Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America 9780520940260, 9780520249875
Voices from the dark, or "gothic," side of American life are well known through the work of writers such as Ed
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Table of contents :
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Gloom and Doom
2. The Underground Man
3. The Shrouded Past
4. The Deepest Dark
5. The Shadow’s Curse
6. Mental Monsters
7. Corrosive Sight
8. Dirty Pictures
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Citation preview
A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E
A R T S
I M P R I N T
has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of
.
who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.
Published with the assistance of the Getty Grant Program. Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association of America.
The publisher also gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Associates, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.
PAINTING THE DARK SIDE
PAINTING THE DARK SIDE
ART AND THE GOTHIC IMAGINATION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
SARAH BURNS
university of california press berkeley
·
los angeles
·
london
University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Burns, Sarah. Painting the dark side : art and the Gothic imagination in nineteenth-century America / Sarah Burns. p. cm—(The Ahmanson-Murphy fine art imprint) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-520-23821-4 (cloth : alk. paper). 1. Painting, American—19th century. 2. Race awareness in art. 3. Stereotype (Psychology) in art. 4. Masculinity in art. 5. Art and mythology. I. Title. II. Series. nd210 .b87 2004 759.13'09'034—dc21 Manufactured in Canada 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
2003013276
06 1
05
04
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).8
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction
vii
\ \
xiii
\
1
xv
\
1.
Gloom and Doom
2.
The Underground Man
3.
The Shrouded Past
4.
The Deepest Dark
5.
The Shadow’s Curse
\
6.
Mental Monsters
158
7.
Corrosive Sight
8.
Dirty Pictures
\ \
Epilogue
\
247
Notes
\
249
Index
\
293
44
75
\
101
\ \
\
188 221
128
ILLUSTRATIONS
plates (following page 100) 1.
Thomas Cole, Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 1828
2.
Thomas Cole, Ruined Tower (Mediterranean Coast Scene with Tower), ca. 1832–36
3.
David Gilmour Blythe, Art versus Law, 1859–60
4.
David Gilmour Blythe, The Hideout, ca. 1860–63
5.
Washington Allston, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1817/1843
6.
Washington Allston, Tragic Figure in Chains, 1800
7.
John Quidor, The Money Diggers, 1832
8.
David Gilmour Blythe, Ole Cezer, ca. 1858–60
9.
John Quidor, Tom Walker’s Flight, ca. 1856
10.
William Rimmer, Flight and Pursuit, 1872
11.
Elihu Vedder, The Lair of the Sea Serpent, 1864
12.
Elihu Vedder, Fisherman and the Genie, ca. 1863
13.
Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1875
vii
14.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Temple of the Mind, before 1885
15.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlight, early 1890s
figures 1.
Thomas Cole, Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), 1825
2
2.
Thomas Cole, Hope Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick, 1828
6
3.
Thomas Cole, Shipwreck Scene, 1828
6
4.
Thomas Cole, The Storm, ca. 1827
8
5.
Thomas Cole, Romantic Landscape, ca. 1826
11
6.
Thomas Cole, Landscape with Tree Trunks, 1828
11
7.
Thomas Cole, Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund, 1827
14
8.
Thomas Cole, The Death of Cora, ca. 1827
15
9.
George W. Hatch after Thomas Cole, “Chocorua’s Curse,” 1830
17
10.
Thomas Cole, Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, 1832
20
11.
Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1836
20
12.
David Claypoole Johnston, “Anti-Catholic Doings,” 1836
22
13.
David Claypoole Johnston, “The Two Monuments,” 1836
22
14.
John H. Bufford, Ruins of the Merchants’ Exchange, 1835
23
15.
Thomas Cole, Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower 1838
27
16.
John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, 1829
28
17.
Thomas Cole, Untitled [Volterra], 1831
28
18.
Thomas Cole, Rock in Connecticut, ca. 1827
30
19.
Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Mountains), ca. 1831/32
31
20.
Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Building Fragment), ca. 1831/32
31
21.
Thomas Cole, Past, 1838
35
22.
Thomas Cole, Present, 1838
35
23.
Thomas Cole, Simeon Stylites, ca. 1828
37
24.
Thomas Cole, Mount Etna from Taormina, 1842 (detail)
37
25.
Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood, 1840
39
26.
Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1840
41
27.
Thomas Cole, study for The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His Journey, from The Cross and the World, ca. 1847
42
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illustrations
28.
David Gilmour Blythe, Temperance Pledge, ca. 1856–60
51
29.
