandiosity of the narrative of domination and destiny that the American

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Fig. 21. John Ruskin, Rocks and Ferns in a Wood at Crossmount, Perthshire, 1847. Pen and ink and watercolor over graphite on paper, 12 ¾ × 18 ⅜ in. (32.3 × 46.5 cm). Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Lakeland Arts Trust, Kendal, Cumbria, UK.

Pre-­R aphaelites of the 1860s would actively seek to destabilize. By lavishing attention on crevices, gullies, and hollows, Stillman elevates nature’s negative spaces. In his works, Stillman forecloses the horizon and denies the comforts of conventional perspective; the Claudean heritage is dismantled.

Reckoning with Ruskin Sailing for London as 1859 closed, Stillman was transformed from the young man who had last spent time with Ruskin in 1853. Though the veneration of nature was central to both the Transcendentalist and Ruskinian systems, this overlap could not mask the divergences in how the American artist and English critic each understood the presence and role of the deity in nature, how each construed the act of seeing, and how each envisioned the style of apposite artistic representation that issued from their respective doctrinal priorities. As their experiences of 1860 would painfully reveal, the dimension of Emersonian Transcendentalism that Stillman carried to Europe, encapsulated in Emerson’s “I—­this thought which is called I,—­is the mold into which

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the world is poured like melted wax,” could not be reconciled with the worldview of Ruskin, who, as Lindsay Smith has written, sought “the transcendence without the I.”97 In the years since Stillman’s previous visit with Ruskin, there had also been a significant alteration in each man’s political position. Stillman’s assimilation of Transcendentalist ideas, his exposure to the growing radicalism of friends like Norton, and the unavoidability of civil war had hastened Stillman’s own internalization of American progressive politics. Ruskin had also become more focused upon social criticism, but until 1860 he had emphasized the vital link between the health of a nation’s cultural life and the vitality of its civic life. Ruskin’s hierarchical vision did not prepare him for the disruption of the social order or for the bloodshed that would explode in Stillman’s homeland within less than a year. The two men thus reengaged at a moment of personal, political, and aesthetic turmoil and transformation. Stillman’s various accounts of his time with Ruskin in London and Switzerland in 1860 read like melodrama, moments of fraternity and encouragement metamorphosing into perceived slights and long silences. Nonetheless, their collaboration represents the closure of the first phase of Pre-­R aphaelitism in the United States, represented by a decade of Stillman’s endeavors. Further, examining their time together provides an opportunity to isolate the welter of ideas—­British, European, and American in origin—­that would influence the direction of the movement as the Civil War began. While Stillman still had contributions to make to the generation of American Pre-­R aphaelites who succeeded him, the summer of 1860 intensified the long process of his disengagement from the strictures of truth to nature and his increasing acceptance, if perhaps not yet full adoption, of an aesthetic idealism. This separation was partly the result of Stillman’s personal journey, but it was also a virulent reaction, shared by the American Pre-­R aphaelites and by Norton, to Ruskin’s emerging political regressiveness that led him to resist the abolition of slavery. Ruskin’s relationship with Stillman, particularly during their time in Switzerland, fits a pattern of earlier efforts by the critic to cultivate ties with Millais, Rossetti, Brett, and Inchbold, and would be replicated, though with lesser intensity, in his later support of American Pre-­R aphaelite painters Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, and John Henry Hill. Stillman reentered Ruskin’s life during a difficult year for the critic as a rift in his relationship with Rossetti had begun to open. Following recent disappointments with Brett and Inchbold, Ruskin likely saw in Stillman a promising suppliant.98 Though it had already been more than half a decade since Ruskin’s breach with Millais, that relationship most closely paralleled Stillman and Ruskin’s of 1860. In July 1851 Millais wrote that he and Ruskin “are such good friends that he wishes me to accompany him to Switzerland this summer.”99 Nine years later, Stillman reported to Norton that Ruskin “and I have become best friends” and that “[I] shall be with him next month travelling in Switzerland.”100 Stillman and Ruskin’s sketching trip in Switzerland is a crucial interval in the history of transatlantic Pre-­R aphaelitism.101 Ruskin’s stance toward younger artists combined the roles of patron, critic, fellow artist, and, sometimes, traveling com-

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Fig. 22. John Ruskin and Frederick Crawley, Fribourg. Rue de la Palme and House Beyond Pont de Berne, c. 1854 or 1856. Half-­plate daguerreotype, 4 ¾ × 6 in. (12.1 × 15 cm). Courtesy of K. and J. Jacobson, UK.

panion. He often assigned tasks to these painters in the early stages of their careers, recruiting them as soldiers in his lifelong campaign to preserve what he deemed noble scenes of the natural and built environments, both of which he believed were becoming rapidly degraded and in danger of vanishing forever. One recognizes from Ruskin’s past practice his blend of motivations that led him to ask Stillman to join him. As Stillman recalled in his Autobiography, “Ruskin invited me to go to Switzerland with him for the summer, finding in some of my studies and drawings the possibility of getting from me some of the Alpine work he wanted done.”102 But embedded in Stillman’s multiple accounts are details that reveal fissures in what had previously held the men together: a shared aesthetic rooted in awe of and reverence for nature. During a summer in each other’s constant presence, while struggling to create landscape imagery that would proclaim their increasingly disparate values, these fissures widened into what would become an unbreachable chasm. The locales that Stillman and Ruskin visited and the subjects they attempted can be profitably compared with earlier efforts by Ruskin or by artists working under his direction. One of Ruskin’s many unfinished projects was the documentation of

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Fig. 23. John Ruskin, Fribourg, Switzerland, possibly 1856, dated 1859. Pen, ink, and watercolor with touches of bodycolor on blue-­gray paper, 8 ⅞ × 11 ⅜ in. (22.5 × 28.8 cm). The British Museum, London.

Swiss towns and their history. He wrote in Praeterita that in 1854, upon recognizing the profound changes in the Swiss villages to which he had traveled since the 1830s, he decided to commence a series of drawings that would serve the purposes of both historical documentation and pedagogy.103 From the outset of the expedition with Stillman, it was evident that Ruskin was attempting to document scenes of natural beauty and Swiss history as well as to reexamine landscapes through the eyes of a new acolyte. Stillman recalled, “Our first sketching excursion was to the Perte du Rhone, and, while Ruskin was drawing some mountain forms beyond the river, he asked me to draw some huts nearby,—­not picturesque cottages, thatched roofs and lichen-­stained walls, but shanties, such as the Irish labourers on our railways build by the roadside, of deal boards on end, irregular and careless without being picturesque, and too closely associated with pigsty construction, in my mind, to be worth drawing.”104 The task that Ruskin assigned to Stillman of drawing the shanties by the Rhone is reminiscent of a project that Ruskin had undertaken himself in the daguerreotype Fribourg. Rue de la Palme and House Beyond Pont de Berne (c. 1854 or 1856, fig. 22), as

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well as in the associated drawing in ink and watercolor, Fribourg, Switzerland (1856 or 1859, fig. 23). Ruskin wrote that “the town of Fribourg is in like manner the only medieval mountain town of importance left to us . . . yet retains much of the aspect it had in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”105 The dilapidated homes and warehouses at the center of Ruskin’s daguerreotype, sagging along the riverfront, in peril of imminent collapse, are markedly softened in his drawing, the stark physical reality displaced by a nostalgia for eras irreversibly lost. While the precision of the daguerreotype penetrates the drawing, Ruskin also aestheticizes ruins and poverty through the interplay of the gray roofs and rock and the blue river. Christopher Newall has noted that the Fribourg drawing isolates Ruskin’s artistic choices, fusing “forms into shifting masses animated by areas of carefully observed detail, but with other parts reduced to abstraction and indefiniteness.”106 Newall’s phrasing suggests an observer not yet fully cognizant of empiricism’s potential to depict conditions of social injustice, who instead remains a devotee of the picturesque taste for decay. Ruskin had expended significant efforts to capture the charms of vernacular Swiss architecture and was surprised by the laconic nature of Stillman’s attempt. Stillman recalled: “When Ruskin came back I had made a careless and slipshod five minutes’ sketch, not worth the paper it was on, as to me were not the originals. Ruskin was angry, and he had a right to be; for at least I should have found it enough that he wanted it done, to make me do my best on it, but I did not think of it in that light.”107 There may well be more to the anecdote than just a squabble over appropriate subjects for a sketch. A political and aesthetic divide was opening, one that would deepen within a year over the signal event of Fort Sumter, and subsequently widen during the war with deleterious consequences, not only for the personal relationship between Ruskin and Stillman, but for American Pre-­R aphaelitism. During the summer spent with Stillman, Ruskin continued to work on his most overt statements to date on the iniquities of capitalism and its toxic societal ramifications. Ruskin had previously ventured onto the terrain of political and economic critique in two lectures given in Manchester in 1857, The Political Economy of Art.108 This earlier work focused on cultural economics and introduced concepts such as the financial value of art and artists, how artworks should be priced and practitioners compensated. Ruskin sets forth his vision for the dynamic reciprocity among artist, consumer, and the state, asserting the mutual obligations of each to the other, positions that Stillman had addressed in a more cursory manner in the pages of The Crayon. And yet there was always a paternalistic and authoritarian current in Ruskin’s thinking despite periodic egalitarian overtones. As Ruskin enjoined his audiences in Manchester to appreciate the necessity of unleashing the liberative qualities of art and artist, his allegiance to traditional notions of social hierarchy prevailed. From the podium he exhorted his listeners, “Nay, but you reply, there is one vast difference between the nation’s economy and the private man’s: the farmer has full authority over his laborers; he can direct them to do what is needed to be done, whether they like it or not; and he can turn them away if they refuse to work, or impede others in their working, or

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are disobedient, or quarrelsome.”109 The contemporary reader might anticipate that Ruskin was preparing his audience for an argument in favor of more benign treatment of the farmworker. But instead, Ruskin asserted that in pursuit of an economy optimal for the flourishing of culture and society, the control wielded by the private landholder should also be exerted by the state: “There IS this great difference; it is precisely this difference on which I wish to fix your attention, for it is precisely this difference which you have to do away with. We know the necessity in farm, or in fleet, or in army; but we commonly refuse to admit it in the body of the nation.”110 The dissonance between Ruskin and Stillman on that first sketching trip to the Perte du Rhone created a freighted moment and accelerated the alienation between America’s first Pre-­R aphaelite and his mentor. Stillman’s characterization of the two men’s return by carriage to their lodgings isolates the ideological seed latent in Ruskin’s aesthetics, a seed ill-­suited to flower on American soil: We drove back towards Geneva in silence,—­he moody and I sullen,—­and halfway there he broke out, saying that the fact that he wanted the drawing done ought to have been enough to make me do it. I replied that I could see no interest in the subject, which to me only suggested fever and discomfort, and wretched habitations for human beings. We relapsed into silence, and for another mile nothing was said, when Ruskin broke out with, ‘You were right, Stillman, about those cottages; your way of looking at them was nobler than mine, and now, for the first time in my life, I understand how anybody can live in America.’111

Ruskin’s acknowledgment can be read as a notable, perhaps modest, and certainly impermanent alteration in his thinking about the United States as a nation whose flaws extend from its democratic government, to its landscape bereft of historical associations, to its uncivilized state of culture. Ruskin’s interests in Fribourg’s history as part of his larger project of documenting views of Swiss towns were those of a tourist and artist seeking to record the pleasures of compelling visual and historical scenery. He did not see in the “cottages” or “shanties” along the riverfront what Stillman not only found nonpicturesque but associated with the degradations of the American impoverished, particularly with respect to the “pigsty construction” of their housing. While Ruskin had always focused on Fribourg’s sinuous twist of the river or his own attempts to replicate the sublimity of Turner’s renditions of the town, he had not permitted the harsh reality of the lives in “those cottages” to transcend the category of the aesthetic and become vital to his politics. The exchange with Stillman provides a glimpse of Ruskin’s effort to evolve from privileged art critic of rarefied tastes to social theorist with a heightened sensitivity to economic iniquities. Though his prescribed solutions to structural inequality seemed more Tory than progressive, Ruskin had traveled an improbable distance from the aesthete who had written in The Poetry of Architecture about the moment he “first encountered . . . the unobtrusive, yet beautiful, front of the Swiss cottage.” He had

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channeled his aesthetic pleasure into a fantasy of the cottage’s inhabitants: “one feels that peasants whose hands carved the planks so neatly, and adorned their cottage so industriously . . . can be no dull, drunken, lazy boors . . . sweet ideas float over the imagination of such passages of peasant life.”112 His transformation from a young man of romanticized sentiments to one in middle age who recognized Stillman’s view of the slums as “nobler”—­Ruskin’s ultimate epithet connoting high cultural value—­ than his own captures the turbulent journey that Ruskin would never fully complete. His judgment on the “livability” of America, at least for those of artistic and intellectual sensibilities, represented only a spasmodic interruption of long-­held disdain that would explode into virulence in the spring of 1861.

The Mantle Passes Stillman spent the winter and spring of 1861 in France, renewing friendships with Delacroix, Rousseau, and Troyon. “Out of a quiet and happy life in Normandy,” he was “aroused by the complications of our Civil War.”113 The summer of 1861 saw Stillman exploring several options for war service. “Sick at heart with this insatiable longing to be with and part of my country in her hour of struggle,” Stillman made loose plans to join the Massachusetts regiment of an American officer he met in Paris.114 Upon his return to New York in July 1861, Stillman appears to have made some modest but ultimately unsuccessful attempts to realize that goal. His next idea was to go “up into the Adirondacks to raise a company of sharpshooters.”115 Following the collapse of that plan combined with his subsequent failure of the army’s medical exam, Stillman received a diplomatic appointment as United States consul in Rome in late fall 1861. Despite the tensions and misgivings between Ruskin and Stillman during their summer in Switzerland, Stillman’s residual affection for his former mentor was apparent in the naming of his first child, John Ruskin Stillman, in 1862. The following year, however, what had been a gradual disillusionment with Ruskin and his teachings hardened into feelings of betrayal when the critic’s opinions on the Civil War became public on both sides of the Atlantic. Ruskin’s regressive views on slavery had already caused a breakdown in his communication with Norton, discussed in the following chapter. Stillman’s own outrage was palpable in a letter he wrote in June 1863 to William Michael Rossetti from Rome. Stillman references Ruskin’s recent essays in Fraser’s Magazine: The immediate need of my writing is to have you send me a copy of Fraser with that absurd (they say) defence of slavery, in which Ruskin has been committing a felo de se [suicide], I think they call it. What in the world could have possessed him to do such a thing? Does he know anything about slavery, having never seen a slave? or does he by abstract reasoning prove a falsehood? or that he believes it? which is the same thing with him. I’d like to put the argumentum ad hominem to him, make him my n—­—­ three

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months, to show him what an abstraction may be worth. But do send up the article, that I may measure for myself the present deviation of the compass, and find where our friend’s north pole has got to.116

Stillman returned to the United States weeks later, arriving in New York just after the conclusion of the Battle of Gettysburg. Only six months after the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, Stillman must have been deeply conflicted to learn of the new movement, which claimed him as their American progenitor and Ruskin as their oracle. Though the Association would later condemn Ruskin for his retrograde views, the group continued to regard him as their prophet throughout the war; it would not be until after Lincoln’s assassination that they indicted Ruskin in The New Path. Stillman’s private denunciation did not deter him from submitting two articles to the young New Path during his short tenure in the United States over the summer and fall of 1863.117 His two articles, “Art as a Record” and “Naturalism and Genius,” appeared in the August and October 1863 issues. “Art as a Record” in particular demonstrates that despite his gravitation to Emersonian Transcendentalism, his personal distancing from Ruskin, and his private censure of Ruskin’s political and aesthetic views, he still endorsed the Ruskinian position that the nation’s civic health was essential for the production of superior art. Bringing this message to The New Path, Stillman’s experienced voice endowed the fledgling journal with both authority and critical expertise. He cites specific developments in the output of Millais and Rossetti and the reception of Pre-­R aphaelite works in England, which he uses to construct a viable path forward for the new American movement. He also adopts a tone consistent with that of earlier issues of the journal and follows the Association members in indicting his country’s mainstream artists: “What ought our artists to do for us? What they have done for us, so far, is to supply us with an expensive and grandiose sort of furniture.”118 Nearly fifteen years after Stillman first exhibited a painting and just three years after he effectively abandoned his practice, a group of young men who shared his views caused him to rekindle his resentment toward the New York art establishment he had left behind: “They have done for us very little that is worth doing, given us very little that is worth preserving, taught us very little of any sort. Look through your catalogue, if you still have it, of the last National Academy Exhibition, and count on your fingers the pictures which you would ever care to see again.” “Art as a Record” contrasts such unworthy productions with the work of “the younger men” and justifies the Ruskinian and Pre-­R aphaelite demand for “faithful recording.”119 The argument is one Stillman had made years earlier in The Crayon, but in “Art as a Record” it is recast with an urgency linked to the events of the contemporary moment: It is a rare thing, one of the rarest of things, to find any account of anything fairly and completely given. . . . Take the instance of our war. Our boasted free press has not done its duty by us. Have men been sent as “correspondents” to the seat of war who have had

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power and will to seize the vital truth of great events and preserve it? Very seldom. . . . Oh, reader! if you have a friend in the army who can see and describe, praise him and make much of him, that he may write you often, begging him the while to carefully discriminate between what he knows and what he only hears reported.120

Stillman contends that applying Pre-­R aphaelite acuity to all forms of description—­ not only visual but also textual—­would yield benefits to the general populace. It was crucial, especially during wartime, that the citizenry be able to discern between rigorous depictions and romanticized accounts. Truth is thus a reciprocal responsibility between artist and audience—­the Pre-­R aphaelites sought to condition viewers to demand veracity in multiple media and reward those who shunned “the false system.”121 In his second essay for The New Path, “Naturalism and Genius,” Stillman began to stray from the Association’s script. He argued for the Ruskinian notion that strict mimesis is but the first stage in the young artist’s development, after which, upon mastering faithful transcription, the artist may ascend to a higher and more imaginative level of execution, as exemplified by the work of Turner. Association members, while acknowledging the ultimate need for imaginative maturation, recognized the jejune nature of American art and favored adherence to the veridical as a disciplinary regime. Stillman explained his position to The New Path’s subscribers: “It has been misunderstood by hasty readers, who suppose that we claimed for pure and plain transcript of nature the rank of greatest art. Now, this is so far from being the truth, that we prefer not even to give it the rank of great art, but to use the term great for that art only which is the work of the imagination of a great man.”122 In the following issue, Cook attempted to redirect The New Path’s readership to the arduous but rewarding path: “faithfully to render every beautiful curve of line and every smallest shadow and tender gradation of light and color.”123 Deviation from the goal of what Farrer called “painful fidelity” was not encouraged.124 Though at the Association’s birth the group labeled itself the inheritor of the project initiated by Stillman the previous decade, toward the end of 1863 and beginning of 1864 Cook began to reject that lineage. He took to the New-­York Daily Tribune, where he was the art critic, to revise his earlier declaration that Stillman was the progenitor of the current American Pre-­R aphaelite project, and to predict that the Association would far outstrip Stillman’s contributions. Reviewing the annual National Academy exhibition in 1864, in which several Association members were represented, Cook sought to persuade his readers of the radical innovations of the American Pre-­R aphaelite project, and that its agenda for cultural reform was broader and more interventionist than Stillman’s. Cook criticized Stillman for his intellectual and artistic meandering, for not furthering “the good cause,” while simultaneously elevating Farrer to the prime position as the Association’s most promising proselyte.125 Cook wrote of Farrer’s contributions to the Academy, A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm (1863, see fig. 24) and The Cattskills, from the Village (unlocated):

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The exhibition of these two pictures marks an era in the history of American Art; and that, considered with reference to the principles on which they are painted, they will prove of more importance in the future development of that art than all the pictures that have been painted by all the academicians since the Academy was founded. . . . They are the first pictures that have been painted here in open defiance of all established rules of art, with the avowed purpose of striking out a new path, of going to Nature and proving the rules by comparison with her, and not forcing her to fit the Procrustean bed of the rules. We do not forget . . . Mr. Stillman painted very little, and pursued his art in a fitful, inconstant way; his pictures have great excellences; he might have done for us what Farrer promises to do, but he had not the zeal, the faith, the will of this other. Art, with him, was an amusement; he divided his interest between his easel, his editor’s table, and his mechanic inventions, and now another field holds him at work, half political, half dilettante. . . . Mr. Farrer’s influence, on the contrary, has been, and is, very great and moving. Since his first picture was exhibited—­the “Gone! Gone!” [see fig. 30] there has been more discussion as to the principles of art, more excitement of the whole subject, more interest felt in it, than ever at any time before in our history.126

Cook, who had six months earlier proclaimed Stillman’s vital contributions to American Pre-­R aphaelitism, recognized that the aspirations of the Association had already surpassed its predecessor’s in both aesthetic and cultural ambition. What had been understood by Stillman as a struggle over the suitable representation of the American landscape would seem comparatively naive when reformulated by Farrer and the American Pre-­R aphaelites into more profound interrogations of the legitimacy of the pictorial legacy they had inherited. But Stillman’s contestations were important antecedents of the more pitched controversies that would engage the energies and animosities of American artists, critics, and viewers in the 1860s. The composite nature of his work as painter, critic, and photographer, his cross-­pollination of Transcendentalism and empiricism, and his embrace of modest motifs executed with an unsurpassed level of verisimilitude distinguish Stillman from the mainstream practitioners whom the Association repudiated. Though Stillman’s surviving body of work does not pose the same alterity or intensity of aesthetic and political dissent that would occupy Association members, the terms of the antebellum debate, as framed by his career, were a precursor to the more complex discourse that occurred among the American Pre-­R aphaelites when the stakes were raised by Civil War.

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CHAPTER T WO

The American Pre-­R aphaelite Landscape and Thomas Charles Farrer

Thomas Charles Farrer’s A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm (1863, fig. 24) incites a sensation of dissonance. The painting’s visual intensity, the absence of a Claudean haze on the horizon, the clash of colors contained within its diminutive scale, the seemingly fanatical precision of brushwork, and the assertive effect of flatness all challenge the conventions of the grand studio compositions produced by the mainstream American landscape painters of the mid-­nineteenth century. As cofounder of the Association and the only core member to enlist in the Union army, Farrer led the American Pre-­Raphaelites’ protest against the traditions of academic landscape painting, a revolt that reached its apogee during the years of the Civil War. The Association’s rebellion left its imprint in Farrer’s paintings and writings, both published and unpublished. These works embody an articulate voice that would advocate for the abolition of slavery, broader access to education for women and the working classes, and the promotion of suffrage. His concern for these causes can be traced to his childhood and adolescent exposure to the Chartist and Christian Socialist movements in London, as well as to his own engagement with American politics. All of his reformist objectives, Farrer came to believe, could be advanced by the painter resisting the artistic status quo and pursuing an implacable realism in the execution of landscapes and nature studies. In both his visual and verbal output, Farrer challenged what constituted the apposite aesthetic and ideological representation of his adopted homeland. At the center of this project was his struggle to identify an ethical style of landscape painting, one that would counteract the political narcosis that Farrer associated with idealized depictions.

Detail of fig. 37

During the fifteen years that he spent in the United States, Farrer never relaxed his efforts as an artistic dissident. Likely arriving in New York in late 1858 at the age of nineteen, he had been trained in art schools in England by Ruskin and Rossetti. A central theme in Farrer’s painted and written works is his complex relationship with the oeuvre of the American landscape painter Thomas Cole. This chapter examines key nodal points in Farrer’s canon—­his first publicly exhibited landscape painting, A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm; his acknowledged masterpiece of 1865, View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital (see fig. 37); and his one known published essay, “A Few Questions Answered”—­all of which contend with Cole’s artistic legacy, his celebrity, and his favored subjects. Though Cole had been dead fifteen years by time of the Association’s formation, he still exerted profound influence on American landscape painting. His canvases were frequently exhibited in New York, and reviewers consistently drew comparisons between contemporary landscapes—­by both American Pre-­R aphaelites and more established painters—­and Cole’s earlier and admired works.1 Farrer’s major paintings and his essay reveal that he was constantly calibrating his pictorial and rhetorical responses against Cole’s formidable posthumous presence, as well as the work of living artists such as Durand, Gifford, and Cropsey. Farrer’s position as lead proponent of Ruskinian and Pre-­R aphaelite aesthetics in America has been acknowledged by scholars, who cite his training with Ruskin and Rossetti at the Working Men’s College, founded in London in 1854 according to the principles of Christian Socialism.2 The college’s founders aspired to offer workers the same liberal education open to affluent students.3 Previously unknown is that prior to studying with Ruskin at the Working Men’s College, Farrer attended another art program in London intended to educate the working classes: the Government Schools of Design. The conflicting pedagogical imperatives of the Government Schools and the Working Men’s College are offered here as the origin of the discordant elements that converge in Farrer’s landscapes. In contrast to the Working Men’s College, whose philosophy emphasized learning for its own sake, and not to “raise [students’] value in the labor-­market,” the Government Schools focused on a design curriculum consistent with its utilitarian mission, favoring graphics and the ornamentation of surfaces for the purpose of manufacturing commercial products.4 At the Government Schools, Farrer was subjected to a rigid course of training that involved extensive copying from prints and learning to draw “from the flat.”5 This regime was in contrast to the lessons in Ruskin’s classroom, where, freed from “the everlasting seesaw of Profit and Loss,” students were encouraged to draw from the round.6 Recognizing that Farrer studied with Ruskin after exposure to commercial design training at the Government Schools allows us to locate the sources, techniques, and aesthetics that guided Farrer’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, particularly the confrontation of conventional graphic effects with almost “blade-­by-­blade” fidelity to the mimetic. Farrer’s mature artistic vision joined the political and the aesthetic. He integrated aspects of the opposing educational regimes he had experienced in London

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and borrowed compositional tropes he saw in the works of the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood. Upon his arrival in New York, Farrer applied his English training to the landscapes of the American Northeast, entering into the often-­acrimonious discourse about the proper direction for American painting. He would refuse the stylistic and ideological conventions of the dominant landscape tradition of his adopted homeland, colliding especially with Cole’s representation of such prominent American locales as the Hudson River and Connecticut River valleys. For Farrer and the American Pre-­R aphaelites, veristic precision could correct the failures of their predecessors, whose paintings had glossed an ethically compromised landscape marked by economic exploitation and expansionism.

In the Catskills In summer 1863, Farrer visited his friend and colleague Charles Herbert Moore at Moore’s home in Catskill, New York, half a mile down the road from Cole’s studio and house at Cedar Grove, where the celebrated artist had died in 1848. Moore and Farrer spent their days working out of doors painting small-­scale landscapes and nature studies, surveying not only the sites around Catskill, but the Cole property itself. The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ published comments on the work and legacy of Cole and his followers were consistently hostile, but their choice of summer sojourns and the locales they depicted reveal a less tendentious position. Farrer’s visit to Catskill entailed a significant element of homage—­Cole’s estate and studio had been attracting pilgrims for nearly fifteen years. Angela Miller has explained that “following Cole’s death his studio assumed a shrinelike aura for the younger artists who later emerged as the major landscape painters of the National Academy. After a visit to the Catskill studio in 1850, Jasper Cropsey wrote to his wife: ‘Though the man has departed, yet he has left a spell behind him that is not broken.’ ”  Gifford apparently “underwent a conversion to landscape painting” upon visiting Cole’s studio, and Worthington Whittredge, writing later of Gifford’s visit to Cedar Grove, reported that “there was a halo of light that morning, which lighted up the path which he was to follow.”7 Visiting and working in the studio of an important predecessor was considered a source of inspiration among American artists of the nineteenth century. Cole himself had famously rented Claude Lorrain’s studio in Rome during his visit in February 1832. Cropsey, too, later rented the Claude-­Cole studio in Rome. Moore’s efforts to remain close to both the Cole family and their property suggest the American Pre-­ Raphaelites’ complex stance toward the artists they claimed to renounce. Not only did Moore settle in Catskill, but in subsequent summers he rented Cole’s studio from the late artist’s son, whom he befriended.8 Moore’s relationship with the family extended to Cole’s widow, Maria, whom he gave an intricately rendered pencil drawing of a raspberry bush branch (fig. 25). Maria Cole cherished this sketch, pasting it into a private album in which she kept visual and literary mementos given to her by her husband’s friends, including Church, Robert Weir, and William Cullen Bryant.

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Fig. 24. Thomas Charles Farrer, A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm, 1863. Oil on canvas, 11 ¾ × 25 ¼ in. (29.8 × 64.1 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Maxim Karolik for the M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815–­1865.

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Fig. 25. Charles Herbert Moore, Untitled Plant Study (Raspberries), c. 1864. Pencil, with white heightening, on brown paper, 4 ⅝ × 6 ⅜ in. (11.7 × 16.2 cm). Albany Institute of History & Art, gift of Mrs. Florence Cole Vincent, 1958.28.167.57.

Moore later completed diminutive oils representing Cole’s house and studio, some of which entered the collection of the Cole family.9 The group’s public stance, however, was unwavering. In December 1863, the Association published a review in The New Path of the Fourth Annual Artists’ Fund Society Exhibition that maligned the three works on view by Cole. The paintings, An Italian Autumn (1844, MFA, Boston), The Titan’s Goblet (1833, Metropolitan Museum of Art), and Catskill Creek (1845, New-­York Historical Society), have become respected works in Cole’s oeuvre. But in 1863 the reviewer for The New Path wrote: “The defenders of Mr. Cole must thank the contributor of these three specimens of their idol’s work! . . . three pieces of hopeless imbecility. We rejoice, however, at their exhibition, and wish there were more, that disinterested spectators might learn, once for all, how empty are this man’s vaunted claims to high artistic rank. They cannot stand in the light of today, and in twenty-­five years will not be worth the canvas they are painted on.”10 Farrer had the most charged and productive engagement with Cole’s presence, politics, and aesthetics. A few months before The New Path’s blistering review of Cole’s paintings, Farrer completed A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm. This

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work demonstrates that his relationship to American landscape painters, particularly to Cole, was characterized by more than simple repudiation. He could not have ignored their similarities of biography. Both men were British born, having moved, impoverished, to America on the brink of adulthood. Although Farrer had harsh words for what he believed was Cole’s flawed and overwrought aesthetic, he chose to paint Cole’s homestead and to invoke his name in the painting’s title, staking a claim on the very property on which the master had lived.

Competing Pedagogies: Art Training in London When A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm debuted at the National Academy of Design in 1864, critics claimed that the work lacked compositional unity. The distorted perspective in the works of Pre-­R aphaelites, both British and American, can be attributed to their practice of composing in a piecemeal fashion and completing separate areas of their canvases over the course of an entire summer in multiple out-­ of-­doors sessions. This method may provide a partial explanation for the strikingly unconventional spatial logic of A Buckwheat Field, but in Farrer’s case this logic may also relate to the challenge of uniting the lessons acquired in both the Government Schools and the Working Men’s College—­specifically his attempt to impose a scalar visual regime on a landscape characterized by its volumetric dimensionality. A Buckwheat Field depicts the view from a meadow in Catskill, on the west bank of the Hudson River. In the distance to the northeast, on the opposite shore, is the town of Hudson. The size of the canvas is unusual in the oeuvre of the American Pre-­ Raphaelites, with a width more than twice its height. These proportions allow Farrer to emphasize the site’s expansive topographical qualities, while his minute brushwork highlights the clarity of the scene’s geological and botanical features. Though each area of Farrer’s canvas—­foreground of buckwheat and trees, middle ground of still water, background of the town of Hudson—­is represented in startlingly clear detail, each section appears isolated from adjacent ones. This differentiation is pronounced at the far left of the canvas where light green grass, yellow buckwheat, and dark green forest are striated and stacked, without more subtle gradations of green between the bands. The lack of shading between landscape elements and the resulting flattening effect contribute to the painting’s rigidity, which contemporary critics noted. A reviewer for The Round Table observed the structural, technical, and industrial qualities in Farrer’s presentation of nature, and in doing so unknowingly identified compositional components in A Buckwheat Field that were emphasized in Farrer’s training at the Government Schools: “Farrer renders the structure of objects, but fails to express surfaces. His pictures hold a relation to landscape nature analogous to that which a skeleton holds to the human body. The basis is all right, but the superstructure of beauty is not there. . . . Farrer’s landscapes are little more than anatomical drawings. . . . The greens of nature have a subtlety and variety that Mr. Farrer has failed to represent.

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Again, objects in nature do not stand opposed to each other as if cut out of tin.”11 The Round Table critic disapproves of what he deems stilted and nonnaturalistic. The combination of analogies—­the rigid frame of a vertebrate; schematic diagrams used by doctors; the metallic element central to engineering and manufacturing—­invokes the emergent worlds of science and industry. Farrer’s enrollment in the mid-­1850s at the Government Schools occurred under the leadership of Henry Cole as general superintendent, empowered by his recent success leading the Great Exhibition of 1851, and Richard Redgrave as the superintendent for art.12 Cole subscribed to the utilitarian principles of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, which informed the Government Schools’ mission to elevate the quality of domestic industrial and commercial design. By teaching students to render ornamental surface detail to adorn both decorative and functional objects, Cole believed his program would enable British manufacturers to capture greater market share from their French, Bavarian, and Prussian competitors, whose countries boasted government-­supported art schools and museums. The curriculum at the Government Schools, designed by Redgrave, required even novice students such as Farrer to work from drawing manuals that included exercises in which the silhouettes of complicated machinery were traced and copied, thus fostering familiarity with the industrial machine.13 In Redgrave’s program, however, there were also a variety of lessons ostensibly suited to an aspiring landscape painter. In a lecture, “Importance of the Study of Botany to the Ornamentist,” Redgrave instructed students, “In all preparatory studies the pupil should, by a careful and even laboured imitation, master thoroughly all the details of nature, and acquaint himself with the anatomy of her structure.”14 Students were expected to study botany—­from books, prints, and casts, but not from nature—­in order to abstract natural forms into patterns that would adorn salable goods, including housewares such as dishes, wallpaper, and carpets. Farrer’s frustration with the Government Schools’ curriculum, which he believed restrictive and not conducive to his development as a fine artist, is evident in an undated and incomplete document written by Farrer as an address, likely to his American Pre-­R aphaelite colleagues. Farrer’s fragment is a rich primary source, contemporary testimony by an artist educated in two highly distinct programs of art training, that places in relief key principles of their respective pedagogical models: Gentlemen with your permission I wish to render a little remembrance of my early art life. I was studying in the Government schools in England. I had been making a chalk drawing from a cast—­with my natural childlike confidence in nature. I had drawn all the lights and shadows first as I saw them. The teacher came along, looked at my work, and exclaimed, Oh that won’t do, you see too much, you must destroy all those delicate little shadows and make large masses of black—­there, now that is bold, broad and spirited. I had a great deal of confidence in my Teacher, but my natural right feeling that is given to all of us by the Creator was not yet crushed and killed by Convention.15

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Farrer’s Government Schools teacher underscores a foundational tenet of Redgrave’s curriculum. Despite the reality that twenty-­two of the twenty-­three steps in Redgrave’s training program revolved around “strictly imitative” lessons, such copying exercises did not extend to replicating nature’s delicate shadows or subtle gradations.16 Redgrave was transparent about his commercial objective in requiring such rigid geometry in representations of nature: “flat display of the plant was especially suitable to the requirement of the manufacturer, to reproduction by painting, weaving, stamping, etc., to which naturalistic renderings do not readily lend themselves.”17 Though Farrer reported that he defied his teacher’s mandate, A Buckwheat Field’s severe tonal divisions in the meadow and the river contribute to compositional flattening that is reminiscent of an abstracted pattern on a textile or wallpaper, evidence that Farrer indeed absorbed some of Redgrave’s fundamental principles. Despite the residual influence of the Government Schools’ training in A Buck­ wheat Field, in his address Farrer is openly hostile toward Redgrave’s pedagogy. As the leading proselytizer in the United States of Ruskinian doctrine, Farrer chose to strategically narrate his own biography, describing his boyhood as a period of emerging intuition during which he surmounted the challenges posed by misguided instructors and experts. He recalled his struggle with the instructions issued by his Government Schools teacher: “I . . . tried to do it but it did not seem right to me and I was quite sure it was not as much like the model nor was it half as beautiful in large black masses as before with all the delicate shadows and tender gradation of line, but I . . . tried to make myself believe it was right.”18 But Farrer could not subordinate his instincts to Redgrave’s directives. Instead, he took his work to a “Connoisseur” “of pictures” with whom he was acquainted, who advised Farrer he was “in just the same state of mind” as were the “old painters who lived before Raphael.” Shortly thereafter, he sought out Ruskin and Rossetti at the Working Men’s College for a course of study grounded in “studying all the delicate gradations of colour, the tender subtle variation of shade and bending of lines.”19 Unlike the Government Schools of Design, in which each course was dedicated to aesthetics in the service of design, the Working Men’s College was predicated on a very different philosophy. The college proposed a range of courses in liberal education, including algebra, geometry, French, Greek, Latin, history, and several art classes.20 It was the second major initiative of the Christian Socialist movement, following its efforts at establishing cooperatives among several of the major trades. The movement was primarily active between 1848, in the aftermath of the Chartist demonstration of April 10 that year, and 1854, when the movement’s leader, Frederick Denison Maurice, withdrew from the cause owing to his fear that Christian Socialism was forsaking its cooperative and educative principles and was being drawn into sectarian and political clashes that would have the effect of dividing classes and political parties. At the same time, many Chartists, disillusioned by their failure to engage directly in the political process, were open to the possibilities for social and economic transformation inherent in cooperative doctrine. While each founder of Christian Socialism had

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his own view on the role that politics could play in the process of reform, and most wished to work through the structure of the Church of England to effect their specific social agenda, some believed in employing levers of political pressure more overtly and in models that were more dependent on liberal interpretations of suffrage and representative democracy. Cooperative societies among working men, in the view of the early Christian Socialists, would alleviate some of the more baleful consequences of a competitive market economy in a nation that had undergone an unprecedented pace of industrialization. When their cooperative efforts stalled in the face of early challenges, they turned to harnessing the power of publication and adult education, of which the Working Men’s College was the most prominent manifestation. Maurice was the school’s first director. The first art class at the college was entrusted to Ruskin, whose association with Christian Socialism is problematic, his idiosyncratic politics and complex theology assigning him a role on the outer limits of the movement. In contrast to the position of some of the college’s founders who viewed education as the first step to moral, professional, and social betterment, Ruskin believed that education “should be clearly understood to be no means of getting on in the world, but a means of staying pleasantly in your place there.”21 Despite Ruskin’s uneasy alliance with the ameliorative agenda of the Christian Socialists, he was nonetheless bound up in the college’s founding moment. At the college’s inaugural public meeting in 1854, each attendee received a pamphlet reprinted from Ruskin’s “On the Nature of Gothic Architecture: and herein the True Functions of the Workman in Art,” the sixth chapter of The Stones of Venice, early evidence that the critic’s interests had begun to turn from the aesthetic to broader cultural and social concerns. Ruskin’s research over the previous decade had led him to an idealized view of the Gothic workshop, which in its simultaneous respect for collaborative labor and individual self-­expression allowed for roughness and imperfection in finish, qualities that Ruskin believed served to rebuke the artificial regularities of nineteenth-­century mechanized production taught at the Government Schools.22 F. J. Furnivall, one of the college’s founders, wrote that, in response to the circulation of Ruskin’s pamphlet, “Many of our men afterwards told me how toucht [sic] they had been by Ruskin’s eloquent appreciation of their class.”23 By the time Farrer enrolled in the Working Men’s College, Ruskin had been developing his own theories on the ethical interrelationship of art, labor, and society for nearly a decade. These issues would become the primary focus in his writings after 1860. Consistent with the broad tenets of the college’s Christian Socialist founders, Ruskin believed that great art, as well as the moral development of society, depended on the health and order of the polity. To attain such a sound condition, the polity, in Ruskin’s formulation, must draw its energy from individual workers, each and all permitted to fully engage their creative potential and to have their unique contributions acknowledged. During his tenure at the Working Men’s College, Ruskin further developed his conviction that it was the public’s duty to foster the creation of noble and rigorous

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art, a collective responsibility that should not be left exclusively to wealthy patrons. He believed that teaching working-­class men to appreciate and capture overlooked details in nature—­the glimmer of mica on a rock, the web of veins on a leaf—­would enrich the life of the laboring classes and, thereby, the nation. Ruskin further asserted that the state had a moral and financial obligation to offer the requisite training. He wrote in The Political Economy of Art that “no money could be better spent by a nation than in providing a liberal and disciplined education for its painters.”24 Farrer’s progressive sense of moral and political justice can be traced not only to the various and shifting emphases of the Working Men’s College but also to the circumstances of his childhood and adolescence. He was raised on Gresse Street, off Tottenham Court Road in North London, a short walk from the college’s first facility in Red Lion Square.25 The students of the college’s early years, its first historian wrote, “lived in the areas immediately around the College. . . . North London was still an area of small handicraftsmen, and it was the cabinet-­makers, tailors, printers, engravers, pianoforte makers, woodworkers, watchmakers, gilders, coach-­builders, bookbinders, and instrument makers who were the first students.”26 It is also notable that Farrer’s father, a painter and glazier, “was a radical of the extreme type.”27 Taken together, class, neighborhood, fellow students, and direct paternal example combined to exert a pronounced ideological influence on Farrer that would infiltrate his visual and verbal output during and immediately after the Civil War. Ruskin’s drawing class at the Working Men’s College, among the school’s most popular offerings, became a laboratory for the critic to test his theories and methods of instructing the working classes to draw from nature.28 His pedagogical approach was not only infused with his own politics and a theology increasingly inflected by doubt; it was also responsive to the demographics of his classroom. In an early session, when asked by an “earnest but bewildered wheelwright . . . if he could be taught to draw a wheel, Ruskin replied: ‘I don’t teach anything special or technical. I teach drawing in general, so that any one learning from me would have the power of drawing any object that’s before him . . . if (his visitor) wished to be able to make a drawing to scale . . . the School of Design would be the place.’ ”29 In his address to his colleagues, quoted above, Farrer explained that his self-­guided approach had been to draw “all the lights and shadows first as I saw them,” deviating from the sanctioned Government Schools’ lesson plan into a manner of drawing consistent with what Ruskin made a centerpiece of his pedagogy at the Working Men’s College. Ruskin was clear that the faithful replication of light and shade constituted a first principle of artistic training. Mastery of shadow conditions perception, assists in the acquisition of dexterity, and supplies the quality of delicacy that Ruskin believed was central to all great art. In the Elements of Drawing, published while he was teaching at the college, Ruskin wrote: “the simplest object which it is possible to set before the eye is a sphere. . . . All that this study of the ball is to teach the pupil, is the way in which shade gives the appearance of projection. . . . his mind is always fixed on the gradation of shade, and the outline left to take, in due time, care of itself.”30 Ruskin’s instructional

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methods are visible in a pencil drawing of rock completed by Farrer in 1863 (see fig. 72). This careful study, preserved together with similar sketches executed by fellow Association members, suggests that Farrer introduced Ruskin’s foundational lessons to his colleagues at one of the group’s earliest meetings. It is not merely the specific treatment of line, shadow, and mass that were at the center of the dispute between the training protocols of the Government Schools and those promulgated by Ruskin in his classroom. Henry Cole was a committed Utilitarian, a lifelong friend of J. S. Mill, with whom he had many conversations about the works of Bentham.31 Cole’s program was predicated on Bentham’s doctrine that any system, any attempt to reduce and transmit discrete disciplines to others, must pass through regulated phases, beginning with basic exercises and moving through mounting levels of complexity prior to engaging with that discipline’s substance.32 Cole and Redgrave endeavored to apply utilitarian principles to art education, train teachers who would disperse their curriculum throughout Britain, lower design costs, and elevate the competitiveness of British industry. Ruskin rejected the utilitarian foundation of Cole and Redgrave’s approach, their associated teaching methods, and the resulting product. He lamented both inside the Working Men’s College and publicly that “the Professorship of Sir Henry Cole at Kensington has corrupted the system of art-­teaching all over England into a state of abortion and falsehood from which it will take twenty years to recover.”33 In a memorandum intended for students hoping to join his class, Ruskin wrote: The teacher of landscape drawing wishes it to be generally understood by all his pupils that the instruction given in his class is not intended either to fit them for becoming artists, or in any direct manner, to advance their skills in the occupations they at present follow. They are taught drawing, primarily in order to direct their attention accurately to the beauty of God’s work in the material universe; and secondarily, that they be enabled to record with some degree of truth, the forms and colors of objects, when such a record is likely to be useful.34

In addition to spurning the utilitarian basis of education at the Government Schools, Ruskin invokes the hand and design of God in nature that can be revealed only through a commitment of perceptual attention and as much fidelity as the artist can muster. Farrer, in his address, echoes Ruskin’s religious sympathies when he writes that his “natural right feeling that is given to all of us by the Creator was not yet crushed and killed by convention.” The contest between “natural right feeling” and “convention” was not only a battle of abstract values; it had aesthetic and public policy ramifications in both Britain and the United States, as Farrer would discover during his own years of teaching drawing at Cooper Union in New York, discussed in the following chapter. How should the arts be taught? In the service of which objectives? Ruskin privileges the tasks of revealing God’s majesty in nature and overthrowing the regimentation imposed by mechanization, both of which would enhance the life of

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the working man. Cole’s Government Schools, in contrast, valorized the acquisition of executive “hand power” in the service of British industry and national prosperity.35 The striking visual effects displayed in Farrer’s A Buckwheat Field cannot be accounted for entirely by the training he received from Ruskin and at the Government Schools. He was also a student of Rossetti, who taught both figure drawing and watercolor at the Working Men’s College, and who may have had as great an influence on the young landscape painter’s pictorial style as did Ruskin. Kristin Mahoney argues that Rossetti adopted many of the same pedagogical and ideological stances as did Ruskin, particularly his crusade against the unrelenting utilitarianism in the Government Schools, but Rossetti’s classes differed from Ruskin’s in one major respect: Rossetti emphasized the practice of reproducing color over delineating line and shade.36 Farrer’s freer approach to composition and color may have been influenced by Rossetti’s example; those elements juxtaposed against the geometric delineation and emphatic flatness in works such as A Buckwheat Field and his later View of Northampton, legacies from the curriculum at the Government Schools, combine to create much of Farrer’s signature and disorienting style. Rossetti stressed close looking and direct nature study to the same extent as did Ruskin, a position revealed by Rossetti’s written response to an art student requesting advice on how best to develop his drawing skills: “take a piece of mossy bark . . . and try to imitate it on its own scale as exactly as possible. . . . This would be a work of time and perhaps requires in the first instance that someone should be by to rouse the beginner to a full consciousness of how close a fidelity he ought to aim at, and to be able, by mere industry, to attain.”37 The results of this practice in Rossetti’s own work can be seen in his unfinished oil painting Found (fig. 26), where moss on a wall is reproduced with extraordinary clarity. A classmate of Farrer recalled that Rossetti approached such close looking seeking the complexities of color, rather than the intricacies of line as emphasized by Ruskin. Rossetti lamented, “Mr. Ruskin’ll spoil their eye for colour if he keeps ’em so long at that pencil and sepia drawing.”38 In his classes, Rossetti explained his individual approach to painting in watercolor, with demonstrations of stippling, hatching, and scumbling, all effects Farrer would reproduce in his later landscapes. Although the content of A Buckwheat Field departs dramatically from Rossetti’s own preferred choices of subject, the chromatic dissonance of the colors in Farrer’s painting recalls the vibrant spectrum of Rossetti’s palette of the 1850s, and those of Rossetti’s Pre-­R aphaelite colleagues Millais and Hunt (see figs. 5 and 9). The yellow and green fields appear to be executed exclusively by stippling, and there is a significant amount of scumbling and softening visible in the forest passage at the left of the canvas and in the reflections in the water. Farrer was surely the only artist to depict American scenery whose training included exposure to Ruskin, Rossetti, and the curriculum of the Government Schools. Although he painted the Catskills, a region well known to his New York audience through the work of such contemporary painters as Cropsey and Gifford, as well as Cole, Durand, and Church, he radically defamiliarized the landscape. Farrer

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Fig. 26. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Found, begun 1853 or 1859. Oil on canvas, 36 × 31 ½ in. (91.4 × 80 cm). The Delaware Art Museum, Samuel and Mary R. Bancroft Collection.

upset the tradition established by his predecessors, and his work was accordingly disparaged as “crude and rank in color, devoid of feeling, bald, literal, unpleasing.”39 Not only was A Buckwheat Field deemed offensive in its technical execution—­a legacy of the early incompatibility between Farrer’s two courses of training—­but it also rejected the larger artistic hegemony of the previous forty years. In this repudiation, the artist mounted a challenge to the tradition begun by Cole that promoted a collective identity predicated on what Farrer believed were compromised ethics and aesthetic distortions.