William Sidney Mount, Loss and Gain, 1847
52
30.
David Gilmour Blythe, Good Times, ca. 1854–58
53
31.
David Gilmour Blythe, Hard Times, ca. 1856–60
53
32.
David Gilmour Blythe, The Urchin, ca. 1856
56
33.
David Gilmour Blythe, Boy at the Pump, ca. 1858–59
57
34.
David Gilmour Blythe, Conscience Stricken, ca. 1860
57
35.
“The Total S’iety, A Comic Song,” sheet music cover, 1840
58
36.
“A Brandy Smash,” published in Yankee Notions, May 1853
59
37.
David Claypoole Johnston, “Every Man for Himself!” published in Joseph C. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis, 1844
59
38.
David Gilmour Blythe, Man Putting on Boots, 1860
61
39.
“Evening Amusements in New York,” published in the Lantern, October 9, 1852
64
40.
David Gilmour Blythe, Post Office, 1859–63
65
41.
“An Obstruction of the Tear (tier) Duct,” published in Yankee Notions, September 9, 1860
67
42.
David Gilmour Blythe, Street Urchins, ca. 1856–58
69
43.
David Gilmour Blythe, A Match Seller, ca. 1859
71
44.
David Gilmour Blythe, Prospecting, ca. 1861–63
73
45.
Anonymous, Slave Revolt, mid–nineteenth century
85
46.
Richard Newton, A Real Sans Culotte, 1792
88
47.
Washington Allston, Rocky Coast with Banditti, 1800
90
48.
Washington Allston, Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1820–21
93
49.
After Washington Allston, “Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand,” 1831
93
Washington Allston, Spalatro’s Head, for “Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand,” 1830
94
50. 51.
John Quidor, Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, 1839
107
52.
William Sidney Mount, Dancing on the Barn Floor, 1831
107
53.
Gorgon, relief sculpture from the pediment of the Temple of Artemis, Corfu, Greece, 600–580 b.c.e.
110
Nicolino Calyo, Negro Dancer and Banjo Player, 1835
110
54.
illustrations
ix
55.
“James Crow, Esq., of Kentucky; from a painting by Trumbull, in the Capitol at Washington,” published in Crockett’s Yaller Flower Almanac for ’36, 1836
112
Frank Bellew, “The Modern Frankenstein,” published in the Lantern, January 31, 1852
115
Henry Louis Stephens, “The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster ‘Rebellion,’” published in Vanity Fair, May 10, 1862
116
“The Grave-digger,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 24, no. 171 (1864)
117
59.
“Sambo the Whitewasher,” published in Yankee Notions, October 1863
119
60.
“Pat Sambo the Whitewasher,” published in Yankee Notions, October 1863
119
61.
John Quidor, The Devil and Tom Walker, 1856
122
62.
“My Long Tail Blue,” sheet music cover, 1830s
124
63.
John Quidor, Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, 1858
126
64.
William Rimmer, Midnight Ride, 1830/ca. 1853
131
65.
William Rimmer, Secessia and Columbia (Combat of Giants), 1862
134
66.
William Rimmer, Dedicated to the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers (Warriors against Slavery), 1863
134
67.
William Rimmer, Oh for the Horns of the Altar, 1867
136
68.
Perilous Escape of Eliza and Child, lithograph, 1850s
138
69.
“Running Away,” published in Suppressed Book about Slavery, 1857
139
70.
Thomas Moran, Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia, 1862
139
71.
William Rimmer, Faces: Greek, Goth, Moor, ca. 1867
140
72.
“The Shadow Dance,” published in Samuel van Hoogstraten’s 1675 treatise on painting
143
Henry Louis Stephens, “Substance and Shadow,” published in Vanity Fair, January 21, 1860
143
Henry Louis Stephens, “The Highly Intelligent Contraband,” published in Vanity Fair, April 26, 1862
145
Frank Bellew, “The Slave Owner’s Spectre,” published in Harper’s Weekly, May 30, 1863
147
George Cruikshank, “The Pursuit of the Shadow,” illustration, published in Peter Schlemihl, 1823
152
William Rimmer, Evening (The Fall of Day), 1869–70
156
56. 57.
58.
73. 74. 75. 76. 77.
x
illustrations
78.
Elihu Vedder, sketch for Fisherman and the Genie, ca. 1863
165
79.
Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx, 1863
171
80.
Elihu Vedder, The Sphinx of the Seashore, 1879
174
81.
Elihu Vedder, Medusa, 1867
176
82.
Elihu Vedder, The Young Medusa, 1872
176
83.
Elihu Vedder, Perseus and Medusa, ca. 1875
177
84.
Elihu Vedder, The Dead Medusa, 1875
178
85.
“The Modern Sphinx,” published in Harper’s Bazar, May 1, 1869
183
86.
Thomas Nast, “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan,” published in Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872
184
87.
Elihu Vedder, The Phorcydes, 1868
186
88.
“The Body Snatchers, A Recent Actual Occurrence in the Vicinity of New York City,” published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 18, 1868
193
89.
“To the Surgeon,” Civil War valentine, ca. 1861–65
195
90.
Henry Louis Stephens, “A Hint for State Surgeon-Generals,” published in Vanity Fair, July 5, 1862
197
Fernando Miranda, “Hospital Circumlocution—Even Charity Must Be Barred Out,” detail, published in New York Daily Graphic, January 15, 1885
198
92.
William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty, 1751
200
93.
“Chien fixé sur la table à vivisection,” published in Claude Bernard’s Leçons de Physiologie Opérative, 1879
203
Henri Regnault, Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings of Granada, 1870
206
After Thomas Anshutz, “Dissecting Room,” published in Scribner’s, September 1879
210
Thomas Eakins, Differential-Action Study: Man on Ladder, Leaning on Horse’s Stripped Hind Leg, While Second Man at Left Looks On, platinum print, 1885
212
Eadweard Muybridge, Local Chorea, Standing, published in Animal Locomotion, pl. 557, 1887
214
Thomas Eakins, Naked Series: “Brooklyn No. 1,” Female with Dark Mask, Pose 1, ca. 1883
215
Emanuel Leutze, The Poet’s Dream, by 1840
225
“The Emigrant’s Dream,” published in Yankee Doodle, March 20, 1847
225
91.
94. 95. 96.
97. 98. 99. 100.
illustrations
xi
101.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, Toilers of the Sea, ca. 1883–84
230
102.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, Lord Ullin’s Daughter, 1890s
232
103.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Lorelei, early to mid-1890s and later
232
104.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, Curfew Hour, 1880s
241
xii
illustrations
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
y voyage into the dark side of American nineteenth-century art would have run aground
M
long ago had it not been for the support of many colleagues and friends. The book had its
origins in the mid-1990s, when the dark side of Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic ignited my curiosity. Work on this project proceeded haltingly, however, until it was my privilege to spend two years at Stanford University, where I enjoyed munificent institutional, material, and intellectual support, along with the time to research and write several chapters. I am grateful beyond measure to Wanda M. Corn and Alexander Nemerov for inviting me to teach in the Department of Art and Art History during my first year there, and I am much indebted to the Stanford Humanities Center, where I was a fellow during the second. At Stanford, it was my good fortune to enjoy a sustained and inspiring dialogue with fascinating colleagues and talented students, whose ideas, knowledge, and suggestions helped me to clarify, focus, and refine my thinking. I owe a special thanks to Wanda, too, for her role as “matchmaker” between me and the University of California Press and for her perpetual generosity. It is ironic that a book on the dark side should have come out of a time so bright. Many others have made indispensable contributions to this book. Above all, I owe an enormous measure of thanks to Dr. Terri Sabatos, Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf, Patricia Smith Scanlon, and Kelly Ingleright-Telgenhoff, my supersleuth Indiana graduate assistants, whose resourcefulness, per-
xiii
sistence, energy, ingenuity, and good cheer helped to solve countless problems, seek out innumerable facts, and track many an elusive picture. Colleagues here at Indiana and elsewhere facilitated the work in different ways. I owe special appreciation to Bruce Cole for his unfailing support during the years he chaired the Department of History of Art at Indiana University. Susan Rather, Melissa Dabakis, Scott Dimond, and Darrel Sewell all provided opportunities to deliver versions of the Eakins material while the work was in progress. Jeffrey Weidman was most helpful with questions on William Rimmer, as was Charles Colbert, and Bruce Chambers graciously answered queries on David Gilmour Blythe. Bruce Robertson, Paul Staiti, and Bryan Jay Wolf read the manuscript with scrupulously critical attention. Their plenteous and thoughtful comments helped me to produce what I hope is a much better book. Stephanie Fay has been a model of patient and meticulous editorial acumen from start to finish. Finally, as ever, I want to acknowledge the intellectual inspiration and sustaining friendship of Michele Bogart, Vivien Fryd, Barbara Groseclose, Barbara Miller, Robbie Reid, Eric Rosenberg, Janice Simon, and Ellen Handler Spitz. Without them, the last few years would have been a lot less fun and interesting.