“A Few Questions Answered” Farrer’s address about his experience at the Government Schools seems to be a fragment of a larger document that reflects the broader aesthetic revolt associated with the founding of the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement. The organization’s minutes record that on March 31, 1863, Farrer rose to speak to his fellow members. A version of Farrer’s talk was published in the June 1863 issue of The New Path as “A Few Questions Answered,” with the subtitle “An Essay Read before the Society,” though it did not include the reminiscences on his art training quoted above. The contents of the published article, Farrer’s one signed contribution to The New Path, written when he was twenty-­four years old, are evidence of the psychomachy between his younger self, the Ruskinian zealot, and an emerging artist who had been and would continue to be

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altered by his experiences fighting for the Union. In addition to engaging in a polemic against the works of Cole and his successors, “A Few Questions Answered” can also be viewed as Farrer’s attempt to reconcile the internal conflicts that had surfaced during this period of artistic and ideological maturation in the United States. Farrer’s article depends upon a rhetorical construct employed by Ruskin, which incorporates an argument’s claim and rebuttal, a form of prosecution and defense that proves an effective vehicle for communicating the aspirations of his fledgling enterprise. He addresses each of the prejudices against Pre-­R aphaelitism that had long burdened the movement since its first manifestations in American art in the mid-­1850s. Farrer proceeds to dismiss the proffered critique and assert the rational and aesthetic superiority of Pre-­R aphaelite praxis. This device allows him to reason aloud, entertaining alternative modes of landscape representation, while neither conceding his position nor constraining his passionate defense and counterattacks. Farrer discredits the often-­invoked complaint that Pre-­R aphaelitism in both Britain and America displayed a morbid obsession with “painful fidelity”: “Painful fidelity” is a silly, absurd paradox, and I wish, now, to assert most positively, that painful labor in good works of Art, is an utter impossibility. . . . Suppose, for the sake of illustration, that the face of Nature should entirely change, that trees were to grow differently, rocks be formed in a new way, and all the facts be altered, the generations that follow us would have nothing but our landscapes to tell them what the world looked like in the nineteenth century; think you, they would form a very bright idea of it from the works of Cole, Durand, Allston . . . ?40

Farrer knew his Ruskin well and understood that in his writings and in his pedagogy his teacher had urged the artist to develop an exquisite sensitivity to the supremacy of botanical and geological forces—­mandates that found expression in Ruskin’s own nature studies (see fig. 45). An empiricism that privileged optical acuity would equip the artist to register the sway of a tree or the fissures of a rock, processes that, in Ruskin’s view, testify to the perfection of the Creator’s design. Ruskin promoted a visual regimen in which religious and artistic aspirations converge and deepen in the dual endeavor of observing and drawing nature’s minutiae. Those following Ruskin’s practice believed that mimetic failure was akin to a moral lapse. Ignoring essential botanical truths—­“an Elm leaf is . . . oval and pointed, and a Hickory leaf long and sharp,” as Farrer reminds listeners and readers—­was to both Ruskin and Farrer a breach of the typological strictures that heightened perception of nature and disciplined its representation in landscape painting.41 The British Pre-­ Raphaelites’ incorporation of typological symbols that linked Old Testament events and subjects with those they prefigured in the New Testament has been well studied.42 Less frequently discussed is the application of typology to the reading and representation of objects in nature. For Ruskin, typology was a perceptual sieve through which consciousness could filter and make legible the multiform complexities of nature.

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Typology’s psychological power to suffuse vision and ultimately aesthetic processes is cogently articulated by the Victorian naturalist Philip Henry Gosse: “All earthly things are types of the heavenlies; the visible, shadows and outlines of the invisible . . . where ideas of earthly and unseen things are reflected. . . . the order and fashion of material things were planned expressly with this end in view.”43 Farrer had assimilated this typological sensibility through exposure to the visual and religious culture of London in the 1850s, a perspective reinforced in Ruskin’s classroom. In “A Few Questions Answered,” stylistic and moral truths serve as his “foundation stones,” binding commitments on the artist: “All works of Art, whether pictures, statues, poems or novels, must eventually stand or fall according to the amount of truth in them”; “what a glorious consciousness it is, after a summer of earnest effort, to know that however faulty your work may be, and whatever its shortcomings, yet, it is absolutely right, that you sought God’s truth and sat down and did it.” Central to Farrer’s artistic credo, derived from Ruskin, was a Manichaean binary: “truth is of God, and leads to God; falsehood and faithlessness are of the devil, and lead to death.”44 Farrer’s condemnation of “faithless work” informs his larger censure of Cole’s oeuvre—­similar to Stillman’s disapproval of Church’s output—­replete with composed and invented landscapes. Cole had failed to fulfill the injunction to record with requisite fidelity either geologic history or the facts of contemporary life. In “A Few Questions Answered,” Farrer declares Cole’s idealized scenes of nature valueless and consigns “to the fire” works “that give to the world no facts at all.”45 But what Farrer could not appreciate was that Cole himself struggled with the choice of painting actual versus imagined landscapes. The issue proved particularly polarizing in the early years of Cole’s career, when his dependence on individual patrons and their tastes constrained him from pivoting into the artistic sphere of the ideal. In a well-­known exchange between Cole and one of his major patrons, Robert Gilmor, Jr., in 1826, after Cole expressed his ambition to veer from the realism of his early career, Gilmor’s displeasure was unambiguous: “I prefer real American scenes to compositions.”46 Despite Gilmor’s hortatory language, in 1828 Cole completed two canvases he hoped would propel him into the sphere of the “truly great.” The Garden of Eden (fig. 27) and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden (MFA, Boston), which Cole believed to be “two attempts at a higher style of landscape than I have hitherto tried,” contend with perhaps the most evocative of biblical topographies.47 Cole was describing a process of conjoining imagination, empiricism, and memory. The profile of the mountain in The Garden of Eden, faintly visible in the distant mist, is recognizable as that of Mount Chocorua. Cole had painted this peak in the White Mountains multiple times in the late 1820s, but in The Garden of Eden he disguised Chocorua by reversing its profile and elaborating its crags to create a hybrid paradise.48 His Eden blends invention and observation. Farrer’s accusation that Cole, by shunning literal transcription, had ignored divine energies encoded in nature may seem a display of youthful arrogance. Cole, too, had made exacting drawings from nature and had completed oil sketches out of doors.

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Fig. 27. Thomas Cole, The Garden of Eden, 1828. Oil on canvas, 38 ½ × 52 ¾ in. (98 × 134 cm). Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, 1990.10.

Closely observed and intricately rendered flora can be seen in Cole’s informal studies, such as his From Nature (1823, fig. 28). But Farrer intuited an important difference between Cole’s treatment of biblical passages and the natural typology that he and the American Pre-­R aphaelites had internalized. Eschewing the typological, Cole engaged a visual approach centered on a tropological reading, a key component of biblical exegesis that educes moral truths through interpretation of the Bible’s figurative language. Cole’s tropological sensibility effectively governed his selection of biblical scenes and allegorical themes, and influenced his idealized mode of representation; his imagination had been conditioned to choose dramatic biblical events and subjects in order to convey an a priori moral conviction. Cole does not depend on Adam and Eve to rehearse normative lessons regarding obedience, faith, or the consequences of individual sin, though those lessons inhere in any depiction of the Edenic narrative. Rather, Cole offers a metaphorical presentation that instantiates in its sensuous

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Fig. 28. Thomas Cole, From Nature, 1823. Ink on paper, 9 ⅝ × 7 ¼ in. (24.4 × 18.8 cm). Albany Institute of History & Art, gift of Edith Cole (Mrs. Howard) Silberstein, great-­granddaughter of the artist, 1965.68.1.

composition a premonition and admonition about the inevitable rise and fall of American civilization. In contrast, the typology of the American Pre-­R aphaelites, shared by Ruskin, rooted in mimesis and not metaphor, induced a fruitful dynamic between viewer and natural object, and sustained the belief that perception and the creative act, in honest concert, were expressions of the most passionate veneration. Although both Eden paintings initially failed to sell, they were recognized as an inflection point in Cole’s career and in the trajectory of American landscape painting. The ardor for idealized treatment, though transformed by such artists as Durand, Cropsey, and Church, held sway for the next thirty years, and provoked from the American Pre-­R aphaelites their most vituperative responses in the pages of The New Path. Farrer’s article should be read as part of this campaign, a carefully crafted Pre-­ Raphaelite writ against what they considered the egregious idealism of Cole and his followers. Farrer and his colleagues would not leave unrefuted those reviewers who, decades after Cole’s Eden paintings had debuted, continued to eulogize his allegorical works. In 1855 one writer described the Eden pair as “the highest poetic conception . . . [which] emptied a new current into the channel of [Cole’s] nature, that deepened the river of his thoughts.” The same writer asserted: “We could never hold, in our judgment, the pure landscape painter as high as the allegorical landscapist, or the historical painter. We could not consciously place them on the same platform of art. Pure landscape art comprehends little more than imitation.”49 Even in 1860, The Crayon,

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known for republishing the writings of Ruskin, referred to Cole’s Eden paintings as “enter[ing] the higher sphere of imaginative composition.”50 For the American Pre-­R aphaelites the idea of attaining a “higher sphere” of art via “imaginative composition” was both futile and immoral. Cole’s Eden subjects failed precisely because they were imaginative compositions—­works “that give to the world no facts at all.” Given their commitment to a vigorous empiricism, the American Pre-­R aphaelites never considered biblical scenes as appropriate subjects for their paintings, unlike their British counterparts.51 Nonetheless, in “A Few Questions Answered,” Farrer invokes biblical imagery in service of his iconoclasm. By appropriating his predecessor’s terms, Farrer delegitimizes Cole’s project with logic at once brutal and witty. He rhetorically raises the stakes by posing the question of whether realism might be the apposite style to capture Old and New Testament scenes such as the Flood and the life and times of Christ. In a single flourish, Farrer sweeps away Cole’s most notable allegorical landscapes. Beyond his indictment of The Garden of Eden and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Farrer was likely thinking of Cole’s The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge (1829, fig. 29) and Angels Ministering to Christ in

Fig. 29. Thomas Cole, The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, 1829. Oil on canvas, 35 ¾ × 47 ¾ in. (90.8 × 121.4 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

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the Wilderness (1843, Worcester Art Museum), among Cole’s most vaunted works, as the reification of artistic immorality: If a few Pre-­R aphaelites had lived and painted before the flood, do you not think we should value their works very highly? Do you suppose, for a moment, that we should fight about the “painfulness” of their fidelity, or, if they had painted the Saviour’s life and acts, think you we should quarrel with them and refuse to be instructed simply because they were carefully drawn and faithfully painted? I am inclined to think this would be our principal cause of admiration and belief. Time and future generations will ask of our Art and our Literature, “Is this the way the people of the nineteenth century worked, dressed and acted? Are these their passions, principles and feelings? Is this the Palisades, and the North River, and the Catskills in the year 1863?” If not, they are valueless to us.52

The Farrer who addressed “A Few Questions Answered” to his colleagues in 1863 was a young man in the throes of personal and professional transformation. His emotional and stylistic struggle stemmed not only from his war service, but also from rumors circulating on both sides of the Atlantic that Ruskin was questioning his long-­held religious convictions, thereby casting doubt on the veracity of some of his aesthetic teachings and Pre-­R aphaelite leanings. Despite Ruskin’s attempt to reassure his followers, the English critic’s ever-­deepening immersion in social and economic polemics would become progressively more challenging for Farrer and the movement. Members of the Association, Farrer included, could not ignore the next phase of Ruskin’s politicization. As Farrer composed “A Few Questions Answered,” and during the two-­year period between 1863 and 1865 that was bookended by his two most important surviving landscapes—­projects that brought him into productive collision with the legacy of Cole—­he was burdened by the knowledge that Ruskin had become vocal in his support for the Confederacy, effectively rupturing his relationship with his American acolytes.

Fighting for the Union Farrer would have been exposed to fervent political debate about progressive causes, including abolition, while at the Working Men’s College. During the 1840s and 1850s, there was an active lecture circuit in Britain for African American abolitionists whom Chartists and other British radicals believed shared a common purpose with their own movements. In fact, evidence of the ardent support for American abolition by some Chartist leaders was their belief that the overthrow of American slavery should claim precedence over the advancement of the Chartist agenda. Currents of radicalism had been inculcated in Farrer even before his arrival in the United States, one year after the Supreme Court affirmed in the Dred Scott decision the right of enslavers to transport enslaved workers into the western territories. Farrer’s correspondence

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and drawings indicate that he quickly entered into the polemics that were ubiquitous throughout American society. Among his surviving works are overt references as early as 1860 to the nation’s fight to rid itself of slavery. Farrer was the only member of the American Pre-­R aphaelites who produced a significant body of figurative work, an interest he developed in Rossetti’s classroom. These works are evidence of Farrer’s early attraction to suggestive narratives, the psychological dimensions of his subjects, and the intensity of his commitment to abolition. Shortly after his immigration, Farrer confronted the most pressing issue on the American political scene, his progressive views finding their pictorial correlatives through representational strategies absorbed during his English training. Gone! Gone! (fig. 30) is dated 1860, preceding the outbreak of the Civil War. But Farrer incorporated symbols and references into his composition that suggest a purposely cryptic, if not prescient, narrative. Farrer elicits associations with the commencement of secession, a protracted process initiated by South Carolina’s departure from the Union on December 20, 1860, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas early in 1861, portending inevitable hostilities. Weeks after Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president in March 1861, Gone! Gone! was hung at the National Academy in New York. The show was still on view on April 12, when Confederate soldiers attacked Union troops at Fort Sumter, the official outbreak of the Civil War. Several visual cues suggest that Farrer’s work is meant to speak to the impending war. One is the print after Millais’s A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1852, fig. 31) that hangs framed on the wall behind the bereft woman. The subtitle of Millais’s canvas places that scene shortly before the bloody battle on St. Bartholomew’s Day 1572, during the Wars of Religion. In the scene, the Catholic woman is attempting to protect her Protestant lover by emblazoning his arm with a white scarf, a marker that would indicate that he shared her faith. But the man resists this gesture; by not forsaking his Protestantism, he will die for his religion. A Huguenot was, as Millais described, “a perfect pendant” to The Black Brunswicker (fig. 32), which Farrer saw at the Royal Academy during a visit to London in 1860.53 The two paintings are part of a series, including The Proscribed Royalist, 1651 (see fig. 5) and The Order of Release, 1746 (1852, Tate, Britain), that gave visual expression to a single theme set within four distinct historical periods from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. In The Black Brunswicker, the soldier, a member of the Brunswick Ducal Corps unit in the Napoleonic Wars, prepares to fight in the Battle of Quatre Bras in 1815. On the wall behind the Brunswicker, Millais includes a framed print after Jacques-­Louis David’s famous Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800–­1801), its presence presaging both the French victory at Quatre Bras and the certain death of the English soldier in battle. Each work in Millais’s series assumes ambitious formal challenges of integrating representations of the human figure and keenly observed objects, costumes,

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Fig. 30. Thomas Charles Farrer, Gone! Gone!, 1860. Oil on canvas, 20 × 14 in. (50.8 × 35.7 cm). The Hon. William Gibson.

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Fig. 31. John Everett Millais, A Huguenot, on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge, 1852. Oil on canvas, 36 × 25 in. (91.4 × 63.5 cm). The Makins Collection, Washington DC.

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Fig. 32. John Everett Millais, The Black Brunswicker, 1860. Oil on canvas, 41 × 27 in. (104.1 × 68.6 cm). Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums of Liverpool.

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and natural details into disparate historical settings.54 In Gone! Gone! Farrer extends Millais’s project of dramatizing abiding motifs such as the sacrifices demanded by war, and the courage required to survive crisis, separation, and the death of loved ones, but transposes these social issues onto an American landscape: New York’s Hudson River and Palisades are visible through the window. Importing the British Pre-­R aphaelite practice of iterating a single theme across historical periods and emulating Millais’s visual quotations by representing A Huguenot in miniature, Farrer processed and interpreted the regional tensions that would inflame the nation.55 Beyond its title, what makes the iconography of Gone! Gone! particularly portentous is its rupture with Millais’s practices of portraying his figures physically enlaced as well as centering female gazes within his visual narratives. The eyes of the women in Millais’s works are crucial vehicles that express emotional extremity: she looks downcast in the throes of imminent loss in The Black Brunswicker; vigilant against recapture in The Proscribed Royalist; in stoic defiance in The Order of Release; and longingly into her lover’s eyes in A Huguenot. But in Farrer’s Gone! Gone!, the male protagonist is absent, his departure an irreversible fact, draining from the scene any prospect of reunion. Even more striking is the position of the woman’s hands. In Millais’s four historical scenes hands and fingers are featured prominently, but they are deployed to touch, embrace, or caress. In Gone! Gone!, the figure’s hands, from the base of her palms to her fingertips, cover her face and eyes from her chin to her forehead. Her elongated fingers point the viewer to the window behind her through which we can see five masted ships and one large steamer on the Hudson. One of these ships transports her lover toward unavoidable battle; he is now beyond her physical reach or visual retrieval. By denying his protagonist sight and his viewer the opportunity for reciprocal engagement, Farrer confronts Millais’s iconography of the gaze and corporeal loss and reconfigures both features into a visual lament for the American moment. Farrer’s increasing artistic engagement with American progressive politics and abolitionism was explicit in another work he exhibited at the National Academy of 1861, Evening Thoughts. While the painting remains unlocated, a review in The Crayon describes “the portraits of Washington and John Brown associated together on the mantelpiece.”56 Farrer likely linked the two men owing to their respective connections to the arsenal at Harpers Ferry—­where Farrer would be stationed the following year, after enlisting in the Union army. Farrer’s interest in Brown had likely been piqued in England, where the abolitionist’s exploits were widely reported. The British Pre-­ Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown twice considered painting the subject “John Brown Assisting the Escape of Runaway Slaves,” though he never realized the work.57 Farrer, though, returned multiple times to Brown’s iconic presence, inserting his image into portraits to indicate the commitment of both sitter and artist to the radical antislavery platform. In Farrer’s Portrait of Clarence C. Cook (1861, fig. 33), a likeness of Brown hangs on the wall in the background, alongside a print after William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World (fig. 34). Further underscoring Cook’s known allegiances, Farrer placed the calling card of another abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, atop the table

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Fig. 33. (above) Thomas Charles Farrer, Portrait of Clarence C. Cook, 1861. Frontispiece to Poems by Clarence Cook, New York, 1902. Widener Library, Harvard University. Original drawing unlocated.

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Fig. 34. (right) William Holman Hunt, The Light of the World, c. 1851–­53. Oil on canvas, 48 × 24 in. (121.9 × 61 cm). Keble College, Oxford, UK.

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on which Cook writes.58 By juxtaposing these Pre-­R aphaelite and activist icons, Farrer yokes what he and Cook found to be mutually reinforcing missions—­to advance Pre-­ Raphaelitism on American soil was to also further abolitionism. Scenes related to mobilization and the struggle to preserve the Union, gleaned from personal experience, became subjects for Farrer’s future paintings. He would take up the suggestion of Louisa Cook, Clarence’s wife, who wrote to Farrer one month after the outbreak of war and a year prior to Farrer’s own enlistment: “I wish you would seize some of the beautiful subjects—­the grand drama now enacting in America offers for an artist—­I was delighted with a picture drawn by a newspaper correspondent a little while ago of the arrival of the Seventh Regiment at Annapolis . . . they arrived on a beautiful Sunday  .  .  . in the rich morning sunshine resting from their fatigues, they would have to wade knee deep in clover blossoms to apply the match to their cannon if needed. . . . Could there be a more picturesque subject?”59 One year later, Farrer would enlist in the Union army, assembling on Seventh Street in Manhattan for his departure with the Twenty-­Second Regiment of the National Guard of the State of New York. One of “550 Strong,” Farrer and his regiment were sent off with great fanfare, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” resounding in the background: “About 9 o’clock the band, after playing a few airs, finally struck up ‘John Brown’s Body,’ the regiment and the crowd around them took it up again in a vast swell of sound that peaked like a great organ, and as the song ended, all burst into a deafening uproar of cheers, in the midst of which the column started.”60 Farrer’s decision to enlist in the Union army was made impetuously (fig. 35). He left New York in May 1862 without informing his closest friends and perhaps in frustration over the critical response to his work. The admirer of John Brown was stationed at Harpers Ferry, the site of Brown’s raid three years earlier and a locale imbued with martial and abolitionist associations. A crucial front during the Civil War, Harpers Ferry changed hands eight times throughout the course of the conflict. For those dedicated to the antislavery movement, it was a sacred venue, a place of fascination for many Union soldiers who “examined every place famous for John Brown’s footsteps.”61 Farrer’s struggles on the battlefield would over the next three years yield powerful visual articulations, and war-­related themes would become central to his output. One surviving letter, written to the dealer Samuel P. Avery, reveals the emotional turmoil that Farrer’s service inflicted. In it he returns several times to the question of expression, specifically to his inability to describe what he was witnessing at the front: Here the country is beautiful (although I can not enjoy it much) and there is a slight sense of danger about it. We can smell the blood as it were. It would be superfluous for me to attempt a description of our locality. . . . I find it very difficult to put two words together. I write very little and talk less, soldiering does not sharpen the wit or strengthen the intellect, but it improves and offers every encouragement and opportunity to the animal and worst passions in men, we lose our individuality become mere tools of another will and the less you think, feel, and ask reasons why and wherefore the better soldier you make.62

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Fig. 35. Mathew Brady, Company A, 22nd New York State Militia near Harper’s Ferry, Va [Farrer’s Regiment], 1862. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

In the subsequent years Farrer the artist would express in paint and in words what he had been unable to voice as a soldier. Records of the Twenty-­Second Regiment suggest that he participated in gruesome assignments, witnessing scenes that transfigured the contours of his imagination. While stationed in Baltimore, before receiving orders to march on Harpers Ferry, Farrer’s regiment was “frequently detailed to assist” in transporting “steamer loads of wounded and sick from the swamps of the Chickahominy” who “were being daily landed at the wharves of the city.”63 Although Farrer’s enlistment lasted only three months, the experience of marching off to battle would reverberate in his imagination through the end of the war and beyond. In the first months of 1865, he would paint April, 1861 (unlocated), which, according to Sturgis, pictured “the Seventh Regiment marching, on its way to war, through the street without, while a lady within turns away from the window through which the streets and the soldiers are seen.”64 Echoing the imagery and sense of loss that occupied him in Gone! Gone!, and likely recalling Louisa Cook’s description of the Seventh Regiment of four years earlier, Farrer’s April, 1861 would inaugurate the period—­the summer and fall of 1865 spent in Northampton, Massachusetts—­marked by intense production and experimentation in both oils and watercolors, landscapes and still lifes.

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“The General Contagion” In the years following Farrer’s enlistment, the American Pre-­R aphaelites became aware of Ruskin’s evolving aesthetic and political views. While they followed the critic’s published statements in Fraser’s and the Cornhill magazines, discussed in the introduction, they were also kept apprised of Ruskin’s position on the Civil War by Norton. Before becoming the nation’s first professor of the history of art at Harvard in 1875, Norton served as an important conduit of news in America regarding British culture. Befriending Ruskin in 1855, Norton had become his frequent correspondent and perhaps his closest confidant. An advocate of social and educational reform, Norton held passionate views regarding the moral crusade of the Civil War. Among the many reformist activities Norton pursued over his life, perhaps his key role during the war was his editorship of the New England Loyal Publication Society. This involved writing broadsides syndicated in hundreds of newspapers throughout small towns in the Northern states and in European countries to increase public support for the Union effort.65 During the 1850s, Norton had forged close relationships not only with Ruskin, but with Rossetti, Edward Burne-­Jones, and William Morris. He owned works by Ruskin and Rossetti and lent them to the American Pre-­R aphaelites for study.66 Norton immediately recognized the significance of his British contacts to advancing the American movement. Within two months of first becoming acquainted with the Association, he wrote Rossetti: “There is hope for Art in this country. The true ideas—­the idea the P.R.B. has done so much to make clear—­are extending among our younger men, both painters and architects, and we shall before long have some good work to show.”67 In short order he became for the American Pre-­R aphaelites an important source of counsel, financial assistance, and patronage. Norton’s support for the movement intensified as his relationship with Ruskin deteriorated. Despite nearly a decade of friendship, during the war there was a breach between the two men as Ruskin’s missives assailed the righteousness of the Northern cause. Ruskin informed Norton, “I simply can’t write to you while you are living peaceably in Bedlam,” describing the Civil War as “the miserablest idiocy . . . mixing up a fight for dominion—­(the most insolent and tyrannical—­and the worst conducted, —­in all history)—­with a soi disant fight for liberty. If you want the slaves to be free—­ let their masters go free first.”68 Ruskin’s rhetoric and views were particularly painful for Norton given his commitment of time and energy to the Union cause. Both correspondents were deeply ambivalent about continuing their friendship in the face of such a profound ideological schism.69 Throughout the war years it appears that Norton frequently updated Farrer and his colleagues about his communications with their English mentor. It would not be until after the war ended that the American Pre-­R aphaelites would hold Ruskin publicly accountable for his position. However, in January 1864 the editors of The New Path published an article that can be viewed not only as a response to voices, like

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Ruskin’s, that were injurious to abolition, but also as a clarion call to artists to take up their brushes in support of the Union. “A Letter to a Subscriber” is framed as a reply to a reader from Baltimore who, in mailing his subscription fee to the journal, had included a postscript to his note to the editors: “Should you ever conclude to bring Politics within the scope of the ‘New Path,’ you will immediately, thereafter discontinue my paper.”70 The editors retorted: Dear Sir, . . . when you said “Politics,” of course you meant, “Slavery.” . . . It will never do, therefore, to send you the “New Path” without having first set you right as to our position. . . . Art in America has been pursued on wrong principles. . . . We have been under the ban of a great national sin, concerning which all the religious teachers, all the literary men, all the best society, all the schools and colleges were, apparently, leagued together by a silent compact to utter no word of remonstrance, rebuke or complaint. More moral cowardice has been shown by people in the front rank of our society . . . towards the sin of slavery. . . . Could Art hope to escape the general contagion?71

“A Letter to a Subscriber” establishes a direct linkage interconnecting the “sin of slavery,” “moral cowardice,” and the debased quality of art produced in a culture “infected” by these sins. Where “A Few Questions Answered” condemns Cole for his blatant inattention to the facts of his own time, which results in misplaced moral allegories about the perilous course of American destiny, “A Letter to a Subscriber” specifically indicts Cole and his successors for idealizing northeastern landscapes while failing to depict, thereby acquiescing in, the “contagion” of slavery. Schooled at the Working Men’s College to advocate for the less privileged in society, Farrer connected righteousness, honest labor, and ethical conduct with the civilizing forces that sustain humanity’s finer instincts, including artistic achievement. As Farrer was the only core member of the Association to fight in the Civil War, his voice would have been particularly persuasive in crafting The New Path’s lament that American artists had abjured their responsibility to create works that condemned slavery. But the editors also inferred the inverse proposition, that great art can be produced only by the “skillful” artist working within a society that has renounced slavery, and that privileges highly mimetic representations that honor their Creator. Farrer’s typology of the natural world, inherited from Ruskin and the British Pre-­R aphaelites, would lead to the requisite sympathetic imagination and ethical determination to “batter down” “that awful House of Sin.”72 Cole’s tropological emphasis, grandiose in its proclamations of biblical morality but blind, the American Pre-­R aphaelites believed, to the practice of human bondage, led to artistic and moral perdition.

Northampton, Summer 1865 Just three months after the end of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, the editors of The New Path could no longer remain silent about those in Britain

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who had “turned [their] back upon us.” They indicted Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Thomas Carlyle, William Thackeray, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Charles Dickens, but reserved their harshest condemnation for Ruskin. The New Path editors wrote that “a name held in love and honor, manifested in many ways, through the length and breadth of this land—­John Ruskin—­has spoken words of such bitterness and unreason, on our national struggle, to his best friends here, that intercourse with him is no longer possible; saying, among other things, that we are washing our hands in blood, and fighting to make slaves of white people.”73 Arriving for the summer in Northampton, Farrer was under emotional duress. The decision to indict his teacher and mentor in the journal that had, only two years earlier, been the leading platform for Ruskinian doctrine in the United States would have not been made lightly. Farrer was also reeling from criticism that he had received from his friends and colleagues the previous year on his first large-­scale landscape. Cook had deemed the untitled and probably destroyed work, “an almost total failure,” and Moore wrote Farrer “to beg you not to exhibit it.—­It is not at all worthy of you, & will be a great injury both to your own reputation & the cause of ‘Truth in Art’ if shown to the public.”74 This censure from close associates, the negative press for A Buckwheat Field, and the published rejection of Ruskin likely produced substantial doubts regarding the viability of supporting himself and his new wife and child as an artist working in Pre-­R aphaelite and Ruskinian modes.75 The paintings Farrer produced in Northampton in the summer of 1865 are evidence of his continuing confrontation with his experience of war, the stylistic and ideological paradoxes inherent in his art training, and his ongoing resistance to dominant American landscape conventions. Likely it was his friendship with Norton that had brought Farrer to the Connecticut River Valley for a summer of out-­of-­doors painting. Norton had essentially founded an American Pre-­R aphaelite artists’ colony in nearby Ashfield, where he had a summerhouse, attempted to purchase additional land to lure other artists with whom he shared aesthetic convictions, and persuaded Farrer to locate his home.76 During the months following the war’s conclusion, Farrer developed his signature style, characterized by a controlled distribution of natural elements executed with a relentless verism. One work completed during this period, Mount Tom (1865, fig. 36), appears to adhere more closely to picturesque conventions. The painting suggests that Farrer was productively exploring alternative styles to address his personal experience of war, as well as the grievous wound inflicted on the nation by the bullet fired at Ford’s Theater. The work features Farrer’s characteristic “painstaking attention to minute details,” as one reviewer complained, particularly visible in the foreground’s foliage, where each leaf insists on its individuality.77 Mount Tom offers the viewer an ambiguity that belies its apparent serenity, its constituent elements of daylight, blue water, and the reflection of white cloud and amber hillside held in a fragile unity. There is a quality of mourning in the quietude of the scene—­ Farrer inserts only a single human figure, a fisherman, whose hat immediately signals his status as a Union veteran. He wears a kepi, standard issue to Union soldiers for

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Fig. 36. Thomas Charles Farrer, Mount Tom, 1865. Oil on canvas, 16 × 24 ¼ in. (40.6 × 61.6 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington. John Wilmerding Collection, Promised Gift.

fatigue duty.78 This veteran angler is the lone human presence in an otherwise depopulated landscape, grieving lost comrades, and the viewer, too, is reminded of those never to return but who still haunt Farrer’s imagination. There is also a haunted quality that clings to the demarcated farms, meadows, and mountain hillsides in Farrer’s View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital (fig. 37), his most ambitious project of that summer and the masterpiece of his career. His vantage point was from the dome of the State Hospital for the Insane, built in 1856. Like A Buckwheat Field, View of Northampton absorbs the opposing educational protocols of the Government Schools and the Working Men’s College. More specifically, Farrer’s painting demonstrates a subordination of some of Ruskin’s teachings in pursuit of a hybrid aesthetic that elevates the priorities of the Government Schools. For example, the small trees in the distance, seemingly arranged by coordinates on an axial grid, and reminiscent of his placement of trees in A Buckwheat Field, are consistent with Redgrave’s directive in the Government Schools’ drawing manual to “produce plants conforming exactly to geometric principles.”79 Together, the positioning of natural features, the

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Fig. 37. Thomas Charles Farrer, View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital, 1865. Oil on canvas, 28 ⅛ × 36 in. (71.4 × 91.4 cm). Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA.

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absence of a framing device, and the precision with which Farrer depicts objects in the near and far distance create an overall sense of flattening and reproduce the effects of surface ornamentation and patterning more appropriate to wallpaper or textiles. In View of Northampton, Farrer fused spatial compression with a Ruskinian adherence to the veridical to produce a startlingly unconventional landscape painting. His decision to execute the foreground, middle ground, and background with equivalent attention to detail—­the articulation of leaves in the foreground, the textured mountainside in the background—­is an approach that blends the training of the two educational programs he attended. The impression of flatness was the desired effect of the techniques taught at the Government Schools. But American and British Pre-­R aphaelite works were also consistently critiqued for avoiding the volumetric in favor of the flat. Moreover, the Pre-­R aphaelite tendency to render the distant background and the foreground with equal precision had a discomfiting effect owing to its perceived unnaturalness. The merging of the stark geometry of the Government Schools and the Ruskinian delicacy and gradations of shade transforms View of Northampton into a challenging visual document, both in its repudiation of hierarchical composition and in its rejection of what the American Pre-­R aphaelites considered a politically regressive idealism. But despite the group’s collective judgment of Ruskin’s political views, their mentor’s imprint was not fully eradicated from Farrer’s artistic consciousness. Behind the “cut-­out” trees in View of Northampton is a notably Ruskinian-­inspired touch: a thin band of mist that clings to the distant and low-­lying mountains across most of the canvas. The marriage of mist and mountains was most happily celebrated, according to Ruskin, in the landscapes of Turner. That summer of 1865, Farrer again productively reconciled his dual educational heritage with the potent legacy of Thomas Cole. In decamping to Northampton, Farrer confronted another picturesque locale on which Cole had left his imprimatur: the Connecticut River Valley. Initiated two years earlier with A Buckwheat Field, Farrer’s pictorial engagement with Cole came to a head in View of Northampton. Cole’s most famous depiction of the Northampton scenery is his view from the top of Mount Holyoke, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—­The Oxbow (1836, fig. 38). Farrer would have seen Cole’s painting three years earlier in New York, where it was celebrated after having been absent from public view for fourteen years.80 Farrer selected a distinct vista, a site northwest of Mount Holyoke. The body of water in the foreground is the Mill River, and behind that is the Connecticut River, the curve due north of the oxbow. Mount Holyoke, the site from which Cole painted, is seen at the right of the canvas, overlapping the horizon line. While Cole’s work shows only the early stages of cultivation of the meadowland, Farrer’s, painted thirty years later, reveals the industrialization and urbanization that have since taken place, embodied in the hospital from which he paints, a community of residences, a church, and activity built up around the waterway, denoted by the dam that visually links the near and far banks of the Mill River.

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Fig. 38. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—­ The Oxbow, 1836. Oil on canvas, 51 ½ × 76 in. (130.8 × 193 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The Connecticut River Valley had occupied a place in the national consciousness from the late eighteenth century.81 The Prospect House at the summit of Mount Holyoke was a popular tourist destination, its reputation further promoted by the publication in 1829 of Captain Basil Hall’s Forty Etchings Made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1827 and 1828, well known in both the United States and England. Among the plates included in Hall’s book is View from Mount Holyoke in Massachusetts.” Cole had seen this volume in 1829 and his response was to make an exact tracing of Hall’s etching, which was based on a drawing Hall had created using a camera lucida.82 That drawing was the foundation for Cole’s painted Oxbow. The view from Mount Holyoke became famous, but not exclusively because of Cole’s painting. Many artists who pictured the same vista consulted neither The Oxbow nor the actual topography visible from Mount Holyoke’s summit. The more common referent was a widely circulated engraving of the view from Mount Holyoke by English topographer William Henry Bartlett (fig. 39), included in the landmark volume American Scenery, with text by Nathaniel Parker Willis, which began serial publication in 1837.83

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Fig. 39. Robert Wallis after William Henry Bartlett, View from Mount Holyoke, 1838. Engraving. Published in American Scenery; or Land, Lake, and River: Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature. Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library.

Farrer announced his independence from the precedent set by Hall, Cole, and Bartlett by selecting another of the region’s vantage points—­not one of the other summits in the Holyoke range, but the dome of Northampton’s State Hospital for the Insane. Not only does the site of the dome invoke many plainly nonsublime elements, not the least of which is implied by the work’s titular reference to the hospital, known locally as the “lunatic asylum,” but the vista it afforded is obstructed by a row of trees. This visual obstacle is a compositional technique reminiscent of that seen in An English Autumn Afternoon (1852–­53, fig. 40), which Farrer likely viewed in the studio of Ford Madox Brown. Also an instructor at the Working Men’s College, Brown frequently displayed his finished and in-­progress works to his students. In using An English Autumn Afternoon as a model, Farrer would have recognized that Brown’s work harnessed a powerful political message consonant with his own embrace of radical equality.

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Virtually every element of Brown’s landscape, as Alastair Wright has argued, served an innovative visual schema that commented on the contest between the development and the conservation of Hampstead Heath. Brown completed this painting at a moment in which a campaign was underway to improve access to the heath for the area’s laboring and middle classes, which included the protagonists of An English Autumn Afternoon.84 In his composition, Brown reconfigured eighteenth-­ century modes of picturesque prospect painting that linked vision with physical possession of land. He determined that the presence of middle-­class figures enjoying the view was essential to his canvas’s message. This insertion, Wright maintains, carried a potent political charge. By capturing a well-­known prospect from an unconventional vantage, Brown claimed his view and the surrounding landscape for those who were less economically and socially empowered—­a choice Farrer, too, would make in revising Cole’s painting. But Farrer further radicalized his work by choosing not to insert figures like Brown’s young couple. Instead, his painting’s viewers stand in for the asylum’s patients, who had been provided access to the magnificent panoramic view. In An English Autumn Afternoon and View of Northampton, both Brown and Farrer engage the issue of possession and access, and both side with progressive interpretations of legal and psychological claims to property and vision. Farrer’s viewer is invited to gaze over the same well-­regulated and domesticated intervales and coursing river that Cole and other artists had sketched for decades, with this important difference: Farrer was looking in the opposite direction to that chosen by Cole. While Farrer consciously determined to replicate a resonant American

Fig. 40. Ford Madox Brown, An English Autumn Afternoon, 1852–­53. Oil on canvas, 28 × 53 in. (71.7 × 134.6 cm). Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.

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landscape painted by his most famous predecessor, he decided to invert the image, to choose an idiosyncratic vantage point from which to transcribe it, to transpose the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ signature effect of an obstructed natural foreground, and to include elements of modernity and industrialization that Cole either would not have known or would have intentionally ignored and disavowed. Farrer’s choice of the dome of the hospital as the site from which he engages the Northampton landscape merits particular attention. In his influential account of The Oxbow, Alan Wallach discusses the experience of the panoptic sublime that arises when one encounters a panoramic vista from the top of a mountain. Wallach follows Foucault in linking the panorama to Bentham’s panopticon. Arranged in a circular prison, inmates in the panopticon were unsure whether they were being watched by the guard in a central tower, which produced an atmosphere of perpetual surveillance. Physically removed from the inmates, authority was anonymous, metaphorically becoming “the eye of power” or “sovereign gaze.”85 Similarly, Jonathan Crary invokes Bentham and Foucault when discussing nineteenth-­century vision, emphasizing how the panopticon “involved arrangements of bodies in space, regulations of activity, and the deployment of individual bodies.”86 Foucault demonstrates how the strategic objective of institutional supervision in Bentham’s panopticon could be adapted and widely applied. Panoptic surveillance could be employed in schools, factories, and, notably, in hospitals. The technique had long been in use at the Government Schools: an image in the Illustrated London News in 1843 shows one of the institution’s classrooms in its first building at Somerset House (fig. 41). An invigilator is perched at an elevated desk at the room’s center, his raised position offering a view of every student’s work and authorizing the supervision and control of their conduct and output. While Farrer seems to intuit the potential for domination inherent in panoptic organization, his aesthetic and political inclinations led him to counter the hierarchical models of spatial discipline. Through his educational and military experiences, he would have understood the dangerously repressive implications, avant la lettre, of what Foucault deemed the “sovereign eye.” But these experiences also primed him to seek liberative correlatives in nature generally, and specifically in the panoramic landscape. View of Northampton at once recognizes and disrupts the manipulative and punitive capacities of the panoptic sublime. In the months after the close of the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln, Farrer chose daily to enter the grounds of the State Hospital for the Insane, to ascend the many steps to the dome of its multibuilding complex, to unavoidably witness below him “the deployment of individual bodies,” specifically the patients moving within the highly regulated system, all in service of representing one of the nation’s most famous panoramic vistas. By invoking an alternative set of contemporary associations with the prospect view, Farrer refused to consecrate the panorama’s connection to authority and oversight. The State Hospital for the Insane (fig. 42) was a recently completed structure that participated in a larger transregional movement to erect hospitals and health

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Fig. 41. (top) “School of Design, Somerset House.” Illustrated London News, May 27, 1843, 375. Widener Library, Harvard University.

Fig. 42. (bottom) Henry Seibert & Bros., “State Hospital for the Insane, Northampton Massachusetts.” Frontispiece, Twelfth Annual Report, State Lunatic Hospital at Northampton, October 1867 (Boston: Wright & Potter, State Printers). Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, CT.

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and wellness institutions in the Gothic Revival style, the architectural pillar of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ reformist agenda, discussed in the following chapter. Farrer would have been attracted to the newly raised building that advanced the interests of his mentor and colleagues. Following the opening of the hospital in 1858, its activities and treatment plan were frequently reported in local newspapers. Constructed according to the Kirkbride Plan, the hospital represented a system of asylum design popular in the mid-­nineteenth century and adhered to a philosophy of rehabilitation that maintained that the architecture of medical institutions could itself promote patients’ therapeutic progress. One of the key components of a Kirkbride facility was an expansive view. The Northampton State Hospital’s vista was chosen to enhance the recuperative potential of the physically and emotionally unwell by providing ample access to natural light, clean air, and the dramatic landscape of Mount Holyoke. In Farrer’s selection of the dome of the hospital as his vantage point, he was not simply attempting to occupy the very “eye of power” possessed by his former Government Schools invigilator. In his decision to view the Northampton meadows from above, Farrer negotiated between the authoritarian and egalitarian connotations inherent in the prospect view. Farrer would have been well aware of the progressive agenda tied to the hospital’s architectural siting. In 1864, the Springfield Republican proudly announced that “the institution is surpassed by none in the country,” owing to the hospital’s “very superior location for scenery, pure air, cool and fresh water in abundance.”87 The reputation of the view’s restorative capacities quickly spread, and the hospital’s dome became a local attraction, drawing tourists who had been lured by the panorama from the top of Mount Holyoke. Visitors soon intruded on what was intended to be a serene environment for patients. “Having been found that very serious inconvenience arose from the custom of keeping the cupola open to visitors,” the hospital’s annual report of 1865 read, “it was closed in November last, greatly to the relief of our household.”88 Barred to the public for over six months by the time Farrer arrived in the area, the dome would have been accessible to him only by special dispensation. View of Northampton embraces the therapeutic panorama as its subject, evidence that Farrer was attentive to the unique healing characteristics of the asylum’s siting. Farrer’s egalitarian vision suffused his process of creation. He shared the vista with the hospital’s patients, many of whom were fellow former Union soldiers suffering from the “excitement of camp,” likely a form of post-­traumatic stress disorder.89 Further, no feature in his painting, natural or built—­neither dam, nor schoolhouse, nor tree—­is accorded greater or lesser visual impact or emotional valence. The artist chooses not to rank these features’ importance by inserting framing devices that guide the viewer’s eye to areas most deserving of attention. Instead, Farrer’s trees and structures are laid out before the viewer in the expansive open landscape, the eye encouraged to observe each plant, each cow, each house with the same unstinting scrutiny with which it was painted. This optical democracy, in which no element imposes singular control on the viewer’s experience, extended to Farrer’s facture; the

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Fig. 43. Asher B. Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853. Oil on canvas, 48 × 72 in. (121.9 × 182.7 cm). Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond. Gift of an anonymous donor.

Pre-­R aphaelite hallmark of rendering foreground and background objects with equivalent precision is on full display. The articulation of leaves near the picture plane and the forested mountainside of Mount Holyoke in the distance are both delineated with the miniature stroke for which the Pre-­R aphaelites were known. Farrer suspended the compositional hierarchy imposed by his predecessors and, in its place, embraced an organizational structure and painterly technique that enshrined a prime goal of abolition and emancipation: equality. In his antipicturesque presentation of the Connecticut River Valley, Farrer looks out over the same landscape as had Cole but eliminates the earlier artist’s two hallmarks: the sublimity of Mount Holyoke’s summit and the regulated meadows of the valley below. Invoking such writers as Foucault and Crary inevitably raises the issue of modes of vision. Farrer was simultaneously seeing a landscape different from Cole’s and seeing the same landscape differently. By fusing multiple views from the summit, Cole created a hybrid and idealized reality in which his empirical powers of observation and Romantic imagination profitably converged. Farrer, by contrast, apprehended a single

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but vast unit of visual content. He perceived a view with an apparently pronounced curvature in nature and endeavored to render each feature within his visual frame onto a flat canvas in an equivalent level of optical resolution. The Ruskin of Modern Painters and the Elements of Drawing and the work of the British Pre-­R aphaelites authorized the perspectival dissonance he knew would inevitably result. Farrer’s treatment of Northampton stands in stark visual, ideological, and emotional contrast to Cole’s. The Oxbow has long been an iconic image within American landscape painting, its hold on both the scholarly and popular imagination tied to its ability to absorb diverse interpretations. The painting is comprised of visual binaries, most notably the stormy wooded promontory occupying the foreground at left, sharply separated from the sunlit meadowland at right by the oxbow’s diagonal. The schismatic intensity of this compositional structure has been read as representing the tensions between nature and civilization, or as balancing alternative narratives of American progress and national identity. While scholars today emphasize a foreboding in The Oxbow as well as Durand’s apprehension of the industrial development pictured in Progress (1853, fig. 43), the American Pre-­R aphaelites did not indulge in such discriminations; instead, they viewed the oeuvres of Cole, Durand, and their milieu as participating in equally unworthy projects.90 Farrer’s veristic rendition of Northampton not only rejected the idealized terms of Cole, but also disavowed the jingoistic narratives of Cole’s successors. But picturesque landscapes were morally compromised for another reason. Continental expansion had, for decades, been tied to debates over whether slavery should be extended into the western territories. Completed in the months after the close of the Civil War, the long-­standing debate over slavery’s perpetuation finally settled, View of Northampton presents what Farrer deemed was an ethical landscape. Here was a postbellum landscape painting free from the pictorial devices associated with campaigns for geographic and human domination. Farrer’s panoramic vista of Northampton proffered to the viewer the same recuperative experience that the asylum afforded the former Union soldiers. In View of Northampton, Farrer furnished a therapeutic landscape that could, in the words of the late President Lincoln, “bind up . . . the wounds” of a nation long divided over the institution of slavery.91 An amalgam of experiences shaped the political sensibilities that Farrer expressed in View of Northampton. From the time of his childhood in North London, Farrer would have been fully aware of the Chartist movement’s core ambition to extend the franchise to the working man. Yet neither of the institutions where his formative educational experiences took place was sympathetic or directly responsive to Chartist demands. Instead, these programs offered palliatives: at the Government Schools, incorporating Bentham and utilitarian educational doctrine, children of the working class with artistic abilities were subjected to rigorously supervised training to become regulated contributors to British mercantile expansion. At the Working Men’s College, under Ruskin’s teachings, a working-­class student could become perceptually more adept so that he would remain content while occupying the social rank to which he

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was born. It was when Farrer took this diverse and confusing cluster of political and aesthetic beliefs and placed them into the American crucible of flawed and morally compromised democracy that a vision emerged within him uniting his past training and present interests with the exigencies of a nation transformed. The recent defeat of slavery encouraged a sanguine view of the American future—­one that was shortly to be dashed but was momentarily shared by a generation of transatlantic progressives. Farrer’s new and enriched perspective led him, months after Lincoln’s assassination, to seek out the dome of a lunatic asylum, to paint the reverse of the panorama that artists and tourists had considered a site of American promise. Farrer’s View of Northampton is a verso to the recto of one of Cole’s most ambitious pictorial pronouncements. In his decision to paint from the dome and present the Northampton landscape with exacting mimesis, Farrer extended his hard-­won vision of the American landscape—­gained by dint of his upbringing, training, immigration, military service, and leadership of the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement. This vision encompasses not only the landscape but the patients of the hospital below, regulated bodies who, significantly, were among the nation’s disenfranchised. Farrer was also depicting a landscape and a view that were believed to have the potential to restore the damaged psyches and bodies of Union soldiers and, in so doing, to claim essential freedoms that previous medical and architectural protocols had failed to offer. He was symbolically honoring the rights that had been denied to him in England and for which he had fought in the United States. In his interpretation of the landscape around Northampton, in providing an alternative to the idealized version of the setting by Cole, Farrer rejected the hierarchical organization of picturesque traditions, and replaced it with an egalitarian opticality that registered in equal intensity all the natural and man-­made objects surveyed. A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm and View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital, understood as sites of struggle between competing aesthetics and ideologies, and across generations, disrupt the art historical narrative that American landscape painting gravitated inexorably away from realism in the aftermath of the Civil War. The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ engagement with their American contemporaries and predecessors, often but not always acrimonious, complicated their adherence to Ruskinian principles and British Pre-­R aphaelite conventions. Perhaps most importantly, Farrer and the other members of the Association were not bystanders to the epochal event of their time. In their repudiation of Cole, Durand, and others they termed “old fogies,” the American Pre-­R aphaelites participated in heated ideological discourse that rejected slavery, upheld the Union, and rebuked the patriarchal figure of Ruskin himself.