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acknowledgments
INTRODUCTION
THE ART OF HAUNTING
y training as a historian of American art was based on a canonical narrative that still com-
M
mands authority. In this narrative, the most representative, most “American,” painting was
the celebration of landscape as type and emblem of national identity. Significantly, the most American of all landscape genres was so-called luminism, in which all-pervading light took on the status of transcendental signifier, standing in for the divine, and for the divinity in nature. Light flooded the grandiose paintings of the Hudson River school; light blazed in the sunset skies of Frederic E. Church and sparkled in the canvases of the American Impressionists. The genre painters we studied likewise produced radiant, mythic images of daily life: farmers harvesting, children romping in sunny fields. When race entered the picture, it seldom had a threatening edge. Black men and women appeared on the margins as harmless, often laughable figures. If violence occurred, it was far off on the western frontier, where Indians slaughtered buffalo and threatened pioneers. We now know all too well how selectively (and for what political and cultural ends) such images represented the American scene. Notwithstanding, they still constitute the mainstream of our historical inquiry, although the emphasis has shifted from celebration to interrogation.1 Scholars tended to explain the many exceptions to the rule of sunny–side up as just that, ranking those artists with oddballs and misfits who, for whatever contrary reason, broke out of the mold. Indeed, the title of Abraham Davidson’s 1978 study, The Eccentrics and Other American
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Visionary Painters, says it all.2 The “eccentrics,” whose art bears little resemblance to that of “mainstream” painters, lingered at the margins of American art history, unincorporated into the larger canonical picture. By and large, I accepted that model, though I always nursed a secret preference for the oddballs. It was not until I began to think about Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic (see Plate 13) that I stumbled into the boneyard of American art history. Admired and praised in the twentieth century as a powerful and uncompromising masterpiece of American realism, this portrait of a distinguished surgeon in action excited controversy in its earliest years; ambivalence toward the painting persisted long after the hullabaloo had subsided. A full quarter century after its first appearance in public the art critic Sadakichi Hartmann found it both morbid and macabre. As late as 1931 the critic Frank Jewett Mather was describing The Gross Clinic as a “witches’ kitchen,” where a “beneficent magus” presided over “eager young men” clutching at the patient’s “gashed thigh” in a mysterious ambience of “general black fustiness.”3 Looking back at the virulent critical reaction in 1879, when the painting was on display at the Society of American Artists in New York, I discovered the same pattern. What could account for such disgust before a work many now consider a monumental and unparalleled representation of modern surgical achievement? Was there another side, a darker side, to The Gross Clinic and the artist who made it? My research strongly suggested that there was. If Eakins—a canonical artist if ever there was one—had a dark side did this hold out possibilities for reconsidering those oddballs and eccentrics so far from the center?4 That is, if Eakins’s dark side was as much a part of him as the systematic, scientific, fact-finding sensibility that structured his work and constituted his image as an authentically American genius, then why not revisit the eccentrics and reconsider them in relation to the mainstream? Why not regard their visual production as equally “American,” with equally compelling things to say about America in the nineteenth century? Was there a way to connect artists otherwise widely separated, socially, geographically, and chronologically? And were there other canonical painters besides Eakins who ventured into the dark side? I knew that there was a substantial and rapidly expanding body of history and criticism on the gothic tradition in American literature, stretching from the novelist Charles Brockden Brown in the eighteenth century, through Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville in the nineteenth, to William Faulkner and beyond in the twentieth. Why was there no similar corpus of work on a gothic tradition in American art? How could the gothic in American culture be limited to one medium? Was it possible to trace a gothic strain in the history of American art, tying together misfits and mainstream painters? And how might the answers to those questions alter the contours of the American art-historical canon? I determined to find out. In this book, I explore and interpret the dark side: the gothic imagination in nineteenth-century American painting.