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CHAPTER THREE

Architects of Reform: Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis, Jr.

In August 1863, with Farrer and Moore ensconced in Catskill for a summer of painting, Association architect Peter Bonnett Wight wrote Farrer with a lighthearted grievance. Wight and fellow architect Russell Sturgis, Jr., believed the group’s painters were not pulling their weight in the publication of The New Path: “Russ & I are contributors, editors and proprietor.” He warned Farrer: “You must hurry up those subscriptions from the Catskills, or we shall carry out the threat . . . the journal will appear as ‘Wight & Sturgis’s magazine of art, architecture, literature, Abolition and Spiritualism.’ ”1 Wight’s letter reinforces what a review of The New Path reveals—­that Wight and Sturgis had been the leading contributors to the journal in its first year. In the inaugural issue, in which he debuted his four-­part series “Our ‘Articles’ Examined,” Sturgis proclaimed the Association’s public profile of non serviam: “we profess to be radical thinkers” and “the Radical Reformer who dreads only stagnation.”2 Radicalism and reform were cornerstones of the architectural program of the Association, a collective expression of ambition and praxis conducted zealously in their designs and publications. The American Pre-­R aphaelites believed that the intensity of their aesthetic and political revolt was heightened by the fertile affiliation of architecture with the other arts being pursued by their Association colleagues. In fact, Wight’s banter is testimony to the crucial role played by architecture as the centrifuge that could productively gather and distribute the political, spiritual, and artistic energy necessary to fulfill the movement’s first principle, as articulated in its Articles of Organization:

Detail of fig. 62

“We hold that, in all times of great Art, there has been a close connection between Architecture, Sculpture and Painting; that Sculpture and Painting, having been first called into being for the decoration of buildings, have found their highest perfection when habitually associated with Architecture; that Architecture derives its greatest glory from such association; therefore, that this union of the Arts is necessary for the full development of each.”3 American Pre-­R aphaelite painters destabilized their landscape representations through their signature hyperrealism, overthrowing formulas of pictorial organization that endorsed concepts of hierarchy, control, ownership, and cognitive possession. Pre-­R aphaelite architects, by contrast, rebelled by harnessing the materials, ornamentation, and values associated with Gothic forms, altering the built environment and, by extension, the experience of those who entered their structures. The “greatest glory” would elude their grasp: the permanent “union of the Arts.” Nonetheless, this chapter argues that we can take the full measure of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ aesthetic and political rebellion only by considering the contributions of the Association’s architects to the movement’s interartistic endeavor. While the American Pre-­R aphaelites included two architects among their earliest members, there was no comparable representation among the founders of the British Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood. The subsequent fusion of British Pre-­R aphaelitism with Gothic Revival architecture occurred the following decade under the aegis of Ruskin and Henry Acland in the design and construction of the Oxford Museum of Natural History in 1855 and one year later at the Oxford Union. At the museum, a scrupulous Pre-­R aphaelite fidelity to natural forms was foundational to every aspect of the building’s ornamentation. The Oxford Union became a site for intensive Pre-­ Raphaelite collaboration, with a group of artists, led by Rossetti, joining together to execute its interior murals. This convergence of Gothic Revival architecture with Pre-­ Raphaelite sculptural carving and painting occurred as British Pre-­R aphaelitism was moving away from its founders’ emphatic devotion to mimesis. But the American Pre-­R aphaelites had the benefit of observing their British predecessors at a physical and temporal distance, emulating their examples in both architecture and painting. Ultimately, the Americans sought the cultural benefits of aesthetic symbiosis from the earliest days of their movement. It was through this broadening of their mandate, formalized by the Association’s founders in their Articles of Organization and propounded relentlessly on the pages of The New Path, that the American Pre-­R aphaelites positioned themselves to advocate for greater aesthetic and political reforms than did the members of the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood, individually or collectively. American Pre-­R aphaelite architects incorporated into their designs and building practices the four major architectural principles promulgated by Ruskin: constructional polychromy; mass bounded by defined contours; highly naturalistic sculptural ornamentation; and, perhaps most crucially, the central role and respected treatment of the workman. This chapter argues, however, that Ruskin’s famous promotion of the imaginative freedom of the craftsman was freighted in the context of American

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culture and politics. While American Pre-­R aphaelite architects internalized Ruskin’s faith in the socially recuperative benefits of Gothic architecture, and particularly in how it could blunt the pernicious effects of mechanization on the arts, Wight and Sturgis’s understanding of Gothic style’s liberative potential differed from Ruskin’s. Gothic architecture, in its original and revived forms, had historically been pursued in the service of both egalitarian and authoritarian agendas. Consequently, Wight and Sturgis sifted architectural history in order to identify Gothic forms with distinctly democratic associations. A close reading of the two architects’ articles in The New Path and other outlets, as well as a review of their designs, reveals the wide breadth of their architectural knowledge, their deep familiarity with ecclesiastical, domestic, and civic examples of Gothic Revival structures, and an acute understanding of the polyvalent political messages that inhered in Gothic and Gothic Revival forms. In their designs, Wight and Sturgis reformulated the Gothic semantic and deployed it as a vehicle to address issues of enforced servitude, the disaffected laborer, and widespread cultural illiteracy that calcified in structural inequality. While they espoused Ruskin’s ardent belief that Gothic Revivalism could nourish the creative impulse of the artisan-­craftsman, they were careful to avoid giving voice, in either their designs or their words, to the repressive associations that were also linked to Gothic structures. The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ embrace of the Gothic Revival style was a major factor in attracting patrons with the cultural capital and institutional affiliations that were central to Wight and Sturgis winning architectural commissions. In The New Path, Wight raised patronage to the status of a social contract: “every person whose labor or money contributes to the erection of a building, has a duty to perform, not only to posterity, but to the cause of universal truth.”4 Two such patrons, who not only supported the Association’s painters, architects, and scientists, but also leveraged their institutional platforms to disseminate Pre-­R aphaelite ideals, were Charles Eliot Norton and Daniel Coit Gilman. Correspondence suggests that it was Sturgis who first cultivated the group’s relationship with Norton, while Wight became close with Gilman. Of the two, Norton is today the better known. But Daniel Gilman was also among the most esteemed educators of the second half of the nineteenth century, beginning his career at the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale in the late 1850s, and in 1876 becoming the founding president of Johns Hopkins University. Recognizing that Pre-­R aphaelitism as a movement shared homologous contours of dissent with abolitionism, Norton and Gilman provided crucial opportunities for Wight and Sturgis to extend Gothic Revivalism and Ruskinian architectural principles in the United States. This chapter examines the commissions offered to Wight and Sturgis during the years of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ association. The erection of the National Academy of Design, the Union Square Annex of the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, the Yale School of the Fine Arts (now known as Street Hall), and a Civil War memorial at Harvard were, according to Norton, events of national concern.5 He recognized the opportunity offered to the nation by the conclusion of the Civil War.

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Victory not only effectively ensured slavery’s defeat but would also stimulate an influx of laborers who could transform the American built environment. The Gothic style, Norton explained, “has of late become matter of serious thought and endeavor among those who recognize architecture as having a vital relation to the needs and habits of each successive generation of men.”6 Wight in particular amplified the impact of his Association’s message by designing purpose-­built galleries in which the movement’s painters would ultimately exhibit their work. The inaugural exhibition held in 1867 at Street Hall provided an opportunity for American Pre-­R aphaelite painters and architects, as well as their leading patrons, to collaborate to an extent unprecedented in their association. In New Haven, they adopted, in their words, “the old cry of the anti-­slavery reformers, ‘Agitate the question!’ ” and applied this revolutionary energy to their most successful interdisciplinary effort, seizing “their opportunity to speak and write and ‘agitate the question’ of truth in art.”7

The Stirrings of a Politicized American Gothic Wight and Sturgis became friends as boys at New York’s Free Academy (now City College of New York). Wight enrolled at the school in 1850 when he was twelve years old, and Sturgis followed two years later. Wight recalled it was their mutual affinity for Ruskin’s architectural writings that brought them together as teenagers: “Our friendship was cemented by the study of . . . architecture. We read all the books on the subject to be found in the college library, including a set of Ruskin’s ‘Seven Lamps’ and ‘Stones of Venice,’ which had just come out.”8 Though the Free Academy did not offer instruction in architecture, both students decided to pursue the profession, taking courses in drawing and engineering. During their adolescence, years before they would cofound the Association, Wight and Sturgis nurtured a friendship with a fellow classmate that would ultimately produce sustained and generous patronage for every founding member of the American Pre-­R aphaelites. At the Free Academy, the aspiring architects met William Gilman, younger brother of the future Yale professor Daniel Gilman.9 This early friendship yielded an important network of contacts that would assist in the rise of the Association a decade later. Over ten years, William interacted not only with the future American Pre-­R aphaelite architects, but also with the young men who would become artist and scientist members of the group. In summer 1862, William served with Thomas Farrer in the Twenty-­Second Regiment of the National Guard of the State of New York.10 William also attended Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, where his brother Daniel would become professor of geography and mentor to the three Sheffield students who were the Association’s first scientist members: Eugene Schuyler, Clarence King, and James Gardiner.11 After the Association’s formation, William contributed financially to The New Path and became the leading collector of American Pre-­R aphaelite painting. As a professor at Yale, Daniel would hire Wight to design its first art school. Ultimately, the friendship of Wight, Sturgis, and William

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Gilman, fostered at the Free Academy, would prove integral to the American Pre-­ Raphaelite movement.12 During their early careers, Wight and Sturgis followed Ruskin and the British Pre-­R aphaelites in lauding, if overstating, incipient republicanism in medieval Italian city-­states. Both Americans found in Gothic revival architecture a potent medium for promoting the egalitarian values they believed were missing in American culture. In Ruskin’s famous formulation, workers were denigrated by the mechanical repetition utilized in modern designs and by the symmetrical proportions of neoclassical architecture. Ruskin decried “the great civilized invention of the division of labour,” which reduced workers to “small fragments and crumbs of life” and foreclosed opportunities for individual expression. In contemporary Britain, without “healthy and ennobling labour,” workers were left with such a “little piece of intelligence” that they were permitted to contribute only fragments—­not even “a pin, or a nail,” but “the point of a pin, or the head of a nail.”13 Gothic architecture, by contrast, was built by craftsmen whose guilds guaranteed devoted workmanship, granted workers autonomy, and conferred status and respect. As Linda Dowling has observed, “Invoking history, especially medieval history, thus became for . . . [the] mid-­century generation neither an ‘aristocratic’ flourish nor a ‘nostalgic’ appeal but a fervent gesture of sympathy and solidarity with humanity.”14 Wight and Sturgis understood well the stylistic features and the associated messages that suffused classical, neoclassical, Gothic, and Gothic Revival architecture. In his series of essays in The New Path, originally delivered as lectures to Association members, Sturgis asked readers and listeners to “look back to see what the past ages have done.” After acknowledging that “Karnack and Luxor are the stateliest names in the history of Art,” Sturgis proleptically isolated characteristics of each subsequent historical style, demonstrating how the contemporary architect would inevitably select the Gothic as the most inherently beautiful and connotatively resonant of democracy. “Every column is roughened with carving, every slab, hidden with painting. The capitals blossom with the lotus, carved as it grew in their river, and painted in colors that yet endure.” Significantly, all of Sturgis’s architectural examples—­from Babylon, Greece, Rome, and, of course, the Middle Ages—­highlight the central platform of American Pre-­R aphaelitism, the convergence of painting, sculpture, and architecture that was fundamental to his and Wight’s vision.15 Wight and Sturgis embraced the salutary associations that Ruskin had attached to medieval guilds in his writings over the previous decade. Ruskin’s sixth chapter of The Stones of Venice, “The Nature of Gothic,” was one of the critic’s earliest forays into blending his aesthetic interests with his broader cultural and social concerns. It was in this text that Ruskin presented his idealized view of the Gothic workshop, where both collaborative labor and self-­expression were encouraged. Such cooperative arrangements allowed craftsmen freedom to execute designs they had conceived themselves, which often displayed distortion and irregularities, expressive elements that Ruskin hoped would be introduced into contemporary architecture, and would serve to combat the spiritless uniformity of machine-­produced objects.16

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Ruskin’s influence placed a focus on a tradition of Gothic architecture rooted in Venice, Florence, and northern Italy in general, arguing that these regions had sustained a culture that generated highly naturalistic depictions of flora and fauna and animated poses and facial features in both painting and sculptural carving, as seen in decorated capitals at the Doge’s Palace. But for Wight and Sturgis, designing buildings in a nation that had supported slavery since its founding, an additional semantic beyond the mere elevation of the worth of the individual workman was required. They sought associations that communicated active dissent and the overthrow of illegitimate power. To this end, both men looked toward the British tradition of Gothic architecture and, more specifically, to English examples of the Gothic Revival that had already harnessed this style for the same purpose. Gothic architecture had begun to accrue a complex welter of overtones in seventeenth-­century England. Projects at Oxford such as the rebuilding of Oriel College (1620–­41) and University College (1634–­76) gave rise to a delicate equilibrium of messaging. Such structures inherently defended the legacy of monarchical and religious conservatism, which, in turn, promoted a comforting sense of lineage and historical continuity. But the buildings simultaneously evoked a past in which British subjects had thrown off the yoke of royal domination and established a system at least in part rooted in representative democracy. Subsequent generations of architects and their sponsors, by choosing not only between Gothic forms and classical ones, but also among the numerous structural and ornamental features of medieval building, could attempt to control the political valence of their creations. Wight and Sturgis’s granular understanding of the polysemous associations of Gothic Revival architecture informed their adoption of the style as a means to voice dissent against the authoritarian structures that had condoned slavery and war, and had fostered conditions of economic and spiritual servitude. This is not to reject the standard account that explains the American enthusiasm for the Gothic Revival by emphasizing Ruskin’s vision for revitalizing the role of the workman in the creation of noble architecture. Wight and Sturgis did explicitly connect this Ruskinian prescription to social regeneration in the form of abolition, union, and a just peace. Sturgis wrote that the National Academy was constructed according to “the principle that the workman should have to do with the design of what he executes,” and Wight argued that this participation was a potent symbol of “hope for art in the future.”17 But the received version of Ruskin’s avowed support for workmen, for the restoration of guild-­like working conditions that would sustain the “fuel, and focus for individual fire,” must be placed in the broader context of the Gothic’s connotative richness in the English tradition. When exported from England and grafted onto American buildings and designs, this powerful set of meanings assumed symbolic heft.18 Wight and Sturgis would have been alert to the story of America’s colonization and how it had been reinterpreted as a Gothic enterprise. One of the best-­known versions of this fanciful origins narrative, published in 1843 and delivered in lectures, was by Norton’s close friend George Perkins Marsh, an American diplomat often

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recognized as the nation’s first environmentalist. Entitled The Goths in New-­England, Marsh’s book established the context in which the Gothic architectural style, exemplified by sites such as Windsor Castle, could fit neatly into a historical account that elevated democratic values attained after periods of virtuous dissent. Momentous events on a national scale—­including King John’s forced signature of the Magna Carta, and the rebellions of the English Reformation, the English Civil War, and the Glorious Revolution that dethroned James II in 1688—­were associated with Windsor Castle and its environs, which were bound in the British imagination to moments that had favorably altered the course of history.19 Marsh chose to look past Gothic’s simultaneous affirmation of monarchy in favor of its radicalism, a deliberate strategy that architects Wight and Sturgis transposed into their architectural philosophy. Positioning America as predestined to democratic governance, Marsh outdid British expositors in his appropriation of a Gothic heritage. “The intellectual character of our Puritan forefathers is that derived from our remote Gothic ancestry . . . upon the removal of shackles and burdens, which the spiritual and intellectual tyranny of Rome had for centuries imposed on it.”20 While arguing for the consanguinity of his contemporary countrymen with ancient Goths may seem a dubious proposition, Marsh was making a case that had significant resonance among those in a mid-­nineteenth-­century America seeking to reaffirm its egalitarian bona fides. “The Goths. . . . We are their children. It was the spirit of the Goth, that guided the May-­Flower across the trackless ocean; the blood of the Goth, that flowed at Bunker’s Hill.”21 The Gothic Revival in the United States needed the authorization of a powerful tradition. Writers such as Marsh filled that need and armed politicians, artists, and architects like Wight and Sturgis with arguments and propaganda useful to their causes.

Charles Eliot Norton: The Bulwark of the Movement Following the formation of the Association, Sturgis reached out to Norton, sending him the first two issues of The New Path as well as the group’s Articles of Organization: “I know you only thru your works, with which, however, I am well acquainted and heartily in sympathy. . . . I send you a copy of the articles of organization of a young society here. . . . I shall be very glad to hear . . . how far you are satisfied with our confession of faith.”22 By 1863, Norton was one of the nation’s foremost authorities on artistic and literary affairs. His support of Pre-­Raphaelitism and Gothic Revivalism in America had been uninterrupted since 1855, when he began writing for The Crayon at Stillman’s request. Sturgis would have known that obtaining the approval of Norton, not only as a leader of Boston’s intelligentsia but as editor of the North American Review, would be a critical step in gaining a wider audience for the Association and The New Path. Norton had for years lamented “the absoluteness of the want of fine buildings in America,” and in the Association and The New Path he found passions consonant with his own.23 Within months, Norton reviewed The New Path in the North American Review, writing that the journal was “by far the most interesting and noteworthy

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American publication concerning Art,” and introduced the American Pre-­R aphaelites as “men, not only of talents, but of serious convictions and of independent thought.” Though Norton recognized the Association’s members as “disciples of Mr. Ruskin,” he importantly announced their independence, noting that “they are no blind followers even of that great master.” In his review, Norton stakes the nascent movement, endorsing their unilateral repudiation of the nation’s existing institutions: “if its leaders hold firm to their own principles, they will finally be recognized as the redeemers of American Art from its present servitude to tradition and falsehood, and its subserviency to the popular preference for what is showy and admired to what is intrinsically worthy of admiration.”24 Norton’s support constituted an important act of cultural consecration. The American Pre-­R aphaelites were heartened to receive the encouragement of such an esteemed intellectual, especially one who shared sympathies with respect to contemporary art and architecture. The Association members’ admiration for Norton was apparent when Sturgis forwarded to Moore a letter that he had received from Norton; Moore sent it on to Farrer. They were delighted to learn that Norton, too, sought to banish idealized styles from painting, sculpture, and architecture: “Let me get rid, as soon as may be, of Greek temple Custom Houses, of pitch pine Gothic, of Fifth Avenue Renaissance, of Powers & Palmer & Cole & Church.”25 Norton would later invite American Pre-­R aphaelites to his residences in Cambridge and Ashfield, where his home, the Locusts, attracted artists and intellectuals committed to progressive politics. During these visits he made available his art collection, which included Elizabeth Siddal’s Clerk Saunders (1857, fig. 44) and Ruskin’s Fragment of the Alps (1854–­56, fig. 45), works he had purchased from the Exhibition of English Art in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston in 1857 and 1858. He also owned prints after Turner, which the American Pre-­R aphaelites were eager to study. Norton’s generosity seemed boundless—­he even sent the watercolor he owned by Rossetti, Before the Battle (1858, fig. 46), to Moore for a lengthy period.26 Norton had been awakened to the merits of Pre-­R aphaelitism and Gothic Revivalism during a European trip of 1855 to 1857, in which he followed an itinerary set by Ruskin. He spent an extended period in Italy, where he relied upon The Stones of Venice as a vade mecum. Ideas on the ongoing relevance of medieval culture began to permeate Norton’s own writings, particularly those completed in Tuscany. His Notes of Travel and Study in Italy of 1859 was an expanded compilation of pieces he had published for The Crayon while abroad. The heart of the book is devoted to Orvieto and its cathedral, which, in Norton’s eyes, was the “perfect monument of the past munificence and spirit of its people.”27 Norton’s exaltation of the Orvieto cathedral, and the conditions that nurtured its construction, recalls the ideological thrust of Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic.” For Norton, Orvieto was a “combination of popular effort with trained skill,” a record of the era’s communal determination and participatory endeavors: “There have been no works of architecture in later times comparable . . . in grandeur of design, in elaborateness of detail, in that broad unity of conception

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Fig. 44. Elizabeth Siddal, Clerk Saunders, 1857. Watercolor, gouache, colored chalks, on paper, 11 ¼ × 7 ⅛ in. (28.4 × 18.1 cm). The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK.

Fig. 45. John Ruskin, Fragment of the Alps, c. 1854–­56. Watercolor and gouache over graphite on cream wove paper, 13 3/16 × 19 7/16 in. (33.5 × 49.3 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Samuel Sachs, 1919.506.

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Fig. 46. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Before the Battle, 1858, retouched 1862. Transparent and opaque watercolor on paper, mounted on canvas, 16 ⅝ × 10 ¾ in. (42.2 × 27.3 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Picture Fund.

which, while leaving the largest scope for the play of fancy and the exercise of special ability by every workman, subordinated the multifarious differences of parts into one harmonious whole. The true cathedral architecture partook of the qualities which Nature displays in her noblest works,—­out of infinite varieties of generally resembling, but intrinsically differing parts, creating a perfect and concordant result.”28 Adorned with carved botanical and figural sculpture, shimmering mosaics, and polychrome stone, the Orvieto cathedral was a total work of art that represented an extraordinary moment of collaboration in the thirteenth century explicable, in Norton’s view, by reference to the era’s political conditions (fig. 47). Cathedrals, like that in Orvieto, were conceived following the reduction of the worst inequities of feudal rule. No longer indentured to barons, workers and craftsmen pooled their collective skills. Medieval cathedrals were, according to Norton, “expressions of the popular will and the popular faith. . . . They represent . . . the decline of feudalism, and the prevalence of the democratic element in society.”29 For Norton, Gothic Revivalism would extend Gothic architecture’s legacy of spiritual populism to the United States: “It would seem that there could be no country in the world where buildings of the noblest kind would be more desired.”30 Executed according to Gothic principles, such buildings could offer, he wrote, deliverance to “men who have lived long in darkness.”31 As heightening sectional tensions led to civil war, Norton began to adapt ideas on medieval craftsmanship and the politics of the Middle Ages to confront American exigencies. His study of the art and civic life of

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Orvieto, Florence, and Siena stimulated him to map the trajectory of American civilization against the accomplishments of those Italian city-­states. Norton delivered the lecture “Emancipation in the Middle Ages” at the Lowell Institute on January 1, 1863, the day the Emancipation Proclamation took effect. In his view, the Civil War was a crisis “for which the whole past seem[ed] to have been a preparation.” Detailing selected narratives of brutal oppression and valiant uprising from the birth of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, Norton linked the manumission of the serfs, who were freed by their lords after fighting in the Crusades, to a viable pathway for the emancipation of enslaved American laborers: enlistment in the Union army. Norton’s timing of this message was purposeful—­his lecture was delivered on the day Black soldiers were legally permitted to enlist in the Union army. The question over whether free men of color and enslaved workers could serve in the military had been bitterly debated among Union leaders since the attack on Fort Sumter, with many worrying that the Union’s border states would secede should that right be extended. In Norton’s view, the Emancipation Proclamation settled that dispute, “open[ing] a new era in the progress of mankind.” From before the war through the cessation of hostilities, Norton worked to stimulate an American revival in architecture and the visual arts analogous to the “revolutionary spirit” unleashed when the Crusades “broke down the barriers between high and low” and “the peasant [was] emancipated from the worst servitude.”32 Fig. 47. Orvieto Cathedral. Begun 1290.

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Norton’s reading of history represented both an elaboration and a variation of Ruskin’s argument that artistic and cultural vitalization was intrinsically related to recasting the role of the workman within society. While Ruskin, too, had lauded the cultural richness of the Middle Ages, he did not valorize the era’s overthrow of feudalism and subsequent emergence of nascent democratic governance within selected city-­states such as Florence and Venice—­an emergence, it should be noted, that remained in tension with persisting oligarchic structures. The cluster of meanings that Norton preferred to identify with Gothic Revival architecture was a hybrid of Ruskin’s assertion that the worker must be reinvested with creative agency and broader reformist associations with the unfinished project of British representative government. The fusion of these two traditions was signaled by the 1859 publication of Norton’s Notes of Travel and Study in Italy and his review of the Oxford Museum for the Atlantic Monthly. The museum was designed by Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward, who collaborated with Ruskin in their plan and construction (fig. 48). Built to house the university’s collection of natural history, as well as several departments of natural science, the Oxford Museum was the first building to accord with the architectural principles that Ruskin championed. The opening of the museum was accompanied by a monograph that detailed its history, plan, layout, and, importantly, its ornamental decoration. The publication was jointly authored by Ruskin and Henry Acland, an Oxford University professor of medicine, longtime supporter of Ruskin,

Fig. 48. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, designed by Thomas Newenham Deane and Benjamin Woodward.

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Fig. 49. Columns in the upper arcade, Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

and moving force behind the project. Ruskin claimed the structure as “the first exponent of the recovered truth” of the “juster expressions of the Gothic principle,” and Norton agreed, laying out the implications for his own country.33 “It has proved the perfect pliancy of Gothic architecture to modern needs,” Norton explained, “and shown its power of entire adaptation to the requirements of new conditions.”34 In referring to “new conditions,” Norton was not merely referencing Gothic architecture’s vaunted adaptability to all uses and future expansions; he was also referring to the current conditions imposed by the Civil War that demanded civic and political mobilization. “Traditionary adherence to old methods” and “bigoted conservatism,” Norton wrote, had been “overcome” at Oxford, and the museum had served as a powerful corrective.35 It made art, in Ruskin’s words, “fixed instead of portable” and “large and publicly beneficial.”36 Nowhere is the “adherence to old methods” in pursuit of “recovered truth” more evident than in the execution of the Oxford Museum’s lower and upper arcades (fig. 49). Over sixty columns were adorned with capitals, shafts, and bases, many carved and designed by the brothers James and John O’Shea, and their nephew Edward Whelan, brought from Ireland specifically for the task. The O’Sheas’ talents and

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Fig. 50. Memorial Hall, Harvard University, designed by William Robert Ware and Henry Van Brunt.

sensibilities were in accordance with Ruskin’s dictate that architecture be drawn from nature—­the shafts were selected “from quarries which furnish examples of many of the most important rocks of the British Islands,” with capitals and bases representing flora and fauna found in each corresponding region. In the Oxford Museum Woodward and Ruskin would unite sculptural carving, tiles, ironwork, and woodwork in a dynamic constituency of aesthetic elements. Every component of both the building and its contents, by dint of the unique hand of their makers, commanded of the visitor a commensurate feat of individual attention and provided a powerful impetus to Wight’s and Sturgis’s Gothic Revival designs of the 1860s. Following the formation of the Association, Norton’s aspirations of the 1850s for the amelioration of American art and culture turned to concrete action. As the Civil War drew to a close, he acted on his long-­held desire to bring Gothic Revival architecture to America, convening Harvard alumni to discuss a memorial to honor the “sons of Harvard fallen in the war.”37 The group decided to solicit designs for their Memorial Hall by architects who were Harvard alumni. Norton’s confidence that collaborative craftsmanship could replicate the achievement of the Middle Ages led him to ask both Wight and Sturgis to submit proposals for the memorial, despite the fact that neither had attended Harvard. Wight declined to apply, but Sturgis sent plans.

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Although Sturgis’s design has not survived and was not selected, his proposal was Norton’s favorite. Notably, the plan chosen for Memorial Hall, designed by Harvard alumni William Ware and Henry Van Brunt, was in the High Victorian Gothic style and indebted more to the example of Eugène Viollet-­le-­Duc than to Ruskin (fig. 50). Norton was never satisfied with the outcome of the competition. Given his fervent hope for an American Risorgimento, he believed a Pre-­R aphaelite architect committed to the egalitarian tenets of the Ruskinian Gothic Revival would have been the most felicitous choice to design the first postbellum building at Harvard.

The National Academy of Design During the war years, Wight and Sturgis sought their first major architectural commissions. Erected “in the years of angry strife,” Wight’s National Academy cannot be separated from its historical moment.38 Although Wight had been awarded the building’s commission in 1861, his design was not officially accepted until April 1863, the delay due, in part, to disruptions caused by the conflict, as well as by requested revisions to his initial plans. Fraught military and political circumstances attended the academy’s conception and execution. Once construction began, it “carried on in spite of every discouragement,” according to Wight, including three labor strikes, and a hiatus caused by the “draft for the army during the progress of the work.”39 The opening was expected to be a celebratory occasion, scheduled for April 15, 1865, just days after General Lee’s surrender. But instead, the building was “draped in mourning; the American colors on a shield, covered in crape, was placed on a doorway . . . on the occasion of the passage through the city of the mortal remains of the late President.”40 Although Wight did not serve in the Union army, he viewed the architectural commissions he accepted during the war years as important service to the Northern effort.41 Following the selection of his plan for the National Academy, Wight was employed twice by the US Sanitary Commission: to design, in Washington, DC, the North’s first army field hospital to treat wounded soldiers, and, later, to design and oversee the construction of the Union Square Annex of New York’s Metropolitan Sanitary Fair in 1864 (neither plan survives). Wight’s work on the fair interfered with some of his other commissions, in particular his early discussions with Yale to design Street Hall. Explaining the delay to Gilman, Wight emphasized the sense of responsibility he felt in fulfilling the Sanitary Fair job: “When I undertook the Fair I carefully weighed the whole matter in my mind and know [sic] that I would inconvenience some of my customers,” but, he reasoned, his acceptance of the commission was “a duty above every private consideration.”42 Wight’s decision to design in the Gothic style was not made cavalierly but was the product of extensive familiarity with alternative historical forms. Neither of Wight’s first two designs for the National Academy proposed a fully Gothic solution; they were, rather, iterations of Italian Romanesque (figs. 51 and 52). This evolution is further evidence of the range of influences on American Pre-­R aphaelite architecture

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and mirrors Ruskin’s own early agnosticism with regard to the styles most worthy of revival. Ruskin did not immediately alight on Gothic as the correct answer for all architectural needs. In The Seven Lamps, he wrote: “The choice would lie I think between four styles:—1. The Pisan Romanesque; 2. The early Gothic of the Western Italian Republics  .  .  .  ; 3. The Venetian Gothic in its purest development; 4. The English earliest decorated.”43 Wight, too, demonstrated an ecumenical sensibility that encouraged him to combine elements from a range of historical styles to consolidate them to original effect. The academy’s structural polychromy, as well as its two levels of highly articulated stringcourse moldings, both signatures of the Gothic Revival, were central features in his two early Romanesque designs as well as in the completed building. Among the significant changes he made between his earlier and final plans (fig. 53) was to the façade’s third story, for which Wight specified small bricks in

Fig. 51. (opposite top) Peter Bonnett Wight, National Academy of Design Competition, New York, New York, South Elevation, 1861. Ink, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 20 ⅞ × 27 in. (53 × 68.6 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago. Fig. 52. (opposite bottom) Peter Bonnett Wight, National Academy of Design Competition, New York, New York, South Elevation, 1861. Ink, watercolor, and gouache on paper, 17 ⅝ × 22 ⅞ in. (44.8 × 58.1 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 53. (above) National Academy of Design, designed by Peter Bonnett Wight. Photograph by Maurice Stadtfeld, 1866. National Academy of Design. Photographs with an Introductory Essay and Description by P. B. Wight, Architect (New York: S. P. Avery, 1866). Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

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his Romanesque versions but which was ultimately constructed using more costly lozenge-­shaped marble. This decision accords with Ruskin’s call for building in the spirit of sacrifice, which he believed was particularly characteristic of Gothic architecture, in contrast with connotations of austerity attached to Romanesque designs.44 Even more noticeable is Wight’s shift away from the pronounced Romanesque arches of his original window heads and voussoirs to openings spanned by pointed arches. It is likely that Wight’s resolve to redesign the building in the Gothic style was a result of his intense immersion in the activities of the Association and the group’s stated belief that the “true Art” of the future would be Gothic art. Sturgis praised the completed building in his review in The New Path as “designed in entire accordance with the views concerning Architecture which have always been set forth in this journal.”45 Wight selected key elements from Ruskin’s preferred Italian Gothic aesthetic, which had also featured prominently at the Oxford Museum. Though Ruskin could be mercurial in his prescriptions and preferences, a constant across his treatises was his belief that the “true colors of architecture are those of natural stone.”46 For the National Academy, Wight accordingly arranged for polychrome stone to be mined from the region—­gray and white marble from Westchester, New York; North River bluestone from the Hudson Valley; and red marble from Vermont.47 In “The Lamp of Beauty,” Ruskin explained that architectural color need not simply indicate a building’s structural contours, such as accentuating a façade’s stringcoursing. Colored stone could “arrange itself in chequers and zig-­zags” or in stripes, preferably horizontally.48 Wight integrates all of these decorative schemes on his façade’s three stories, each pattern differentiated by a change in building materials as opposed to by means of applied color. These selections were consistent with Ruskin’s view of the associative and historical resonance of locally sourced materials, studied firsthand and carved by worker-­craftsmen. The choice to build with stone from nearby quarries was a conscious effort by Wight to imbue secular architecture with ideals that mobilized civic participation and the artisan’s creative capacities, thereby promoting individual freedom and broader moral instruction. Wight put into practice many of Ruskin’s prescriptions in the building of the National Academy. As had Deane and Woodward at Oxford, Wight hired carvers whom he granted freedom in the design and ornamentation of columns and capitals. He provided his workmen photographs, live plants, and botanical studies, and encouraged craftsmen to carve their ornamentation extemporaneously, using the images and flora only as inspiration (fig. 54).49 Some of the studies offered to the workmen appear to have been furnished by Wight’s Association colleagues—­Wight’s papers include meticulous pencil drawings by Farrer, including several of the jack-­in-­ the-pulpit flower (fig. 55), which was featured in the carved ornament on one of the capitals of the building’s exterior columns, in red American marble. For Wight, “the carved capitals on that building, designed by the workmen from nature,” were central to his “attempt to revive the system of decoration derived from nature . . . an example that I would set for all future work.”50

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Fig. 54. Columns at the National Academy of Design. Photograph by Maurice Stadtfeld, 1866. Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago.

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Fig. 55. Thomas Charles Farrer, Jack-­in-­the-­Pulpit, c. 1860. Pencil on paper, 8 1/16 × 9 ½ in. (20.5 × 24.1 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago.

Two columns with carved capitals flanked the academy’s drinking fountain, a feature that was both intended and received as possessing particularly egalitarian associations (fig. 56). Offered to both the citizens and the canines of New York, and placed at street level at the very center of the building’s main façade, Wight’s fountain was modeled on, as Sturgis noted, “an English architectural fountain,” which typically had borne “the names of the public-­spirited individuals who have given them to their fellow citizens.”51 Indeed, the National Academy had initiated what was for the time an unusual approach to public funding by soliciting donations in amounts of one hundred or five hundred dollars and offering memberships to the academy in return.52 The successful response to this campaign was seen as a gift from citizens of the city of New York to a private institution, and remarks given at the laying of the cornerstone suggested that the offering of a home for contemporary art in a costly Gothic Revival structure was made in Ruskin’s spirit of sacrifice. The democratic associations that the fountain evoked were numerous, including the easy access it

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afforded to satisfy the most elemental need for water and its public availability to all classes. The fountain’s dual utilitarian and symbolic functions were highlighted in an engraving that accompanied an article in Harper’s Weekly announcing the academy’s opening (fig. 57). In the design of his sidewalk fountain, Wight did not relax his belief that faithful and lavish representations of the natural world should be incorporated into the building’s most public-­facing ornamentation. In the spandrels over the fountain his carvers included “a great tiger lily, a wild marsh lily, an ‘arrow-­head,’ and a ‘cat-­ tail’ . . . in unchecked luxuriance.” But beyond the communal and whimsical flourish of providing “useful dog troughs on both sides,” Wight’s “free fountain” also carried the weight of substantial political messaging. In his review of the National Academy, Sturgis captured the qualities of sacrifice, equity, and social generosity inherent in Wight’s offering: “The fountain is a good thing, and should be imitated; who will be found to honor himself and his name forever by the gift of such another,—­not an iron hydrant, but a beautiful basin of marble into which the water shall continually trickle?” Writing just weeks after the conclusion of the war and the assassination of Lincoln, Sturgis positioned Wight’s fountain as a model worthy of emulation in the memorials that would soon be built across the United States: “Who will honor the memory of his father, or his brother or friend killed in battle for his country. . . . Let

Fig. 56. Fountain at the National Academy of Design. Photograph by Maurice Stadtfeld, 1866. Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection, Ryerson and Burnham Art and Archi­ tecture Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Fig. 57. “Fountain under the Main Entrance of The National Academy,” Harper’s Weekly, June 3, 1865, 348. Widener Library, Harvard University.

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the monuments to our lost President, which will arise in every city, draw the people about them by this means.”53 Wight’s academy was a successor to the Oxford Museum. He perceived the two buildings as participating in a transatlantic project that literally set in stone the doctrine Ruskin had crystallized in prose. In a pamphlet illustrated with photographs of the academy, published shortly after the building was completed, Wight himself noted the lineage between his work and Oxford: “Deane & Woodward, architects of the new museum at Oxford, said that the carved capitals on that building, designed by the workmen from nature, cost less than ordinary carving; and I can add my testimony to theirs, that the capitals of the Academy of Design cost no more than Corinthian capitals of the same size and delicacy of finish. . . . And this has been the result with men to whom the work has been totally new—­who had not even seen such work as they were asked to do.”54 Wight’s design, construction, and adornment reflected the “Naturalism” that Ruskin had invoked in “The Nature of Gothic,” to describe how Gothic ornamentation both “resembled” nature and channeled the spiritual commitment of the carver.55 Naturalism for Wight elicited multiple expressive strengths from the craftsman, including idiosyncrasies of personal style and a pleasing variation that was the inevitable result of imperfect execution. But Wight’s and his colleagues’ vision of the egalitarian role of architecture was far more radical in its implications than Ruskin would have endorsed. Ruskin did believe in the social value of ornament and asserted that if executed according to what he viewed as the sanguine principles of medieval guilds, such ornament would serve worthy didactic purposes. But despite the radical implications of some of Ruskin’s arguments, his political and social views were far from democratic; he held that unequal labor relations do not fundamentally disadvantage one class over another or lead to political suppression, authoritarianism, or slavery. In fact, in Ruskin’s view, any dilution of the social stratifications conferred by birth would result in a further undermining of Britain’s national culture and polity.56 Such a retrograde political philosophy could not be sustained by the American Pre-­R aphaelites in a nation riven by slavery and civil war. Wight understood the design and construction of the National Academy as a transformative aesthetic and political statement that would redeem not only the nation’s future architecture, but the status, dignity, and freedom that must be universally granted if the United States was to fulfill its social compact. Wight’s emulation of the Oxford Museum extended to the manner in which he documented and publicized the National Academy. The pamphlet he published on the building resembled in its general appearance, tone, and illustrations the Oxford Museum monograph by Acland and Ruskin. Wight included photographs and descriptions of the academy, detailing its process of construction and ornamentation, and the architect’s rationale for ultimately selecting the Italian Gothic style. As he had in 1859 with the Oxford Museum monograph, Norton reviewed Wight’s pamphlet in the North American Review. In his earlier piece, Norton had lamented his country’s lack of edifying architecture: “in the whole breadth of the continent there is not a

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single building of such beauty as to be an object of national pride.”57 With the National Academy, Wight answered Norton’s call for a monument of “greatness and worth.” The new building endowed the nation with an “elevating and purifying presence,” and Norton extolled it as “one of the most original, interesting, and important works of architecture erected during the present generation.”58 For Wight, too, the National Academy was a symbol of cultural healing and “hope for art in the future.”59 As the architect wrote in his pamphlet, “I believe it will be one of the results of unseen regenerative influences which have been felt throughout the world, to a greater or less extent, during this generation, and of which modern wars, and especially our civil war, have been no small part.”60 Wight understood that a revival of Gothic architecture and medieval building practices was only one of a cluster of “regenerative influences” required to effect a total reformation of American art and culture. Another key to this project would be the invigoration of American painting by his colleagues in the Association as they eschewed established landscape conventions and pursued their own alternative and nonhierarchical vision. Wight was aware that his National Academy and Street Hall, which would shortly open, together with the Pre-­R aphaelite paintings they would showcase, could not only “advance the cause” but ensure the “permanent success of this great reformation.”61

Daniel Gilman and Street Hall In the decade before the Association was formed, Gilman and Norton had come to recognize that in championing Pre-­R aphaelitism and Gothic Revivalism, they could also promote the imbrication as well as the professionalization of scientific inquiry and humanistic expression. In his review of Acland and Ruskin’s monograph, Norton had noted that one of the most striking achievements of the Oxford Museum in both its design and its function was its “full recognition of the Natural Sciences as forming an essential part of the scheme of University studies.”62 For Gilman, the scientific disciplines that advanced an understanding of the natural world demanded the same intensity of perceptual attention as did the artistic processes that required the truthful rendition of nature. Indeed, classificatory observation was considered crucial to the conditioning of the scientific mind. This belief had taken hold in the United States at the outset of Gilman’s career, as American universities such as Yale and Harvard became vital sites in which scientists worked to link their curricula with the country’s most urgent social, commercial, and cultural needs. The Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale were founded in 1847 for instruction in science and engineering. As a leader at Sheffield, Gilman, along with his colleagues, argued that earlier educational models based entirely upon the classical curriculum taught at Yale College insufficiently prepared students to enter into the country’s expanding agricultural and industrial economies. Lawrence and Sheffield helped to establish a model in American higher education that integrated both the sciences and the liberal arts.

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Gilman’s vision for Sheffield was to create the conditions in which scientific and cultural energies could converge. Joining scientific study with accomplished draftsmanship became central to Gilman’s pedagogical method, and he led the incorporation of drawing instruction into the scientific school. Under Gilman’s plan, every student was required to receive drawing lessons at regular intervals throughout their three-­year course of studies. His program, while training students in modes of inquiry that heightened their capacity to observe and interpret natural facts, also participated in the broader cultural dissemination that sharpened perceptual alertness to botanical and geological imagery. This curriculum, implemented before the American Pre-­ Raphaelites formed their Association, primed Gilman to embrace an artistic project predicated on the fusion of scientific and aesthetic empiricism. Because of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ commitment to the nature study, their works appealed to Gilman as a professional scientist. Given his interest in such specializations as botany, geology, and mineralogy, when confronted with Pre-­R aphaelite nature studies, Gilman would have agreed with many commentators that such elaborately realistic images were analogous to those produced through the use of optical instruments such as the magnifying glass and microscope. Farrer’s Jack-­in-­the-­Pulpit (see fig. 55) possesses such resonances. With its clearly defined graphite contours juxtaposed against a cream ground, it is visually similar to the magnified image—­viewed through a microscope’s lens—­of a specimen affixed to a slide. In the months after the formation of the Association, Gilman developed a plan that allowed him to use his institutional platform to provide the American Pre-­ Raphaelite movement with multiple forums to promote their art and architecture to a university community and, by extension, to a nation that he hoped would become increasingly receptive to the fertile overlap between the sciences and the arts. Where Norton failed to realize his aspiration to erect a building designed by a Pre-­R aphaelite architect at Harvard, Gilman succeeded at Yale. In 1863 Gilman commenced talks with Wight to design a Gothic building that would serve as Yale’s School of the Fine Arts. Now known as Street Hall, the school is one of three buildings that today constitute the Yale University Art Gallery (figs. 58 and 59). While it may seem incongruous that a professor of geography would direct the building of an art school, Gilman had long been committed to the productive dialogue between the sciences and the arts at the university level. His dedication to the arts was well recognized in New Haven. After he reorganized the Yale School of Science, he was the moving force behind the first loan exhibition of paintings and sculpture at the university in 1858. Shortly after the exhibition closed, Gilman published an article in which he assessed the importance of the exhibition and laid out his aspirations for the arts at Yale: “It is common to lament that in ‘the masses’ of our countrymen there is so little love of the aesthetic. . . . But all such lamentations, just as they are, will have little effect till those who guide the public taste . . . sign the builder’s contracts . . . till educated men yearly leaving our colleges in companies of thousands, are well instructed in the principles of artistic as well as of literary taste.”63 Over the next five years Gilman took major steps to realize

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Fig. 58. (top) Street Hall, Yale University, designed by Peter Bonnett Wight, c. 1866. Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. Fig. 59. (bottom) Yale University Art Gallery, 2012. Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.

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Fig. 60. Dwight Hall, Yale University, designed by Henry Austin. Photograph by Ned Goode, 1964. Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Fig. 61. Alumni Hall, Yale University, designed by Alexander Jackson Davis. Photograph by William Henry Jackson, c. 1901. Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

his vision. He secured funding from the donor Augustus Russell Street to build the country’s first art school, and granted Wight and his Ruskinian vision the full creative and financial autonomy that Gilman had identified as crucial to nurturing “public taste” and broader cultural progress. While winning the prestigious National Academy assignment had prepared the way for Wight’s selection to design Street Hall, the architect’s Ruskinian orientation was also congruent with the Gothic Revival style recently embraced at Yale. Along with Gilman, Street Hall’s architectural selection committee included Andrew Dickson White, a devoted Ruskinian and professor of history and English who would later become Cornell’s first president. Over the prior two decades important buildings erected at Yale had been completed in the Gothic Revival style, including Dwight Hall (1846), designed by Henry Austin, and Alumni Hall (1853), by Alexander Jackson

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Fig. 62. Ρeter Bonnett Wight, The Yale School of the Fine Arts, Elevation from the Southeast, 1864. Watercolor on paper, 16 ⅝ × 13 ½ in. (42.2 × 34.3 cm). Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University.

Davis (figs. 60 and 61).64 These buildings, consciously in the tradition of Europe’s most renowned universities, had initiated the “collegiate Gothic” trend that endured for a century at Yale. Street Hall represents a further restatement of a commitment to the Gothic style, updated to contain ideas promulgated by Ruskin and featuring hallmarks of his favored Venetian Gothic idiom, including intricate traceries, polychrome stone, natural rather than figurative ornamentation, and a reduced emphasis on the verticalism found in northern European Gothic structures in favor of broad mass on a wide footprint. Wight’s original watercolor of Street Hall (fig. 62), which presented his proposed design to Yale administrators and the building’s donors, highlights these elements. The drawing also calls attention to the thick stone that endowed the building with the impression of massiveness, facilitating an effect that Ruskin deemed essential to Gothic structures—­chiaroscuro, or the casting of an “energetic shadow.”65 Gilman, too, had long hoped that American builders would adopt Ruskin’s directives. In the piece he published following Yale’s loan exhibition of 1858, after lamenting his countrymen’s “so little love of the aesthetic,” Gilman narrowed his focus to the inferior state of contemporary architecture in America. He complained that “our parks and promenades are so limited in extent and so bare both of natural beauty and artificial

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Fig. 63. Street Hall. Yale University.

adornment, that our state houses and other public edifices are so frequently paste-­board and stucco, that our churches present such disgraceful sacrifices to the ‘lamp of Truth.’ ”66 Gilman’s singling out of that section of Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture signaled one of his priorities in building Street Hall, one that had similarly occupied Wight at the National Academy: the interest in using local stone. In the “Lamp of Truth,” Ruskin called for “structural truth,” “surface truth,” and “ornamental truth,” in the design of buildings. “Architectural deceits” were to be avoided, Ruskin cautioned, such as “the painting of surfaces to represent some other material than that of which they actually consist (as in the marbling of wood).”67 Gilman, too, deemed such ornament artifice and accused contemporary American architects of committing “disgraceful sacrifices.” Wight’s earliest designs for Street Hall were responsive to both Ruskin’s injunctions and Gilman’s embrace of the British critic’s principles. Decorative elements that Ruskin would have endorsed and that recalled those at the Oxford Museum include the open and blind quatrefoil and trefoil tracery on the building’s windows and the alternatingly colored voussoirs that make up the arches (fig. 63).68 As he had at the National Academy, Wight allowed his carvers at Yale liberty of expression, resulting

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in an exuberance that can be seen in the ornamentation of the exterior capitals at the school’s entrance, executed by a craftsman named “Williams,” who carved into sandstone a spray of three-­lobed leaves and pendant flowers, features that identify the plant as bleeding heart (fig. 64).69 Williams’s degree of botanical fidelity, which he heightened with incised veins and modeled stalks, was in the tradition of the O’Sheas at Oxford and rivaled the American Pre-­R aphaelite artists’ efforts in paint, as exemplified in William Trost Richards’s Red Clover with Butter-­and-­Eggs and Ground Ivy (1860, fig. 65), a watercolor equally attentive to the unique characteristics differentiating flora, achieved with subtle variations in tone. As he had at the National Academy, Wight sourced his stone locally and selected four distinctly hued sandstones: Street Hall’s foundation was quarried from East Haven and its exterior walls from Belleville, New Jersey. Contrast stonework, including the trim, arches, and capitals, was obtained from Portland, Connecticut, and Brownholm, Ohio.70 In Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, Norton underscored the importance of the proximity of the quarries to the site on which the Orvieto Cathedral was raised: “Black marble was got from the quarries near Siena, alabaster from Sant’ Antimo, near Radicofani, and white marble from the mountains of Carrara.”71 Using local materials also meant using local labor, Norton explained, which contributed to communal vigor in all the locales from which stone was quarried: “The immense amount of labor employed in the construction, and of labor of the most diverse description, from the highest efforts of the inventive imagination, to the simplest mechanical hammering of blocks of stone, led to a careful organization of the whole body of workmen. . . . Beside the masters and men at work at Orvieto, many others were . . . employed in obtaining materials, and especially in quarrying and cutting marble for the Cathedral.”72 In New Haven, such practices were especially appreciated. Yale had long insulated its students from the greater community, and Gilman positioned its School of Fig. 64. Column capital at Street Hall’s entrance, carved by “Williams.” Yale University.

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Fig. 65. William Trost Richards, Red Clover with Butter-­and-­Eggs and Ground Ivy, 1860. Watercolor with selectively applied glaze over graphite on paper, 6 13/16 × 5 5/16 in. (17.3 × 13.5 cm). The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

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the Fine Arts, both physically and institutionally, to be a bridge between the academic and urban worlds. To this end, Wight designed Street Hall with two entrances, one faced internally toward the main campus, and a second fronting Chapel Street, its doors inviting the citizens of New Haven. The classes at the School of the Fine Arts would include those enrolled at Yale College as well as students from the surrounding region, and it would be the first branch of the university to accept women. Street Hall, both materially and ideologically, was one of the most prominent secular manifestations in America of Ruskinian Gothic architecture, a major achievement for both the American Pre-­R aphaelites and their patron-­advocates.

The Movement’s Pinnacle: The First Annual Exhibition of the Yale School of the Fine Arts As Street Hall neared completion, Gilman organized a loan exhibition to inaugurate the new building, fulfilling a devout wish of Ruskin and a founding principle of the American Pre-­R aphaelites: “that Painting and Sculpture . . . [find] their highest perfection when . . . associated with Architecture.”73 With a month’s notice, Gilman arranged for 289 paintings to be transported to the new building. Installed in two purpose-­built galleries on Street Hall’s second floor, with watercolors lining the corridor, the First Annual Exhibition followed the example of the loan exhibition Gilman had mounted in 1858. Works owned by Yale that had been previously exhibited appeared again, including the John Trumbull collection, which the university had acquired in 1832. But the shows differed in key respects. Where the earlier exhibition featured European Old Masters from local collections, the inaugural exhibition at Street Hall privileged contemporary American art.74 The most important difference was that sixty-­nine of the paintings in 1867—­over a quarter of the total on display—­were works by American Pre-­R aphaelites. These works were hung together, and the representation of each individual American Pre-­R aphaelite outnumbered that of any other artist in the show. Farrer exhibited twenty works and Moore twelve. Respected Academicians Kensett and Gifford each showed four, Bierstadt three, Cropsey two, and Whittredge one. While many at Yale cited the university’s 1858 loan show as the precursor to the inaugural exhibition at Street Hall, Gilman and the American Pre-­R aphaelites also had in mind a British example of the previous decade that had specifically blended Gothic Revival architecture with Pre-­R aphaelite painting. The unification of painting, sculpture, and architecture had been most successfully realized at the Oxford Union debating hall, another building designed in the Gothic Revival style by Woodward while the Oxford Museum was under construction. Completed in 1857, the Oxford Union was modeled after an English parliamentary house in order to channel associations of the reasoned discourse necessary to sustain representative government, and it was ornamented with Venetian Gothic elements, including the red-­and white-­ banded voussoirs that also adorned Street Hall. Rossetti gathered a group of artists to collaborate on a scheme of interior murals and sculptural carving for the building. He

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was joined by Burne-­Jones, Val Prinsep, Arthur Hughes, John Pollen, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, and Alexander Munro, who together executed painted and carved scenes of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur. While Ruskin never formally commented on the Oxford Union, the Pre-­ Raphaelites would have understood that their project there fulfilled Ruskin’s dictate that painting “associated with architecture” is “the noblest type of the manner.”75 Indeed, the Pre-­R aphaelites would have found further encouragement in The Seven Lamps, where Ruskin had gone even further to assert that upon a building’s completion, its “Pictorial subject . . . becomes necessarily principal, or, at all events, ceases to be the architect’s concern; its plan must be left to the painter after the completion of the building, as in the works of Veronese and Giorgione on the palaces of Venice.”76 Ruskin had spent the better part of the 1850s attempting to unite the Pre-­R aphaelite and Gothic Revival movements. In 1853, he had failed to secure for Millais a commission to design a Gothic window during a renovation of Camden Chapel. And when the Oxford Museum competition was announced in 1855, Ruskin swore to “get all the pre-­R aphaelites to design me—­each an archivolt and some capitals—­& we will have all the plants in England and all the monsters in the museum.”77 Though no Pre-­ Raphaelite painters contributed to the ornamentation at the Oxford Museum, they united their talents at the Oxford Union. The achievement was lauded by George Edmund Street, a leader of the Victorian Gothic Revival, who, in a lecture of 1858, asserted that the Pre-­R aphaelites’ contributions at the Oxford Union were central to the success of the revival movement. Street viewed the young artists as “persever[ing] in the opposition to the set rules and customs of our profession with which we have hitherto carried out our revival” and declared that the goal of the “the Pre-­R aphaelite Movement is identical with our own.”78 Though Wight did not have the budget at either the National Academy or Street Hall to complete his interiors with the type of ornamentation that would have fulfilled the Pre-­R aphaelite ideal of fusing architecture and the visual arts, Gilman’s influence on the selection of paintings and the installation of Street Hall’s inaugural exhibition provided the best, if transient, alternative. Gilman’s allocation of over a quarter of the exhibition’s space to the American Pre-­R aphaelites in a building designed by one of their own was an extraordinary act of patronage. But it can also be read as an attempt to merge Pre-­R aphaelite painting and Gothic Revival architecture in the manner that had been realized at the Oxford Union and in a fertile environment that they would never find at the National Academy.79 Despite Wight having designed the academy, its institution’s president and governing council were unreceptive, even hostile, to the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ submissions—­an unsurprising response given that the artists on the council were often the target of the Association’s published vitriol. With Gilman’s support, Street Hall was a tabula rasa for the American Pre-­R aphaelites. The group understood that all the elements to attain critical and popular success that had previously eluded them were in place in New Haven. Correspondence reveals a collaboration between Gilman and the American Pre-­R aphaelites, especially strategic on

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the part of the painters involved, in mounting the Street Hall exhibition. The artists and architects themselves understood the potency of the Gilman-­Norton nexus, that the two patrons acting in concert could powerfully advance their collective cause. Ahead of the exhibition, Farrer wrote to Gilman “to suggest the advisability of ” inviting Norton “to deliver an address at the opening of the school.” To persuade Gilman, Farrer highlighted Norton’s expertise: “He has studied art more thoroughly than any other man in the country. He corresponds with Ruskin, Rossetti & many others and has the deep respect of the best artists here. The reform & improvement of American Art is very near to his heart.”80 While there is no evidence that Norton spoke at the exhibition’s opening, it is clear that Gilman deferred to the judgment of Farrer and Moore with respect to displaying the work of the American Pre-­R aphaelites. In July 1867, just days before the inaugural exhibition opened, Farrer and Moore arrived at Yale. A letter from Moore to Gilman discloses their reason for traveling to New Haven: Mr Farrer & myself have been in again to look at the galleries, & at the small room assigned to the Realistic work. And we conclude, upon more mature consideration, that our work would not be justly shown in it. . . . it is really quite out of the way, & we especially desire that it should be fairly seen by everybody. It is this last reason mainly that has induced Mr. Farrer & myself to make no little sacrifice of time & labor to collect, & come to arrange the collection. . . . There is a good space of wall in the largest upper gallery. . . . We therefore ask for this place instead of the lower room.81

Period floor plans of Street Hall and the exhibition catalogue confirm that Gilman acquiesced to Moore and Farrer’s request. The American Pre-­R aphaelites were not cloistered to the side; both their work and their professional expertise were, in this moment, central to the success of the exhibition at Yale. The American Pre-­R aphaelite works on view set off a firestorm of commentary in New Haven on the merits (and demerits) of the Pre-­R aphaelite aesthetic. The controversy was intensified by the fact that, despite Gilman’s efforts, the students at Yale College ridiculed the vocational orientation of the science curriculum at Sheffield. The College Courant ran several reviews of the exhibition. One article began benignly: “It affords us pleasure to see specimens of the so-­called pre-­R aphaelite School, introduced, we believe, for the first time to the public of New Haven.” But the message quickly turned to opprobrium: “Representing the pre-­R aphaelite style, we have the works of two amiable and conscientious young men—­Farrar [sic] and Moore. . . . While we admire the patience and skill manifested, we regret that a higher end is not attained . . . how much better are they than botanical or geological specimens?”82 Deploying the word “specimens” effectively questioned the American Pre-­ Raphaelites’ and their Yale patron’s aspiration to scientific precision in representations of nature. Another Courant reviewer wrote that he “certainly cannot feign any enthusiastic admiration of the Pre-­R aphaelites in the South Gallery,” with few works

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“calculated to afford much pleasure to the beholder,” condemning Moore’s contributions as “simply detestable.”83 Agitation over the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ domination of the exhibition reverberated beyond New Haven. Within days of the show’s opening, the prominent artist Louis Lang, celebrated for his monumental contemporary history paintings, wrote to the widow of the donor Augustus Street, who had died during Street Hall’s construction. After praising Mrs. Street’s late husband for having “the magnanimity to erect such a splendid edifice for the use of fine art and letters,” Lang turned to his reason for writing: “I am told that the new school or its defenders the so called ‘Pre-­R aphaelites’ are trying very hard to have the control of teaching their own established notions,” he wrote, referring to Yale’s new School of the Fine Arts. Lang sought an ally in his attempt to curtail the spread of Pre-­R aphaelitism: “I can only hope that you with your excellent sense for beauty will only allow a moderate influence of this new gospel.”84 Mrs. Street had already once thwarted the aspirations of the Pre-­R aphaelites. Upon her husband’s death in 1866, she halted the disbursement of remaining funds for the completion of Street Hall, arguing that she preferred they be used to decorate and furnish the building’s interior. Following Ruskin’s directive that an architect should leave a building’s interior design scheme to painters, Wight’s plan for the inside of Street Hall did not extend beyond partitioning rooms and placing skylights. At an impasse with the donor’s widow, Wight never completed the building according to his original design—­today the towers still lack their turrets (see figs. 58 and 59). Lang’s letter to Mrs. Street reveals that the American Pre-­R aphaelites sought more in New Haven than a generous platform to disseminate Gothic Revival and Pre-­R aphaelite principles. With the founding of a school of art, they sensed an opportunity to ensure a vibrant legacy through teaching. Both Farrer and Cook had taught drawing and architecture, respectively, earlier in the decade at the Cooper Institute’s School of Design for Women in New York, and had been disappointed in subsequent changes that were made to the curriculum in the mid-­1860s. Originally modeled after the course of study at the British Government Schools, the School of Design for Women was founded in 1852 to teach “the principles of design as applied to manufactures,” and to be an educational institution “where women could be taught to make patterns for carpets, wall-­paper, calicoes, silks, chintzes, lace.”85 When Farrer began teaching a drawing class there in 1861, he developed a curriculum that blended the lessons he had learned at the Government Schools and the Working Men’s College. Though his focus remained on “encourag[ing] American women in their efforts to supply the place of foreign designers,” a utilitarian goal that was anathema to Ruskin, Farrer introduced into his classroom the British critic’s own pedagogical model, “teach[ing] pupils to copy with the most literal fidelity small objects from Nature, such as mosses, flowers and shells.”86 The announcement that Yale would construct the country’s first collegiate art school and Wight’s subsequent procurement of the architectural commission coincided with the change in the pedagogical mission at the Cooper Institute’s School

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of Design. The American Pre-­R aphaelites, Cook and Farrer especially, likely saw an opportunity to correct in New Haven the drift in purpose they had witnessed in New York. Dismayed by the institute’s adoption of a traditional academic model of instruction in painting and sculpture through the reliance on plaster casts, Cook published two articles for The Round Table in late 1865 and offered a new direction that would reinvigorate the school’s mission. “Mr. Farrer and Mr. [ John William] Hill [should be] made heads of the drawing department.” A council of artists and architects would be established to “assist the school by visiting it regularly, and examining the work . . . to lecture, to award prizes.” The council would include architects “Mr. Wight, Mr. Sturgis,” and artists “Charles Moore, John Henry Hill.”87 Cook was effectively arguing for the complete takeover of the Cooper Institute’s School of Design by the American Pre-­R aphaelites. Gilman’s commissioning of Wight at Yale would have given the American Pre-­ Raphaelites renewed hope that they might collectively control the curriculum, studios, and classrooms of one of the United States’ leading educational institutions, this time from its inception. Sturgis published an article in The New Path cautioning administrators at Yale not to allow the institution to become entrenched in the practices of such “expiring academics” as “old King Cole and his school”: We congratulate Yale upon the erection of the first collegiate building in America devoted exclusively to Art. Now that the building is secured, it becomes a consideration of immense importance—­W hat sort of art is to be nurtured by it. Upon the answer to this question, given by those who have the control of this business, it depends whether the old ideas that have done so much to depress Art among us are to find Mr. Street’s munificent gift a sort of Medea-­kettle, in which the old bones and shrunk sinews of expiring academics shall be boiled into new life, and old King Cole and his school look up again; or whether young America shall take possession of the field, and give us an Art of which we need not be ashamed.88

“Young America,” of course, comprised the American Pre-­R aphaelites, and in their view they were the only artists prepared to usher their postbellum nation down “the right path.”89 “In a new country where real knowledge of art is so small and exclusive,” Farrer argued, it was “vitally necessary that [students] should be well grounded in the knowledge of the right and wrong in art.”90 But Mrs. Street’s attempt to dismiss Wight in 1866, as well as the appointment of Jonathan Ferguson Weir, an artist known for his popular depictions of industrial scenes and pleasing interiors, as the school’s first director, foreclosed the opportunity. Gilman appears to have offered his protégés what he could: for Moore and Farrer to “direct the hanging” of the “exhibition at Yale College.”91 Within days of mounting the exhibition, Moore, writing to Gilman, amplified his efforts to promote the Pre-­R aphaelite display: “Dear Sir: I send you with this a few ideas which I think might help the public to understand better the Realistic

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work in the Exhibition.”92 Included was a one-­page text titled “Realistic Work In the South Gallery. BY ONE WHO BELIEVES IN IT.”93 Part manifesto, part redoubt, the piece instructs the public on how to approach the Pre-­R aphaelite project: “It is impor­tant that the public should understand this work more accurately as to its nature and aim,” Moore asserted in his first sentence. He presumed, based on hard experience, that the Pre-­R aphaelite work at Yale would confound its viewers. Moore clarified the fundamentals of the movement to the uninitiated: “The pictures in the present exhibition have nearly all been painted in the open air, and in presence of the real subjects represented. They are strictly studies from nature.” Moore’s piece takes direct aim at recent criticism the group had received from one of their own—­a review by Cook of Moore’s Hudson River, Above Catskill (see fig. 3), when it had been shown just weeks earlier at the annual National Academy exhibition. Moore exhibited the painting for the second time that summer at Street Hall. Though Cook had long supported Pre-­R aphaelitism as the preferred vehicle to advance American art, by 1867 he grew intolerant with what he regarded as the group’s inability to progress toward a richer and more imaginative conception of truth to nature. Writing in the New-­York Tribune of Moore’s contribution to the National Academy, Cook attacked American Pre-­R apahelitism’s achievements to date, writing that Moore’s painting “conquer[s] the spectator’s interest and approval by . . . clear scientific demonstration, rather than with the glow and elevation of spirit.”94 Most painfully, the review praised the idealizing aesthetic that the movement had vowed to replace. Gilman made Moore’s leaflet available for viewers alongside the Pre-­R aphaelite work in Street Hall. In it, Moore takes on the accusation that American Pre-­R aphaelite painting does not achieve the “effect” or “poetry” of nature. He responded directly to Cook by reaffirming the group’s commitment to empiricism, which Moore expected would appeal to at least a portion of the New Haven audience, given Gilman’s cohort of colleagues and students at Sheffield. Moore wrote that the Pre-­R aphaelites “believe the technical science of natural aspects to be the only basis and medium of all noble artistic expression. . . . It is quite likely to offend, at first, the conventional aesthetic sense.” Though the American Pre-­R aphaelites did not succeed in directing the course of instruction at Yale’s School of the Fine Arts, the comprehensiveness of their ambitious showing in the galleries of Wight’s Gothic Revival creation persuaded, at least in the moment, their wayward critical supporter to return to the fold. Cook’s review of the display at Street Hall is perhaps the most remarkable encomium ever penned on behalf of the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement: It is now, for the first time, possible to see and judge what has been accomplished by this coterie of young men and women. Heretofore they have been rather snubbed than welcomed when seeking an opportunity to meet the public on equal ground with the older and better-­known artists. . . . Say what the opponents of these men may, ridicule and find fault to their hearts content, this remains; that here, for the first time, is a

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movement in American Art, not merely original and peculiar, but springing from an enthusiasm in something higher than the mercantile spirit that has thus far animated us; an independent movement clear of the Old World, whether that be right or wrong; building its own road as it has gone along; careless of criticism, careless of applause, and only bent on solving its own problems, in its own way.95

Controlling all aspects of their public presentation—­venue, galleries, selection of work, hanging and related lighting, critical explication—­the American Pre-­ Raphaelites would never again possess as much agency to influence the larger cultural conversation. After years of dimly lit and skied displays, of suffering belligerent reviews, in the summer of 1867 the American Pre-­R aphaelites realized their vision of uniting painting, architecture, sculptural carving, and criticism in their inexorable pursuit of realism and reform.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Pre-­R aphaelites in the West: Clarence King and John Henry Hill

“My tent was pitched upon the edge of a cliff, directly overhanging the rapids. From my door I looked over the cataract, and, whenever the veil of mist was blown aside, could see for a mile down the river,” recalled the geologist, Clarence King, in 1870, of his month at Shoshone Falls in southern Idaho two years earlier.1 The scene described had occurred during the second season of the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel (1867–­72) led by King, and was captured by the expedition’s photographer, Timothy O’Sullivan. In Camp at Shoshone Falls, Idaho (1868, fig. 66), O’Sullivan pictures the tent perched on the brink of the falls, the headwaters calm before cascading over the break, the mist thinning to reveal the river’s profile snaking into the far distance. This photograph, one of at least ten large plate and sixteen stereo views of Shoshone Falls made by O’Sullivan on the expedition there in 1868, represents the southeast side of the site. His image juxtaposes the varied textures of the topography, highlighting the still headwaters, the eroded basalt walls, and craggy chasms of the Snake River Canyon. Against this terrain, the figure of King can be seen in the foreground, setting up his theodolite, preparing to measure the distance across the falls. Closer to the picture plane is a man seated on a boulder with his back to the camera. A contrast to King’s industriousness, this man, nondescript save his bowler hat, contemplates the rushing waters of Shoshone’s crest. This faceless, hatted man appears in at least six of O’Sullivan’s Shoshone Falls photographs. Anonymous in much of the history of the expedition as well as

Detail of fig. 94

the literature on O’Sullivan’s production, the figure is likely John Henry Hill, the American Pre-­R aphaelite painter who served as staff artist on King’s survey in 1868. He is also seen from behind in Shoshone Falls, Idaho (fig. 67), his intense focus on the cascade visible in his rigid posture, suggesting that he might be sketching or painting the scene before him. King, Hill, and O’Sullivan had separated from the larger party on September 16, and traveled outside of the assigned survey area for an excursion that lasted approximately four weeks.2 King’s topographers, botanist, zoologist, and assistant geologists stayed within the survey’s designated boundaries, remaining primarily in the East Humboldt Range. Camp at Shoshone Falls, Idaho represents King, Hill, and O’Sullivan performing their individual tasks on this ancillary journey. King engages the landscape with the tools of a scientist while Hill draws it; O’Sullivan, his corporeal presence not captured in the frame but his participation confirmed by his authorship of the image, photographs it. This picture is not merely one of a stark and forbidding landscape; it is a record of three protagonists, each executing their specialized tasks while collaborating as an integrated team. This chapter takes as its central subject the Fortieth Parallel Survey season of 1868 and examines how its staff and their activities transferred the aesthetics and praxes of Ruskin, the Pre-­R aphaelites, and, ultimately, Turner to the western United States. The copious literature on King and his Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel passes over his role as a founder in 1863 of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art. Yet his leadership of the survey and his subsequent writings indicate that the principles and passions shared among Association members strongly marked King’s sensibility for the rest of his career. As the previous chapter considered the values and convictions of the Association’s architects, this chapter investigates the contributions of its scientists: King and his childhood friend, his survey’s second-­in-­ command, James Gardiner, who was also a founder of the Association. Though King’s and Gardiner’s active involvement with the Association lasted only a few months before they traveled west in spring 1863, the two were central members in 1862 and 1863 of the “Ruskinites of the city,” and both men played key roles in drafting the group’s Articles of Organization.3 The participation of King and Gardiner at the birth of the Association amplifies our understanding of the intervention that American Pre-­R aphaelitism sought to effect. The American movement’s breadth and ambition as an agent of social transformation arguably surpassed its English counterpart in large measure through the integration of science and scientists into its collective vision. Neither amateur nor professional scientists were represented among first-­or second-­generation British Pre-­R aphaelites. The scientific disciplines that King and Gardiner brought to the Association found palpable expression in the imagery subsequently created by virtually all of its members, and, notably, in Hill’s western canon. The alignment of topographic and geologic science with Hill’s western landscapes is evidence that American Pre-­R aphaelitism’s assimilation of contemporary advances in scientific knowledge was far more central to its aesthetic and reformist agendas than was the

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Fig. 66. (top) Timothy O’Sullivan, Camp at Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868. Albumen silver print. Courtesy of the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY.

Fig. 67. (bottom) Timothy O’Sullivan, Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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case for the British Pre-­R aphaelites. As John Holmes has written, the Pre-­R aphaelite Brotherhood treated science “not as precise disciplines or bodies of knowledge, but as ideals of what art . . . ought to be. . . . It was the idea of ‘science’ that mattered most to the Pre-­R aphaelites . . . more than the findings of those sciences themselves.”4 The presence of trained scientists within the Association and Ruskin’s own orientation toward empiricism, induction, and social transformation permeated American Pre-­ Raphaelitism. In the postbellum years the movement’s most dynamic expressions were situated at the intersection of the work of the group’s scientists and painters. A key event for the American Pre-­R aphaelites took place in 1867, when the federal government granted King the authority and funds to study and record the landscape between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada. King did not hesitate to recruit his team from the Association he had earlier cofounded, tapping Gardiner as his chief topographer and Hill as staff artist. In doing so, he undertook an effort that would result in a concerted application of Ruskinian aesthetics to western landscapes. Hill’s presence on the survey and his resulting oeuvre represent a lost history of western image making that can be pieced together through the disinterment of documents and imagery that have long been overlooked. His unpublished diary, a sketchbook he kept in the field, and over seventy located pencil drawings, watercolors, and oils, made both on-­site and after his return east, add new dimensions to the narrative advanced by much of the last twenty-­five years of scholarship on visual production in the West. The work of Martha Sandweiss and Robin Kelsey, as well as scholars of the most prominent photographers and painters of western landscapes, specifically Bierstadt and Moran, have developed persuasive theses that photographic and graphic imagery, especially in the years after the Civil War, was securely positioned in the service of gilding a mythology of the West that promoted political, economic, and territorial ambitions. As Sandweiss argues, landscape photography “documented the region’s highest peaks and deepest canyons to capture visual evidence of the divine blessings bestowed upon the American nation.”5 Kelsey identifies an omnipresent instrumentality within the entire survey project and, in the case of O’Sullivan and the Fortieth Parallel Survey, cites the practical demands of field conditions, logistical challenges of mastering new technologies, and members’ responses to bureaucratic requirements, as “crucial to the emergence of a new pictorial style” that “facilitate[d] a new era of economic development.”6 Western imagery was harnessed for the express purpose of identifying routes for a transcontinental railroad, settling the contentious issue of the new nation’s borders, and locating the richest lodes of mineral wealth for inevitable exploitation.7 This established account of the generative forces that yielded the mainstream art produced on western surveys is not inaccurate. It is, however, incomplete. Beside the dominant historiography that sets forth the muscular ambitions that underlay the commissioning of work by photographers O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, and Carleton Watkins, and painters Bierstadt and Moran, there is a parallel tradition, quietist, rooted in a dispassionate empiricism. Throughout his western imagery, Hill

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resists the compositional accoutrements of privilege, including inherited spatial norms that endorse hierarchical structure through concepts such as centrality and subordination. Hill embraced a key strategy of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ aesthetic and social engagement, avoiding the lulling effect of conventional landscapes by creating a democracy of constituent parts in which the viewer must recognize each part’s claim to equal value. Hill’s sensibility introduces a West that refuses to participate in a visual “Gold Rush,” that repudiates paintings in thrall to Platonic ideals of “mountain” and “cataract” that filled the canvases of Moran and Bierstadt. But Hill also brought an expanded toolbox to the West. He did not uniformly replicate the obsessive attention to nature’s minutiae that marked, for example, his A Study of Trap Rock (1863, see fig. 69), in part because of conditions in the field, but also because he believed that a broader expressiveness in the vein of Turner was appropriate to landscapes that he likened to infernos. Nonetheless, his art remained predicated on the egalitarian opticality central to the achievements of Stillman and Farrer. The essential qualities of uniform delineation and equality of finish abide even in his field sketches. Though the American Pre-­R aphaelites considered working in the presence of their motif a high calling and a measure of artistic devotion, Hill understood that he would have to relax this Ruskinian dictate and execute additional versions of his western paintings in his studio in order to fulfill King’s subsequent commission for ten paintings upon his return east. He completed King’s commission in the early years of the 1870s while living alone on Phantom Island, an uninhabited islet in New York’s Lake George Narrows. Hill resided there in total isolation for roughly seven years, becoming known to locals as the “hermit of Lake George.”8 In a small cottage that he built himself, which he called his “Artist’s Retreat,” he lived in a solitude more complete than that of either Thoreau’s Walden or Emily Dickinson’s conservatory. The diary he kept during this period is an extraordinary document. Each day Hill recorded temperatures, every detail of the changing flora and fauna. During winter, he daily measured the thickness of the ice on the lake’s surface as he sledded or skated among the other islands and to the small towns along the lakeshore. Replete with sketches of what he had encountered that day or scenes he was in the process of painting, his diary is also testament to a humility of living and art making that eschews sensational effects. His record of his time on Phantom Island is a vital statement by an avowed American Pre-­R aphaelite that the nation’s landscapes, even its most monumental settings, should not elicit a style, iconography, or palette that participates in false representations, but should instead answer Ruskin’s call to value the externalities of nature, to engage only “what things are in themselves.”9 King’s hire of Hill was not simply a convenient choice among a group of equally qualified American Pre-­ R aphaelite painters. Years earlier, the Association had identified Hill as the artist whose talents were best matched to the challenge of dismantling the “vast machinery of advertisement and puffery” that had yielded such works as Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1864, fig. 68). American Pre-­R aphaelites rejected Bierstadt’s paintings, arranged studio compositions that

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Fig. 68. Albert Bierstadt, The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 1863. Oil on canvas, 73 ½ × 120 ¾ in. (186.7 × 306.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

reflected no true landscape, his bombastic “devices” used “to rouse and stimulate public curiosity,” and condemned them “to die quietly in the obscure places from which they have been drawn.”10 In spring 1864, with no foreseeable end to the Civil War, the federally funded government surveys still three years in the future, the Association set the stage for Hill’s eventual apotheosis as the Pre-­R aphaelite painter of the American West: “We have one man in this country,—­John Henry Hill,—­who can paint a mountain as we believe no other man living can paint one; but, he can do it as well on a hand-­breadth of paper, as on a canvas the size of a house.”11 By resisting the expressionistic flourishes of a nascent western mythopoeia encouraged by political and commercial interests, Hill’s output is a productive anomaly, revealing an allegiance to Ruskinian and Pre-­R aphaelite aesthetics that revises the messaging of a government-­sponsored survey. It also proves that the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement did not end with either the disbandment of the Association in 1865 or the exhibition at Street Hall in 1867. Rather, its energies transferred to the West, whose sweeping landscapes and arduous terrain required alternative representations that assimilated varying degrees of mimesis and expressiveness. Pictorial Ruskinianism in America was an evolving body of protocols, changing as the ground shifted from the more familiar and domesticated landscapes of the Northeast to the discovery of the West’s geological mysteries and broad panoramas.

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King and Gardiner: Practical Ruskinites and Wendell Phillips Men “We have already become well known to the practical Ruskinites of the city and met with them last Tuesday evening to prepare for the organization of a society to advance . . . the one great idea of Truth to Nature,” Gardiner reported to his mother days after the founding of the Association.12 Living together in New York in early 1863, King and Gardiner were integral members of the Association, serving as elected officers and participating in drafting the group’s articles of organization. Throughout their scientific training—­King at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School and Gardiner first at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and subsequently at Sheffield—­the friends steeped themselves in Ruskin’s writing. Gardiner first encountered Modern Painters in 1860, during a period in which he reported that he “did nothing but draw,” and in short order the writings of the British critic became a regular part of Gardiner’s course of study, which was focused primarily on engineering.13 Once war was declared, Gardiner’s daily schedule shifted to drilling “three times a day,” studying mathematics, and, most importantly, reading Ruskin each afternoon beginning “after dinner . . . till four.”14 From the moment shots were fired at Fort Sumter to their departure for California two years later, King and Gardiner were constantly preoccupied by the prospect of military service, first by their indecision about enlisting in the Union army, and later, after they opted not to, by the increasing lengths they went to to avoid the draft. The unpublished correspondence between Gardiner and his mother, of which both sides remain, reveals how the impending draft and combat directed the course of the young men’s scientific and aesthetic activities. At the start of the war, both men held the belief, in contrast to many in the North who were willing to accept a compromise short of emancipation, that the war must be sustained until it reached a just conclusion. “I am more than ever a Wendell Phillips man heart and soul with the philanthropic ‘radicals,’ ” King wrote Gardiner.15 But both men wavered. King did not join “Norton’s Cadets,” a company of Yale faculty, students, and alumni, raised by Professor William A. Norton, a founder of the Sheffield Scientific School, and aided by Gilman, who served as its recruiting sergeant. After “another battle with my inclinations about going to war,” King wrote Gardiner, he admitted that he saw “clearly my duty to keep myself for the future.”16 As the conflict intensified, so did King’s anxiety: “When I said I wanted to ‘push a bayonet’ I was wrong. God knows that for my country I would ‘push a bayonet’ and that I would not quail before death for my land but the act would crucify in me so many of my noblest impulses. It is like tearing my soul in sunder.”17 King and Gardiner’s hesitations turned to outright draft dodging in the summer of 1862, when, following King’s graduation, the men departed for a trip to Canada with three Yale classmates. Though this excursion has been described in the literature on King as a “rowing expedition,” primary documents reveal that the trip was planned as a means of evading conscription.18 Days before the men sailed for Canada, with volunteers running low and army desertion high, Congress passed the Militia Act of 1862

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to spur renewed enlistments. Following the act’s approval, King’s friend, Hal Stone, who had planned to join the trip, wrote King “that [it] is my duty of going in the army that I have decided not to go to Canada.”19 As the young men headed north, an order issued by the War Department authorized the arrest and imprisonment of those suspected of evading the draft. “May you be delivered from the clutches of this horrid martial law which will hunt for all such precious victims as your crew,” Mrs. Gardner wrote her son; “in Canada you are safe & I much prefer that you should stay there.”20 Mrs. Gardner was right to worry. Days before, the group had been detained at the US-­Canadian border in New York. After convincing the agent they were only on “a pleasure trip” and not fleeing conscription, they crossed into Canada. “Are you not glad I am safe from drafting[?]” Gardiner asked in a letter home.21 Meanwhile, Mrs. Gardner made plans for her son to enroll in law school in New York, ensuring that his status as a student would exempt him from the draft when he returned in September.22 King and Gardiner’s deliberations and their ultimate decision to travel west, not uncommon among those seeking to elude the draft, highlights an important experience shared by most members of the Association. Their posture of “conscientious evasion,” discussed in the introduction, was rooted in deeply held religious convictions that nourished the same qualities of vision that encouraged their displays of dissent from normative representations of nature. Flawed vision, they believed, had for generations allowed the nation’s structural inequities to batten, until the sufferings of war were unavoidable. As Gardiner wrote to his mother from San Francisco in January 1864, glossing Thessalonians, the Psalms, and Isaiah: “I have ‘Studied to be quiet, and learn that men are disquieted in vain’ that ‘the effect of righteousness is quietness.’ ”23 For men of Gardiner’s and King’s constitutions and sentiments, the nurturing of truthful vision depended on abstention, reflection, humility, and heightened powers of faithful observation and recording.

The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ Geologic Brotherhood In the months following their return from Canada, King and Gardiner immersed themselves in the cultural life of New York. King had known the Hill family since at least 1861 when his mother purchased one of John Henry’s drawings.24 John Henry and his father, John William Hill, spurned the commercial demands of art making, preferring to make painstaking representations of the surroundings of the family’s homestead in West Nyack, New York, and avoiding “the strife and contention of the city.” “I do not covet public approbation,” John William wrote; “I have a few friends who like my work and are now supporting me for them.”25 King and Gardiner were two such friends, decorating their shared rooms in the city with drawings by father and son.26 While neither Hill was particularly active in the organizational aspects of the Association, both had begun to produce work in the Pre-­R aphaelite style beginning in the mid-­1850s. Along with Stillman, John William was among the earliest followers of

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Ruskin in the United States, having read Modern Painters around 1855, perhaps inspired by articles in The Crayon, which began publication that year. John William “became firmly possessed with the conviction that he ought to try to paint Nature just as he saw it.”27 Beginning in 1856 the Hills’ annual contributions to the National Academy comprised such titles as John William’s Study from Nature (1856) and Road-­Side Study (1857), and John Henry’s Study of Weeds, Study of a Hickory, and Study of a Pine (all 1857). Throughout the latter half of the 1850s, before Farrer’s arrival in New York and the subsequent founding of the Association, the Hills and Stillman were the most visible adherents of the Ruskinian method. While neither Hill was commercially successful, both father and son exhibited prominently and received substantial critical attention for their zealously executed nature studies and landscapes of modest dimensions. By the time King was organizing the Fortieth Parallel Survey, he had spent four years in the West and was fully versed in its various terrains and the challenges of representing them. During these same years, John Henry’s output was marked by a pronounced ability to render geological forms with mimetic precision. One particular work announced Hill’s unusual ability to picture complex rock formations with astonishing accuracy, while also creating an image endowed with a resonant political charge. An oil completed during the war years, A Study of Trap Rock (Buttermilk Falls) (1863, fig. 69), was, he wrote, “the most elaborately literal study from nature I ever made,” and sheds light on the qualities in Hill’s oeuvre that attracted King.28 The “Trap Rock” of the title refers to the type of igneous rock that constitutes Buttermilk Falls’s craggy slope, formed through the cooling and subsequent solidification of lava. A Study of Trap Rock would also have appealed to King because of the connection between geology and politics advanced by Ruskin in Modern Painters IV, which was a central influence on both King and Hill. Evidence of the importance of this volume to the Association can be deduced from a portrait of Hill by Farrer, John Henry Hill in the Studio Etching (1859, fig. 70). Modern Painters IV and Ruskin’s The Political Economy of Art are visible on the drafting table, flanking the etching that occupies Hill’s attention. Together they suggest the intersection of art, politics, and labor that was a pillar of the movement, and that Hill presented in A Study of Trap Rock. Barbara Gallati has demonstrated that the igneous rock that Hill pictures in A Study of Trap Rock lies at the center of an elaborate geological metaphor advanced by Ruskin in Modern Painters IV. Ruskin believed that rocks could “teach us the great truths which are the basis of all political science.” Different classes of rocks projected greater strength or weakness owing to their mineralogical composition, which for Ruskin symbolized “the various states of mankind.” Igneous rock, “inseparably united by some fiery process,” represented the “perfect state of brotherhood and strength in which each character is clearly distinguished, separately perfected, and employed in its proper place and office.”29 A Study of Trap Rock, an image of boulders, each bearing the load of another, visualized the geologic “brotherhood” found in nature, a supportive collaboration that the American Pre-­R aphaelites would first seek in their Association and later, in The New Path, demand of their compatriots.30

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Fig. 69. John Henry Hill, A Study of Trap Rock (Buttermilk Falls), 1863. Oil on canvas, 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Fig. 70. Thomas Charles Farrer, John Henry Hill in the Studio Etching, 1859. Pencil on paper, 6 ¼ × 5 ¾ in. (15.9 × 14.6 cm). Paul Worman Fine Art, Worcester, MA.

Though Hill chose not to enlist, his brother James did and died in the army in 1864. Written and visual evidence suggests that Hill viewed the “elaborately literal study from nature” he completed during the war years as a contribution to the North’s campaign. A Study of Trap Rock was, he wrote, “done in July and occupied me every afternoon in the month while our civil war was going on.”31 Another detail that we must consider in reading this work is the insertion of an artist sketching in the lower right corner. This figure is not a self-­portrait, as has long been presumed, but rather

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Fig. 71. (left) James Terry Gardiner, rock drawing, 1863. Pencil on paper, 2 ⅞ × 2 ¾ in. (7.3 × 7 cm). James Terry Gardiner Papers. Collection of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, NY. Fig. 72. (below) Thomas Charles Farrer, rock drawing, 1863. Pencil on paper, 4 ⅞ × 1 ¾ in. (12.4 × 4.4 cm). James Terry Gardiner Papers. Collection of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, NY.

Hill’s friend and colleague Farrer, less than one year returned from the front.32 While Hill described the setting as “a pleasant rocky dell,” the painting has also been interpreted as an allegorical treatment of the slaughter and sacrifice of war.33 The power of the piece resides in the tension between Hill’s pleasant dell, hewn by millions of years of volcanic rifting, and the immediacy of the stone outcroppings outlined in the bright air of midsummer, each block cleaved and angled, each individuated through the precision of Hill’s draftsmanship. May Brawley Hill identifies these “broken . . . blocks and boulders that jumbled together with the trunks of dead trees like so many fallen bodies . . . [and] the sundered rock as an emblem of the several states, once strong and unified, now torn apart by civil war.”34 Rebecca Bedell argues that associations between boulders and gravestones had been advanced in American landscape painting since the previous decade. Durand’s studies of rocks, she contends, “offer pictorial meditations on disintegration and death,” as seen in his Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees (c. 1856, New-­York Historical Society), in which the “rocks are strikingly tomblike.”35 In the case of A Study of Trap Rock, Hill participates in a program of perceptual and cultural reform as set forth by Ruskin but transported into the crucible of American politics. Hill captures the artist’s confrontation—­his own and Farrer’s—­ with “The Stones” of Nyack, New York, but his objective is similar to Ruskin’s on behalf of the modern traveler to Venice: to offer an experience of looking deeply into an American landscape as a means to a reformation of contemporary culture. King and Gardiner endeavored to recruit an artist with a demonstrated ability to render rock formations with fidelity to their current physical aspect as well as to

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Fig. 73. [ John Henry Hill], rock drawing, 1863. Pencil on paper, 5 ½ × 2 ½ in. (14 × 6.4 cm). James Terry Gardiner Papers. Collection of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, NY.

the dynamic geological processes that forged them. Such dedication to this motif was evident in the nature studies executed by Ruskin and by most of the American Pre-­R aphaelites. Several rock drawings (figs. 71–­73) preserved in Gardiner’s papers reveal one early activity that Association members mutually pursued shortly after their group’s founding.36 One of the sketches, signed with Gardiner’s initials, is dated March 14, 1863. A second is signed “Farrer,” and a third is unsigned. The paper support of each drawing appears to have been cut from one larger sheet—­on the back of all three sketches are geometric scribbles in ink accompanied by multiple versions of John Henry Hill’s monogram, with the Hs joined, which he developed during this period. These scribbles suggest that John Henry, perhaps providing the sheet from his sketchbook, may have been responsible for the third rock drawing. This group activity appears as a conscious effort to perform one of the drawing exercises, perhaps the most essential, set out by Ruskin in the Elements of Drawing. “Go out into your garden, or into the road, and pick up the first round or oval stone you can find.”37 This seemingly banal assignment, Ruskin assured the skeptical student, would pay dividends: “all drawing depends, primarily, on your power of representing Roundness.”38 The three graphite drawings, completed following Ruskin’s injunction to create forms not through outlines but by means of light and shadow, are also attentive to his directive to “put on patches of color or shade of exactly the same size, shape, and gradations as those on the object and its ground.”39 All three artists mimic the way in which Ruskin, in his own drawing illustrated in Elements (fig. 74), vignetted the stone against the ground by means of quickly executed lines. Farrer’s ground, however, is composed of continuous circular loops that track his gesture—­ his pencil appears to have retained direct and fluid contact with the page. Gardiner’s approach, which extends to both his ground and the stone, is characterized by substantially more linear, unidirectional strokes of the pencil. While he achieves “the evenness

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Fig. 74. Mary Byfield after John Ruskin, “Exercise VIII, Fig. 5.” Wood engraving. Elements of Drawing (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1857), 49. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

of the gradations” that Ruskin advises, the naturalism of Gardiner’s rock falls short of Farrer’s; the latter follows Ruskin in “imitating the texture and all the cracks and stains of the stone.”40 The author of the third rock drawing, likely Hill, is the most successful in achieving the shading necessary for rich volumetric effect. This quality would be critical to powerful representations of the West’s massive geological formations. These drawings illustrate the convergence of Gardiner and King’s aesthetic and scientific interests with those of the Association’s artists. The sketches also served as preparation for the topographical and geological tasks that lay ahead of them on their survey expeditions in a manner consistent with Ruskin’s prescriptions. In directing the student to examine the features of a stone that could fit in one’s palm, Ruskin associated the minute with the mountainous. “Cracks and fissures” were “in reality a little ravine.”41 In Modern Painters IV, Ruskin ennobled the humble study of rocks. “For a stone,” he famously asserted, “when it is examined, will be found a mountain in miniature.”42

In the West “What would Ruskin have said if he had seen this!” exclaimed King in 1863 upon first seeing Mount Shasta in California.43 Shortly after arriving in the West that year, King and Gardiner attached themselves to the State Geological Survey of California under William Brewer and Josiah Whitney. Over the next few years, the men developed their geologic and topographic skills, surveying the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the boundary rim of Yosemite Valley, and the northern Arizona region. King’s ardor for Ruskin, in his adoption of rapturous language in his descriptions of nature, led

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William Goetzmann to describe King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872) as the “prime Ruskinian document of the age.”44 King’s sensibility was thoroughly steeped in the ideas and rhetoric of Ruskin long before the American became a best-­ selling author and famous mountaineer. In 1863, in the West for the first time, fresh from his months participating in the Association, he exhorted himself in his own scientific notes, in strikingly Ruskinian terms: “Look at [nature] then with gentleness and humble admiration. . . . You, Clarence King, never dare to look or speak of nature save with respect and all the admiration you are capable of. Nature is a solemn force a glorious reality which ought to move us to high thought and true nobility.”45 King adopted Modern Painters as a manifesto, its urgency beckoning him, and the twenty-­ one-­year-­old geologist was poised to answer the critic’s call. By 1867, King had served as geologist on multiple state government–­funded surveys in the West. After four years keenly observing the region’s scientific and commercial resources, he conceived a plan that would advance his and the federal government’s interests in the western territories. In late winter 1867, King proposed “to direct a geological and topographical exploration of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada.”46 From his previous trips to this region, King knew that its mountains likely held secrets about glaciation and volcanism that, if revealed, would represent a substantial contribution to the scientific literature on topics of profound contemporary interest. But he also recognized that the region, if better understood, could serve mercantile objectives, including expanding the transcontinental railroad and, below ground, yielding valuable minerals, including coal and silver. Three seasons of fieldwork, subsequently extended for three more, were approved by Congress. King was authorized to hire his own team of specialists. Though Hill’s name has disappeared from the scholarship on the survey, it was literally on the top of King’s list as he made plans to staff his second season in the field. On January 10, 1868, King compiled a series of names in his calendar, presumably of individuals to whom he planned to write letters. First in the list was “Hill,” and the following week “JH Hill” topped another column of names.47 By late March, San Francisco’s Daily Evening Bulletin reported his arrival: “John Henry Hill, a New York artist, who is well-­known there for the peculiar delicacy and suggestiveness of his landscape drawings and etchings, arrived in this city this week, on his way to join the Pacific Railroad Geological Surveying party under Clarence King.”48 The “delicacy and suggestiveness” that the journalist highlights introduces what would become a key element of Hill’s western output. Hill appears to have traveled first to Virginia City, Nevada, where King and Gardiner were staying until the season began in May. O’Sullivan, lodging nearby, visited frequently to make photographs of the Comstock Lode and the mines at the site. Hill’s earliest watercolors from that spring suggest that through April and May he accompanied O’Sullivan, both men executing images in their respective media. Two works by photographer and painter, of the Empire State Mill, where ore mined from the lode was reduced, were made just outside Virginia City (figs. 75 and 76). Hill’s watercolor

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Fig. 75. John Henry Hill, The Empire State Mill, Virginia City, 1868. Watercolor on paper, image: 3.5 × 5 in. (9 × 12.7 cm); sheet: 7 × 5 inches (17.8 × 12.7 cm). Private collection.

records many of the same features as does O’Sullivan’s photograph: the mill and two smokestacks sit in the left middle ground; the stone bridge and shallow stream occupy the foreground, with the idiosyncratically shaped peak of Sugar Loaf Mountain, a volcanic plug, rising in the distance. The presence of mills and other industrial incursions speaks to an aspect of Hill’s work that was particularly pronounced in the artist’s northeastern landscapes and studies. Both Hills had been deeply interested in representing the many saw-­and gristmills that dotted the landscape of their native Rockland County, and King, understanding that incipient development was a crucial step in physically and psychically laying claim to the western territories, may well have been attracted to John Henry’s interest and ability in rendering these signature developments. One of two vignettes on a sheet just five by seven inches, Hill’s watercolor does not display elaborate finish, the right side of the composition only preliminarily sketched, the structures mere outlines in wash. O’Sullivan’s photograph captures much of the scene in crisper detail than does Hill’s watercolor, but Hill could represent what the photograph could not. Where O’Sullivan’s sky is bleached owing to the limited depth of field that could be captured by contemporary lenses, Hill’s is rendered with strokes of blue wash, his clouds the unpainted ground of the page. Detailing the sky did not just enhance a composition’s overall harmony; its appearance in different locales was a material data point for the Fortieth Parallel Survey, whose members were trained to

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Fig. 76. Timothy O’Sullivan, Sugar Loaf Mountain, near Virginia City, Nevada, 1868. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

take meteorological notes and barometric readings at every site, often multiple times per day. Further, Hill’s work, in color, documents the red tone of Sugar Loaf ’s igneous rock and the surrounding Six Mile Canyon. His on-­site watercolor, even one absent the Pre-­R aphaelite detail that characterized much of his work in the East, demonstrates how a painter was indispensable to a survey seeking imagery to complement a range of scientific activities. In finding the precise shade of red ochre that animates his mountainside, Hill was artistically faithful to a scientific fact that King was in the process of documenting with his measurements: the unevenly dispersed limonite found in the mountain’s diffusion bands. The second season of the Fortieth Parallel Survey officially began on May 8, 1868. In a watercolor he made in his sketchbook that day, Washoe Peak from Carson (fig. 77), Hill recorded a series of both subtle and dramatic impressions. Three horizontal bands of color present with equal emphasis the lower range of hills, rendered in umber, their barely perceptible verdure highlighted by faint touches of pale green. In the mountain Hill preserves the ground of his support and creates the masses of peaks and crevasses by means of violet strokes and white highlights. His sky is composed of simple ribbons of blue hues, animated by variations in their saturation. At the top left corner, the wash pools and runs, resolving itself into a chaotic border. Even in the absence of mimetic precision, Hill offers a fact of nature: skies cannot be bounded

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Fig. 77. (top) John Henry Hill, Washoe Peak from Carson, 1868. Watercolor on paper, 4 9/16 × 7 ⅝ in. (11.6 × 19.4 cm). Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Michael S. Engl, 2003.21.