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introduction
My “gothic” is at some remove from the “Gothic” architectural and decorative style that enjoyed a romantic and ecclesiastical revival in the nineteenth century.5 It is also at some remove from the English literary gothic tradition initiated by Horace Walpole, Anne Radcliff, and “Monk” Lewis. The gothic novel in England was the product of an age in upheaval. Centering on themes of terror, mystery, and the supernatural, gothic tales mapped the struggles and desires of the self, haunted by the dark forces of the ancestral past or oppressive feudal institutions. Fictions of a turbulent era, these narratives featured wicked monks and corrupt aristocrats as villains bent on persecuting innocent maidens and brave youths. Their landscapes were brooding and their settings ruinous or sublime: rotting castles, labyrinthine dungeons, medieval fortresses on crags. In the pictorial arts, the Swiss-born painter Henry Fuseli achieved perhaps the epitome of gothic expression in works such as the memorable Nightmare (1781; Detroit Institute of Arts), with its swooning woman, scowling incubus, and ghostly nag’s head peering through theatrical curtains. Early in the nineteenth century, English and Continental artists explored other gothic themes: ruined churches, apocalyptic disasters.6 What had all this to do with America? Born out of revolution, the young country had no ruins and (in comparison with the Old World) only a shallow past—and what seemed an infinitely bright future. As a product of the Enlightenment, it meant to be a republic of reason, dominated by neither church nor king. Tradition and culture still bound independent America to England, but there was little to foster the transplantation of the English gothic to American soil. Yet it did take root here, shifting shape in response to different and varying sets of historical and social circumstances. In this project I follow directions traveled by the literary and cultural historians who in recent decades have historicized the American gothic. Leslie Fiedler’s landmark study Love and Death in the American Novel remains important, even though scholars have, with good reason, criticized his figuration of American gothic as an exclusively masculine genre centering on a “flight from society to nature, from the world of women to the haunts of womanless men.” For Fiedler, American gothic was “a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.” But as Teresa Goddu notes, Fiedler translated the “dark spectacles” of the gothic into the “more meaningful symbolism of psychological and moral blackness.” That is, he sought mythic, universalizing transcendence for the gothic in America and, although he discussed racial conflict and oppression, gave comparatively little weight to the racial, political, and economic meanings that have more recently engaged scholarly energy. Nonetheless, his vision of the haunted American literary landscape moved criticism into new territory, both troubling and shadowy.7 These shadows have lengthened over the panoramic expanse of our history as scholars continue to dismantle the myths of America as an enlightened and progressive republic. In Nightmare on Main Street, Mark Edmundson examines the resurgence of the gothic in the millennial 1990s, track-
introduction
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ing it everywhere, from the insatiable public appetite for violence and horror to repressed-memory syndrome and Goth subcultures. Focusing on the antebellum decades, David S. Reynolds, in Beneath the American Renaissance, explores the cultural “basement” of the period and argues that canonical writers, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, tapped into a teeming, murky world of popular fascination with sex, crime, vice, and perversion. Although Reynolds is concerned with literary form more than social critique, his research shows how vast a chamber of horrors underlay the polished surfaces of American literary culture. In Murder Most Foul, Karen Halttunen focuses more specifically on a pervasive, enduring public fascination with horrific, savage criminality, from the earliest years of settlement.8 I also draw heavily on the important work of Toni Morrison and Teresa Goddu on the subject of race. Although I focus on the social, the sexual, and the psychological, the racial is an overwhelming and compelling presence in the territory I explore. The institution of slavery and, more generally, racial oppression and violence have haunted and disfigured history and society alike. In “Romancing the Shadow,” Morrison insists urgently that we must recognize the connotations of the “darkness” that pervaded American romantic expression. “Black slavery enriched the country’s creative possibilities,” Morrison writes. “For in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not-me. The result was a playground for the imagination.” Even the Enlightenment can be understood only in relation to the institution of slavery: “the rights of man and his enslavement.” Whiteness, the fundamental term of American identity, means nothing without its foil of blackness. The “Africanist” presence in our literature, therefore, is a “dark and abiding” one that shaped the “imaginative and historical terrain upon which early American writers journeyed.” Yet more often than not this presence, unmentionable for many reasons, appeared in a vocabulary “designed to disguise the subject.”9 In Gothic America, Goddu examines “a number of sites of historical horror—revolution, Indian massacre, the transformation of the marketplace—[but] is especially concerned with how slavery haunts the American gothic.” Gothic stories, she argues, intimately connected to the culture producing them, “articulate the horrors of history.” The nation’s narratives “are created through a process of displacement: their coherence depends on exclusion. By resurrecting what these narratives repress, the gothic disrupts the dream world of national myth with the nightmares of history.” Oozing into other genres and appearing in unlikely places, the gothic brings “the popular, the disturbing, and the hauntings of history into American literature.”10 In the course of my research, I came to realize that similar gothic patterns infused American visual culture. Above all, the Africanist presence identified by Morrison could be glimpsed in a variety of disguises, some obvious, others oblique. Where graphic caricature spoke bluntly of racial