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Fig. 78. (bottom) Albert Bierstadt, Yosemite Valley, c. 1864. Oil on canvas, 5 ¼ × 9 ¼ in. (13.3 × 22.9 cm). Courtesy of the Century Association, New York. Photograph by John Bigelow Taylor.

by lines. Yet Hill’s sky, indeed the entire watercolor, performs substantial formal and semantic labor. By eschewing the magniloquent visual rhetoric that characterized even Bierstadt’s most diminutive oil sketches produced during his own fieldwork in the West (fig. 78), Hill’s Washoe Peak speaks with humility, neither soliciting physical possession through the promotion of a site’s potential for tourism and mining, nor inviting cognitive attachment by a claim of subjective consciousness. Hill’s western sketches project an artist unfettered from a priori schema, guided instead by an impulse to register his impressions and assemble them without sentiment or fallacy.

Encountering Shasta In the first days of June, Hill separated from the team, spending the rest of that month and part of July visiting two of California’s great wonders, particular favorites of King: Mount Shasta and Yosemite. Mount Shasta, “the single cone of an immense extinct volcano,” was King’s most enduring geologic obsession; he had climbed it in the course of his first expedition in 1863 during the California Geological Survey.49 King appears to have asked Hill to make the trip to Shasta alone, since the boundaries of the Fortieth Parallel Survey did not extend to northern California. Further, because the California Geological Survey had not included artists, King may have been interested in acquiring images of the mountain five years after first seeing it and had planned to write a travelogue of the Sierra Nevada since at least 1865. During his employment on the northern Arizona survey, a page in a notebook otherwise devoted to scientific notes listed possible “Sierra Nevada Titles,” among them, “Peaks & Plains of California,” “Geological Mountaineering in Sierra Nevada,” and “Snow fields & Forests of Sierra Nevada.”50 King’s search for an appropriate title is instructive, demonstrating that even before receiving authorization to conduct the survey, he was filtering his sense impressions through both Ruskinian and scientific lenses. Hill’s own diary, which he kept from 1870 through 1874 when he lived on Phantom Island, further testifies to King’s preoccupation with Shasta as a subject of both scientific and aesthetic interest. During these years, the artist’s most constant activity was completing “the ten drawings I was to make for [King] according to agreement,” many of which were of Shasta and Yosemite.51 For King, Shasta was unrivaled: “Riding over it in almost any part the one great point in the landscape is the cone of Shasta; its crest of solid white, its vast altitude . . . give it a grandeur equalled by hardly any other American mountain.”52 Hill agreed with King’s description. A sketchbook kept by Hill in the summer of 1868 shows that Shasta’s cone became a passion for the artist as well. The book contains twenty-­five pencil drawings of Mount Shasta from different angles, annotated with captions indicating the location from which the mountain was drawn. In Mountaineering, King recalled the affective power of the parallax view, of synchronizing multiple perspectives in a unified and revelatory vision of a dramatic geological subject: “I lay several hours sketching the outlines of the summit . . . getting acquainted with the long chain

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of peaks, that I might afterward know them from other points of view. I became convinced from the great apparent elevation and the wide fields of snow that we had not formerly deceived ourselves as to their great height.”53 What is particularly notable in King’s prose is his facility blending aesthetic contemplation and empirical induction, crystallizing for the reader the experience of these entwined epistemological modes. Hill’s drawings of Mount Shasta reveal that the daily activities of the survey had begun to influence his artistic process. Circling the site was also key to the surveying practice of triangulation, the method by which Gardiner and the survey’s assistant topographers measured long distances using the principles of trigonometry. Hill’s process of image making physically mimicked the circumambulatory process of the survey. King and Hill were also encouraged by Ruskin, in Modern Painters IV, to circle a site to best advantage. The critic had included four drawings of Mont Blanc executed from various perspectives (fig. 79), explaining that their “jagged and spiry outlines are rendered still more remarkable in any view obtained of them in the immediate neighborhood of Geneva.”54 Ruskin had walked the perimeter of Mont Blanc’s base to augment his geologic research, confident that his aggregate insights would elevate his representations of the mountain’s grandeur. Again, visual epiphany is born of arduous empirical research. One view of Mount Blanc allowed Ruskin to perceive that “though separated by some eight or nine miles of actual distance, the two ranges [Mont Blanc and its companion hills] are part of one and the same system of rock.”55 For all his experience as a mountaineer, King continued to draw inspiration from Ruskin’s geological and artistic practices. In a memo in his 1868 diary, King reminded himself that “Ruskin views mountains from below.”56 Hill, too, was serving Ruskin’s vision. For six weeks he scouted Shasta, collecting perspectives from below at distances near and far, confronting the mountain’s gamut of faces, forged by ancient and ongoing geologic tensions. From Butteville (fig. 80), Hill delineated Shasta’s deep clefts with darkly hatched lines, a gesture that distills the mountain’s history of flowing lava and cleaving, thus fulfilling Ruskin’s dictate that a drawing should chronicle the dynamic history of its subject. In contrast, the terrain as viewed from Strawberry Valley (fig. 81) is noticeably less severe, Hill’s lighter stroke responsive to the terrain’s shallower crevices. The mountain’s most benign face is viewed from the east (fig. 82). While a caption communicates that its base is surrounded by dead bush, this flank of the mountain is characterized by the gentle undulation of its slopes. In many of Hill’s sketches of Shasta, its ridges and crags are patiently rendered, while the surrounding landscape is hastily drawn. Nonetheless, deliberate intent informs Hill’s haste. The antinomy between painstaking transcription and cursory sketch also animates the watercolors that Hill began on-­site, some more finished, others inchoate. In one incomplete painting (fig. 83), Shasta’s summit is “an arch of pale blue,” as King described the peak, the snow on its lower slopes isolated dramatically against a neutral white ground.57 Hill’s accomplishment in this delicate but precise juxtaposition, which King also achieves in his prose, is to suspend in a single image the picture’s dual character as geological document and aestheticized artifact.

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Fig. 79. J. C. Armytage after John Ruskin, “Aiguille Structure.” Engraving. Modern Painters IV (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1856), plate 29. Houghton Library, Harvard University.

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Fig. 80. (top) John Henry Hill, Mount Shasta from Butteville, 1868. Pencil on paper, 4 × 6 ⅜ in. (10.2 × 16.2 cm). Collection of the New-­York Historical Society. Gift of Harry Shaw Newman, 1958.121.

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Fig. 81. (bottom) John Henry Hill, Mount Shasta from Strawberry Valley, 1868. Pencil on paper, 4 × 6 ⅜ in. (10.2 × 16.2 cm). Collection of the New-­York Historical Society. Gift of Harry Shaw Newman, 1958.121.

Fig. 82. John Henry Hill, Mount Shasta from East, 1868. Pencil on paper, 4 × 6 ⅜ in. (10.2 × 16.2 cm). Collection of the New-­York Historical Society. Gift of Harry Shaw Newman, 1958.121.

A discovery King made at Shasta in 1870, of active glaciers surrounding the volcano, sheds light on why Hill continued to execute images of the peak well into 1874. These images include watercolors he completed in the field as well as the exhibition watercolors and oils he undertook through the mid-­1870s. King’s decision to bring a team to Shasta in 1870, not part of the original plan for the Fortieth Parallel Survey, may have been inspired by renewed interest in the mountain ignited by Hill’s works. Instead of returning to the Cordillera Range, King instructed his team to examine the dormant volcanoes of the Cascade Range, beginning with Shasta. Summiting Shasta from a new approach—­different from that of his previous climb—­King made one of the most important discoveries in the history of nineteenth-­century American geology. Previously, scientists had believed that no glaciers remained active on the American continent, but King refuted that view, announcing, “We completely upset the ideas of Humboldt and Fremont concerning the mountain itself.”58 O’Sullivan was not with King when he made his Shasta discovery. Having signed on in 1870 as photographer for the rival survey of the one hundredth meridian led by Lieutenant George M. Wheeler, O’Sullivan had been replaced by Carleton Watkins during the Fortieth Parallel’s fourth season. Though Watkins made arresting photographs of the volcano and glaciers (fig. 84), capturing with dramatic chiaroscuro the gullies, ravines, and horns coated in snow and ice, King wrote that Watkins lamented “that the mountain should so have draped itself with mist as to defy his camera.”59 It

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Fig. 83. John Henry Hill, Mount Shasta, 1868. Pencil and brush and blue ink wash on paper, 10 × 14 in. (25 × 35.6 cm). Private collection.

appears that King could not relinquish his conviction that the artist possessed a capacity superior to that of the photographer, in many cases, to capture both the details and the totality of a scene. Shasta, King wrote, had “an unmistakable purity and delicacy of tint” that gave to its surrounding landscape “the aspect of water-­color drawings.”60 King, Hill’s diary suggests, acted on this belief in ordering multiple views of Shasta from the artist long after he had retreated to Phantom Island. One of Hill’s most elaborate views of the mountain is a watercolor completed in 1874 (fig. 85), according quite precisely with King’s lapidary description in Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. Hill pictures Shasta as a “heaven-­piercing crest of white,” as King had recounted, the apex protruding between clouds. Despite the presence of a photographer at the moment King made the greatest discovery of his professional career, his earlier experience as a founding member of the American Pre-­Raphaelites and his abiding commitment to the teachings of Ruskin led him to believe that natural imagery, as intrinsically faithful to scientific truth, would yield only to an artist of Hill’s temperament, training, and aesthetic.

Catastrophism in Idaho Following his Shasta excursion, Hill reunited with the survey team in mid-­August in Ruby Valley, Nevada, by way of Yosemite. Once he was reintegrated with the survey,

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Fig. 84. Carleton Watkins, Commencement of the Whitney Glacier, Summit of Mt. Shasta, 1870. Albumen silver print. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, P1975.94.10.

Fig. 85. (overleaf) John Henry Hill, Mt. Shasta, 1874. Watercolor on paper, 11 15/16 × 17 13/16 in. (30.3 × 45.2 cm). Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Michael S. Engl, 2003.13.

it appears Hill and O’Sullivan visited many sites together, including the area around Ruby Valley, the nearby East Humboldt Mountains, and, as they made their way north to Idaho’s southern border, to City of Rocks, where painter and photographer captured the spire-­like formations of granite (figs. 86 and 87). King, Hill, and O’Sullivan crossed the northern border of the Fortieth Parallel Survey area, separating from the larger survey team, many of whom stayed in the East Humboldt Range. Their destination was Shoshone Falls, then known as the “Niagara of the West.” At 212 feet tall, Shoshone Falls was 45 feet taller than the eastern wonder. At Shoshone Falls, the team was not looking to assess the region’s natural resources or development potential. Instead, King seized an opportunity to amass evidence to validate his unconventional geological theories. King was a believer in catastrophism, which proposed that the earth’s surface, its landmasses and oceans, mountains and canyons, had been formed by ancient, rapid, and violent geologic activity, including floods, volcanoes, and earthquakes. Most of his peers, by contrast, including scientists on other western surveys, subscribed to the central principles of uniformitarianism, a theory of the earth’s development that was widely promulgated in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–­33), and based on the notion that geologic change was the result of gradual natural forces occurring over millennia.61 John Wesley Powell, who led the investigation of the Green and Colorado rivers, and Grove Karl Gilbert, the

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Fig. 86. John Henry Hill, City of Rocks, October 3, 1868. Watercolor on paper, 3 ⅜ × 7 in. (8.6 × 17.8 cm). Private collection.

geologist on the Wheeler survey, were both dedicated uniformitarians.62 King’s experience on the Fortieth Parallel Survey, however, had a formative impact. During his time in the West, he came to a more subtle understanding that accommodated the coaction of catastrophism and uniformitarianism, and he began to advance what he called “a dovetailing together of the two ideas”: that the geological record was characterized by long stretches of gradualism, “periods of geological serenity,” punctuated by “sharp, destructive revolution, as unheralded as an earthquake or volcanic eruptions.”63 King was ahead of his time. His “dovetailing” theory is largely accepted by scientists today and known as “punctuated equilibrium,” a label coined in 1972 by Stephen Jay Gould, who explained that “modern geology is really an even mixture of two scientific schools: Lyell’s original, rigid uniformitarianism” and “scientific catastrophism.”64 Shoshone Falls was outside the assigned geographic area of King’s survey. It is clear that King did not view his detour as violating orders, as he included a lengthy description of his unsanctioned activities in popular and scientific reports, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada and the later Systematic Geology (1878), respectively. Shoshone Falls, with its steep chasms and chain of cascades, the legacies of both volcanic and diluvial upheaval, reinforced King’s catastrophist views and intensified in him a religious awe consonant with this majestic act of divine intervention. Volcanoes had been a central interest for Alexander von Humboldt, who wrote extensively about them in multiple publications over decades.65 King followed Humboldt in believing that volcanism, summoning images of lava, heat, and, by association, the terrain of hell, authorized the productive synthesis of science and religion.66 By identifying features of the landscape that were remnants of volcanic activity—­and not coincidentally of biblical disasters—­King harnessed a literary-­aesthetic trope that would also serve as

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Fig. 87. Timothy O’Sullivan, The Sphinxes, (500 ft.) City of Rocks. Idaho, 1868. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Fig. 88. (overleaf) John Henry Hill, Shoshone Falls, Study from Nature, 1868. Watercolor on paper, 12 × 17 in. (30.5 × 43.2 cm). Private collection.

cornerstone of his scientific project. In Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, King’s opening description of Shoshone yokes his scientific orientation with his religious sensibility: “Suddenly you stand upon a brink, as if the earth had yawned. Black walls flank the abyss. Deep in the bed a great river fights its way through labyrinths of blackened ruins, and plunges in foaming whiteness over a cliff of lava. You turn from the brink as from a frightful glimpse of the Inferno.”67 Shoshone Falls provided an opportunity for King to sponsor representations of landscape marked by catastrophic episodes that would both validate his scientific position and inspire a fear of God, yoking the empirical and the sublime. As Jason Weems has written, King “argued that some sort of agency—­a divine, cosmic creator—­enacted destruction as a means of fueling transformation and improvement.”68 Notably, King’s response and descriptive language were later echoed by Hill who, when “asked what the country looked like . . . said quietly, ‘Like hell.’ ”69 Shoshone followed Shasta in Hill’s western oeuvre as receiving the most frequent treatment, in both watercolor and oil. The first and best-­known image is the watercolor completed on-­site, Shoshone Falls, inscribed at the lower right “JHH 1868 Study from Nature” (fig. 88). This view of the falls head-­on was also captured by O’Sullivan (see fig. 67), and pictorially parallels King’s description in Mountaineering of coming

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Fig. 89. (top) John Henry Hill, Shoshone Falls, Sept 30, 1868. Watercolor and pencil on paper, 5 × 7 in. (12.7 × 17.8 cm). Private collection.

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Fig. 90. (bottom) Timothy O’Sullivan, Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

upon the falls. Each of the elements that King singles out is visible in both O’Sullivan’s and Hill’s works: the brink of the canyon, its dark basalt walls, and the foaming cataract. Catalyzed by King’s interest and the inherent drama of the site, Hill and O’Sullivan determined that the phenomenon in front of them might yield its mysteries to an application of the parallax approach that Hill had earlier employed at Shasta. O’Sullivan’s photograph is one of ten large plate and sixteen stereo views he made at Shoshone, encircling the site to gain multiple perspectives of individual views while investigating the forces unleashed in a catastrophic episode in the geological past. The photographer set out at Shoshone’s rim, following it around the falls and proceeding into the canyon. A second sketch by Hill, inscribed “Sept 30” indicates that Hill was in step with O’Sullivan (figs. 89 and 90). This unfinished watercolor, at five by seven inches and originally part of the artist’s sketchbook, only half the size of Shoshone Falls, is characterized by dynamism in both subject and execution. The play and opposition of broad and narrow brushstrokes enact the influx and efflux of water and record the gestures of the artist’s hand. The contrast in inscriptions between Hill’s two on-­site watercolors speaks directly to the speed and process of their completion. The inclusion of “Study from Nature” on the larger drawing claims it was finished in the presence of the motif. Absent, however, is a particular date, which Hill often included on works executed in his sketchbook. The size and facture of Shoshone Falls announce it as a finished composition, likely completed over a period of days in the field, during which O’Sullivan took photographs and King measurements. Further testifying to this set of practices is O’Sullivan’s photograph of the falls taken from the same angle as Hill’s “Sept 30” sketch. The photographer’s view includes a figure—­likely King—­ perched on a rocky outcropping above the falls. Its horizon line askew, O’Sullivan’s image can be considered the photographic analogue of the drawing dashed off by Hill. Both recorded first impressions of the site’s majesty, but in the subsequent days and weeks they would spend there with King, each would search for the falls’ “best general view.”70 Ultimately artist and photographer would capture the falls from an angle that underscored the interval of ancient violence that had scarred the land. The quantity of photographs that O’Sullivan made at Shoshone Falls and the paintings of the site King subsequently commissioned from Hill are further evidence that the region held a particular personal and professional resonance for the geologist. As a series, O’Sullivan’s Shoshone photographs capture the terror of approaching the Snake River Canyon and the desolation of the petrified plains and chasms. The painted and photographic images served, as King wrote, as visual “record[s] of upheaval and subsidence, of corrugation and crumpling of the great mountain chains.”71 Examined in their presumed sequence, O’Sullivan’s photographs and Hill’s watercolors impress upon the viewer the minatory experience of attaining the precipice of the falls. Individually and as a group, the images display the geologic variety of the Shoshone region. The juxtaposition of photographs that feature the wide canyon (fig. 91) against those of ragged rocks at the top of the falls (fig. 92) powerfully testifies to the land’s formation through compression, lifting, tilting, faulting, and folding.

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King described Shoshone’s “mouths of black caverns, where the lava seems to have been blown up in the form of a great blister,” noting the qualities born of catastrophe, but without using the controversial label. King was careful to cite the falls as evidence of his “dovetailing” theory of catastrophism and uniformitarianism, noting areas where violent and gradual forces together shaped natural features: “wherever large fields of basalt have overflowed an earlier rock, and erosion has afterward laid it bare.”72 The multiple perspectives of the photographs and watercolors create for the viewer the sense of the land overlapping onto itself. This sensation is replicated within both media by the sharp chiaroscuro of the white falls against black earth. O’Sullivan’s and Hill’s images revel in the site’s paradoxical dynamism: the rocky chasm betrays ancient and concluded geologic turmoil; the continuous cascade of water contradicts that notion and suggests the canyon remains in perpetual turbulence. King would not speak publicly about his catastrophist views until 1877, when he addressed an audience at the Sheffield Scientific School and delivered “Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment,” a lecture that he described as “nothing less than an ignited bomb-­shell thrown into the camp of the biologists.”73 Scholars have cited King’s catastrophist views as stemming from the teachings of Louis Agassiz, with whom King briefly studied at Harvard in 1862 following his graduation from Sheffield.74 Agassiz had been one of the most vocal proponents of catastrophism, arguing that the Ice Age had been an abrupt cataclysm in which entire species of flora and fauna had been suddenly eradicated. Though the reasoning behind Agassiz’s Ice Age convictions is now widely accepted, his scientific rigor had been questioned as a result of his embrace of polygenism and persistent rejection of Darwinian theories of evolution.75 King’s catastrophism, however, was not shaped solely by Agassiz. The young geologist was also exposed to catastrophist principles in Modern Painters IV. Though in his early career Ruskin was careful to remain diplomatically silent in published writings and public forums on the issue of gradual versus abrupt geologic change, his esteem for Lyell and his Principles of Geology is apparent in Ruskin’s correspondence of the 1840s.76 It was not until 1875 in Deucalion that Ruskin explicitly disagreed with “the late Sir Charles Lyell,” whose “great theorem of the constancy and power of existing phenomena was only in measure proved,—­in a larger measure disputable; and in the broadest bearings of it, entirely false.”77 Twenty years earlier, in Modern Painters IV, Ruskin’s sympathetic display of catastrophist views was a model of discretion, avoiding the controversy that had seized Britain’s scientific community. King, however, would have understood the support for catastrophism implicit in Ruskin’s earlier writing: “there may be appointed, in the natural order of things, convulsions . . . on a scale which the human race has not yet been long enough to witness. . . . the fury which lays cities into sepulchres of lava bursts forth only after intervals of centuries . . . it is not irrational to admit that there may yet be powers dormant, not destroyed, beneath the apparently calm surface of the earth.”78 Ruskin provided a viable model that King could build upon in his engagement with the American West. The English critic, as Jonathan Smith has noted, “directs

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Fig. 91. (top) Timothy O’Sullivan, Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Fig. 92. (bottom) Timothy O’Sullivan, Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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his complaint not against science but against materialist science, the science that resolves all things into atoms and numbers,” and perverted what Ruskin termed “the exact relation between landscape-­painting and natural science.”79 Ruskin instead furnished an explanation for natural phenomena that not only, he believed, had scientific purchase, but proposed a richer account that was more broadly accessible to a cross section of society. He deferred to the poetic expositions of elemental natural forces integral to ancient mythologies, including pagan narratives that he offered in Deucalion, but also that he found in Christian scripture, as he had argued earlier in Modern Painters IV. These myths posed a higher truth and were more vital explanations of external realities than those of scientific materialism that reduced natural phenomena to their particulate “essences.” King, too, was a mythologizer, but his means, given his education, his profession, and the responsibilities of leading a national survey in a time of expansionist exploration, had necessarily to include more of the actual and intellectual instrumentation of modern science. By fusing up-­to-­date geological principles, King made a radical move in the teeth of Lyellian uniformitarianism. He elevated catastrophism and made it a foundation of a mythology of the American West with profound implications for how it would be pictorialized by the artists and photographers he recruited to accompany him. Inheriting Ruskin’s priorities, King sought not to remake traditional narratives but to construct a mythos of the West. This mythos, built upon Ruskinian mimesis and, as will shortly be discussed, Turnerian expressiveness, was tasked with many obligations, not only the promotion of scientific truth but the preservation of the spiritual countenance and divine basis of nature. In perhaps his most brilliant inventions, reflected in the rhetoric of Mountaineering, the empirical findings of Systematic Geology, and the imagery created under his aegis, King revived the catastrophist tension that was indispensable to the projection of the western sublime.

An American Turner “to paint our Sierras as they are” The paintings Hill completed for King in the early 1870s while living on Phantom Island, particularly the two located studio versions, in oil and watercolor, of Shoshone Falls, testify to both the artist’s and the geologist’s enduring interest in Turner (figs. 93 and 94).80 In Mountaineering, King announced his “longing for some equal artist” to Ruskin’s idol, Turner, “who should arise and choose to paint our Sierras as they are.”81 Hill aspired, on his work’s own modest terms, to fulfill King’s longing. While Turner’s influence is discernible in the work of many nineteenth-­century American landscape painters, including that of Cole and in the western oeuvre of Moran, the American Pre-­R aphaelites had perhaps the most nuanced, if not fraught, relationship with Turner because their understanding of his work had come to them unadulterated, and for a long time unquestioned, as the received word of Ruskin. At the time of the Association’s founding, American Pre-­Raphaelite artists did not have substantial firsthand exposure to Turner’s art. As a result, they were inordinately

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Fig. 93. John Henry Hill, Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1871. Oil on canvas board, 36 × 48 in. (91.4 × 121.9 cm). Idaho State Museum.

Fig. 94. (overleaf) John Henry Hill, Shoshone Falls, 1871. Watercolor, 12 × 17 ½ in. (30.5 × 44.5 cm). Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Bequest of Arthur J. Phelan Jr.

influenced by prints after his work and Ruskin’s voluptuous prose descriptions. Compared to Turner’s paintings, prints after his originals were crisper in execution and absent of color. With little knowledge of the imaginative freedom of Turner’s late style, the American Pre-­Raphaelites, in the first years of the movement, believed they were following Turner’s footsteps in the exacting mimesis that Ruskin had equated both with the project of the British Pre-­Raphaelites and with Turner’s earlier landscape productions. But as the Association’s artists traveled to England to experience Turner’s work directly, they began to appreciate its more subjective dimension and to appropriate his “mood,” replete with his looser brushwork and tonal and atmospheric effects, which they came to associate with what they believed were the artist’s progressive politics. Hill is an example of the transformation that could occur once an artist encountered original Turners, unmediated by Ruskin’s prose. His exposure to Turner had

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Fig. 95. Edward Goodall after Joseph Mallord William Turner, Fall of the Tees, Yorkshire, 1827. Line engraving on paper, 6 ⅜ × 9 in. (16.3 × 22.6 cm). Tate Britain, London.

started early in his career. Both he and his father were enamored of an engraving by Edward Goodall of Turner’s Fall of the Tees (1827, fig. 95). In 1864 and 1865, he traveled to England, a voyage possibly undertaken, like King and Gardiner’s journey west the previous year, to avoid the draft.82 In London, Hill’s primary activity was copying “drawings and sketches of Turner,” “three days out of a week, from ten till four” at the South Kensington Museum.83 Hill was referring to works on paper by the artist that were part of the Turner Bequest, which comprised the contents of his studio at his death in 1851. Five years later, upon the settlement of Turner’s estate, approximately three hundred paintings and over thirty thousand watercolors and sketches were bequeathed to the nation. From the late 1850s, paintings and drawings by Turner could be viewed at the National Gallery and at Marlborough House, and, by the time of Hill’s trip, at South Kensington. Writing to his Association colleagues from London, Hill reported specific Turners with which he was especially taken, including Calais Pier (1803, National Gallery, London), Crossing the Brook (c. 1815, Tate), Sun Rising through Vapour (c. 1807, National Gallery, London), and, most crucially, The Fighting Temeraire (1839, National Gallery, London) and “the drawings for the Liber [Studiorum].”84

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The major project Hill undertook upon his return from London, Sketches from Nature (1867), a book of etchings and aquatints after his own watercolors, shows Hill digesting and appropriating Turnerian subjects, techniques, and media. Several of the prints in Sketches are in dialogue with The Fighting Temeraire, as well as plates in the Liber Studiorum, including Hill’s Moonlight on the Androscoggin, N.H. and Old Whaler, at New Bedford, Mass (figs. 96 and 97). Hill had seen Farrer’s copy of The Fighting Temeraire (fig. 98) earlier in the decade, and had been instructed by his friend to seek out the original at the National Gallery. “Nobody, I am sure, could imagine anything finer than this picture,” Hill wrote of “The Old Temeraire,” its titular connection to his Old Whaler surely no accident. Shortly after arriving in London, Hill described Turner’s painting for the readership of The New Path: “The sun sinking down below the night mist, with his shafts of dying light gleaming along the upper clouds as they float with infinitely varied forms; then, far above, is the pale, watery blue, with the silvery moon shining out so brightly; and, beneath, the ship floating quietly along the placid water to its final dissolution.”85 Turner’s formal innovations, including those in the Liber Studiorum, stimulated Hill to consider his own handling of light. In Moonlight on the Androscoggin, N.H., he explored dynamic contrasts of tone, which he achieved by placing at his composition’s center a fluorescent source that radiates “shafts of dying light.” Back in New York, Hill attempted to align his new understanding of Turner’s techniques and gestural freedom by painting an American waterfall, an effort whose source of inspiration was immediately recognized. After viewing one of Hill’s contributions to the inaugural exhibition at Street Hall, Falls of the Hudson (unlocated), Cook wrote of Hill that “Turner has swallowed him nearly bodily.”86 But there were other reasons that the American Pre-­Raphaelites looked to Turner as a model. In the early 1870s, when Hill was executing paintings of Shoshone Falls for King, American audiences had soured on the work of many British artists, their productions pejoratively associated with the vocal support for the Confederacy shown not only by such prominent intellectuals as Ruskin and Carlyle, but by powerful political and mercantile forces in England. Turner escaped that scorn, in part, because his oeuvre had been characterized by its creative assimilation of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Continental models, muting the association of his landscapes with an overtly British lineage. As Joseph Goldyne has observed, “Turner’s work cannot be easily understood as a manifestation of English art. He was one of those rare figures whose aesthetic and national pedigree appear to be obscured by the shock of his almost unprecedented innovation.”87 By the time his Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840, fig. 99) arrived in New York in 1872, Turner was regarded by many Americans as having been a passionate abolitionist.88 The painting depicts an episode from 1781, in which crew members on the ship the Zong threw infirm enslaved passengers overboard so that insurance reimbursement for lost human cargo could be collected. In the robust literature on The Slave Ship scholars have addressed the extent of Turner’s antislavery views—­whether the work truly represents abolitionist

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Fig. 96. (top) John Henry Hill, Moonlight on the Androscoggin, N.H., 1867. Etching and aquatint. Plate 17, Sketches from Nature (Nyack Turnpike, NY). The New York Public Library, Print Collection.

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Fig. 97. (bottom) John Henry Hill, Old Whaler, at New Bedford, Mass, 1867. Etching and aquatint. Plate 18, Sketches from Nature (Nyack Turnpike, NY). The New York Public Library, Print Collection.

Fig. 98. Thomas Charles Farrer, The Fighting “Temeraire,” tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, after Turner, c. 1860. Oil on canvas, 23 ⅞ × 35 13/16 in. (60.6 × 91 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Meta and Paul J. Sachs, 1965.445.

sympathies or if the event simply offered Turner an ideal subject for what was, by 1840, his trademark: the historical landscape scene.89 Even its display at the British Anti-­Slavery Society has been reconsidered in the context of Turner’s early investment in speculative schemes tied to a Jamaican plantation, worked by enslaved labor.90 Nonetheless, it is clear that Turner’s painting possessed a potent political semantic for the American Pre-­R aphaelites. The circumstances surrounding The Slave Ship’s sale to an American collector and its reception in the United States in 1872 enhance our understanding of Hill’s steady gravitation toward a Turnerian style. Within four years of its arrival in the United States, The Slave Ship was owned by two collectors who had been prominent abolitionists, and the subsequent public reaction had an immediate impact on multiple Association members. The Slave Ship had been known to the Pre-­R aphaelite circle in America well before it arrived in New York. Stillman would have seen it in Ruskin’s dining room when he visited Denmark Hill in 1850 and 1853, and Norton had viewed it there in 1856.91 Farrer likely encountered it for the first time in 1858, when Ruskin invited students in his class at the Working Men’s College “to see the Turners at his home at Denmark

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Fig. 99. Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840. Oil on canvas, 35 ¾ × 48 ¼ in. (90.8 × 122.6 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund.

Hill.”92 Though there is no record of a visit from Hill to the Ruskin family home in 1864–­65, he likely visited the critic’s residence as well, armed with an introduction from Norton or Farrer. Hill would have been warmly received after Farrer’s visit in 1860, during which he showed off work by his Pre-­R aphaelite colleagues in New York, and later reported that “Ruskin speaks well of John’s drawings.”93 From the late 1860s, Norton had been actively working with Ruskin to bring more works by Turner to the United States. It is no surprise, given his friendship with the critic, his progressive politics, and his reputation as the country’s leading scholar of art history, that Norton became the key actor in brokering the sale of The Slave Ship between Ruskin and John Taylor Johnston, the first president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose personal collection included works that conveyed antislavery and war-­related themes.94 By the time Johnston acquired The Slave Ship, his collection was well known to the American Pre-­R aphaelites—­Farrer and Newman had visited between 1870 and 1871.95 When The Slave Ship arrived in 1872, Johnston held a “private” viewing at his Fifth Avenue home on April 11—­attended by nearly 250 of New York’s cultural luminaries, including such pillars of the National Academy as Daniel

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Huntington, Winslow Homer, Whittredge, Gifford, and Kensett. Among the crowd were also Association members William Trost Richards and Russell Sturgis. John Henry Hill’s name is absent—­though his diary records that on April 9 he left Phantom Island and “started for home to be gone three weeks.” Johnston continued to open his home for a month to those eager to see “America’s first public Turner,” and Hill may have visited without signing the register. But days after his return to Lake George on April 30, his father did sign in on Fifth Avenue, viewing The Slave Ship with leading American Pre-­R aphaelite collectors Gordon Lester Ford and William C. Gilman.96 Hill’s choice to employ Turnerian effects—­such as The Slave Ship’s cacophony of red and yellow impasto, its refulgent solar penumbra, and its vigorous brushwork—­ was part of an artistic and political calculus that sought to recenter American Pre-­ Raphaelitism on imagery that resonated, both stylistically and by reputation, with the progressive vision that had animated the movement since its inception. As he completed his large Shoshone in oil (see fig. 93), Hill keenly felt the stakes of the Association’s project: “How much landscape painting is like politics,” he reflected in his diary.97 When Hill presented the work at the National Academy, it quickly stirred controversy. A negative review of the painting in Watson’s Art Journal and Hill’s reaction to it, recorded in his diary, capture the convergence of issues surrounding Ruskinian nature study and the overt influence of Turner, as well as the role of photography in Hill’s artistic process. Although the Watson’s critic deemed Hill’s work “A well drawn picture,” his praise quickly turned to censure: “It is scratching and meretriciously painted. The waterfall is too pronounced and is in all points too opaque. It has little motion and the spring has no lightness.”98 The review was sufficiently unsettling to prompt Hill to copy it in its entirety in his diary. Immediately following the insertion, Hill commented: The critics of Turner were never consistent, they thought his execution careless but attributed it to his inability to draw. Good drawing and meretricious execution is something beyond my comprehension. . . . What struck me about the falling water was its opacity compared with the transparent green water above and below, one might as well look for transparency in a piece of chalk as in breaking white foam . . . A friend to whom I showed the study made on the spot from which the picture is painted and a photograph taken from nature said I am astonished they are identical. I could not have imagined the two more alike. Now I challenge any of the artists of established reputation to show a photograph of a subject that they have painted and find the two alike.99

Hill invokes Turner in his defense of his own painting as a faithful representation of the scene as he witnessed it. He links his “study made on the spot” (see fig. 88) to O’Sullivan’s Shoshone Falls, Idaho (see fig. 67). While Stillman simultaneously pursued painting and photography in the late 1850s and early 1860s, members of the Association had been less sanguine about the new technology, feeling imperiled by the photograph, which threatened to render obsolete their claims to preeminence in the field of acute

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natural observation. But Hill praises his work’s closeness to O’Sullivan’s photograph and considers the mastery of photographic verisimilitude as a necessary disciplinary phase, as Ruskin had set forth, if the artist is to surpass the mimetic and enter into the transformative realm of the imagination, as had Turner. In Modern Painters IV, Ruskin addressed his critics who contended that his simultaneous embrace of the Pre-­ Raphaelites and Turner was irreconcilable by explaining that all artists must negotiate the fundamental uncertainty of visual experience, that clarity versus the suggestive in painting did not constitute a meaningful binary, and, most importantly, that transcription of nature was a step to master, rather than a terminus, on the path to creating imaginative works in the vein of Turner. In his defiant diary entry, Hill takes pride in the fact that his “study made on the spot” is “identical” to O’Sullivan’s photograph and thus claims that he had attained one of Ruskin’s crucial thresholds: developing the vision and executive ability to replicate nature with the objective precision of a photographic instrument. Further comparison between Hill’s studio paintings of Shoshone and O’Sullivan’s photograph, however, reveals that while on Phantom Island, Hill sought to make a Turnerian leap into the realm of higher truth. The artist had in his possession at least one photographic print by O’Sullivan of Shoshone while he was composing his studio compositions (see figs. 93 and 94). Using both the photograph and his on-­site watercolors, Hill produced two versions of Shoshone in which the artist’s imaginative instincts converge with the demands of faithful rendition. Compared to the on-­site drawing, in both the studio oil and the watercolor the falls are closer to the picture plane, there is less space devoted to the foreground, and the chasm is more gaping. Moving progressively from Ruskin’s notion of a “memorandum of the place,” Hill was striving to attain a unified effect that fulfilled the critic’s dictate to transcend the “topographical delineation of the facts,” and to “arous[e] in the mind of the beholder those sensations which would be caused by the facts themselves.”100 Following the procedures of Turner in The Pass at Faido, St. Gotthard (1843, The Morgan Museum and Library), famously dissected by Ruskin in his discussion “Of Turnerian Topography” in Modern Painters IV, Hill also introduced a stabilizing symmetry to a vista where there had been none. In the studio watercolor, the falls are flanked by two basalt walls. O’Sullivan’s photograph and the “on the spot” watercolor, by contrast, illustrate the face of only one wall protruding to the left of the falls. Hill has inserted a symmetrical wall on the right, which he seems to have lifted from another O’Sullivan photograph (fig. 100). In willingly synthesizing elements from multiple photographic prints, Hill harnessed a Turnerian power of imaginative selection and profitably indulged his capacity to originate and reconfigure imagery and to combine it with veridical truth. In his confrontation with Shoshone Falls, Hill drew upon the methods of both Ruskin and Turner to realize the immensity of the visual drama before him. He juxtaposed earth tones to suggest the ruggedness of the landscape, achieved by mottling his foreground, as opposed to intricately stippling the ground, to reproduce the loose rock and short brush discernible in O’Sullivan’s photograph. Hill reserves his most Ruskinian

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Fig. 100. Timothy O’Sullivan, Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 1868. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

passages, in both his studio and on-­site versions, for his central subject: the vertically striated cliff on the far side of the canyon and the rushing white water. Hill’s encounter with Shoshone seemed to rekindle many of the aesthetic instincts that had stimulated the formation of the Association five years earlier. The waterfall before him invoked the cataract in Turner’s Fall of the Tees that had been singled out in Modern Painters I. Hill accepted the challenge proffered by Ruskin’s prose, to capture the “splashing, shapeless foam,” to “arrive at the plunge of it,” “to feel its weight and wildness.”101 Hill’s versions of Shoshone should be understood as an accrual of influences and priorities: his respect for the survey’s need for images faithful to the site’s radical geological and topographical features; his response to the sweep and fidelity of O’Sullivan’s photographs; and his assimilation and reinterpretation of Turner’s formal expressiveness and political connotations. Hill’s versions of Shoshone, executed over many years in oil and watercolor, suggest he was motivated to return to the subject by something more than the commercial demand for spectacular western

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vistas. One of his representations of Shoshone was borrowed by Daniel Gilman for Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School—­a loan that provides a hint of the satisfaction that Shoshone offered to Hill.102 Certainly, he was gratified to know that it attained a sufficiently articulated realism to serve as a pedagogical aid to aspiring geologists and topographers—­evidence that would have signaled that he had abided by his original pact with Ruskin and his commitment to strive always for truth to nature. But Hill’s evolution as an artist and the unique drama of the falls demanded that he unite his Pre-­R aphaelitism, which had tended toward a quality of stasis in his nature studies and eastern landscapes, with a dynamism he acquired from Turner. Hill’s innate quietism is joined to the kinetically expressive, suggesting that in painting Shoshone Falls, both on-­site and in the studio, he had found a subject in which he could express his artistic persona in all of its hard-­earned dimensionality.

Coda: Bierstadt’s Return As Hill continued to produce western scenes on Phantom Island, and as the Fortieth Parallel Survey pursued its mission, King turned to two painters who accompanied the team on three of the four remaining surveys. During the 1869 and 1870 seasons, Gilbert Munger served as staff artist. While Munger was not associated with Pre-­ Raphaelite circles in New York, his painting betrayed an early interest in Ruskin and was praised by critics as “the fruit of conscientious study on the spot.”103 Munger was highly skilled and “could paint the specifics of a landscape to please a geologist, but he also knew how to delight connoisseurs of art.”104 Though King continued to commission works from Hill into the 1870s, he relied upon Munger’s images, translated into lithographs and chromolithographs for the survey’s official publication, Systematic Geology, to offer evidence of the expedition’s success to both the government and the public. Also influenced by Bierstadt, Munger understood that his works required a picturesque dimension in order to appeal to popular audiences, with framing devices that draw the viewer’s eye into the deep space of his landscapes topped with skies in pleasing pastel tones (fig. 101). In 1872, after the fourth season of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, King published Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. Though Mountaineering recounted for a popular audience the adventures and discoveries of his survey to date, King also indulged his more artistic sensibilities. Fact and fiction blur. King invented a character, a Californian painter named Hank G. Smith whom he encounters while hiking, and in whom he invested his own aesthetic preferences, distancing himself from views that might arouse controversy. During a conversation on contemporary landscape painting that King recounts, it is Smith, not King, who denounces the leader in the field of western landscapes: “It’s all Bierstadt and Bierstadt and Bierstadt nowadays! What has he done but twist and skew and distort and discolor and belittle and be-­pretty this whole doggonned country? Why, his mountains are too high and too slim. . . . He hasn’t what old Ruskin calls for.”105 King decides to transform into a humorous

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Fig. 101. Gilbert Munger, Yosemite Valley, c. 1869. Oil on canvas, 28 × 48 in. (71.1 × 121.9 cm). Collection of Nick and Mary Alexander.

vernacular the comparatively rarefied stylistic dispute between the merits of real and ideal forms in landscape representations. By putting an important aesthetic assertion in the voice of a rustic, a character type that would have been recognizable in the eastern corridors of power, and by subverting more pedantic forms of argumentation, King fused his artistic priorities with the greater political point: falsity in the depiction of the American West—­making “mountains too high or too slim”—­was akin to misappropriating the national consciousness, an asset more valuable than precious metals. The pages of The New Path had been filled with invective against Bierstadt that echoed in King’s mind when he was writing Mountaineering. King’s and Gardiner’s participation in the Association had empowered the American Pre-­R aphaelites to reject Bierstadt’s work by undermining its scientific pretensions: “Unfortunately for Mr. Bierstadt,” The New Path critic wrote, “the Rocky Mountains have been photographed, and geologists have been there, too, on government surveys . . . and we have the authority of some of these same geologists, when we say that this picture is a caricature, and not a true portraiture of the country.”106 Despite such disapprobation, in an apparent reversal King hired Bierstadt in 1872 to spend three weeks with the survey during its final season. Several arguments were

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Fig. 102. Albert Bierstadt, Autumn in the Sierras, 1873. Oil on canvas, 72 × 120 in. (182.9 × 304.8 cm). City of Plainfield, NJ.

likely made in favor of recruiting Bierstadt. The previous year, Ferdinand Hayden, who led a rival government-­funded survey, hired the famous photographer William Henry Jackson, as well as Moran, to accompany his upcoming fieldwork in the Yellowstone Basin. Within months of their return, Moran’s Grand Canyon of Yellowstone (1872, US Department of the Interior Museum) was purchased by the government and displayed prominently in the Capitol.107 Though imagery in the service of scientific inquiry had been central to King from the earliest days of the survey, the attention Hayden and Moran received as King prepared to depart for his final season in the field was likely a powerful impetus—­his competitive instincts outweighing his aesthetic reservations—­to hire the best-­known painter of the American West. Bierstadt’s Autumn in the Sierras (fig. 102), a monumental work based on his Fortieth Parallel Survey experience, was exhibited in 1873.108 Though it hung temporarily in the House of Representatives, Bierstadt’s painting was criticized for being “of the same general character as scores of his other compositions, located in the same region, treated in the same style, and fully as panoramic . . . the same semi-­sensational tone pervades the picture.”109 Though Hill lived on Phantom Island throughout the period in which Bierstadt accompanied King’s survey, the old hostilities that the

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American Pre-­R aphaelites harbored for the artist had not dissipated. Still completing King’s commissions, he likely experienced feelings of betrayal when he learned that King had hired Bierstadt. A diary entry of 1874 reveals his enduring frustration. He recounted a conversation with a woman familiar with Vassar College’s art collection, and asked her whether she knew his two drawings held there. He was indignant that “she had not the slightest recollection of them,” deriding the pictorial bombast of his rival: “I dare say if there had been a rubbishing Bierstadt 15 or 20 feet long she would have remembered that.”110 Bierstadt’s grandiose paintings served as visual correlatives of the national mythos of expansionism, a message consistent with the government’s rationale for sponsoring western surveys. The American Pre-­R aphaelites rejected his work not simply because its faithlessness and overwrought execution represented “the old, idle system” of the art world, but also because of its tacit endorsement of the bellicose instincts inherent in Manifest Destiny.111 Bierstadt’s oeuvre, the American Pre-­R aphaelites believed, participated in and embodied a “vast machinery of advertisement and puffery . . . which we think has reached the rank of an organized nuisance.” The group issued a “call upon all artists who wish to elevate their profession above that of the showman.”112 When Hill departed for the West, granted a platform by King, there would have been much hope that he was the “man strong enough” “to help us abate” “this apparatus.”113 Hill’s western output is a testament to American Pre-­R aphaelitism’s empirical commitment, to a humility of art making that eschewed sensational effects. It is a vital statement by an avowed Ruskinian and Pre-­R aphaelite that America, even its most exalted settings, need not elicit personal or national aggrandizement. Hill’s body of imagery of the American West proved the country could be pictured quite differently: the artist need not participate in the promotion of interests that led inevitably to moral and economic corruption. At the foot of western peaks, from the ledge of cataracts, and in solitude on Phantom Island, Hill painted landscapes of striking veracity that stand as a passionate repudiation of what he perceived as the bloated iconography and painterly excess of an illegitimate subjectivity.