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introduction
tension and unease, the language of painting was characteristically indirect and required careful unraveling to reach the racial dimension. Slavery was not the only divisive and explosive American social ill. Pernicious inequities of gender, class, and ethnicity also found utterance in gothic visual speech. But slavery and its legacy, looming large in our history, stand for all. In these pages, therefore, slavery is the keystone of my gothic arch. The scholarly works that have informed my own thinking point clearly to a radically alternative vision of America, haunted by specters of otherness: psychological, familial, social, and especially racial. Yet they focus almost exclusively on the printed word. Even when they include illustrations from the period—pictures from trial pamphlets, grotesque political cartoons, and the like—those pictures amplify or reinforce the argument of the text rather than define a gothic visuality. Painting the Dark Side, by contrast, imports the gothic into the realm of the visual. I seek to broaden and complicate our ideas of the gothic and its meaning in nineteenth-century American visual culture—especially in painting. I define this “gothic” as the art of haunting, using the term as container for a constellation of themes and moods: horror, fear, mystery, strangeness, fantasy, perversion, monstrosity, insanity. The art of haunting was an art of darkness, often literally: several of the artists I study shared a dark style, characterized by gloomy tonalities, deep shadows and glaring highlights, grotesque figures, and claustrophobic or chaotic spaces. The gothic is hardly limited to such visual traits, however; we see it in Elihu Vedder’s sunstruck beaches and the highly descriptive and strictly controlled drafting of William Rimmer or Thomas Eakins. If there is no consistent set of gothic conventions, what connects these disparate works across the nineteenth century? Beyond the question of style, the gothic is a mode of pictorial expression that critiques the Enlightenment vision of the rational American Republic as a place of liberty, balance, harmony, and progress. Gothic pictures are meditations on haunting and being haunted: by personal demons, social displacement (or misplacement), or the omnipresent specter of slavery and race. They explore the irrational realms of vision, dream, and nightmare, and they grapple with the terror of annihilation by uncontrollable forces of social conflict and change. Gothic pictures trade on terror, ambiguity, and excess while inverting or subverting the status quo. They conjure up disturbing spectacles of grotesque bodies in which the monstrous, the animal, and the anomalous threaten the social construction of the normal. They push and occasionally dissolve boundaries designed to segregate social and cultural space, crisscrossing between high and low, elite and popular, painting and caricature. The dark side remains for the most part unknown, although several studies in addition to Davidson’s Eccentrics have done significant work in mapping the territory. Bryan Jay Wolf uses deconstruction and psychoanalysis to probe gothic dimensions in the art of Washington Allston, Thomas
introduction
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Cole, and John Quidor, who also figure large in Painting the Dark Side. David Miller explores the image and connotations of the swamp, which he construes as the dark side of the nineteenth-century American landscape both in painting and in literature. Michael Fried dips into certain dark and haunted regions of Thomas Eakins’s psyche, and, more recently, Gail E. Husch has revealed the cultural meanings embedded in the disaster genre, which enjoyed a great resurgence in the years from 1848 to 1854.11 Rich in ideas, these studies are also highly selective, focusing on a specific period, artist, genre, or method. I want to account for the gothic pictorial imagination in a broader and more unified historical, social, and cultural framework. But my narrative does not weave itself into a seamless whole, nor does the book function as a systematic, all-inclusive survey of the gothic in nineteenth-century art.12 My aim is to suggest how the gothic, in its many forms, gave certain artists—in and out of the mainstream—a potent, fluid language for dealing with darker facets of history and the psyche that seldom intruded into the optimistic domains of more conventional landscape and genre painting. Gothic pictures stand as visual metaphors for an ever-shifting tangle of secrets, obsessions, fears, and dread. In them disquieting forces, impossible to address directly, find expression in disguise, and things kept in the dark return in the form of veiled, coded, or elliptical messages. Elihu Vedder, for example, could never have expressed outright in a painting his hidden fears of female power. But his images of colossal sea serpents, dead Medusas, and devouring Sphinxes allowed him to displace and distance those terrors, to push them to the dark side, where veils of fantasy shroud a raw anxiety. Nor could the Boston painter Washington Allston acknowledge his identity as a slaveholding southerner in any acceptable, pictorial form. His gigantic unfinished opus Belshazzar’s Feast (see Plate 5) gave him a covert channel for managing a past that never ceased to haunt him. There was more to it than personal expression, however. Were the pictures by these artists and others I investigate merely visual diaries, written in code and dedicated to the exorcism of personal demons, they might be very interesting indeed, but would remain unconnected—a diverting array of tormented psyches and guilty consciences. Instead, however, on the gothic picture plane the personal and the political interlace in complex ways. Vedder’s serpents, Medusas, and Sphinxes reference not only his own anxieties but also those of middle-class masculinity, socially adrift and threatened by the destabilizing forces of emergent feminism. Allston’s fear and guilt were also the fear and guilt of a white society—North and South—stained, haunted, and torn by the curse of slavery. Gothic picture were slates on which the cultural unconscious inscribed itself in cryptic symbols and expressed itself in terms at once subjective and social, private and public. This is the gothic strain, the gothic pattern, that I trace in Painting the Dark Side. The gothic in my account (as in Fiedler’s) is an almost exclusively masculine province, one in
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which images map the terrain of white male anxiety, fear, and repression. Social, economic, and political tensions splintered nineteenth-century American life into myriad shards as opposing groups sought to gain or aggrandize power. For men, art became one of the sites where these conflicts and others simmered or raged. Women artists and artists of color were in the extreme minority through most of the century, and few, if any, ventured into the gothic visual territory I survey here. For such groups literature served as the vehicle of gothic expression while men colonized the pictorial domain. White masculine status and identity, far from stable and unified, constantly faced social, political, and economic challenges. Those may partly explain why male artists manufactured gothic visual languages to express (and repress) their fears or deployed the gothic vocabulary in acts of pictorial and social transgression. All were haunted by visions of social cataclysm and fantasies of regression and personal dissolution. The dread of losing control—or the delights of surrender— permeated the space of the gothic picture. Another connecting thread besides whiteness ties together the eight painters I study. All were, in one way or another, outsiders. Cole was an immigrant who never rooted himself deeply in the soil of his adopted country. Allston was a displaced southern aristocrat trying to conceal his profoundly southern roots in a quintessentially northern town. Blythe and Quidor were at the extremes of marginality, socially, economically, and even geographically. Vedder was a cultural migrant, adrift in wartime New York and subsequently a permanent expatriate, Rimmer a man of precarious balance, always on the brink of poverty and madness. Ryder, a working-class outsider, sedulously cultivated the weirdness that fascinated his largely middle-class clientele. Eakins, a Philadelphian of respectable family and impeccable professional credentials, though he might seem the odd man out here, willfully made himself an outsider. His provocations to the status quo ranged from the gory Gross Clinic to the flagrant pursuit of nudity in the service of art. Pushed to the margins, these painters stood on the brink and gazed down into frightening depths. From the beginning, I wondered if there was a way to bring the emerging gothic pattern in nineteenth-century painting into line with the gothic strain in American literature. As the work progressed, the figure that came back again and again in different guises was that of Edgar Allan Poe, although Hawthorne and Melville both make appearances here, along with the earlier gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown. In The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Hawthorne probed the personal, familial, and social dimensions of the past as a haunting weight on the present. Brown’s haunted landscapes suggest an approach to Cole’s, and Melville in Benito Cereno (1856) produced an elaborate metaphor for the haunting presence and evil of race in America. Yet it was Poe who, like the repressed, kept returning. Poe, as Goddu has noted, fits awkwardly with a national literary canon, functioning most often as “the demonized ‘other’ who must be exorcised from the ‘mainstream’ of our ‘classic’ American