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“We may as well confess, without making too many wry faces about it, that what we are in sorest need of just now, is a poetical painter,” Clarence Cook declared in the New-­ York Tribune in 1867.1 Several factors led to the waning of the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement. Among the most detrimental was the disaffection of Cook, its most visible spokesman. Cook’s stridency against academic landscapes had established The New Path’s reputation, as Norton noted, for “dogmatism and self-­sufficiency.”2 The attention the group received in the middle years of the 1860s was in large measure due to the heightened profile it achieved after Cook accepted the position of art critic for the Tribune in 1864. But in 1867, the American Pre-­R aphaelites suffered public injury at the hands of the critic who had previously been their most vocal ally. It was past time for the Association’s painters “to take another and a higher step,” Cook argued, into the realm of imaginative composition. He indicted “the realists” by name, “Mr. Farrer, Mr. Moore, Mr. Newman, Mr. Henry Farrer, the Hills.” “All their labor, and all their observation, and all their local truth” should have prepared the American Pre-­R aphaelites to graduate to the next and vital stage of Ruskin’s tiered schema, to “succeed in getting the effect of nature, either in her color or her light and shade.” In the absence of such an evolution, Cook argued that his former colleagues had effectively retreated from the front lines of their own revolution: “If they cannot be poets themselves, they have prepared the way for poets” and have “laid a right foundation for a future excellence to be built on.”3 What had formerly been regarded as their productive heterogeneity of realist styles was now an ineffective “divergence.”

Detail of fig. 110

Fig. 103. Sanford Robinson Gifford, Indian Summer in the White Mountains, 1862. Oil on canvas, 16 × 30 in. (40.6 × 76.2 cm). Collection of the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC. Gift of the Estate of Miss Elizabeth Boyd. 1945.3.

No longer did their “many points of likeness” unite singular styles into a coherent and mutually enriching cooperative. “Mr. Farrer no longer represents the tendencies of the new school,” Cook charged; “[he] represents only himself, it is difficult to say just what his tendencies are. . . . The younger Hill, also, is becoming not only conventional, but conventional in the most unsatisfactory way.”4 For dissidents who had set out four years earlier to overthrow all traditions and norms in American art, the insult of conventionalism from their former compatriot was bitter indeed. Association members began to experiment with emerging styles. As Alan Wallach, Angela Miller, and others have argued, during the third quarter of the nineteenth century there were parallel initiatives within mainstream American landscape painting that sought effects such as “breadth of treatment” paired with “resonant, light-­suffused atmosphere,” as in Gifford’s Indian Summer in the White Mountains (1862, fig. 103) and Kensett’s Sunset (1872, fig. 104).5 Miller observed that these works, by “encouraging a sustained absorption in the image in place of an active movement through it,” nurtured a cult of introspection.6 “Faith in nature as the source of national self-­definition” gave way to “a more introverted, personal, and reflective relationship with the natural world.”7 In the aftermath of the Civil War, paintings characterized by such “aestheticizing tendencies,” as Wallach has described them, addressed the shifting cultural demands of the country’s evolving art market as well as the expansion of New York’s bourgeoisie.8 Paintings whose central features were the diffusion of ambient light and reflections in still water elevated formal qualities, posed little thematic challenge, and, in Wallach’s view, by their acquisition, served to congratulate

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the viewer’s acumen and social standing. In the postbellum age, the aestheticized painting distanced itself from the era’s political urgencies. The American Pre-­R aphaelites were not immune to the lure of looser facture, muted palettes, and grander subjects—­ostensibly the “poetic” attributes that some felt had been absent in their original project. Farrer’s Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River (1865, fig. 105), Moore’s Snow Squall (1865–­66, fig. 106), and Richards’s Marine View with Boat on Horizon (c. 1869, fig. 107) avoid sharp delineations, high-­keyed chromatics, and a flattening of volumetric space that characterized their earlier Pre-­ Raphaelite compositions. There is no evidence that these formal decisions were rooted in a commitment to introspection or cultivation of the self that would mark the work of George Inness or Thomas Wilmer Dewing. The American Pre-­R aphaelites’ open brushwork and more subtle coloring was consistent with the group’s long-­ standing willingness to engage in transatlantic dialogue, locating inspiration in the lyrical expressions of Turner’s late works, as well as in the aestheticist productions of Rossetti, Millais, and Inchbold, all of whom had made a parallel move away from British Pre-­R aphaelitism. Personal circumstances reinforced shifting aesthetic convictions. In the early 1860s, poverty had been the inevitable companion of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ veristic devotion. Moore, frequently short of means, boasted of his painstaking

Fig. 104. John Frederick Kensett, Sunset, 1872. Oil on canvas, 18 × 30 in. (45.7 × 76.2 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Fig. 105. (0verleaf) Thomas Charles Farrer, Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River, 1865. Oil on canvas, 16 ¼ × 24 ¼ in. (41.3 × 61.6 cm). Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA. Purchase with the Elizabeth Peirce Allyn (Class of 1951) Fund and the Warbeke Art Museum Fund, 2002.6.

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Fig. 106. (top) Charles Herbert Moore, Snow Squall, 1865–­66. Watercolor and touches of graphite on paper, 5 ⅝ × 8 15/16 in. (14.3 × 22.7 cm). Princeton University Art Museum.

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Fig. 107. (bottom) William Trost Richards, Marine View with Boat on Horizon, c. 1869. Oil on canvas, 6 ⅞ × 13 ¾ in. (17.5 cm × 35 cm). Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Gift of M. J. and A. E. van Löben Sels, 1993.55.114.

Fig. 108. William Trost Richards, Old Ocean’s Gray and Melancholy Waste, 1885. Oil on canvas, 40 ¾ × 72 ¼ in. (103.5 × 183.5 cm). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Edward H. Coates (The Edward H. Coates Memorial Collection), 1923.9.6.

practice and its connection to a paucity of sales: “I cover about as much canvass as I could cover with the end of my thumb in a forenoon of three hours work.”9 Bachelors at the founding of the Association, these young artists had since married and started families in the latter years of the 1860s. With growing financial obligations, they could no longer subsidize the project of an arduous mimesis that had been the central feature of their movement and their most potent signal of political and aesthetic reform. Richards most successfully adapted his working methods to capitalize on American audiences’ taste for moodier and more tonal landscapes. By 1888, referring to his popular marine subjects such as Old Ocean’s Gray and Melancholy Waste (1885, fig. 108), he wrote that “it only takes a day and a half to paint a picture,” and that he had “painted a 6 foot picture . . . in 3 days.”10 While the American Pre-­R aphaelites had been forced to reckon with Ruskin’s views on slavery from their group’s inception, and condemned him in The New Path after the conclusion of the war, their movement was more severely damaged by association with their mentor when, in 1867, the New York Times issued a public denunciation of Ruskin and his American followers. “Mr. Ruskin’s fanaticism and prejudices have long been familiar to the reading public, as well [as] his peculiar views on the question of human servitude.” But more recent commentary by “the eminent

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English critic” had come to light “that severely tries our confidence in his judgment.” The Times paraphrased Ruskin in a devastating indictment: “The barbarous manner in which the people of the North, he [Ruskin] wrote, had conducted the war upon Southern people and their patriarchal institutions, had utterly destroyed his interest in American art.” Ruskin’s blasphemies encompassed the American nation, its art, and its artists: “True art, in fact, could not flourish among a people so depraved.”11 The Faustian pact the American Pre-­R aphaelites had sealed with Ruskin had come due. The movement was offered up by the Times as a sacrifice: “Mr. Ruskin may not be wholly to blame in this matter. The disciples of the Pre-­R aphaelite school in this country, an insignificant and unpopular clique, have filled his ears with dolorous complaints of their own want of success, arguing, from their failure to sell their pictures, the total depravity of artistic sentiment among Americans.”12 Ruskin’s “prejudices” were linked to the American “disciples of the Pre-­R aphaelite school” and to the vast casualties of the war. Without the organ of The New Path and abandoned by their most prominent champion, Cook, the American Pre-­R aphaelites were effectively mute. Just months later, their exhibition at Yale would constitute a final collective attempt to resuscitate their reputation as “advocates of reform in America.”13 Though they derived great satisfaction from their transitory achievement of uniting their painting with Wight’s Gothic Revival structure in New Haven, any sense of triumph was haunted by their public and private association with Ruskin and his views. In a letter to Norton, written while their show was mounted in Street Hall, Ruskin turned on Norton’s “American friends,” whom he deemed unworthy of the example of Turner, and whose work he condemned as no better than daguerreotypes. “All my first work in Modern Painters, was to show that one must have nature to digest. Not chalk & water for milk. . . . and now a great deal of artists work—­done as they suppose, on my principles—­is merely gobbling up good food and polluting it a little and sending it out at the other end of them—­and asking the public to admire the faeces.”14 Associated with a purveyor of evil, their art analogized to excrement, few movements could survive the ferocity of such blows. The American Pre-­R aphaelites would scatter. Farrer sold the work that remained in his studio and returned to England in spring 1871. In the two decades that remained to him, he was “taken cordially in hand by Mr Ford Madox Brown, Mr Ruskin, Mr Morris and other leaders in that circle of painters, poets, and teachers,” and would execute paintings and etchings suffused with subtle tonal variations and a looser stroke, as seen in his Burnham Beeches (1874, fig. 109).15 He never achieved the prominence in Britain that he had briefly attained in the United States. Farrer’s brother, Henry, remained in the United States and became a leader of the American etching revival, diaphanous atmospheric effects permeating his landscapes. Richards enjoyed a lucrative career producing marine paintings in oil and watercolor. While the American Gothic Revival movement in architecture persisted through the 1880s, the Ruskinian manifestation propounded by Wight and Sturgis effectively ceased with their own contributions, as later architects building in the Gothic style diluted

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Fig. 109. Thomas Charles Farrer, Burnham Beeches, 1874. Watercolor and gouache on wove paper mounted on cardboard, 7 × 10 1/16 in. (17.8 × 25.6 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Ruskin’s teachings with those of Viollet-­le-­Duc. John William Hill, a generation older than his Association colleagues, was the lone member who refused to deviate from the still lifes, nature studies, and landscapes he had produced since the early days of American Pre-­R aphaelitism, persisting until his death in West Nyack in 1879. — The dissolution of the American Pre-­R aphaelite movement did not fully undermine all of its adherents’ commitment to its pictorial strategies. Instead, its mimetic protocols were repurposed to address new demands. The public had repudiated strict verisimilitude in the paintings they hung on the walls of their homes and galleries, and photography was often considered the apposite medium with which to capture and preserve vital elements and details of historical and contemporary life. But some Ruskinians understood that Pre-­R aphaelitism possessed distinct merits and could address alternative, specifically instrumentalist ends. While John Henry Hill’s watercolors for the Fortieth Parallel Survey perhaps best exemplify such instrumentalism, Moore and Newman applied many of its stylistic signatures to attain worthy and practical goals in the fields of pedagogy and historic preservation. Despite

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Ruskin’s disinheritance of his American followers in the late 1860s, his opinions and relationships remained in flux, and he resurrected friendships as they benefited him. In the latter 1870s, he recruited Newman to contribute paintings to his Guild of Saint George and traveled with Moore to assist in building a teaching collection for both the guild and the new art program that Moore and Norton were designing at Harvard. While the guild endeavored to inject a redemptive vision influenced by medieval values into contemporary British society, and included the purchase of land and the establishment of what has been described as a utopian community, Ruskin also founded St. George’s Museum in Sheffield, where working people could view art, geological and mineralogical specimens, and rare manuscripts culled from his own collection. Newman and Moore were the two American Pre-­R aphaelites among the artists whom Ruskin tasked with traveling through Europe making detailed watercolors of architecture and scenery that he believed would shortly be swept into oblivion. Ruskin had anticipated the dual trajectories of photography and painting in protecting the legacy of architectural forms that were being distorted and demolished literally as he drew them. As early as 1845 in Venice he lauded daguerreotypes as “glorious things,” with exceptional sensitivity to the nuances of light and an uncanny ability to register “every chip of stone & stain.”16 Yet Ruskin would ultimately become dissatisfied with photography’s limitations in recording the physical details, proportions, and irregularities necessary to safeguard his most precious concern: the preservation of civilization’s crowning achievements in art and architecture. “Fifteen years ago,” he wrote Julia Margaret Cameron in 1868, “I knew everything that the photograph could and could not do;—­I have long since ceased to take the slightest interest in it.”17 Instead, he would recommit to pencil and brush as the tools that could most truthfully capture the near ineffable splendors of the past. As Ruskin focused on his role as a social critic, the instrumental capacities of drawing rivaled its aesthetic function in his pantheon of cultural values. As he dedicated himself to assembling his collection of the most noble exemplars of European cultural expression, he understood the need to employ watercolorists whose vision and execution empowered them to translate aspects of paintings and buildings with the fidelity of draftsmanship and sensitivity to the chiaroscuro fundamental to powerful architectural forms. Upon meeting Moore and Newman in the late 1870s, he found artists whose Pre-­R aphaelite sensibilities, rigorous skills, and circumstances would make them perfect soldiers in his campaign to “hold fast to that which is good.”18 In 1877, Moore showed Ruskin a now-­unlocated watercolor by Newman of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, likely resembling a version painted in 1879, View of Santa Maria Novella (fig. 110). Ruskin’s admiration for the composition prompted him to write the artist: “I have not for many and many a day seen the sense of tenderness and depth of colour so united—­still less so much fidelity and affection joined with a power of design which seems to me, though latent, very great.”19 In the same letter, Ruskin commissioned his first drawing from Newman: “I wish you could do those

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Fig. 110. Henry Roderick Newman, View of Santa Maria Novella, 1879. Watercolor on paper, 17 ½ × 21 ½ in. (44.5 × 54.6 cm). Collection of the Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA.

three old arches, seen right in front on the left of the steps going up to Sta. M. Novella. If they are still uninjured and wear their weeds, there’s nothing lovelier in Florence.” Together, the subsequent The Three Arches of Santa Maria Novella (1877, fig. 111) and View of Santa Maria Novella register what the camera could not—­the polychrome striped inlay of white marble and green serpentine marble, quarried from nearby Prato. Newman records the rounded and pointed blind arches, each of which contains a tomb, the oculus window, and the painted lunettes, which collectively endow the church with the qualities of a jewel box. In both works Newman is as attentive to the striations and cracks of the building as he is to the shadows thrown onto both the façade and the surrounding square. In The Three Arches, an elderly figure reclines, a reminder that old Florence is near vanishing.

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Fig. 111. Henry Roderick Newman, The Three Arches of Santa Maria Novella, 1877. Watercolor and pencil, 16 ¾ × 20 ½ in. (42.5 × 52 cm). © The Ruskin –­Library, Museum and Research Centre, University of Lancaster, UK.

While Newman’s watercolors validated Ruskin’s confidence that Pre-­R aphaelitism could advance the noble purpose of preserving a crucial cultural legacy, Moore’s execution of similar subjects was primarily in the service of enlightened pedagogy. In 1871, at Norton’s invitation, Moore assumed the position of “Instructor in Freehand Drawing and Watercolor” at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. Like Yale’s Sheffield, Lawrence incorporated the study of drawing from nature into its curriculum. “I have not, thus far, had any very systematic plan of instruction; but have followed Mr. Ruskin’s teaching as far as I could,” Moore reported to Norton in 1873.20 Moore’s teaching philosophy was in contrast to many contemporary art programs in the country that centered on drawing from the nude model. After formally joining the Harvard College faculty in 1874, he made his first European trip to assemble a teaching collection. During Moore’s years with Ruskin, the men’s pedagogical and preservationist missions converged. The American made copies of Fra Angelico and Botticelli, objects in the British Museum, details of notable Gothic ornament, and Ruskin’s own drawings. Moore’s hand answered to Ruskin’s priorities. Old Doorway in Venice (1877, fig. 112),

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Fig. 112. Charles Herbert Moore, Old Doorway in Venice, 1877. Watercolor and white gouache over graphite on heavy off-­white wove paper, 15 7/16 × 11 3/16 in. (39.2 × 28.4 cm). Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum. Gift of Miss Elizabeth G. Norton in memory of Charles Eliot Norton and Charles Herbert Moore, 1957.127.

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described by Moore as a “study for color and chiaroscuro,” documents “the old masonry whose edges have been shaped and whose hues harmonized by time.”21 He distinguishes between materials as he would among flora—­stone and wood are precisely articulated, the bricks a dapple of tan, buff, burgundy, and pink. The reinforcing post, the plaster that fills the gaps left by lost stones, the algae collecting at its base, and the shifting water of the canal betray a structure aged yet vital. Highlighting the transition of his artistic practice from purely aesthetic to instrumentalist, Moore organized his European output into a catalogue of Studies and Fac-­similies from Examples of the works of Florence and Venice; and of Fac-­similies and Original Studies to be used as Exercises in Drawing (1878). Notes on his teaching philosophy were included, but his emphasis was on imparting the disciplined application of techniques with an intensity born of his own commitment to realism. Pre-­R aphaelitism’s laborious finish, on display in his European drawings, became a cornerstone of his curriculum, but harnessed to a practical pedagogy rather than a work of fine art to be sold. “The only perfect mode of representing the aspects of natural things . . . is by finished painting, which affords the utmost attainable means of expressing every visible quality.”22 Over a decade after the Association had ceased to operate as a cohesive movement, Moore remained faithful to the moral and aesthetic tenets of American Pre-­R aphaelitism: the artist’s “active attention to many of the most subtle principles of nature” was a binding obligation and “a means of culture in itself.”23 Other modes of instruction and painting, Moore cautions, “the various unfinished styles of modern painting,” “serve often only to gratify a false ambition, and to foster ocular obtuseness.”24 From agitating for liberation from normative visual hierarchies and originating a new style of representing the American landscape, Moore had turned to transmitting American Pre-­R aphaelitism’s egalitarian opticality to the next generation.

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Acknowledgments

Since my first encounter with American Pre-­R aphaelite watercolors at the New-­York Historical Society over a decade ago, numerous individuals have offered assistance, advice, and intellectual fellowship. Chief among them is Linda Ferber, who enthusiastically encouraged my study of the movement she resurrected in her own pioneering scholarship. I am grateful to her not only for opportunities to share my research in symposia and publications, but also for her formative support and gracious friendship. Tim Barringer and Jennifer Raab have served as mentors and sounding boards from this book’s earliest stages. Their own scholarship on politically engaged realism on both sides of the Atlantic has offered exacting models for my work. These chapters have been shaped and reshaped, the interpretations sharpened, and the stakes raised by our dialogue and their critique. Ned Cooke enriched my study of the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ interartistic endeavors and urged me to consider the Gothic Revival movement within global frameworks. Yale University, its Department of the History of Art, the Paul Mellon Centre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art have supported my research. I owe a debt to Sylvia Yount and Elizabeth Kornhauser and the staff in the Met’s American Wing for welcoming me during my year as Douglass Foundation Fellow in American Art. Private collectors and museum curators have generously made American Pre-­ Raphaelite works available for close study: Paul Worman in New York; Bernie and Jeanne Brown in Bolton Landing; Erica Hirshler at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Douglas McCombs at the Albany Institute of History and Art; and Gail Stavisky at

the Montclair Art Museum. My former colleagues at the New-­York Historical Society have extended unflagging support. I sincerely thank Margaret Hofer, Roberta Olson, Eleanor Gillers, Alexandra Krueger, and Alex Mazzitelli not only for their assistance with research, but also for their goodwill and good humor over many years. I completed this manuscript while working as a curatorial fellow at the Harvard Art Museums, where colleagues offered practical guidance and spirited intellectual exchange. I am grateful to Cassandra Albinson, Margaret Morgan Grasselli, Soyoung Lee, Elizabeth Rudy, Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Miriam Stewart, Martha Tedeschi, and Natalia Ángeles Vieyra. This book has benefited from fruitful conversations with many scholars. I thank Nancy Anderson, Esther Chadwick, David Peters Corbett, Abby Eron, Tricia Foley, Gillian Forrester, Kathleen Foster, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Margaret Laster, Ashley Lazevnick, Royal Leith, Amy Meyers, Mark Mitchell, Keely Orgeman, Martica Sawin, Janice Simon, Diane Waggoner, and Alan Wallach. I am also grateful to the anonymous readers of the manuscript. Michael Dosmann and Devika Jaikumar at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and Todd Forrest of the New York Botanical Garden assisted with plant identification in American Pre-­R aphaelite works. I was delighted to correspond with descendants of Thomas Charles Farrer—­ Elisar Cabrera, Christopher Kennedy, and Andrew Melville-­Smith—­who provided images, documents, and stories of their ancestor. Patricia Junker and Tom Parker generously shared in-­progress and unpublished papers. Nick and Mary Alexander, William Gibson, Ken and Jenny Jacobson, and Paul Worman have kindly allowed works from their collections to be illustrated in this book. Staff at archives and libraries in the United States and Britain have aided my research: the Concord Free Public Library; Cooper  Union  Archives and Special Collections; Crystal Bridges Library; Houghton Library at Harvard University; London Metropolitan Archives; Massachusetts Historical Society; National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum; New-­York Historical Society; New York State Library; Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago; Schaffer Library at Union College; Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; and the University of Manchester Library. Special thanks to Peter Blodgett at the Huntington Library, Melissa Bowling and James Moske at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, Celestina Cuadrado and Timothy DeWerff at the Century Association, Tal Nadan at the New York Public Library, Jerold Pepper at the Adirondack Museum, and Jim Stimpert at the Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University. Over the course of this project, I received invaluable feedback from copanelists and discussants while presenting versions of this material at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, the Dahesh Museum of Art, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and Yale University, as well as at CAA annual conferences. Sections of the introduction, chapter 2, and chapter 3 appeared in “Abolitionism and the American Pre-­R aphaelite Experiment,” in The

224

acknowledgments

American Pre-­Raphaelites: Radical Realists, edited by Linda S. Ferber and Nancy K. Anderson (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2019), and parts of the introduction and chapter 2 were published in “A Dissenting Realism: Style and Ideology in the American Pre-­R aphaelite Movement,” American Art 35, no. 3 (Fall 2021) © 2021 Smithsonian Institution. At Princeton University Press, I am grateful to Michelle Komie for her championing of this project, and to the hardworking and affable team who brought this book to fruition, Marcia Glass, Kenneth Guay, Lauren Lepow, Yve Ludwig, Dave Luljak, and Steve Sears. I extend my thanks to the Terra Foundation for American Art for awarding this book a publication grant. Friends in the field provided crucial comments on drafts of talks and essays, as well as moral support. I am particularly indebted to Nicholas Robbins, who offered incisive remarks on many sections of the manuscript, and whose own work on transatlantic artistic exchange has been integral to the development of this book’s argument. I have appreciated the camaraderie, intellectual and otherwise, of Nika Elder, Sara Frier, Meredith Gamer, Diana Seave Greenwald, Samuel Luterbacher, Laurel Peterson, Emily Sessions, and Shannon Vittoria. Another realm of gratitude is reserved for family. My grandparents fostered my devotion to art and artists; my sister buoyed me in meeting successes and setbacks; my mother cultivated my enduring bond to the Hudson; my father assumed vital roles of patient reader and astute critic; and Isaac delivered the restorative joys and steadying force of partnership.

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Notes

Abbreviations CCC Letters: Clarence Chatham Cook letters. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. CEN Papers: Charles Eliot Norton Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University. CHM Letters: Charles Herbert Moore letters. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. CK Papers: Clarence King Papers. The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. DCG Papers/JHU: Daniel Coit Gilman Papers. Special Collections, The Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University. DCG Papers/YU: Daniel Coit Gilman Papers (MS 582). Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. FA Collection: Ford Autograph Collection. Manuscripts and Archives Division. The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. JHH Diary: Diary of John Hill. Library, Adirondack Experience, the Museum on Blue Mountain Lake. JTG Papers: James Terry Gardiner Papers (SC11835a). Manuscripts and Special Collections, New York State Library. MMA Archives: Office of the Secretary Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives, New York. RWE Letters: Ralph Waldo Emerson Letters. Houghton Library, Harvard University. WJS Collection: William James Stillman Collection (WJS 295), Special Collections, Schaffer Library, Union College.

Introduction 1. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 117–­18. While many of the unsigned articles in The New Path include content that reveals the identity of their authors as members of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, “A Letter to a Subscriber” is the only piece in the journal to be signed “The ‘New Path’ ” and should thus be read as a collaborative and collective statement made by the Association. 2. Ibid., 118. 3. The minutes of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art list at least twenty-­five members who were elected into the Association or signed the group’s Articles of Organization between its founding on Jan-

uary 27, 1863, and its disbandment on March 29, 1864. See Minutes of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art ( January 27, 1863–­February 23, 1865), Peter Bonnett Wight Papers, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago. The New Path, however, continued to be published through December 1865. Peter Bonnett Wight’s The Development of New Phases of the Fine Arts in America (1884) records a reminiscence of the early days of the Association. In it, Wight recalls: “The original society numbered nineteen persons, mostly residing in New York and vicinity. But there were eleven subscribers to the publication fund who were not original members” (20–­21). Using either the contemporary account in the minutes or Wight’s later recollection, one can conclude that there were approximately thirty individuals directly involved in the activities of the Association in 1863 and 1864. 4. Sturgis, “Our ‘Articles’ Examined,” 6. 5. On occasion, the group also referred to itself as the “Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art,” a name that appears on some of the covers of The New Path journal. 6. “Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art,” 12. 7. The interrelationship of The New Path, The Crayon, and The Germ is discussed by Janice Simon in “The New Path 1863–­1865,” 113–­17. Simon has also authored the most comprehensive study of The Crayon: see Simon, “ ‘The Crayon’, 1855–­1861.” 8. Frederic George Stephens [ John Seward, pseu­ donym], “The Purpose and Tendency of Early Italian Art,” ed. William Michael Rossetti, The Germ 2 (February 1850): 58. 9. Thomas J. Tobin, “The Politics of Small Victorian Art Periodicals” (paper presented at Victorian Periodicals and Politics: The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Annual Meeting, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, September 2005), 4. 10. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 118. 11. “Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art,” 11–­12. 12. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 118; Wight, “What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done. I,” 52. 13. Wight, “What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done. I,” 52. 14. Prettejohn, The Art of the Pre-­Raphaelites, 242. 15. Angela Miller discusses how academic landscape conventions allowed American viewers to “rehearse the process of taking actual possession of the landscape” in The Empire of the Eye, 147–­54, quote at 148.

16. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 118. 17. Harvey, The Civil War and American Art, 17–­71. 18. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 118. 19. Cook, “The Work of the True and the False Schools,” 84; “Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art,” 11. 20. David C. Miller, “The Iconology of Wrecked or Stranded Boats in Mid to Late Nineteenth-­Century American Culture,” in Miller, American Iconology, 81. 21. Hudson River, Above Catskill is signed at the lower left, “C. H. M. 1865,” but an inscription on the tacking edge of the stretched canvas, otherwise concealed by the frame, reads “April.” This inscription suggests that Moore may have begun this work in April that year, following Lincoln’s assassination. 22. Patricia Junker, “Sacred to the Memory: Charles Herbert Moore, Thomas Cole, Abraham Lincoln” (article in preparation, 2021). My thanks to Patricia Junker for generously sharing her manuscript with me. 23. The works in which Farrer depicts John Brown and references other prominent abolitionists, including Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison, are discussed in chapter 2. 24. Hunt, Pre-­ Raphaelitism and the Pre-­ Raphaelite Brotherhood, 2:492. 25. Lionel, “The Artists’ Fund Society, Fourth Annual Exhibition,” 94. 26. “Spiritual obesity” was a phrase coined by Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–­1911), an American abolitionist and writer. See Butler, Critical Americans, 6. 27. Sturgis, “The Conditions of Art in America,” 16–­17. 28. Ruskin used the expression “the pure fact” in his chapter “Of the Pathetic Fallacy” in Modern Painters III (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 5:211–­12. 29. Ibid., 212. 30. Wight, “What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done. II,” 81. 31. Grace Glueck, “Art: The American Pre-­ Raphaelites,” New York Times, April 5, 1985, 24. 32. Ferber and Gerdts, The New Path, 9. 33. Kathleen Foster has more recently examined the American Pre-­R aphaelites’ influence on and participation in the American watercolor movement in American Watercolor in the Age of Homer and Sargent, 45–­57, 67–­74. 34. Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River School,” 20. 35. Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 65n1, 66; 244n3. 36. Ibid., 4. 37. Stebbins and Anderson, The Last Ruskinians, 9. 38. These artists include, among others, Harold Broadfield Warren, Joseph Lindon Smith, Martin Mower, and Denman Waldo Ross. See Stebbins and Ricci, “Biographies,” in The Last Ruskinians, 100–­101. 39. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 114. 40. Early in the war, exemptions could be purchased for three hundred dollars. After the exemption provision was repealed, drafted men could provide a substitute at their own cost. In New York, “the price of substitutes rapidly went beyond a thousand dollars.” See Johnson, A Short History of the War of Secession, 1861–­1865, 298. 41. Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 323–­26.

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42. Moore, “The Office of Imagination,” 80. 43. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 44. 44. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 27–­28. See also Bourdieu, Distinction, 316–­17. 45. Butler, Critical Americans, 2007; Dowling, Charles Eliot Norton; Rennella, The Boston Cosmopolitans. 46. Dowling describes efforts by scholars to characterize Norton as operating within the “genteel tradition,” the notion introduced by George Santayana in “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy” (1911), in The Genteel Tradition: Nine Essays, ed. Douglas L. Wilson (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 37–­64. See Dowling, xii–­xiv. Other works with similar characterizations of Norton include Van Wyck Brooks, The Dream of Arcadia: American Writers and Artists in Italy, 1760–­1915 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1958), 122–­34; Menand, The Metaphysical Club, 51–­52. 47. Hills, “The American Art-­Union as Patron for Expansionist Ideology in the 1840s,” 326. 48. Norton, “The New Path,” 303–­4. 49. Stillman, Autobiography, 141. 50. Dyson, The Last Amateur. 51. Farrer included the inscription “A lover of Ruskin sketched by Ruskin’s pupil” on his portrait John Henry Hill in the Studio Etching (1859, see fig. 70), and the nearly identical signature “A lover of Ruskin drawn by Ruskin’s pupil” on Portrait of John William Hill (c. 1859, New-­York Historical Society). 52. Haslam, “Looking, Drawing and Learning with John Ruskin at the Working Men’s College,” 66. 53. The Abolition Act of 1833 came into effect in 1834, with a transitional period leading to full emancipation in 1838. 54. Wight, “What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done. I,” 52. 55. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in Works of John Ruskin, 8:255. 56. “A Letter from Mr. Ruskin,” The New Path 1, no. 1 (May 1863): 9. 57. “Art in London,” New-­York Commercial Advertiser, July 6, 1861, 2. Reprinted in “A Letter from Mr. Ruskin,” The New Path, 9–­10. 58. “A Letter from Mr. Ruskin,” The New Path, 10. 59. Ruskin to Norton, October 24, 1858, in Bradley and Ousby, The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, 46–­47. 60. Ruskin, Unto This Last (1860), in Works of John Ruskin, 17:29–­30. 61. Ruskin, “Essays on Political Economy, being a sequel to papers which appeared in the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ ” Fraser’s Magazine, April 1863, 450. Republished in Ruskin, Munera Pulveris (1872), in Works of John Ruskin, 17:255–­56. 62. Ibid., 447, 448. (Munera Pulveris, 246, 247). 63. Ibid., 451. (Munera Pulveris, 246). 64. Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, 3–­35. 65. Stillman to William Michael Rossetti, June 16, 1863, in Rossetti, Rossetti Papers, 26. 66. Ruskin to Norton, February 10, 1863, in Brad-

ley and Ousby, The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, 75–­76. For a discussion of the Ruskin-­ Norton correspondence with regard to Ruskin’s statements on slavery and race, see Kaplan, Contraband Guides, 165–­79. 67. For discussions on the development of the label “Hudson River School,” see Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River School”; Burke and Voorsanger, “The Hudson River School in Eclipse”; Carr, “Initiating and Naming ‘The Hudson River School’ ”; and Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 3–­4, 76–­77. 68. “Introductory,” 3. 69. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 117–­18. 70. As art critic for the New-­York Tribune, Cook also used that platform to accuse “the regular Academicians” of assuming “a prescriptive right” “to exaggeration” and “over-­statement.” See Cook, “National Academy of Design: The Thirty-­Ninth Exhibition (Fifth Article)”; Cook, “The National Academy of Design: Forty-­ First Annual Exhibition.” By 1867, the establishment responded. The Round Table’s critic noted that “certain writers upon art matters . . . have a mission, which is to disparage the exhibitors whose pictures each succeeding season at the Academy of Design . . . have built up for American art a reputation already acknowledged.” He impugned “the Pre-­R aphaelite idea, which professes nature or nothing, that is at the bottom of all this.” See “Pictures at the National Academy,” The Round Table, April 27, 1867, 261. The precedent for such communal defensiveness had been set in 1848 when the academy was “entrusted the official guardianship of Cole’s legacy.” See Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 66. 71. See Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River School,” 3–­4; Worthington Whittredge, The Autobiography of Worthington Whittredge, 1820–­1910, ed. John I. H. Baur (Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1942), 54. Carr posits that the critic Montgomery Schuyler used the label “Hudson River School” for the first time in the New York World on July 24, 1876. See Carr, “Initiating and Naming,” 5–­6. 72. Lillie, “Two Phases of American Art,” 211, 213.

Chapter One. America’s First Pre-­R aphaelite: William James Stillman 1. Cook, “The Work of the True and False Schools,” 85. 2. Stillman, Autobiography, 140. 3. Simon has argued that “Ruskin and Emerson functioned as philosophical guides for the editors and major contributors” of The Crayon, in “ ‘The Crayon’, 1855–­1861,” 9. Karen Georgi has examined how Stillman contended with “Emerson’s and Ruskin’s respective understandings about the knowledge produced by visual perception” in painting the Philosopher’s Camp in the Adirondacks (1858, see fig. 13). See Georgi, “Summer Camp with William J. Stillman,” quote at 25. 4. Emerson, “Nature” (1836), in Essays and Lectures, 36. 5. Gura, Man’s Better Angels, 4. 6. Stillman, “John Ruskin,” 358. The piece is also reproduced in Stillman’s The Old Rome and the New, 92–­127.

7. Stillman, Autobiography, 130. 8. Stillman, “John Ruskin,” 357. 9. Stillman, Autobiography, 112. 10. Ibid., 116. 11. Stillman, “Extracts from Letters of a Tourist—­No. 3, July 8, 1850,” 1. 12. Stillman, “Extracts from Letters of a Tourist—­No. 2, March 14, 1850,” 1. 13. Stillman, Autobiography, 219–­20. 14. Ruskin to Stillman, December 26, 1850, WJS Collection. Also quoted in Stillman, “John Ruskin,” 365. 15. James John Garth Wilkinson, Emmanuel Swedenborg: A Biography (Boston: Otis Clapp, 1849), 86. Quoted in Gura, American Transcendentalism, 61. 16. Ruskin warned Stillman to “avoid German books.” Ruskin to Stillman, December 26, 1850, WJS Collection. Also quoted in Stillman, "John Ruskin," 365. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Harvey, The Painted Sketch, 35, 64–­65. 20. Stillman, Autobiography, 177. 21. Ibid., 178. 22. Stillman to Norton, April 3, 1859, CEN Papers. 23. Stillman, Autobiography, 140–­41. 24. Ruskin, Modern Painters I (1843), in Works of John Ruskin, 3:304. 25. Stillman, Autobiography, 197–­98. 26. Ruskin, Modern Painters I (1843), in Works of John Ruskin, 3:159. 27. Colbert, Haunted Visions, 108. 28. Ibid., 52. 29. Eight other located landscapes on view in 1855 at the National Academy include Church, The Cordilleras (1854, Private collection); Church, La Magdalena (1854, Private collection); Church, Tamaca Palms (1854, National Gallery of Art); Church, Tequendama Falls (1854, Cincinnati Art Museum); Cropsey, Morning (1854, Princeton University Art Museum); Durand, In the Woods (1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art); Gifford, A Sketch of Mount Chocorua (1854, Private collection); and John Frederick Kensett, An October Day in the White Mountains (1854, Cleveland Museum of Art). 30. Emerson, “Nature” (1836), in Essays and Lectures, 33. 31. Ibid. 32. The full title of the journal was The Crayon: A Journal Devoted to the Graphic Arts and the Literature Related to Them. 33. Stillman to Emerson, November 20, 1854, RWE Letters. 34. Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, 12. 35. Ruskin, Modern Painters I (1843), in Works of John Ruskin, 3:91. 36. Stillman to Emerson, November 20, 1854, RWE Letters. 37. Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, 47. The quotation from the book of Psalms is, “Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.” King James Bible, Psalm 42:7. Ruskin, too, would use the biblical phrase in Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:121.

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38. Harvey, Transatlantic Transcendentalism, 110. 39. Stillman, “Dii Majores Ac Minores,” The Crayon 2, no. 26 (December 26, 1855): 399. 40. Stillman, “Individuality in Art,” The Crayon 1, no. 8 (February 21, 1855): 113. Karen Georgi discusses the criticism that Stillman authored in The Crayon that is distinctly inflected by his reading of Ruskin. See Georgi, Critical Shift, 76–­91. 41. Stillman, “Artistic Licenses,” The Crayon 1, no. 17 (April 25, 1855): 257–­58. 42. Stillman to Norton, July 2, 1855, CEN Papers. 43. Ibid. 44. Stillman to Norton, August 9, 1855, CEN Papers. 45. Until recent decades, Mount Chocorua was known as “Distant Peak,” dated 1861. Richard Dort Bullock believed it to be a view in France, a misidentification that linked it to Stillman’s travel in that country and enthusiasm for Barbizon painters, especially Rousseau, Millet, and Troyon. See Bullock, “William James Stillman,” 290. 46. A selection of paintings of Mount Chocorua by these artists in institutional collections includes Cole, Lake Winnepesaukee (1827, Albany Institute of History and Art); Cole, Landscape Scene from The Last of the Mohicans (1827, Fenimore Art Museum); Cole, The Garden of Eden (1828, Amon Carter Museum, see fig. 27); Cole, Autumn Twilight, View of Corway Peak [Mount Chocorua] (1834, New-­York Historical Society, see fig. 11); Cole, Corway Peak, New Hampshire (1844, Maier Museum of Art); Cole, The Hunter’s Return (1845, Amon Carter Museum); Cropsey, Mt. Chocorua and Railroad Train, New Hampshire (1869, Department of State); Durand, Chocorua Peak (1855, RISD Museum); Kensett, October Day in the White Mountains (1854, Cleveland Museum of Art). 47. Stillman to Norton, August 31, 1855, CEN Papers. 48. Stillman to Norton, July 2, 1855, CEN Papers. 49. Stillman, “Sketchings,” The Crayon 1, no. 13 (March 28, 1855): 203. 50. McGrath, Gods in Granite, 33. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 37. 53. Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 5:208. 54. Ibid., 125. 55. Of the six unlocated paintings by Stillman listed in the 1857 entry of the Exhibition of the National Academy 1861–­1900, vol. 2, two depict the White Mountains (On Kearsarge Brook, North Conway and The Stepping-­ Stones, Kearsarge Brook, N[orth] Conway), two upstate New York (View on Tuppers Lake, Adirondack Wilds and Reminiscence of the Mohawk); the generality of the final two titles, Early Twilight and Night-­Fall in the Wilderness, does not indicate the geographic areas they depict. 56. “Exhibition of the National Academy,” New York Daily Times, June 20, 1857, 4; John Durand, “Sketchings,” The Crayon 4, no. 7 ( July 1857): 222. 57. “The National Academy Exhibition,” New York Daily Times, May 27, 1857, 2. For a discussion of The Andes of Ecuador, and, in particular, how it reflects the

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cosmology of Alexander von Humboldt by generalizing particular facts, see Raab, Frederic Church, 45–­63. 58. Emerson, “Art” (1841), in Essays and Lectures, 437. 59. Stillman to Norton, February 17, 1860, CEN Papers. 60. Stillman, “Art as a Record,” 43. 61. “The Essential Difference between the True and the Popular Art Systems,” The New Path 2, no. 3 ( July 1864): 34–­35. 62. Several scholars have dated “The Subjective of It” to 1898 because of its inclusion in Stillman’s collection of essays, The Old Rome and the New, published that year. See Bullock, “William James Stillman,” 121; Everson, “William J. Stillman,” 43; Campbell and MacManus, “Illustrated Picturesquely,” 7. The misconception that “The Subjective of It” was a memoir piece, when it was first published in 1858 in the Atlantic Monthly, has prevented Stillman’s essay from having been used to adduce evidence of his most intentional effort to synthesize Transcendentalism and Spiritualism in the wake of his early disaffection with the Ruskinian project. 63. Stillman, “The Subjective of It,” 852. 64. Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 5:201. 65. Stillman, “The Subjective of It,” 851. 66. Ibid., 853. 67. Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 5:205. 68. Stillman, “The Subjective of It,” 852. 69. Stillman to Norton, September 1857, CEN Papers. 70. Emerson, Complete Works: Poems, 463. 71. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Footpaths,” Atlantic Monthly 26, no. 157 (November 1870): 518–­19; Wendell P. Garrison, “William James Stillman,” Century Illustrated Magazine 46, no. 5 (September 1893): 656. 72. Clarence Cook, “The Fine Arts. Art in Philadelphia,” New-­York Tribune, May 22, 1867, 2. The last recorded location of Stillman’s painting was in 1876, when it sold for fifty dollars at the Mathews Art Gallery in New York—­an unceremonious outcome for “one of his greatest works.” See “Fine Arts,” New York Herald, March 4, 1876, 6. Bullock asserted that the Athenaeum held the painting in its collection until it was sold on December 16, 1924, citing Athenaeum records. See Bullock, “William James Stillman,” 122, 275, 294. James Schlett, however, writes, “The Athenaeum purchased the painting in 1859, but it had disappeared from the library’s collection by 1870.” See Schlett, A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden, 70, 217. 73. F. S. Stallknecht and C. E. Whitehead, “Sporting Tour in August, 1858,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, November 13, 1858, 336–­49. 74. Georgi, “Summer Camp with William J. Stillman.” Georgi argues that The Philosophers’ Camp offers an opportunity to examine how “Ruskin and Emerson pulled Stillman in opposite directions” (33). While she deems Stillman’s near-­contemporary essay “The Subjective of It” a primarily Emersonian document, Georgi suggests that Stillman’s painting “displays much of [his] Ruskinian approach to nature” (31–­32). Eleanor Jones

Harvey, by contrast, has argued that The Philosophers’ Camp is informed by Emerson’s worldview, “deeply inflected by decades of studying” the writings of naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. See Harvey, Alexander von Humboldt, 360–­62. 75. Stillman, Autobiography, 256. 76. Schlett, A Not Too Greatly Changed Eden, 85. 77. Stillman, Autobiography, 256. 78. Stillman to Norton, October 6, 1858, CEN Papers. 79. Ibid. 80. Emerson, “The Adirondacs: A Journal. Dedicated to my Fellow-­Travellers in August, 1858,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: The Major Poetry, 155. 81. The clause “to people it if even with shadows” did not appear in the original publication of “The Subjective of It” in the Atlantic Monthly in 1858. Stillman added the clause to the essay in 1898 when he republished it in The Old Rome and the New, 233. 82. Stillman exhibited for the last time at the National Academy of Design in 1859. Though he occasionally painted after 1860, he did not consider himself a professional painter. Occasional works produced in England and Europe after 1860 are noted in Elliott, A Pre-­Raphaelite Marriage. 83. Stillman’s photographic output is discussed in Bohrer, “Fixing the Acropolis”;  Edwards, “An ‘Ever-­ Recurring Controversy’ ”; Ehrenkranz, Poetic Localities; Lindquist-­Cock, “Stillman, Ruskin & Rossetti”; Campbell and MacManus, “Illustrated Picturesquely”; Simon, “William J. Stillman’s Photographic Turn”; Szegedy-­Maszak, “An American on the Acropolis”; Szegedy-­Maszak, “Athens”; Waggoner, “ ‘The Perfect Observance of Truth,’ ” 95–­104; Waggoner et al., East of the Mississippi, 98–­102, 197–­98. 84. Stillman, “Sketchings,” The Crayon 1, no. 7 (February 14, 1855): 107. 85. [William J. Stillman and John Durand], “Prospectus of Second Volume,” The Crayon 1, no. 26 ( June 27, 1855): 416. 86. Simon, “William J. Stillman’s Photographic Turn,” 99. 87. Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, 20. 88. Simon, “William J. Stillman’s Photographic Turn,” 110. 89. Emerson, “Nature,” in Essays and Lectures, 18. 90. Eleanor Jones Harvey notes that Durand’s studies from nature often varied in level of finish. Those that display a more polished finish were frequently exhibited in the sketch room at the National Academy of Design. See Harvey, The Painted Sketch, 35, 65, 138, 141. Rebecca Bedell adds that Durand’s nature studies were “finished, exhibitable, saleable works.” See Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature, 47–­49. 91. Stillman, Autobiography, 167. 92. Ibid., 167–­68. 93. Ibid., 168. 94. Kennel, “An Infinite Museum,” 159. 95. “The Edinburgh Photographic Society Exhibition,’’ Caledonian Mercury, January 2, 1857. 96. Kennel, “An Infinite Museum,” 158.

97. Emerson, “The Transcendentalist. A Lecture Read in the Masonic Temple, Boston, January, 1842,” in Essays and Lectures, 196; Smith, Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry, 28. 98. John Brett’s Val d’Aosta marked a turning point in Ruskin’s relationships with both Brett and Stillman. Ruskin purchased Val d’Aosta from Brett at the end of 1859, just weeks before Stillman arrived in London. It would likely have been one of the first paintings Ruskin showed to Stillman at Denmark Hill. Ruskin had felt compelled to purchase the painting when it went unsold at both the Royal Academy and Liverpool Academy exhibitions in 1859, given the amount of direction he had imposed on Brett during the summer of 1858 in the region of St. Pierre in the Italian Alps. The tension caused by their collaboration, in addition to the negative reviews Val d’Aosta received, led to a cooling in Brett and Ruskin’s relationship. Shortly after Ruskin took possession of Brett’s work, he turned his attention to cultivating his friendship with Stillman and would begin planning their own joint trip to the Alps the following summer. On Brett and Ruskin, see Hickox, “John Brett and Ruskin”; Staley, The Pre-­Raphaelite Landscape, 174–­81. 99. John Everett Millais to Martha Combe, July 2, 1851, in Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 116. 100. Stillman to Norton, March 27, 1860, and July 29, 1860, CEN Papers. 101. Several studies have overlooked Stillman’s presence on Ruskin’s trip to Switzerland in 1860. In the time line included in John Ruskin: Artist and Observer, the entry for 1860 begins, “From May until August he [Ruskin] travels alone to Savoy and Switzerland.” See “Chronology,” in Newell, John Ruskin: Artist and Observer, 367. In the most comprehensive account of this topic by John Hayman, every trip by Ruskin to Switzerland is listed with the exception of his 1860 sketching journey with Stillman. See Hayman, John Ruskin and Switzerland. By contrast, Timothy Hilton mentions the trip and Stillman’s presence on it in his John Ruskin, 298. 102. Stillman, Autobiography, 106. 103. Ruskin, Praeterita (1885), in Works of John Ruskin, 35:483. 104. Stillman, Autobiography, 309. 105. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:456. For a discussion of Ruskin’s collaboration with Frederick Crawley, including his daguerreotypes of 1854 to 1856, as well as his time in Fribourg that decade, see Jacobson and Jacobson, Carrying Off the Palaces, 83–­128, 312–­18. 106. Newall, John Ruskin: Artist and Observer, 160. 107. Stillman, Autobiography, 309. 108. In 1880, Ruskin republished the 1857 lectures, The Political Economy of Art, with additions, as A Joy For Ever. 109. Ruskin, “A Joy For Ever” Being the Substance (with Additions) of Two Lectures on the Political Economy of Art (1857, 1880), in Works of John Ruskin, 16:24. 110. Ibid. 111. Stillman, Autobiography, 310.

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112. Ruskin, The Poetry of Architecture (1836), in Works of John Ruskin, 1:31, 37–­38. 113. Stillman, Autobiography, 331. 114. Stillman to Norton, July 12, 1861, CEN Papers. 115. Stillman, Autobiography, 332. 116. Stillman to William Michael Rossetti, June 16, 1863, in Rossetti, Rossetti Papers, 26. 117. The attribution to Stillman of these pieces further supports the linkage between Stillman and the Association. The articles were signed “J.S.,” consistent with the convention of signing articles with initials that many contributors employed throughout the journal’s two-­year run. David Dickason and Stephanie Wiles also consider “J.S.” to be Stillman. See Wiles, “Between England and America,” 53–­54 and Dickason, The Daring Young Men, 53. Additional contextual evidence establishes Stillman as the author. For example, in “Art as a Record,” the author underscores his relationships with important figures of the day, “Emerson, Lowell, Whittier, Holmes, Longfellow, Bryant,” individuals with whom Association members were not acquainted, but whom Stillman knew well. He also cites an unpublished poem by his “friend” Oliver Wendell Holmes that the poet had shared with him. Further evidence is offered in “Naturalism and Genius,” when Stillman describes the Aiguilles Rouges region in Switzerland that he had visited with Ruskin three years earlier. See Stillman, “Naturalism and Genius,” 66. 118. Stillman, “Art as a Record,” 37. 119. Ibid., 38, 40. 120. Ibid., 40–­41. 121. Ibid., 37. 122. Stillman, “Naturalism and Genius,” 64. 123. Cook, “The Work of the True and False Schools,” 85. 124. Farrer, “A Few Questions Answered,” 13. 125. Cook to Farrer, May 31, 1862, CCC Letters. 126. Cook, “National Academy of Design: The Thirty-­ Ninth Exhibition (Fifth Article).”

Chapter Two. The American Pre-­R aphaelite Landscape and Thomas Charles Farrer 1. Cole’s paintings of the Catskills were compared to two paintings of the region by Farrer, including A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm, in Cook, “National Academy of Design: The Thirty-­Ninth Exhibition (Fifth Article).” Cole’s work was compared to that of the American Pre-­Raphaelite painters in Cook, “The National Academy of Design: Forty-­First Annual Exhibition.” 2. Farrer’s training with Ruskin and Rossetti at the Working Men’s College has been noted in Dickason, The Daring Young Men, 84; Wiles, “Between England and America,” 12–­15; Ferber and Gerdts, The New Path, 16, 60, 62, 91. Farrer’s enrollment is listed in the college’s ledger and registry books, 1854–­1871, Working Men’s College Papers, London Metropolitan Archives. 3. Haslam, “Looking, Drawing and Learning with John Ruskin at the Working Men’s College,” 66. 4. Langley, “What Is the Use of It?,” 137. 5. Government Schools’ administrators used the

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expression “from the flat” to distinguish between copying exercises from a flat page and those from a three-­ dimensional plaster cast. Charles Heath Wilson, named director of the institution in 1843, used the phrase that year when describing its elementary drawing curriculum in the Third Report of the Council of the School of Design, for the Year 1843–­4 (London: William Clowes and Sons, 1844), 9. Redgrave differentiated between exercises “from the flat” and “from the round” in his National Course of Instruction for Government Schools of Art in Britain in 1852. 6. Langley, “What Is the Use of It?,” 138. 7. Miller, Empire of the Eye, 66–­67; “ ‘The Brushes He Painted with That Last Day Are There . . .’: Jasper F. Cropsey’s Letter to His Wife, Describing Thomas Cole’s Home and Studio, July, 1850,” American Art Journal 16, no. 3 (1984): 81; Gifford Memorial Meeting of the Century. Friday Evening, Nov. 19, 1880 (New York: Century Rooms, 1880), 34. 8. Myers, The Catskills, 168. 9. The sketch of the raspberry bush branch is inscribed and signed at lower right: “For Mrs. Cole. / C.H.M.” Three oil paintings by Moore that represent Cole’s house and studio include Thomas Cole’s Studio (1862, Private collection); Untitled Landscape with Thomas Cole’s First Studio (c. 1862, Thomas Cole National Historic Site); and Thomas Cole’s Cedar Grove (1868, Thomas Cole National Historic Site). 10. Lionel, “The Artists’ Fund Society, Fourth Annual Exhibition,” 98. 11. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design.” 12. For an examination of the Government Schools of Design, see Bell, The Schools of Design; Frayling, The Royal College of Art, 35; Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education; Quinn, Utilitarianism and the Art School. 13. Denis, “An Industrial Vision: The Promotion of Technical Drawing in Mid-­Victorian Britain.” For further discussions of the curricula at the Government Schools of Design, see Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty; Conforti, “The Idealist Enterprise and the Applied Arts.” 14. Redgrave, “Importance of the Study of Botany to the Ornamentist,” 150. 15. Incomplete and undated address, c. 1863, Thomas Charles Farrer folder, FA Collection. 16. Redgrave, “An Introductory Address on the Methods Adopted by the Department of Practical Art, to impart instruction in art to all classes of the community,” in Cole and Redgrave, Addresses of the Superintendents of the Department of Practical Art, 62. 17. Richard Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of Painters of the English School, 544–­64; quoted in Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 237–­38. 18. Incomplete and undated address, c. 1863, Thomas Charles Farrer folder, FA Collection. 19. Ibid. 20. The endeavor was led by Frederick Denison Maurice, an Anglican clergyman and a professor at the new King’s College, London, along with John Mal-

colm Ludlow, Thomas Hughes, John Westlake, John Llewelyn Davies, Richard Litchfield, and Frederick J. Furnivall. 21. Ruskin, Time and Tide (1867), in Works of John Ruskin, 17:397. 22. Cockram, Ruskin and Social Reform, 18–­21. 23. Ruskin, Furnivall, and Wise, Two Letters Concerning “Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds,” 13. The subtitle of the pamphlet distributed at the Working Men’s College, and herein of the true functions of the Workman in Art, did not appear in the original publication of The Stones of Venice. It is believed that Furnivall added it when distributing the pamphlet at the college, although the words may have been Ruskin’s. See Ray Watkinson, “The Obstinate Refusers: Work in  News From Nowhere,” in Coleman and O’Sullivan,  William Morris & News from Nowhere, 192n17. 24. Ruskin, “A Joy For Ever” Being the Substance (with Additions) of Two Lectures on the Political Economy of Art (1857, 1880), in Works of John Ruskin, 16:35. 25. Farrer’s childhood address, 22 Gresse Street, is listed on his birth certificate, included in the appendix of Wiles, “Between England and America,” 374. 26. Harrison, A History of the Working Men’s College, 49–­50. 27. Cook, “Farrer (Thomas Charles).” 28. Harrison, A History of the Working Men’s College, 58. 29. Emslie, “Art Teaching in Early Days,” 41–­42. 30. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing (1857), in Works of John Ruskin, 15:13–­14. 31. Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 226, 228. 32. Ibid., 227. 33. Ruskin, Fors Clavigera, vol. 3 (1877), in Works of John Ruskin, 29:154. 34. Ruskin, memorandum (1859) preserved by F. J. Furnivall, quoted in Edward Tyas Cook, The Life of John Ruskin, vol. 1 (London: George Allen & Co., 1911), 391; Ruskin, Appendices, “Religious Art” (1860), in Works of John Ruskin, 16:471. 35. Haslam, “Looking, Drawing and Learning,” 66; Quinn, Utilitarianism and the Art School, 67–­95. 36. Mahoney, “Work, Lack, and Longing.” 37. Rossetti, February 1859, in Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1:348–­49. 38. Quoted in Emslie, “Art Teaching in Early Days,” 44. 39. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design.” 40. Farrer, “A Few Questions Answered,” 14–­15. 41. Ibid., 15. 42. See Boime, “William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Scapegoat’ ”; Landow, William Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism. For Ruskin and typology, see Finley, Nature’s Covenant; Frost, The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George. 43. Gosse, The Aquarium, 124. For a discussion of Gosse and typology in Victorian England, see Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, 77–­91. 44. Farrer, “A Few Questions Answered,” 13, 14. 45. Ibid., 14. 46. Gilmor to Cole, December 13, 1826. “Correspon-

dence between Thomas Cole and Robert Gilmor, Jr.,” in Merritt, Studies on Thomas Cole, an American Romanticist, 45. 47. Cole to Gilmor, May 21, 1828. Ibid., 58. 48. Kelly and Barry, Thomas Cole’s Paintings of Eden, 25. 49. E. Anna Lewis, “Art and Artists of America: Thomas Cole. N.A.,” Graham’s Magazine 46, no. 4 (April 1855): 336. 50. “The Artists of America: Thomas Cole,” The Crayon 7, no. 2 (February 1860): 45–­46. 51. See Smith, “Salvation,” in Barringer, Rosenfeld, and Smith, Pre-­Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-­Garde, 114–­15. 52. Farrer, “A Few Questions Answered,” 15. 53. Millais, The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, 350. 54. Ibid., 148. 55. Gone! Gone! is close in composition to another British painting of the period, Thoughts of the Past, by John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (Tate), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859. Farrer may have also seen this painting in London. See May Brawley Hill, “Gone! Gone!” [catalogue entry], in Ferber and Gerdts, The New Path, 162. 56. W., “Sketchings,” The Crayon 8, no. 4 (April 1861): 94. Evening Thoughts is discussed by Wiles in “Between England and America,” 42–­43, 410–­11. 57. Ford, Ford Madox Brown: A Record of His Life and Work, 184, 314. 58. Ferber, “John Brown’s Grave,” 77. Farrer pictured a third contemporary abolitionist in Captain Cabot Russel, Fifty-­fourth Massachusetts Regiment, Killed at Fort Wagner (1864, unlocated), with a portrait of William Garrison hanging on the wall in the background. The Fifty-­Fourth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry was the first regiment of Black soldiers organized in the Union army, commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, scion of a Boston abolitionist family. Both Shaw and Russel were killed at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner on July 18, 1863. 59. Louisa Cook to Farrer, May 18, 1861, CCC Letters. 60. Wingate, History of the Twenty-­Second Regiment, 34–­35. 61. Alonzo Quint, chaplain of the Second Massachusetts Regiment volunteers, quoted in Frye, Harpers Ferry under Fire, 30. 62. Farrer to Samuel P. Avery, undated [summer 1862], FA Collection. 63. Wingate, History of the Twenty-­Second Regiment, 52. 64. Sturgis, “National Academy of Design—­Fortieth Annual Exhibition,” 93. 65. Dowling, Charles Eliot Norton, 40. 66. Norton purchased Elizabeth Siddal’s Clerk Saunders (1857, see fig. 44) and Ruskin’s Fragment of the Alps (1854–­56, see fig. 45) from the Exhibition of English Art in New York and Boston in 1857 and 1858. See ibid., 30. 67. Norton to Rossetti, August 24, 1863, in Rossetti, Rossetti Papers, 30. 68. Ruskin to Norton, August 6, 1864; Ruskin to Norton, February 10, 1863, in Bradley and Ousby, The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, 75, 81.

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69. Kaplan discusses the breach in the Ruskin-­Norton friendship, as well as its aftereffects once the men had resumed their correspondence, in Contraband Guides, 165–­79. 70. “A Letter to a Subscriber,” 114. 71. Ibid., 113. 72. Ibid., 119. 73. “ ‘The Builder’ versus ‘The New Path,’ ” The New Path 2, no. 7 ( July 1865): 119–­20. 74. Cook to Farrer, July 11, 1864, CCC Letters; Moore to Farrer, April 25, 1864, CHM Letters. 75. Farrer married Anne Richards McLane Farrer (1836–­1933) in 1864. Anne joined the Association in March 1863, when seven women were nominated for membership, though no paintings or drawings by her are located. 76. Joseph Bement to Norton, November 15, 1866, CEN Papers. 77. “Art Matters,” New York Times, April 3, 1867, 8. 78. Deborah Chotner, “Mount Tom” [catalogue entry], in Kelly, American Masters from Bingham to Eakins: The John Wilmerding Collection, 64. 79. Macdonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education, 236. 80. Farrer likely saw The Oxbow in 1862 at the Artists’ Fund Society. Cole’s painting, exhibited for the fourth time since 1836, received a celebratory review and was held up as evidence that “Nature [had] made Cole a Poet.” See “The Artists’ Fund Society,” The Albion, A Journal of News, Politics and Literature 40 (November 23, 1862): 40, 47. 81. Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” 81. 82. Cole’s tracing has been discussed in multiple essays on The Oxbow. See Roque, “The Oxbow by Thomas Cole”; and Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke.” 83. Hoppin, “Depicting Mount Holyoke,” 34–­35. 84. Wright, “Suburban Prospects,” 185–­93. 85. Wallach, “Making a Picture of the View from Mount Holyoke,” 83; Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/Knowledge; Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. 86. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 18. 87. “The Northampton Hospital and Its New Superintendent,” Springfield Republican, July 9, 1864, 2. Nineteenth-­century American asylum design, the role played by institutions’ natural surroundings in promoting recovery, and contemporary tourist interest in places of healing are discussed in Sears, Sacred Places, 89–­99. For a discussion of the nineteenth-­century belief in the therapeutic efficacy of nature studies and landscape painting, see Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature, 55–­58. 88. Tenth Annual Report of the Trustees of the State Lunatic Hospital at Northampton, October, 1865 (Boston: Wright & Potter, 1865), 14. 89. In 1862 the American Traveller reported that the Taunton Hospital for the Insane had received new patients suffering from a “new cause”: “Excitement of Camp.” “Insanity in Massachusetts: Remarkable Cases

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in Boston,” American Traveller, January 11, 1862, 2. For an examination of post-­traumatic stress disorder in soldiers during and following the Civil War, see Michael Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 108–­33; 200–­201; and Eric T. Dean, Shook over Hell: Post-­Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 90. Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, “Manifesto for an American Sublime: Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow,” in Kornhauser and Barringer, Thomas Cole’s Journey, 63–­ 95. Scholars have long regarded Durand’s Progress as a bald expression of nationalist aspirations, a painting that unquestionably praises American civilization’s conquest over virgin forests. Rebecca Bedell has persuasively revised this interpretation, demonstrating that Durand’s work, executed on commission for Charles L. Gould, a businessman in the railroad and mining industries, captures the artist’s anxiety around the commercial expansion endorsed by his patron. See Bedell, “Asher Durand’s Progress Reconsidered.” 91. Paraphrasing Psalm 147:3, Abraham Lincoln wrote in his second inaugural address (March 4, 1865) of the work that would have to be done to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” Abraham Lincoln Papers, series 3: General Correspondence, 1837 to 1897, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

Chapter Three. Architects of Reform: Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis, Jr. 1. Wight to Farrer, August 11, 1863, FA Collection. 2. Sturgis, “Our ‘Articles’ Examined,” 4, 5. 3. “Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art,” 11. 4. Wight, “What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done. I,” 52. 5. Norton, “Wight’s National Academy of Design,” 586. 6. Ibid., 587. 7. “Our Artists and Their Critics,” 3, 4. 8. Wight, “Reminiscences of Russell Sturgis,” 123. 9. William Charles Gilman to Daniel Coit Gilman, undated, Box 3, Folder 179, DCG Papers/YU. Wight, Sturgis, and William Gilman studied with same drawing master, Paul Duggan, an associate member of the National Academy of Design. 10. William Charles Gilman to Daniel Coit Gilman, August 10, 1862, Box 3, Folder 179, DCG Papers/YU. 11. Eugene Schuyler was among the first three students to earn a doctor of philosophy degree at Yale, awarded by the Sheffield Scientific School, in 1861. While the title of his dissertation is unknown, his field of specialty was “Philosophy and Psychology.” According to Ralph P. Rosenberg, Schuyler “took final examinations for the doctorate in such heterogeneous subjects as political science, metaphysics, Greek, modern languages, and botany.” See Rosenberg, “Eugene Schuyler’s Doctor of Philosophy Degree: A Theory Concerning the Dissertation” Journal of Higher Education 33, no. 7 (October 1962): 381–­86, quote at 382.

12. Though William Gilman was one of the leading collectors of American Pre-­Raphaelite painting, his criminal activity of the 1870s also contributed to the movement’s fall into obscurity. In 1877, a story broke that captivated the nation. A seller of insurance scrip, William designed a Ponzi-­style scheme that involved forging checks, resulting in his loss of over a quarter million dollars of his clients’ money. Sentenced to five years in state prison, he was transported to Sing Sing. In the days before and after William’s trial, the contents of his home and office were seized as part of forced bankruptcy proceedings. On January 16, 1878, his art collection—­composed almost entirely of American Pre-­Raphaelite paintings—­was auctioned by Leavitt Auctioneers. The sale included watercolors and oils by Thomas Farrer (24 works), Henry Farrer (1 work), John William Hill (15 works), Charles Herbert Moore (5 works), and Henry Roderick Newman (4 works). There is little trace of the disposition of his extensive collection, which included masterpieces of American Pre-­Raphaelite art, many of which had been on view at the inaugural exhibition at Street Hall. A few of Gilman’s works have made their way to public and private collections in the past half century, including Moore’s  Snow Squall (1865–­66, Princeton University Art Museum, see fig. 106), Farrer’s  Twilight  (c. 1864, MFA, Boston), Farrer’s  Mount Tom (1865, National Gallery of Art, see fig. 36), and Farrer’s June (1867, Private collection); most remain unlocated.  Perhaps their provenances’ taint by association with William Gilman contributed to their virtual disappearance; certainly the loss of this cache of works diminished an appreciation of the impact of American Pre-­Raphaelitism as histories of American landscape painting were written in the twentieth century. 13. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851), in Works of John Ruskin, 9:196. 14. Dowling, Charles Eliot Norton, 24. 15. Sturgis, “Our ‘Articles’ Examined,” 7. 16. Cockram, Ruskin and Social Reform, 18–­21. 17. Sturgis, “An Important Gothic Building,” 26; Wight, National Academy of Design, 6. 18. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851), in Works of John Ruskin, 9:291. 19. Brooks, The Gothic Revival, 175–­76. 20. Marsh, The Goths in New-­England, 10. 21. Ibid., 14. 22. Sturgis to Norton, June 2, 1863, CEN papers. 23. Norton, “The Oxford Museum,” 769. 24. Norton, “The New Path.” The notion that American art was in need of redemption had been asserted the previous decade on the pages of The Crayon, which, as Simon has argued, “championed art and criticism as necessary balms for a distressed nation.” See Simon, “ ‘The Crayon’, 1855–­1861,” 75–­197, quote at 75; and Simon, “Imaging a New Heaven on a New Earth.” 25. Norton to Sturgis, quoted in Moore to Farrer, August 7, 1864, CHM Letters. 26. On Norton’s purchases from the Exhibition of English Art, see Dowling, Charles Eliot Norton, 30. The exhibition was planned to conclude in Washington, DC, but it is unclear whether the show was mounted in

the capital. See Susan Casteras, “The 1857–­58 Exhibition of English Art in America and Critical Responses to Pre-­R aphaelitism,” in Ferber and Gerdts, The New Path, 112. On Norton’s acquisition of prints after Turner, see Cohn, “Turner, Ruskin, Norton, Winthrop,” 14–­17. On Norton lending Rossetti’s Before the Battle to Moore, see Mather, Charles Herbert Moore, 24. 27. Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, 101. 28. Ibid., 102–­3. 29. Ibid., 105. 30. Norton, “The Oxford Museum,” 769. 31. Ibid. 32. Norton, “Emancipation in the Middle Ages.” 33. Ruskin, “Mr. Ruskin’s Second Letter,” in Acland and Ruskin, The Oxford Museum, 90, 104. 34. Norton, “The Oxford Museum,” 768. 35. Ibid., 767. 36. Ruskin, “Mr. Ruskin’s First Letter,” in Acland and Ruskin, The Oxford Museum, 50–­51. 37. Shaffer, “Ruskin, Norton, and Memorial Hall,” 215. 38. “The National Academy of Design,” Harper’s Weekly, June 3, 1865, 348. 39. Wight, National Academy of Design, 9. 40. Richards, The National Academy of Design, 47. 41. Wight unsuccessfully attempted to secure a position as a voluntary military engineer at the start of the war. See Landau, P. B. Wight, 15. He also managed to avoid the draft, likely by paying the three-­hundred-­ dollar commutation fee. 42. Wight to Gilman, May 4, 1864, and June 14, 1864. Box 1-­54, Folder 3, DCG Papers/JHU. 43. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in Works of John Ruskin, 8:258. 44. Lewis, The Gothic Revival, 98. 45. Sturgis, “An Important Gothic Building,” 17–­18. 46. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in Works of John Ruskin, 8:80. 47. Landau, P. B. Wight, 19. 48. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in Works of John Ruskin, 8:180. 49. Landau, P. B. Wight, 19. 50. Wight, National Academy of Design, 9. 51. Sturgis, “National Academy of Design—­Fortieth Annual Exhibition,” 83. 52. Richards, The National Academy of Design, 46. The practice of funding a construction with multiple private donations from community members also dated to the Middle Ages. In 1842, a project was undertaken to complete the Cologne Cathedral, which had been begun in 1248. The German politician August Reichensperger advocated that the construction be funded—­by communal private donation—­in a manner consistent with its Gothic design. See Lewis, The Gothic Revival, 75. 53. Sturgis, “National Academy of Design—­Fortieth Annual Exhibition,” 83. 54. Wight, National Academy of Design, 9. 55. Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (1851), in Works of John Ruskin, 9:182–­84. For a reception of Ruskin’s architectural methods in America, see Brooks, John Ruskin and Victorian Architecture; Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic

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Thought in America; Weingarden, Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th-­Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture. 56. Anthony, John Ruskin’s Labour, 56–­57. 57. Norton, “The Oxford Museum,” 770. 58. Norton, “Wight’s National Academy of Design,” 586. 59. Wight, National Academy of Design, 6. 60. Ibid. 61. “Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art,” 12. 62. Norton, “The Oxford Museum,” 767. 63. Gilman, “Art Exhibition in Yale College,” 813–­14. 64. Matheson and Solan, “Street Hall,” 49. 65. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in Works of John Ruskin, 8:125. 66. Gilman, “Art Exhibition in Yale College,” 813–­14. 67. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in Works of John Ruskin, 8:60. 68. Matheson and Solan, “Street Hall,” 53; Landau, P. B. Wight, 11. 69. Sturgis, “Mr. Street’s Gift to Yale College,” 149. Sturgis incorrectly labels the plants carved into Street Hall’s capitals as liverwort. I thank an anonymous peer reviewer for identifying the flora on the carved capital as bleeding heart, and Michael Dosmann and Devika Jaikumar at the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University for confirming this identification. 70. Ibid., 147. 71. Norton, Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, 121–­22. 72. Ibid., 120–­21. 73. Sturgis, “Our ‘Articles’ Examined,” 6. 74. Matheson, Art for Yale, 43. I am also grateful to Tom Parker for sharing his unpublished lecture on the inaugural exhibition at Street Hall (Fogg Art Museum symposium, 2007). 75. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in Works of John Ruskin, 8:184. 76. Ibid., 185. 77. Ruskin to Pauline Trevelyan, December 14, 1854, in Reflections of a Friendship: John Ruskin’s Letters to Pauline Trevelyan 1848–­1866, ed. Virginia Surtees (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979), 95. 78. George Edmund Street, “On the Future of Art in England: A Paper read at the Anniversary Meeting of the Ecclesiological Society, June 1, 1858,” The Ecclesiologist, August 1858, 234, 239. 79. The fully realized fusion of painting, carving, and architecture at the Oxford Union was short-­lived. The Pre-­R aphaelites’ murals, painted onto the walls without plaster, began deteriorating almost immediately. See Clare A. P. Willsdon,  Mural Painting in Britain 1840–­1940: Image and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 258. 80. Farrer to Gilman, June 13, 1866. Box 1-­14, Folder 30, DCG Papers/JHU. 81. Moore to Gilman, July 8, 1867. Box 1-­32, Folder 20, DCG Papers/JHU. 82. “The Art Exhibition,” The College Courant 1, no. 2 ( July 17, 1867): 1. 83. Beta, “The Art Exhibition,” The College Courant 1, no. 4 (September 11, 1867): 1.

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84. Louis Lang to Caroline Street, July 15, 1867. Artists’ Letters and Manuscripts Collection, Box 5, Folder 8. Crystal Bridges Library. 85. Cook, “Art: The Cooper Institute ‘School of Design for Women, I’ ”; Cook, “Art: The Cooper Institute ‘School of Design for Women, II.’ ” For a history of the School of Design for Women and its absorption into the Cooper Institute, see Masten, Art Work. 86. Cook, “Art: The Cooper Institute ‘School of Design for Women, I’ ”; Henriette Desportes Field, letter, c. 1861, Cooper Union School of Design for Women Papers, Directors’ Reports, 1859–­1873, Cooper Union Collection, Cooper Union Library, quoted in Masten, Art Work, 111. 87. Cook, “Art: The Cooper Institute ‘School of Design for Women, II.’ ” 88. Sturgis, “Mr. Street’s Gift to Yale College,” 149. 89. Wight, “What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done. II,” 80. 90. Thomas Charles Farrer to the Trustees, January 4, 1862. Cooper Collection, C5DB C778RT Box; The Cooper Union Archives and Special Collections. 91. Margaret McDonald to Gordon Lester Ford, July 1, 1867, FA Collection. 92. Moore to Gilman, July 16, 1867. Box 1-­32, Folder 20, DCG Papers/JHU. 93. Moore, “Realistic Work In the South Gallery. BY ONE WHO BELIEVES IN IT,” 1867. Scrapbook on the History and Work of the School of the Fine Arts (Folio Yjg51 2), Volume 1, Manuscripts and Archives, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University. 94. Cook, “The National Academy of Design: Forty-­ Second Annual Exhibition.” 95. Cook, “Fine Arts in New-­Haven.”

Chapter Four. Pre-­R aphaelites in the West: Clarence King and John Henry Hill 1. King, Mountaineering, 189. Mountaineering was published serially in the Atlantic Monthly and Overland Monthly in 1870 and 1871. This quotation first appeared in “The Falls of the Shoshone,” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 5, no. 4 (October 1870): 379. 2. Goodyear, “An Early Photograph of Shoshone Falls,” 272. 3. James Terry Gardiner spelled his last name “Gardner” through his early adulthood, following the spelling of his father and grandfather. The family name, however, had historically been spelled “Gardiner,” to which James reverted in middle age. For “Ruskinites,” see n12, below. 4. Holmes, The Pre-­Raphaelites and Science, 9. 5. Sandweiss, Print the Legend, 2. 6. Kelsey, Archive Style, 3, 25. 7. For further discussions of how American visual culture was deployed to mythologize western territories and sanction westward expansion, see Anderson et al., Thomas Moran; Jurovics et al., Framing the West, 17–­ 18, 29–­30; Kelsey, Archive Style, 24–­25; Kinsey, Creating a Sense of Place; Truettner et al. The West As America.

8. Stoddard, Lake George, 96. For a discussion of Hill’s productions of the Lake George region see Finlay, “The Hermit of Phantom Island.” 9. Ruskin, Modern Painters III (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 5:202. 10. “Notices of Recent Pictures,” 161; “Recent Exhibitions, Sales, Etc.,” 74. 11. “Notices of Recent Pictures,” 162. 12. James Terry Gardiner to his mother, Anne Terry Gardner, January 31, 1863. Box 1, folder 6, JTG Papers. Gardiner’s mother maintained the spelling of her surname as “Gardner.” 13. Gardiner to Anne Terry Gardner, May 11, 1859. Box 1, folder 4, JTG Papers. 14. Gardiner to Anne Terry Gardner, March 20, 1862. Box 1, folder 5, JTG Papers. 15. Clarence King to James Terry Gardiner, March 25, 1860. Original letter, HM 27811, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. A typescript copy is included in Box 2, folder 1, JTG Papers. 16. King to Gardiner, Summer 1861. Box 1, folder 19, JTG Papers. The letter is currently missing its opening page(s), so the precise date is no longer certain. Martha Sandweiss, however, dates this letter to July 28, 1861, in Passing Strange, 314n94. A list of “Norton’s Cadets” is preserved in Box 4, folder 4a, DCG Papers/YU. 17. King to Gardiner, March 18, 1862. Original letter, HM 27824, The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. A typescript copy is included in Box 2, folder 1, JTG Papers. 18. The trip is described as a “rowing expedition” by Sandweiss in Passing Strange, 16. 19. Hal Stone to King, July 1862. Box 3, folder 4, JTG Papers. 20. Anne Terry Gardner to James Gardiner, August 13, 1862. Box 1, folder 17, JTG Papers. 21. Gardiner to Anne Terry Gardner, August 14, 1862. Box 1, folder 5, JTG Papers. 22. Anne Terry Gardner to James Gardiner, September 1, 1862. Box 1, folder 17, JTG Papers. 23. Gardiner to Anne Terry Gardner, January 29, 1864. Box 1, folder 7, JTG Papers. Gardiner quotes from multiple biblical passages; see King James Bible, 1 Thessalonians 4:11, Psalm 39:6, and Isaiah 32:17. 24. John Henry Hill to Farrer, December 18, 1861, FA Collection. 25. John William Hill to Samuel Putnam Avery, March 20, 1864. Samuel Putnam Avery Papers, Thomas J. Watson Library, Manuscript Collections, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 26. Gardiner to Anne Terry Gardner, February 13, 1862. Box 1, folder 5, JTG Papers. 27. John Henry Hill, John William Hill, 5. 28. John Henry Hill to Bryson Burroughs, May 14, 1911. MMA Archives. 29. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:132–­33. 30. Gallati, “Thought on Canvas: American Pre-­ Raphaelite Iconography,” in Ferber and Anderson, American Pre-­Raphaelites: Radical Realists, 73.

31. Hill to Burroughs, May 14, 1911. MMA Archives. 32. Although the title, A Study of Trap Rock, does not identify Farrer as the figure sketching, in his diary Hill referred to the etching after the painting, which appears as figure 4 in his Sketches from Nature (1867), as “Trap Rock, Mr. T. C. Farrer sketching.” Hill’s diary is housed in the Adirondack Experience Library, the Museum on Blue Mountain Lake. 33. Hill, “Introduction,” in Sketches from Nature; May Brawley Hill, “Landscapes of Rockland County,” 35–­36. 34. May Brawley Hill, “Landscapes of Rockland County,” 35–­36. 35. Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature, 58, 60. 36. My thanks to Abby Eron for bringing these drawings to my attention. 37. Ruskin, Elements of Drawing (1857), in Works of John Ruskin, 15:48. 38. Ibid., 50. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 54. 41. Ibid. 42. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:368. 43. Rossiter W. Raymond, “Biographical Notice,”  in Hague et al., Clarence King Memoirs, 319. 44. Goetzmann, Exploration and Empire, 377. 45. King, “Scientific Notes, Private,” 1863. Box 1, Series A-­2, CK Papers. 46. “Friday, February 8, 1867,” Journal of the Senate of the United States of America, Being the Second Session of the Thirty-­Ninth Congress; Begun and Held at the City of Washington, December 3, 1866 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867), 226. 47. King, Memo book, 1868. Box 4, Folder 16, CK Papers. 48. “Local Art Items,” Daily Evening Bulletin (San Francisco, California), March 28, 1868, 5. 49. King, Mountaineering, 229. This quotation first appeared in “Shasta,” Atlantic Monthly 28 (December 1871): 713. 50. King, Arizona field notes, 1865–­66. Box 3, Folder 6, CK Papers. 51. John Henry Hill, February 17, 1872. JHH Diary. 52. King, Mountaineering, 230. 53. Ibid., 34. 54. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:201. 55. Ibid. 56. King, Memo book, 1868. Box 4, Folder 16, CK Papers. 57. King, Mountaineering, 224. 58. King to Andrew Atkinson Humphreys, October 10, 1870. King Survey Records, National Archives. Letter reproduced in Moore, King of the 40th Parallel, 338–­39. 59. King, Mountaineering, 228–­29. For a recent discussion of Watkins’s time on King’s survey, see Green, Carleton Watkins. 60. King, Mountaineering, 236–­37. 61. Jurovics, Framing the West, 17–­18. 62. Rebecca Bedell demonstrates that the paintings Moran completed following his tenure on the Pow-

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ell survey—­as well as the Hayden survey—­served to reinforce the uniformitarian priorities of both survey leaders. See Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature, 125. 63. King, “Catastrophism and Evolution,” 463. 64. Gould, Ever Since Darwin, 152. 65. Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 42–­43. 66. Eleanor Jones Harvey discusses Humboldt’s influence on the leaders of the post–­Civil War surveys of the American West, including Clarence King, in Alexander von Humboldt, 390. 67. King, Mountaineering, 196. 68. Weems, “Stratifying the West,” 40. 69. Clarence Cook, “Art,” Atlantic Monthly 34 (September 1874): 375. 70. In 1866, the head of the California Geologic Survey, Josiah Whitney, wrote to the botanist William Brewer of the contributions of the survey’s staff photographer Carleton Watkins: “Watkins is on the spot, with a most wonderful camp, and has taken many fine pictures, some of these I think will surpass anything he has ever done—­especially the trail view from the Mariposa Trail & a spectacle from a spot two-­thirds of the way down which we all think gives the best general view of the valley, and Watkins thinks his best picture.”  The photograph to which Whitney referred was titled Yosemite Valley from the Best General View (c. 1866), and the label “best general view” came to refer to a viewpoint that offered the onlooker the most visual information about a scene. See Carleton Watkins: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1997), 114–­18, quote at 115. 71. King, “Catastrophism and Evolution,” 452. 72. King, Mountaineering, 191. 73. King, “Catastrophism and Evolution,” 464. 74. John P. Herron, “Making an American Landscape: Art, Nature, and the Science of Clarence King,” in Davis and Aspinwall, Timothy H. O’Sullivan: The King Survey Photographs, 31; Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 191; Sandweiss, Passing Strange, 29; Wilkins, Clarence King, 44. 75. Sachs, The Humboldt Current, 248. 76. Frost, The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George, 33. 77. Ruskin, Deucalion (1875), in Works of John Ruskin, 26:117. 78. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:178. 79. Smith, Fact and Feeling, 162–­63; Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:384. 80. Of these two later compositions, one is roughly the same size as the on-­site watercolor, and the oil is much larger, likely the canvas he exhibited at Yale, the New-­ York Historical Society, and the National Academy of Design in 1871. Hill mentioned in his diary working on both paintings, along with a third unlocated version sized in between the oil and watercolor, completed in 1872. 81. King, Mountaineering, 207. 82. On September 11, 1864, Cook wrote to Farrer: “John Henry has gone to England did you know it? Avery says—­but A., you know, is malicious—­that he

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went to avoid the draft.” CCC Letters. 83. Hill, “Letter from J.H.H.,” 73. 84. Ibid., 73. 85. Ibid., 74. 86. Cook, “Fine Arts in New-­Haven.” 87. Goldyne, J.M.W. Turner, 35. 88. Walker, “From Private Sermon to Public Masterpiece.” 89. See Boime, “Turner’s Slave Ship”; Costello, “Turner’s The Slave Ship”; Frost, “ ‘The Guilty Ship’ ”; Marsh, “Ruskin and Turner’s Slavers”; McCoubrey, “Turner’s Slave Ship.” 90. Smiles, “Turner and the Slave Trade.” 91. Ruskin, Praeterita (1885), in Works of John Ruskin, 35:380; Norton, Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, 1:11. 92. Haslam, “Looking, Drawing and Learning,” 72; James Smetham, The Letters of James Smetham (London: Macmillan, 1902), 61–­66. 93. Moore wrote to Farrer on March 4, 1860, “I am glad to learn that Ruskin speaks well of John’s drawings.” CHM Letters. 94. Scott, “America’s First Public Turner,” 73. Scott writes that Johnston’s collection included Gifford’s A Coming Storm (c. 1863, Private collection), Church’s Twilight in the Wilderness (1860, Cleveland Museum of Art), and Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front (1866, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). 95. Visitor’s Book (ca. 1870–­ 1875), Box 10, Folder 10, John Taylor Johnston Papers, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. An inscription by Johnston’s son notes that his father kept this book between 1870 and 1875, though the names are not accompanied by individual dates as in his larger register, cited below. Farrer returned to England in late spring 1871, so his visit with Newman to the Johnston collection would have occurred in 1870 or the first half of 1871. 96. William Trost Richards and Russell Sturgis attended the opening reception for The Slave Ship on Thursday, April 11, 1872, and their names appear in the register book under that date. Johnston hosted visitors to see the work every Thursday through May 16. The signatures of John William Hill, Gordon Lester Ford, and William C. Gilman appear in the May 9, 1872, entry. See Visitor’s Book (February 23, 1865–­April 8, 1881), Box 10, Folder 9, John Taylor Johnston Papers, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. The painting was moved to a gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 18. See “The Fine Arts,” Boston Daily Globe, May 15, 1872, 1. 97. Hill, May 13, 1871. JHH Diary. 98. “Exhibition at the NAD,” Watson’s Art Journal 14 (April 29, 1871): 307. 99. Hill, May 13, 1871. JHH Diary. 100. Ruskin, Modern Painters IV (1856), in Works of John Ruskin, 6:35. 101. Ruskin, Modern Painters I (1843), in Works of John Ruskin, 3:553. 102. John William Hill to Daniel Gilman, January 18, 1871. Box 1-­22, Folder 39, DCG Papers/JHU. 103. “Fine Arts, Forty-­Sixth Annual Exhibition of the

National Academy of Design,” New York Herald, April 17, 1871, 3. 104. Schroeder and Sweeney, Gilbert Munger, 65. 105. King, Mountaineering, 210. 106. “Recent Exhibitions, Sales, Etc.,” 76–­77. 107. Kinsey, Creating a Sense of Place, 43; Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature, 136. Moran also nurtured a decades-­ long fascination, begun in the 1870s, with Shoshone Falls. See Kinsey, “Shoshone Falls: The Niagara of the West,” 18. 108. Though Bierstadt realized his dream of hanging a western subject in the House of Representatives when Autumn in the Sierras was displayed in the chamber in 1874, by the following year the government declined to purchase the painting. For all its painterly theatrics, Autumn in the Sierras suffered a rather anticlimactic fate, finally purchased out of Bierstadt’s studio during the artist’s bankruptcy sale in 1895. See Anderson et al., Thomas Moran, 60–­61. 109. “Autumn in the Sierras,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 5, 1873, 12. For a discussion of the tepid public response to Bierstadt’s later western landscapes, as well as the artist’s attempt to sell these works directly to railroad executives, see Cao, The End of Landscape, 31–­67. 110. Hill, January 15, 1874. JHH Diary. 111. Sturgis, “National Academy of Design—­Fortieth Annual Exhibition,” 89. 112. “Notices of Recent Pictures,” 160–­61. 113. Ibid.

Epilogue 1. Cook, “The National Academy of Design: Forty-­ Second Annual Exhibition.” For a discussion of Cook’s post–­New Path career, see Georgi, Critical Shift, 58–­75. 2. Norton, “The New Path.” 3. Cook, “The National Academy of Design: Forty-­ Second Annual Exhibition.” 4. Ibid. 5. Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 243. See also Sweeney, “Inventing Luminism”; Wallach, “Rethinking ‘Luminism’ ”; and Wallach, “A Note on Aestheticizing Tendencies in American Landscape Painting 1840–­80.” 6. Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 243. 7. Wallach, “Rethinking ‘Luminism,’ ” 117; Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 248.

8. Wallach, “Rethinking ‘Luminism,’ ” 117–­18. See also Beckert, The Monied Metropolis. 9. Moore to Farrer, July 10, 1864, CHM Letters. 10. Two letters from William Trost Richards to his daughter, Eleanor R. Price, 1888. Quoted in Ferber, “William Trost Richards,” 387. Ferber writes, “According to Edith B. Price [Richards’s granddaughter], Richards painted so quickly that after filling an order for a dealer, he would keep the picture around the studio for a month or so in order to suggest that it took him that long to paint it.” 11. “Art Matters,” New York Times, April 3, 1867, 8. 12. Ibid. 13. Wight, “What Has Been Done and What Can Be Done. II,” 80. 14. Ruskin to Norton, August 8, 1867, in Bradley and Ousby, The Correspondence of John Ruskin and Charles Eliot Norton, 105. 15. Cook, “Farrer (Thomas Charles),” 37. Bonds also developed during these years in London between the Farrer and Stillman families, uniting the artists who had played the leading roles in launching the two most prominent phases of American Pre-­R aphaelitism in the 1850s and 1860s. See Mary Van Ingen Farrer Unwin, Anne Richards McLane Farrer, A Remembrance (Private collection, 1933), 5. 16. Ruskin to his father, written from Venice, October 7, 1845. Quoted by Cook and Wedderburn in Ruskin, Modern Painters I (1843), in Works of John Ruskin, 3:210. 17. Ruskin to Julia Margaret Cameron, February 23, 1868. Quoted in Ruskin, The Letters of John Ruskin (1827–­1889), in Works of John Ruskin, 37:734. 18. King James Bible, 1 Thessalonians 5:21, which Ruskin paraphrased in Modern Painters II: “to hold fast, that which we can prove good,” in Works of John Ruskin, 4:214. 19. Ruskin to Newman, June 9, 1877. Quoted in Forman, “An American Studio in Florence,” 530. 20. Moore to Norton, February 6, 1873, CEN Papers. 21. Moore, Catalogue, with Notes, of Studies and Fac-­ Similes from Examples of the Works of Florence and Venice, 18. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. Ibid., 4, 6.

notes to epilogue

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Index

Note: “APR” refers to American Pre-Raphaelites. Page numbers in italic type indicate illustrations. abolitionism: APR and, 8, 15, 16, 19, 28, 102–3, 121; Cook and, 97, 100; in England, 20, 23, 92, 197, 199; Farrer and, 9, 19, 20, 73, 92–93, 97, 100, 103, 233n58; Gilman and, 18; King and, 163; Norton and, 18, 102; Ruskin’s antipathy for, 23, 63; Transcendentalism and, 31; Turner associated with, 197, 199. See also slavery academic tradition: aesthetic principles of, 5; APR’s rejection of, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 24–25, 27, 50, 117, 126, 153, 161–62, 205, 207, 209; Farrer’s rejection of, 73, 75, 86–91; history painting, 54, 152; landscape painting in, 5, 8, 9, 73; Moore’s rejection of, 9, 16; Stillman’s rejection of, 69–70. See also idealism/idealization Acland, Henry, 120, 130, 140, 141 Adirondack Club, 55 Adirondacks, New York, 9, 38–39, 50–57 Agassiz, Louis, 52, 190 Alcott, Amos Bronson, 31 American Art-Union, 30 American Paradise (exhibition, 1987), 13–14 American Pre-Raphaelites: adherence to Ruskin’s principles, 1, 2, 4, 9, 12–14, 16, 21–22, 63, 69, 117, 160, 161; critical reception of, 13–14, 52, 150, 151–52, 154–55, 216, 229n70; criticism of, and break with, Ruskin, 23–24, 63, 69, 104, 215–16; financial situations of, 211, 215; and First Annual Exhibition at Yale, 149–55, 162, 197, 216; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s influence on, 1–4; scholarship on, 13–15, 17; vicissitudes of, 209–11, 215–17, 235n12. See also Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art; dissent The American Pre-Raphaelites (exhibition, 2019), 14–15 American West: art produced in, 160–61; expansion into, 5, 21, 160; explorations of, 15, 20–21, 157–62, 170–207; geology of, 162, 170–71, 175–76, 179, 181, 184, 189–90, 192; mythos of, 160, 162, 192, 207; Romantic and expansionist depictions of, 5, 14, 21, 204–7; Ruskinian and APR principles applied to, 21, 158, 160–62, 170–71, 175–76, 180, 192, 202–3, 207; scholarship on, 160 Ampersand Pond, Adirondacks, 55 Anderson, Virginia, 14 Angelico, Fra, 220 architecture: APR and, 12, 119–21, 149; Daniel Gilman and, 121, 142, 144–46; historic preservation of, 217–20; local sourcing of stone for, 136, 146, 147; as means of reform, 20, 114, 119–21, 140–41; of medical institutions, 114; nature as model for ornamentation of, 12, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 139–40, 146–47; Norton

and, 121, 140–41, 142; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, 3, 120, 150; Ruskin and, 20, 120–21, 122, 130–32, 135–36, 140, 145–46, 150, 152; union of painting and sculpture with, 2, 3, 119–20, 122, 123, 128, 149–50, 155. See also Gothic architecture; Gothic Revival; Sturgis, Russell, Jr.; Wight, Peter Bonnett Armytage, J. C., engraving after John Ruskin, “Aiguille Structure,” 176, 177 Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art: cultural contributions of, 13; dissolution of, 14, 24, 162, 216–17; membership of, 2, 227n3, 234n75; name of, 2, 227n5; origins of, 2, 21, 23, 69, 73, 158, 163; principles of, 2, 9, 12, 28, 119–20, 158; science included in, 2, 3, 20, 158, 160; Stillman’s influence on, 19; unification of the arts as principle of, 2, 3, 20, 119–20, 122, 123, 149–50, 155. See also American Pre-Raphaelites Atlantic Monthly (magazine), 130 Austin, Henry, Dwight Hall, Yale University, 144, 144 Avery, Kevin, 13–14 Avery, Samuel P., 100, 238n82 Barbizon artists, 57, 59, 61 Bartlett, William Henry, View from Mount Holyoke (engraving by Robert Wallis after Bartlett), 109, 110 Bedell, Rebecca, 168, 231n90, 234n90, 237n62 Benecke, Ernest, Groupe de Cedres du M. Liban, 61, 61 Bentham, Jeremy, 80, 84, 112, 116 Bible, 88–89, 91, 164, 192 Bierstadt, Albert, 14, 18, 21, 42, 50, 149, 160–61, 204–7; Autumn in the Sierras, 206, 206, 239n108; The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak, 161, 162; Yosemite Valley, 174, 175 Binney, Amos, 52 Blanquart-Evrard, Louis Désiré: Photographic Studies, 59, 61; Studies and Landscapes, 59, 61 Boston Athenaeum, 52 Boston Saturday Club, 52 botany, 2, 8, 35, 37, 79, 80, 87, 128, 136, 142, 147, 151 Botticelli, Sandro, 220 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17–18 Brady, Matthew, Company A, 22nd New York State Militia near Harper’s Ferry, Va, 101 Brett, John, 63, 231n98; Val d’Aosta, 43, 46, 231n98 Brewer, William, 170, 238n70 British Anti-Slavery Society, 199 British Museum, London, 220 Brooklyn Museum, New York, 13 Brown, Ford Madox, 97, 216; An English Autumn Afternoon, 110–11, 111

Brown, Henry Kirke, 31 Brown, John, 9, 97, 100 Brown, Lydia, 31 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 104 Bryant, William Cullen, 75 Bullock, Richard Dort, 230n45 Burne-Jones, Edward, 3, 102, 150 Butler, Leslie, 18 Byfield, Mary, wood engraving after John Ruskin, “Exercise VIII, Fig. 5,” 169, 170 California Geological Survey, 15, 238n70 Cameron, Julia Margaret, 218 Carlyle, Thomas, 23, 104, 197 Carr, Gerald, 229n71 Casilear, John William, 42 Casteras, Susan, 13 catastrophism, 181, 184–85, 190, 192 Catskills, New York, 8–9, 25, 75, 78–79, 85, 119 Century Magazine, 29 Chartist movement, 3, 30, 73, 81, 92, 116 Chocorua (Abenaki chieftan), 47 Christian Socialism, 73, 74, 81–82 Church, Frederic: APR criticisms of, 5, 41, 49–50; Cole’s friendship with, 75; critical reception of, 14, 49; and nineteenth-century landscape painting, 7, 24, 85, 90; and realism, 14, 50; Stillman’s study with, 30 Church, Frederic, works by: The Andes of Ecuador, 48–50, 49; The Icebergs, 7; Our Banner in the Sky, 7 Church of England, 82 Civil War: APR and, 15–16, 28, 163–64; Cook and, 15; Daniel Gilman and, 163; draft for, 15, 163–64, 196; Farrer and, 93; Gardiner and, 163–64; Harvard memorial to, 20, 121, 132–33, 132; John Henry Hill and, 15, 167–68, 196, 238n82; King and, 163–64; National Academy construction and, 133; Norton and, 102, 129, 131; Ruskin on, 19, 66, 68, 102, 104, 197, 216; Stillman and, 63, 66, 68–69; Wight and, 133, 235n41 Claude Lorrain, 5, 8, 21, 62, 73, 75 Colbert, Charles, 39 Cole, Henry, 80, 84–85 Cole, Maria, 75 Cole, Thomas: characteristics of landscapes of, 14, 43, 47–48, 88–89; criticisms of, 5, 14, 20, 24–25, 41, 75, 78–79, 87–91, 103; death of, 75; estate of, 75, 79, 232n9; Farrer and, 20, 74, 75, 87–91, 108, 111–12; nature studies of, 88–89; and nineteenth-century landscape painting, 9, 14, 24–25, 41–42, 74, 75, 85, 90–91, 103; Stillman and, 30; Turner’s influence on, 192 Cole, Thomas, works by: Angels Ministering to Christ in the Wilderness, 91–92; Autumn Twilight, View of Corway Peak [Mount Chocorua], New Hampshire, 43, 47–48, 47; Catskill Creek, 78; Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 88–91; From Nature, 89, 90; The Garden of Eden, 88–91, 89; An Italian Autumn, 78; The Subsiding of the Waters of the Deluge, 91–92, 91; The Titan’s Goblet, 78; View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm— The Oxbow, 108, 109, 111–12, 116, 234n80; View on the Catskill—Early Autumn, 5, 7

College Courant (newspaper), 151 Colman, Samuel, 42 color, in painting, 3, 12, 43, 73, 85. See also polychromy composition: academic conventions of, 2, 5, 8, 43; APR’s practices of, 8, 79, 161; Farrer’s practice of, 79, 81, 85, 108, 110, 114–15; Hill’s practice of, 161; Pre-Raphaelite practices of, 32, 35, 43, 79; Stillman’s practice of, 29, 32, 35, 43, 48, 54, 61–62 Connecticut River Valley, 9, 75, 104, 108–9, 115 conscientious evasion, 16, 164 conscientious objection, 16 Cook, Clarence: and abolitionism, 97, 100; and APR, 70–71, 153, 154–55, 209–10; as architecture instructor, 152–53; and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 2; and Civil War, 15; criticism by, 2, 27, 52, 70–71, 153, 154–55, 197, 209–10, 229n70; Farrer and, 97, 100, 104; and Hudson River School, 25; and The New Path, 27, 70; “The Work of the True and False Schools,” 27 Cook, Louisa, 100, 101 Cooper Institute School of Design for Women, New York, 152–53 Cooper Union, New York, 84 Cornhill Magazine, 22–23, 102 Crary, Jonathan, 112, 115 Crawley, Frederick, and John Ruskin, Fribourg. Rue de la Palme and House Beyond Pont de Berne, 64, 65–66 The Crayon (journal), 3, 19, 28, 29, 39–43, 48, 55–56, 66, 69, 90–91, 97, 125, 126, 165, 229n3, 229n32, 235n24 Cropsey, Jasper, 42, 74, 75, 85, 90, 149 Crusades, 129 cultural capital, 17 cultural production, 17 Curtis, George, 40 Darwinism, 190 David, Jacques-Louis, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 93 Davis, Alexander Jackson, Alumni Hall, Yale University, 144–45, 144 Deane, Thomas Newenham, and Benjamin Woodward, Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 120, 130–32, 130, 131 (detail), 136, 140, 146, 150 Delacroix, Eugène, 57, 68 democracy: APR’s desire to reform American, 4, 25, 116, 117; Gothic style associated with, 121, 125. See also egalitarianism; egalitarian opticality Dewing, Thomas Wilmer, 211 Dickens, Charles, 23, 104 Dickinson, Emily, 161 dissent: from academic tradition, 4; APR’s posture of, 3, 4, 15, 17, 25, 117, 121, 164; Gothic style associated with, 124–25; patrons’ posture of, 3, 17–18, 121; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s posture of, 3; realism as, 17; realism associated with, 164; Wight and Sturgis and, 121, 124 Doge’s Palace, Venice, 124 “dovetailing” theory, 184, 190 Dowling, Linda, 18, 123 Draft Act (1863), 15 Dred Scott decision, 92

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Duggan, Paul, 234n9 Durand, Asher B.: criticisms of, 5, 24, 32, 41; nature studies of, 35, 37, 57, 168, 231n90; and nineteenth-century landscape painting, 14, 24, 74, 85, 90; and realism, 14, 35, 37, 57; Stillman and, 30, 42 Durand, Asher B., works by: In the Woods, 35, 36, 37; Progress, 115, 116, 234n90; Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees, 168; Study of a Wood Interior, 57, 58 Durand, John, 28, 39, 48 education: APR and, 152–53, 222; Daniel Gilman and, 16–17, 151, 220; Government Schools of Design approach to, 19, 74, 79–81, 83–85, 105, 108, 116, 152, 232n5; Moore and, 14, 153, 217–18, 220, 222; Ruskin and, 3, 14, 19, 74, 81–85, 116, 152, 218, 220; science in the university curriculum, 141–42, 151, 220; Working Men’s College approach to, 3, 19, 74, 81–85, 105, 116, 152 egalitarianism: Gothic architecture and, 20, 121, 123–25, 128; public fountains and, 138–40. See also democracy; egalitarian opticality egalitarian opticality, 8–9, 12, 114–16, 161, 222 Ehrenkranz, Anne, 57 Emancipation Proclamation, 24, 129 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 28, 29, 31–32, 38–41, 49, 52–56, 62–63; “The Adirondacs,” 52; Nature, 39, 40. See also Transcendentalism Exhibition of English Art (exhibition, 1857 and 1858), 126 expansionism, 5, 21, 25, 160, 207 facture and painting process, 5, 12, 42–43, 79, 114–15, 211, 215 Farrer, Anne Richards McLane, 234n75 Farrer, Henry, 209, 217 Farrer, Thomas Charles: and abolitionism, 9, 19, 20, 73, 92–93, 97, 100, 103, 233n58; academic tradition/idealization rejected by, 73, 75, 86–91; and APR, 2, 3, 19, 71, 73–74, 86–87, 116; as art instructor, 152–53; background of, 3, 19, 73–74, 79–86, 92, 116; and Cole, 20, 74, 75, 78–79, 87–91, 108, 111–12; Cook and, 97, 100, 104; critical reception of, 79–80, 86, 100, 104, 151, 209, 210; and First Annual Exhibition at Yale, 149, 151, 153; John Henry Hill and, 165, 167–68, 237n32; and landscape painting, 20; linking of aesthetics and politics in work of, 74–75; marriage of, 234n75; and Moore, 75, 119, 151–52; and Norton, 104, 126, 151; and realism, 70, 87–88, 91–92, 104, 108, 117; return to England of, 216; and Ruskin, 74, 199–200, 216; and Stillman, 239n15; and Turner, 197, 199; in Union Army, 15, 20, 97, 100–101, 122 Farrer, Thomas Charles, works by: April, 1861, 101; A Buckwheat Field on Thomas Cole’s Farm, 70–71, 73–74, 76–77, 78–80, 85–86, 104, 105, 108, 117; Burnham Beeches, 216, 217; Captain Cabot Russel, Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, Killed at Fort Wagner, 233n58; The Cattskills, from the Village, 70–71; Evening Thoughts, 97; “A Few Questions Answered,” 74, 86–92, 103; The Fighting “Temeraire,” tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up, after Turner, 197, 199; Gone! Gone! 93, 94, 97, 233n55;

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Jack-in-the-Pulpit, 136, 138, 142; John Henry Hill in the Studio Etching, 165, 167; June, 235n12; Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River, 211, 212–13; Mount Tom, 104–5, 105, 235n12; Portrait of Clarence C. Clark, 97, 98, 100; rock drawing, 168, 169–70; Twilight, 235n12; View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital, 72 (detail), 105, 106–7, 108, 110–12, 114–17 Ferber, Linda, 13, 14 Fifty-Fourth Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 233n58 First Annual Exhibition of the Yale School of the Fine Arts, 149–55, 162, 197, 216 Fogg Art Museum, 14 Follensby Pond, Adirondacks, 52–53 Fontainebleau Forest, France, 57, 59 Ford, Gordon Lester, 201 Foster, Kathleen, 13 Foucault, Michel, 18, 112, 115 Fourth Annual Artists’ Fund Society Exhibition, 78 Fraser’s Magazine, 22–23, 68, 102 Free Academy, New York (now City College of New York), 122 Fremont, John, 179 Fribourg, Switzerland, 64, 65–67, 65 Fulford, William, 4 Furnivall, F. J., 82 Gallati, Barbara, 15, 165 Gardiner, James: and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 2, 21, 158, 163, 205; and California Geological Survey, 15, 170; and Civil War, 163–64; education of, 122, 163; and Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, 20–21, 158, 160, 168–69, 171; John William and John Henry Hill and, 164; name of, 236n3; rock drawing, 168, 169–70 Garrison, Wendell P., 52 Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, 20–21, 157–58, 165, 168–69, 171–92, 204–7 geology: of the American West, 162, 170–71, 175–76, 179, 181, 184, 189–90, 192; in Gilman’s science curriculum, 142; Ruskin’s and APR’s interest in, 2, 8, 9, 41, 79, 87, 88, 151, 158, 165, 169–70, 176, 190, 192; theories of, 181, 184, 190, 192 Georgi, Karen, 52, 229n3, 230n74 Gerdts, William, 13 The Germ (magazine), 3–4 Gifford, Sanford, 7, 42, 74, 75, 85, 149, 201; Indian Summer in the White Mountains, 210, 210 Gilbert, Grove Karl, 181, 184 Gilman, Daniel Coit: and architecture, 121, 142, 144–46; brother of, 122; and Civil War, 163; First Annual Exhibition of the Yale School of the Fine Arts, 149–52; and John Henry Hill, 204; and Moore, 151, 153–54; as patron, 16–18, 20, 121, 122, 142, 150–51; and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, 141; and science, 141–42, 151; and Wight, 121, 133; and Yale, 16–17, 121, 141–51 Gilman, William, 122–23, 201, 234n9, 235n12 Gilmor, Robert, Jr., 88 God, and nature, 41, 62, 84, 185, 192

Goetzmann, William, 171 Goldyne, Joseph, 197 Goodall, Edward, engraving after J.M.W. Turner, Fall of the Tees, Yorkshire, 196, 196 Gothic architecture: authoritarian aspects of, 121, 125; egalitarian aspects of, 20, 121, 123–25, 128; funding of, 235n52; Ruskin and, 12, 20, 123, 136 Gothic Revival: after Wight and Sturgis, 216–17; APR’s advocacy of, 4, 12, 20, 121, 136; cultural and political significance of, 12, 20, 122, 124–25, 130, 136, 140; hospitals in style of, 114; Norton and, 122, 125, 128, 130–33; patrons of, 16, 18, 20; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s advocacy of, 3, 120; Sturgis and, 12, 20, 121, 124, 132; Wight and, 12, 20, 121, 124, 132, 133, 135–36; on Yale University campus, 144–45 Gould, Charles L., 234n90 Gould, Stephen Jay, 184 Government Schools of Design, London, 19, 74, 79–81, 83–85, 105, 108, 112, 113, 116, 152, 232n5 Guild of Saint George, 218 Gura, Philip, 28 Hall, Basil, Captain Basil Hall’s Forty Etchings Made with the Camera Lucida in North America in 1827 and 1828, 109 Hampstead Heath, London, 111 Harpers Ferry, Virginia, 97, 100 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 25 Harper’s Weekly (magazine), 139, 139 Harvard University, 14, 17, 102, 132–33, 142, 190, 218; Lawrence Scientific School, 141, 220; Memorial Hall, 20, 121, 132–33, 132 Harvey, Eleanor Jones, 230n74, 231n90 Harvey, Samantha, 41 Hayden, Ferdinand, 206 Heade, Martin Johnson, 7 Henry Seibert & Bros., “State Hospital for the Insane, Northampton Massachusetts,” 113 hierarchy of genres, 5 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 52 Hill, James, 167 Hill, John Henry: and the American West, 18, 20–21, 157–58, 160–62, 168–69, 171–207, 217; artistic process for Western paintings, 176, 189; and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 2; and Civil War, 15, 167–68, 196, 238n82; critical reception of, 165, 171, 201, 209, 210; diary of, 161, 175, 180, 201, 207; Farrer and, 165, 167–68, 237n32; Gardiner and, 164, 170; hermitic existence of, 161; King and, 164–65, 171–73, 175, 180–81, 189, 192; and The New Path, 197; on Phantom Island, 161, 175, 180, 192, 201, 202, 204, 206–7; and realism, 164–65, 204; realism of images of American West, 160–62, 172–73, 175–76, 203–4, 207; and Ruskin, 63, 200; travel to England, 15, 196 Hill, John Henry, works by: City of Rocks, October 3, 181, 184; The Empire State Mill, Virginia City, 171–72, 172; Falls of the Hudson, 197; Moonlight on the Adroscoggin, N.H., 197, 198; Mount Shasta, 176, 180; Mount Shasta from Butteville, 176, 178; Mount Shasta from East, 176, 179; Mount Shasta from Strawberry Valley,

176, 178; Mt. Shasta, 180, 182–83; Old Whaler, at New Bedford, Mass, 197, 198; rock drawing, 169–70, 169; Shoshone Falls, 156 (detail), 192, 194–95, 202; Shoshone Falls, Sept 30, 188, 189; Shoshone Falls, Study from Nature, 185, 186–87, 189, 201–2; Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 192, 193, 201, 202; Sketches from Nature, 197; Study of a Hickory, 165; Study of a Pine, 165; A Study of Trap Rock (Buttermilk Falls), 161, 165, 166, 167–68, 237n32; Study of Weeds, 165; Washoe Peak from Carson, 173, 174, 175 Hill, John William, 2, 153, 164–65, 172, 196, 201, 209, 217; Road-Side Study, 165; Study from Nature, 165 Hill, May Brawley, 168 Hills, Patricia, 18 historic preservation, 217–20 history painting, 54, 152 Hoar, Ebenezer Rockwood, 52 Holmes, John, 52, 160 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 40, 50 Homer, Winslow, 201 Howat, John, 13 Howe, Estes, 52 Howe, Samuel G., 50 Hudson River School, 1, 9, 15, 24–25, 229n71. See also academic tradition Hudson River Valley, 9, 75 Hughes, Arthur, 150 Humboldt, Alexander von, 179, 184 Hunt, William Holman, 3, 9, 85; The Light of the World, 97, 99; Our English Coasts, 43, 46 Huntington, Daniel, 200–201 idealism/idealization: APR’s rejection of, 4, 7, 9, 15, 25, 103, 115, 154, 205, 207; in Cole’s work, 88–90, 103; Farrer’s rejection of, 73, 88; in images of the American West, 161; in landscape painting, 7, 9, 18, 25, 37, 73, 90, 103; Ruskin skeptical of, 31–32, 39, 41, 63; Stillman and, 51, 52, 55–56, 63. See also academic tradition; Transcendentalism Illustrated London News (newspaper), 112 Inchbold, John Bolton, 63, 211; Bolton Abbey, 35, 37; In Early Spring: A Study in March, 5, 6 individualism, 28–29, 31 Inness, George, 211 Italian art, 3, 4 Italian Gothic, 20, 124, 136, 140 Italian Romanesque, 133, 135–36 Jackson, William Henry, 160, 206 Johns Hopkins University, 16, 121 Johnston, John Taylor, 200–201 Junker, Patricia, 8 Kelsey, Robin, 160 Kennel, Sarah, 59 Kensett, John Frederick, 42, 149, 201; Sunset, 210, 211 King, Clarence: and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 2, 21, 158, 163, 205; and California Geological Survey, 15, 170, 175; “Catastrophism and the Evolution of Environment,” 190; and Civil

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King, Clarence (cont.) War, 163–64; education of, 122, 163; and Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, 20–21, 157–58, 160, 165, 168–69, 171–92, 204–7; geological theories and discoveries of, 179, 181, 184, 190, 192; John Henry Hill and, 164–65, 171–73, 175, 180–81, 189, 192; John William Hill and, 164; Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, 170–71, 175–76, 180, 184–85, 192, 204–5; Systematic Geology, 184, 192, 204 Kingsley, Charles, 23 Kirkbride Plan, 114 labor. See workers and workmanship; working class landscape painting: academic conventions of, 5, 8, 9, 73; APR approach to, 4–5, 7–8, 12, 13–14, 15, 21; Cole’s influence on, 74, 75, 90; in France, 59; idealization in, 7, 9, 18, 25, 37, 73, 90, 103; photography in relation to, 55; post–Civil War developments in, 210–11; realism in, 5, 8; Ruskin on, 48; sociopolitical meanings of, 5, 15, 20, 21; Turner’s influence on, 192 landscape photography, 55, 59, 61, 160 Lang, Louis, 152 The Last Ruskinians (exhibition, 2007), 14 Lee, Robert E., 133 Lincoln, Abraham, 8, 69, 93, 103, 116, 133, 139–40 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 40 Louis-Philippe, King, 30 Lowell, James Russell, 40, 50, 52, 55 Lyell, Charles, Principles of Geology, 181, 190, 192 Mahoney, Kristin, 85 Malory, Thomas, Le Morte d’Arthur, 150 Manifest Destiny, 21, 25, 207 Marlborough House, London, 196 Marsh, George Perkins, 124–25 Maurice, Frederick Denison, 81–82 McGrath, Robert, 47 medieval art and society: guilds, 12, 20, 123, 140; as model for Pre-Raphaelites, 2, 4, 12–13, 123; as model for Ruskin, 12, 20, 82, 123, 218; Norton’s study of, 126, 128–30. See also Gothic architecture Memorial Hall, Harvard University, 20, 121, 132–33, 132 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 13, 200 Militia Act, 163–64 Mill, John Stuart, 22, 80, 84 Millais, John Everett, 3, 30, 32, 63, 69, 85, 150, 211; The Black Brunswicker, 93, 96, 97; A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge, 93, 95, 97; The Order of Release, 93, 97; The Proscribed Royalist, 32, 34, 35, 37, 57, 93, 97 Miller, Angela, 75, 210; The Empire of the Eye, 14 Miller, David C., 8 Millet, Jean-François, 57 Mitchell, Mark, 15 Moore, Charles Herbert: academic tradition rejected by, 9, 16; as art instructor, 14, 153, 217–18, 220, 222; and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 2; and Civil War, 8; and Cole, 9, 75, 78; critical reception of, 151–52, 154, 209; and Daniel Gilman,

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151, 153–54; and Farrer, 75, 104, 119, 151–52; finances of, 211; and First Annual Exhibition at Yale, 149, 151–54; and Norton, 126; and realism, 154, 222; and Ruskin, 63, 218 Moore, Charles Herbert, works by: Hudson River, Above Catskill, viii (detail), 8, 9, 10–11, 154; Old Doorway in Venice, 220, 221, 222; Snow Squall, 211, 214, 235n12; Studies and Fac-similies from Examples of the works of Florence and Venice; and of Fac-similies and Original Studies to be used as Exercises in Drawing, 222; Thomas Cole’s Cedar Grove, 232n9; Thomas Cole’s Studio, 232n9; Untitled Landscape with Thomas Cole’s First Studio, 232n9; Untitled Plant Study (Raspberries), 75, 78 Moran, Thomas, 18, 21, 50, 160–61, 192, 206, 237n62, 239n107; Grand Canyon of Yellowstone, 206 Morris, William, 4, 102, 216 Mount Chocorua, New Hampshire, 42, 230n46 Mount Holyoke, Massachusetts, 108–9, 114–15 Mount Shasta, California, 175–76, 178–83, 179–80 Munger, Gilbert, 204; Yosemite Valley, 204, 205 Munro, Alexander, 150 National Academy of Design: criticisms of art and aesthetics associated with, 16, 69–70; exhibitions at, 39, 42, 69, 70, 79, 93, 97, 150, 165, 201, 229n29; fountain of, 138–39, 139; fund-raising for, 138; influence of, 24; landscape painters associated with, 75; leaders of, 150, 200–201; Stillman and, 35, 48, 69–70; Wight’s building for, 20, 121, 124, 133–41, 135, 137 (detail), 150 National Gallery, London, 196, 197 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 14 nature: architectural and sculptural forms modeled on, 12, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 139–40, 146–47; Emersonian idealism and, 28; God in relation to, 41, 62, 84, 185, 192; as model for APR, 1, 2, 4, 12; as model for Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 3–4; Ruskin and, 9, 12, 15, 22, 62–64, 84; Stillman and, 28, 30–32, 35, 39–42, 50–51, 57, 62–64; Transcendentalist conception of, 28, 31, 38–41, 55–56, 62–63; truth in/to, 1, 5, 14, 15, 28, 41, 63, 154, 163, 204; typological understanding of, 87–88. See also nature studies; realism nature studies: APR and, 2, 9, 17–18, 41, 75, 142, 154; Cole and, 88–89; Durand and, 35, 37, 57, 168, 231n90; Farrer and, 9, 73, 75; the Hills and, 165; photography and, 55–56; Rossetti and, 85; Ruskin’s advocacy and practice of, 32, 85, 87; in science curriculum, 142, 220; Stillman and, 55–56 Newall, Christopher, 66 New England Loyal Publication Society, 102 Newman, Henry Roderick, 2, 63, 200, 209, 217–20; The Three Arches of Santa Maria Novella, 219, 220; View of Santa Maria Novella, 208 (detail), 218–19, 219 The New Path (exhibition, 1985), 13, 14, 15 The New Path (journal): Cook’s contributions to, 27, 70, 209; Farrer’s contribution to, 86–92; John Henry Hill’s contribution to, 197; Norton and, 125–26; patronage of, 122; precedents for, 3–4; pronouncements on architecture in, 12; pronouncements on painting in, 9, 24, 90, 205, 209; reception of,

19; reviews in, 78; Ruskin and, 16, 21, 22, 69, 215; sociopolitical commentary in, 1, 4, 5, 7, 16, 102–4, 165; Stillman’s contributions to, 69–70, 232n117; Sturgis’s involvement with, 119–20, 136, 153; Wight’s involvement with, 119–21 New-York Commercial Advertiser (newspaper), 21 New York Times (newspaper), 25, 48–49, 215–16 New-York Tribune (newspaper), 70, 154, 209, 229n70 North American Review (magazine), 16, 19, 125, 140 Northampton, Massachusetts, 104, 108, 110, 114, 116 Norton, Charles Eliot: and abolitionism, 18; and APR, 102, 126, 209; and architecture, 121, 140–41, 142; and Civil War, 102, 129, 131; as editor, 102, 125; “Emancipation in the Middle Ages,” 129; European travels of, 126; and Farrer, 104, 126, 151; and Gothic Revival, 122, 125, 128, 130–33; and Harvard, 14, 17, 102, 132–33, 142, 218, 220; and Marsh, 124; and The New Path, 125–26; Notes of Travel and Study in Italy, 126, 128–30, 147; as patron, 16–20, 102, 104, 121, 126, 151; and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 102, 125, 141; and Ruskin, 14, 16, 22, 24, 63, 68, 102, 126, 199–200, 216; and science, 141–42; social and political engagement of, 18, 128–33; and Stillman, 29, 35, 40, 42, 49, 51, 54, 63; and Sturgis, 121, 125–26, 132–33; and Turner, 199 Norton, William A., 163 opticality. See egalitarian opticality Oriel College, Oxford, 124 Orvieto Cathedral, 126, 128, 129, 147 O’Shea, James and John, 131, 147 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 21, 157–58, 160, 171, 179, 181, 201–3; Camp at Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 157–58, 159; Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 158, 159, 185, 188, 189, 191, 201–2, 203; The Sphinxes, (500 ft.) City of Rocks. Idaho, 181, 185; Sugar Loaf Mountain, near Virginia City, Nevada, 171–72, 173 The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, 3–4 Oxford Union, 3, 120, 149–50, 236n79 Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 120, 130–32, 130, 131 (detail), 136, 140, 141, 146, 150 painting process. See facture and painting process panopticon, 112 pantheism, 41 pathetic fallacy, 47–48, 51 patrons: antislavery stances of, 17; of architecture, 121; Daniel Gilman, 16–18, 20, 121, 122, 142, 150–51; dissenting postures of, 3, 17–18, 121; of Gothic Revival, 16, 18, 20; motives of, 18; Norton, 16–20, 102, 104, 121, 126, 151; William Gilman, 122, 235n12 Phantom Island, New York, 161, 175, 180, 192, 201, 202, 204, 206–7 Phillips, Wendell, 97, 163 photography: of the American West, 160; APR and, 201–2; detail and realism in, 35, 217; and historic preservation, 218; John Henry Hill and, 201–2; painting in relation to, 55, 217–18; Pre-Raphaelites and, 35, 59; Ruskin and, 218; Stillman and, 19, 29, 35, 54–62. See also landscape photography

picturesque, 5, 9, 14, 24, 104, 111, 115, 116, 204 politics. See democracy; dissent; egalitarianism; egalitarian opticality Pollen, John, 150 polychromy, 120, 128, 135, 136, 145, 219. See also color, in painting Powell, John Wesley, 181 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Britain): and architecture, 3, 120, 150; critical reception of, 48–49; formation of, 3; influence of, 1–5, 9, 15, 27, 42–43, 92, 97, 102, 115, 116, 222; magazines associated with, 3–4; Norton and, 102, 125, 141; and photography, 35, 59; principles of, 2–5; and realism, 35, 37; Ruskin and, 21–22, 43; and science, 158, 160; Stillman and, 30 Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 5 Prinsep, Val, 3, 150 punctuated equilibrium, 184 Raphael, 3 Rawls, John, 16 realism: APR and, 2, 3, 5, 8, 9, 12; Farrer and, 70, 87–88, 91–92, 104, 108, 117; the Hills and, 164–65, 204; in landscape painting, 5, 8; Moore and, 154, 222; photography and, 35, 217; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, 35, 37; Ruskin and, 9, 12, 28, 37–38, 70, 87, 202; science associated with, 9; Stillman and, 19, 35, 37–38, 69–70; truth associated with, 12 (see also truth: in/to nature). See also nature; nature studies Redgrave, Richard, 80–81, 84, 105, 232n5 reform: APR’s goal of, 1, 2, 5, 7–9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 25, 28, 30, 70, 114, 119–21, 140–41, 155, 158, 168, 207; architecture as means of, 20, 114, 119–21, 140–41; criticisms of nineteenth-century efforts at, 18; Daniel Gilman and, 18; in England, 81–82, 111, 130; Farrer and, 73; individualist focus of antebellum initiatives for, 28–29; Norton and, 16, 18, 102; Spiritualism and, 38; Stillman and, 28–31, 70 Rennella, Mark, 18 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 163 Republican Party, 3 Richards, William Trost, 2, 201, 215, 217, 239n10; Marine View with Boat on Horizon, 211, 214; Old Ocean’s Gray and Melancholy Waste, 215, 215; Red Clover with Butter-and-Eggs and Ground Ivy, 147, 148 Romanticism, 5 Rosa, Salvator, 5 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 3, 23, 63, 69, 74, 81, 93, 102, 120, 149–50, 211; Before the Battle, 126, 128; Found, 85, 86 Rossetti, William Michael, 23, 68–69 The Round Table (newspaper), 25, 79–80, 153 Rousseau, Théodore, 57, 68; The Edge of the Woods, 57, 59; Trees in a Thicket, 57, 59, 60 Royal Academy, London, 32, 37, 43, 93 Ruskin, John: admiration for Turner, 21, 30, 67, 70, 108, 192–93, 202–3; aesthetic principles of, 2, 102; on America and the Civil War, 19, 66–68, 102, 104, 197, 216; APR’s break with, 23–24, 63, 69, 104, 215–16; and architecture, 20, 120–21, 122, 130–32, 135–36, 140, 145–46, 150, 152; bicentenary of, 14; Brett and, 231n98; The Crayon and, 91; criticisms of, 19, 23–24,

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Ruskin, John (cont.) 63, 68–69, 104, 215–16; critique of subjectivity, 12, 31–32, 51; drawing/painting theory and practice of, 43, 61, 85, 169–70, 176, 218; evolution of views held by, 21–23; Farrer and, 74, 199–200, 216; geological interests of, 2, 9, 87, 169–70, 176, 190, 192; on Gothic architecture and medieval guilds, 12, 20, 123, 136; on imagination as superior to mimesis, 70, 202, 209, 216; influence of, 1, 2, 4, 9, 12–14, 16, 18, 21–24, 63, 69, 108, 116, 158, 160–65, 168, 175–76, 180, 204; John Henry Hill and, 63, 200; on landscape painting, 48; Moore and, 63, 218; on nature, truth, and realism, 9, 12, 15, 22, 28, 31–32, 37–39, 62–64, 70, 84, 87, 202; Newman and, 218–19; Norton and, 14, 16, 22, 24, 63, 68, 102, 126, 199–200, 216; on the pathetic fallacy, 47–48, 51; pedagogical practices of, 3, 14, 19, 74, 81–85, 116, 152, 218, 220; and photography, 218; and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 21–22, 43; rhetorical strategy of, 87; and science, 192; skeptical of idealism, 31–32, 39, 41, 63; and slavery, 23–24, 63, 68–69, 102, 215; social and political views of, 3, 4, 12, 22–23, 63, 66–68, 82–83, 102, 123, 124, 130, 140, 218; Stillman and, 18, 19, 23, 29–32, 40–41, 62–69, 199, 231n98, 231n101; in Switzerland, 63–67, 231n101 Ruskin, John, works by: “Aiguille Structure” (engraving by J. C. Armytage after Ruskin), 176, 177; Deucalion, 190, 192; Elements of Drawing, 83, 169; “Exercise VIII, Fig. 5” (wood engraving by Mary Byfield after Ruskin), 169, 170; Fragment of the Alps, 87, 126, 127; Fribourg, Switzerland, 65–66, 65; Fribourg. Rue de la Palme and House Beyond Pont de Berne (with Frederick Crawley), 64, 65–66; “The Lamp of Beauty,” 136; “The Lamp of Truth,” 146; Modern Painters, 12, 21, 30, 31, 37–38, 40, 51, 163, 165, 170–71, 176, 190, 192, 202–3, 216; Munera Pulvera, 23; “The Nature of Gothic,” 82, 123, 126, 140; “On the Nature of Gothic Architecture,” 82; The Poetry of Architecture, 67; The Political Economy of Art, 66, 83, 165; Praeterita, 65; Rocks and Ferns in a Wood of Crossmount, Perthshire, 61, 62; The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 122, 135, 146, 150; The Stones of Venice, 12, 82, 122, 123, 126; Unto This Last, 22–23 Sandweiss, Martha, 160 San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin (newspaper), 171 Schlett, James, 53 Schuyler, Eugene, 122, 234n11 Schuyler, Montgomery, 229n71 science: APR and, 2, 3, 20, 158, 160; Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, 158, 160; realism associated with, 9; Ruskin and, 192; in university curriculum, 141–42, 151, 220 séances, 38, 39 Seventh Regiment, 100, 101 Shattuck, Aaron Draper, 42 Sheffield Scientific School, Yale University, 16, 121, 122, 141–42, 151, 163, 190, 204 Shoshone Falls, Idaho, 157, 159, 181, 184–85, 186–88, 189–90, 191, 192, 193–95, 197, 201–4, 203, 239n107 Siddal, Elizabeth, Clerk Saunders, 126, 127 Simon, Janice, 56, 229n3

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slavery: abolished in British Empire, 20, 228n53; APR opposition to, 1, 4, 7–8, 17, 19, 25, 103, 124; end of, 116, 122, 129; patrons’ opposition to, 17; Ruskin’s defense of, 23–24, 68–69, 102, 215. See also abolitionism Smith, Jonathan, 190, 192 Smith, Lindsey, 63 Société française de photographie, 59 Somerset House, London, 112 South Kensington Museum, London, 196 Spiritualism, 28, 31–32, 38–39, 50–51, 54, 230n62 Springfield Republican (newspaper), 114 Stanhope, John Roddam Spencer, 150; Thoughts of the Past, 233n55 State Hospital for the Insane, Northampton, Massachusetts, 105, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 116 Stebbins, Theodore E., Jr., 14 St. George’s Museum, Sheffield, England, 218 Stillman, John Ruskin, 68 Stillman, William James: academic tradition rejected by, 69–70; and APR, 19, 27–28, 30, 41, 63, 69–71; artistic training of, 29–30; child of, named for Ruskin, 68; and Civil War, 63, 66, 68–69; critical reception of, 35, 48, 50, 52, 70–71; as diplomat, 68; dual inspirations (Ruskin and Emerson) of, 28–29, 31–32, 38–41, 50–55; as editor of The Crayon, 19, 28, 29, 39–43, 55–56, 66, 69; and Emerson, 29, 32, 39–40, 52–54; and Farrer, 239n15; in France, 57, 59, 61, 68; and nature, 28, 30–32, 35, 39–42, 50–51, 57, 62–64; and Norton, 29, 35, 40, 42, 49, 51, 54, 63; as painter, 19, 27–30, 32, 35, 37–39, 41–43, 48–55, 231n82; as photographer, 19, 29, 35, 54–62; and realism, 19, 35, 37–38, 69–70; and Ruskin, 18, 19, 23, 29–32, 40–41, 62–69, 165, 199, 231n98, 231n101; scholarship on, 18–19; social and political engagement of, 30, 63, 66; spiritual interests of, 28, 31–32, 38–39, 50–51, 54–56, 62–63, 69, 230n62; in Switzerland, 63–67, 231n101; and Turner, 29, 30, 38, 70, 199 Stillman, William James, works by: Acropolis of Athens, 55; “Art as a Record,” 69–70, 232n117; Autobiography of a Journalist, 19, 64; Early Twilight, 230n55; The Forest Spring, 35; Mount Chocorua, 29, 42–43, 44–45, 48, 50, 230n45; “Naturalism and Genius,” 69–70, 232n117; Night-Fall in the Wilderness, 230n55; On Kearsarge Brook, North Conway, 230n55; The Philosophers’ Camp in the Adirondacks, 29, 52–54, 53, 230n74; Photographic Studies. Part I. The Forest. Adirondac Woods, 29, 55–62, 56, 58, 60; The Procession of the Pines, 51–52, 230n72; Reminiscence of the Mohawk, 230n55; The Stepping-Stones, Kearsarge Brook, N[orth] Conway, 48, 230n55; Study on Upper Saranac Lake, 26 (detail), 29, 32, 33, 35, 37–39, 48, 50, 54; “The Subjective of It,” 50–51, 230n62; View of Catskill Creek, 30; View on Tuppers Lake, Adirondack Wilds, 230n55 Stone, Hal, 164 Street, Augustus Russell, 144 Street, George Edmund, 150 Street, Mrs. George, 152, 153 Street Hall, Yale University, 20, 121, 122, 133, 142–55, 143, 146, 147 (detail), 162, 197, 216

Sturgis, Russell, Jr.: and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 2; “The Conditions of Art in America,” 12; on Farrer’s April, 1861, 101; and Gothic Revival, 12, 20, 121, 124, 132, 216; and the history of architecture, 123; on the National Academy of Design, 136, 139; and The New Path, 119–20, 136, 153; and Norton, 121, 125–26, 132–33; “Our ‘Articles’ Examined,” 119; proposed design for Harvard’s Civil War memorial, 20, 132–33; and realism, 12; social and political engagement of, 3, 20; training of, 122, 234n9; and Turner, 201; Wight’s friendship with, 122–23; on workmanship, 124 subjectivity: Ruskin’s critique of, 12, 31–32, 51; Stillman and, 28, 31, 50–51; Transcendentalism and, 31–32, 38, 62–63 sujets intimes, 57, 61 surveillance, 112 Switzerland, 63–67, 232n117 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 104 Thackeray, William, 104 Thoreau, Henry David, 38, 161 Tobin, Thomas J., 4 Transcendentalism: audience for, 38; and individual subjectivity, 31–32, 38, 62–63; nature as conceived by, 28, 31, 38–41, 55–56, 62–63; and social amelioration, 28, 31; Stillman and, 28, 31–32, 38–41, 50–56, 62–63, 69, 230n62. See also Emerson, Ralph Waldo Troyon, Constant, 57, 68 Trumbull, John, 149 truth: as APR principle, 1, 4, 5, 9, 14, 27, 69–70, 122; in/to nature, 1, 5, 14, 15, 28, 41, 63, 154, 163, 204; realism associated with, 12; Ruskin and, 15; Stillman and, 69–70 Turner, J.M.W.: American reception of, 197, 199–201; APR and, 192–93, 196–97, 199–201, 211; bequest of works to the nation, 196; influence of, 29, 192, 201; John Henry Hill’s interest in, 15, 161, 192–204; King’s interest in, 192; as model for representations of the American West, 158, 161, 192, 201–4; Norton and, 126; prints after paintings of, 193; Ruskin’s admiration for, 21, 30, 67, 70, 108, 192–93, 202–3; Stillman and, 29, 30, 38, 70, 199 Turner, J.M.W., works by: Calais Pier, 196; Crossing the Brook, 196; Fall of the Tees, Yorkshire (engraving by Edward Goodall after Turner), 196, 196, 203; The Fighting Temeraire, 196–97; Liber Studiorum, 196–97; The Pass at Faido, St. Gotthard, 202; Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 197, 199–201, 200; Sun Rising through Vapour, 196 Twenty-Second Regiment of the National Guard of the State of New York, 100–101, 101, 122 typology, 87–90, 103 unification of the arts, 2, 3, 20, 119–20, 122, 123, 128, 149–50, 155 uniformitarianism, 181, 184, 190, 192, 237n62 Union Army, 7, 15, 20, 97, 100–101, 122, 129 Union Square Annex, Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, New York, 121, 133

United States: reform of, sought by APR, 1, 2, 5, 7–9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 25, 28, 30, 70, 114, 119–21, 140–41, 155, 158, 168, 207; Ruskin’s views on, 19, 66–68, 216. See also Civil War University College, Oxford, 124 US Sanitary Commission, 133 US Supreme Court, 92 utilitarianism, 80, 84–85, 116 Van Brunt, Henry. See Ware, William Robert Vassar College, New York, 207 Venetian Gothic, 135, 145, 149 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 133, 217 Wallach, Alan, 112, 210 Wallis, Robert, engraving after William Henry Bartlett, View from Mount Holyoke, 109, 110 Ware, William Robert, and Henry Van Brunt, Memorial Hall, Harvard University, 20, 121, 132–33, 132 Wars of Religion, 93 Washington, George, 97 Watkins, Carleton, 160, 179, 238n70; Commencement of the Whitney Glacier, Summit of Mt. Shasta, 180, 181; Yosemite Valley from the Best General View, 238n70 Watson’s Art Journal, 201 Weems, Jason, 185 Weir, Jonathan Ferguson, 153 Weir, Robert, 75 West. See American West Wheeler, George M., 179, 184 Whelan, Edward, 131 White, Andrew Dickson, 144 White Mountains, New Hampshire, 42, 47, 48 Whitney, Josiah, 170, 238n70 Whittredge, Worthington, 75, 149, 201 Wight, Peter Bonnett: and Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 2; and Civil War, 235n41; and Daniel Gilman, 121, 133; and Gothic Revival, 12, 20, 121, 124, 132, 133, 135–36, 216; and the history of architecture, 133, 135; and The New Path, 119–21; social and political engagement of, 3, 20; Sturgis’s friendship with, 122–23; training of, 122, 234n9 Wight, Peter Bonnett, works by: National Academy of Design, New York, 20, 121, 124, 133–41, 135, 137 (detail), 150; National Academy of Design Competition, New York, New York, South Elevation, 133, 134; Street Hall, Yale University, 20, 121, 122, 133, 142–55, 143, 146, 147 (detail), 216; Union Square Annex, Metropolitan Sanitary Fair, New York, 121, 133; The Yale School of the Fine Arts, Elevation from the Southeast, 145 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, American Scenery, 109 Wilson, Charles Heath, 232n5 Windsor Castle, England, 125 Woodman, Horatio, 52 Woodward, Benjamin: Oxford Union, 3, 120, 149–50, 236n79; Oxford University Museum of Natural History (with Thomas Newenham Deane), 120, 130–32, 130, 131 (detail), 136, 140, 146

index

255

workers and workmanship: Farrer’s views on, 88, 103; Gothic style and, 122, 128, 136, 140; local sourcing of materials and, 147; medieval guilds, 12, 20, 123, 140; Ruskin’s views on, 12, 20, 82–83, 123, 124, 130, 136; Sturgis’s views on, 124; traditional vs. mechanized, 82, 84–85, 123; Wight’s views on, 136, 147. See also working class working class: educational initiatives for, 3, 19, 74, 81–85, 116; Ruskin’s views on, 66–67, 140, 218; social reform in England concerning, 111, 116. See also workers and workmanship Working Men’s College, London, 3, 19, 74, 81–85, 92, 103, 105, 110, 116, 152, 199

Wright, Alistair, 111 Wyman, Jeffries, 52 Yale School of the Fine Arts. See Street Hall, Yale University Yale University: Alumni Hall, 144, 144; Daniel Gilman and, 16–17, 121, 141–51; Dwight Hall, 144, 144; Gothic Revival on campus of, 144–45; Sheffield Scientific School, 16, 121, 122, 141–42, 151, 163, 190, 204; Street Hall, 20, 121, 122, 133, 142–55, 143, 146, 147 (detail), 162, 197, 216; Yale University Art Gallery, 142, 143 Yosemite, California, 175 Yvon, Adolphe, 57

Photography Credits Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal, Cumbria, UK / Bridgeman Images (fig. 21); Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA / Bridgeman Images (fig. 16); Albany Institute of History & Art (figs. 25, 28); Courtesy of Nick and Mary Alexander (fig. 101); Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX (figs. 3, 27, 77, 84, 85); © Art Gallery of Ontario (fig. 20); The Art Institute of Chicago (figs. 51, 52); The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, New York (fig. 55); Ashmolean Museum / Bridgeman Images (fig. 1); Jon Bilous / Dreamstime. com, Image ID: 75643723 (fig. 63); Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery / Bridgeman Images (fig. 40); Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin (fig. 94); The British Museum, London (fig. 23); © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images (fig. 5); Concord Free Public Library (fig. 13); The Delaware Art Museum / Bridgeman Images (fig. 26); Fine Arts Library, Harvard University (fig. 53); Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / Bridgeman Images (fig. 44); Travis Fullerton © Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (fig. 43); George Eastman Museum (fig. 66); Courtesy of the Hon. William Gibson (fig. 30); Houghton Library, Harvard University (figs. 74, 79); Idaho State Museum (fig. 93); Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University (fig. 107); Courtesy of K. and J. Jacobson, UK (fig. 22); Barbara Katus / Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (fig. 108); Keble College, Oxford / Bridgeman Images (fig. 34); Lady Lever Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool / Bridgeman Images (fig. 32); Library of Congress, Washington, DC (figs. 35, 60, 61, 67, 76, 87, 90, 91, 92, 100); Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College, Lynchburg, VA (fig. 110); The Makins Collection / Bridgeman Images (fig. 31); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (figs. 2, 17, 19, 38, 68, 104); The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / Art Resource, New York (figs. 6, 69, 109); Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC (fig. 103); Montclair Art Museum / City of Plainfield, NJ (fig. 102); © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts Boston (figs. 4, 24, 46, 99); Franco Nadalin / Dreamstime.com, Image ID: 48753815 (fig. 47); National Gallery of Art, Washington (fig. 36); New-York Historical Society (figs. 11, 80, 81, 82); The New York Public Library (figs. 39, 96, 97); New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, NY (figs. 71, 72, 73); Northampton Museums and Art Gallery (fig. 7); Sean Pavone / Alamy Stock Photo (fig. 50); © President and Fellows of Harvard College (figs. 45, 98, 112); Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, NY (fig. 106); Private Collection / Bridgeman Images (figs. 10); Reynolda House Museum of American Art (fig. 12); © The Ruskin – Library, Museum and Re-search Centre, University of Lancaster, UK (fig. 111); Ryerson and Burnham Art and Architecture Archives, The Art Institute of Chicago, Digital File # 44184 (figs. 54, 56); Laura Shea / Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA (fig. 105); Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA (fig. 37); Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (figs. 8, 14, 15, 18, 29); Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT (figs. 58, 62); Tate Images (figs. 9, 95); John Bigelow Taylor / The Century Association (fig. 78); Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD / Bridgeman Images (fig. 65); Watkinson Library, Trinity College, Hartford, CT (fig. 42); James Whitaker / Alamy Stock Photo (fig. 48); Widener Library, Harvard University (figs. 33, 41, 57); David Williams, LatitudeStock / Alamy Stock Photo (fig. 49); Courtesy of Paul Worman Fine Art, Worcester, MA (fig. 70); Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, photograph by Chris Gardner (fig. 59)