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literature.”13 To integrate him, Goddu argues, literary historians and critics resorted to tactics designed to transcend Poe’s region (the South) and its politics. Thus despite his reputation Poe’s standing in the canon remains problematic. As outsider and southerner haunted by personal demons and racial fears, Poe offered a striking pattern for understanding the gothic facets of the nineteenthcentury American painters I chose to study. Indeed, for the pictorial gothic Poe turned out to be a hall of mirrors, offering up the possibility of complex, multiple reflections. Like Allston, Quidor, and Rimmer, he spoke of the horrors of slavery and the nightmare of racial fears in elliptical, metaphoric language fraught with images both terrifying and bizarre. Displaced, dispossessed, a would-be southern aristocrat, Poe seemed an intriguing reference point for Thomas Cole, a displaced Briton stranded somewhere between gentleman and lowly artisan. As a downwardly mobile inebriate hopelessly defeated by the culture of the marketplace, Poe furnished a striking parallel to David Gilmour Blythe, spiraling downward, increasingly out of control. Indeed, like all the painters in this book, Poe struggled in the unrestrained capitalist economy of urbanizing, industrializing America and, like most of them, fell victim to it. Like Blythe, he explored the dark side of modernity and the modern urban wilderness; like Ryder at the century’s end, he probed the gothic layers of modern subjectivity: the guilty conscience, the tortured mind. Poe, more than any other writer, haunts both the gothic pictorial imagination and this book. The narrative that follows falls into three sections. The first, embracing Cole and Blythe, ventures into the gothic spaces of nature and the metropolis. The centerpiece or keystone section examines the racial fears and fantasies embedded in works by Allston, Quidor, and Rimmer. The last section is a voyage into gothic pathologies of mind and body in the art of Vedder, Eakins, and Ryder. My approach varies, depending on focus, but each chapter revolves around one or two “puzzle pictures,” and each attempts to discover the key, or keys, to their gothic secrets. Because I view these pictures as haunted ground, inhabited by demons both personal and social, biography plays a crucial role here. Where possible I identify personal crises or conflicts that might return to the canvases in pictorial disguise. In a complementary move, I examine the historical landscape—social, political, cultural—for signs of trauma, danger, rupture, and dread; that is, repressed, disturbing, or taboo material that might reappear, in masquerade, within the space of the gothic picture. Though the biographical and the social occur in varying proportions from chapter to chapter, they work together to open up hidden layers and suggest gothic meanings. My turn to biography involves risk. It is something like walking a postmodern art-historical plank. That is, sooner or later (following in the footsteps of the artists I examine here) I am bound to tumble into the depths. Beyond certain concrete markers—birth date, father’s occupation, education, date and duration of marriage, date of death—biography furnishes a rich body of unreliable evidence, and a life story may be subject to variation in successive retellings. Even a subject’s
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diaries or letters or the recollections of relatives, friends, and enemies give us no more than selective, distorted, deceptive, and contingent slices of a life irretrievable in its totality. And in the case of David Gilmour Blythe and John Quidor, only scraps of evidence can be found. All this means that I often journey into the foggy reaches of speculation. Nevertheless, I cannot imagine writing this book without biography. In recent years, art historians have tended to privilege the external social matrix, market forces, and the discourses of race, class, and gender as devices to excavate art’s meaning. The artist, operating at the intersection of social and historical forces, is also their product and their tool, a creature of limited agency enjoying only the most illusory of freedoms. I do not dispute the importance and utility of that model, and it is fully operational here. Taken to an extreme, though, it can reduce art to the function of a machine for meaning, predictably decodable (or predictably ambiguous). As I ventured further and deeper into the research for Painting the Dark Side, I was drawn again and again into the artists’ private lives, so richly and strangely textured (or riddled) with obsessions, illusions, quirks, weaknesses, disappointments, and secrets. Surely those leaked out, somehow, onto the surfaces of the gothic picture or seeped up from its depths. Not to factor in that dynamic—however fluid, elusive, and ultimately indeterminate—would only flatten the lattice of public meaning and private feeling that constitute the gothic. I am not in sympathy or complicity with the eight painters I study here; I do not seek to excuse them or explain away their mistakes, delusions, bigotry, and flaws. I will say, though, that they continue to fascinate me, and that, in the end, may be one of the principal reasons for this book. In Painting the Dark Side, finally, I did not set out to overturn the established canon or to erect another in its place. The book is not a counternarrative or carnivalesque inversion of the status quo. Rather, it expands and complicates the canon and suggests productive ways of rethinking it. Inclusive rather than exclusive, it makes new sense of artists hitherto considered misfits while revealing darker dimensions in the work of canonical masters and patrolling the spongy borderlands where popular visual culture and the elite medium of oil so often mixed, mingled, and traded places. More than anything else, Painting the Dark Side seeks to add strangeness and shadow to the familiar well-lit terrain of nineteenth-century American art. Only if we consider the dark side, indeed, can we better comprehend the light.
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1
GLOOM AND DOOM
ne cloudy August day in 1836, the painter Thomas Cole (1801–48) noted in his journal that
O
such weather made him so melancholy that “all life, the past and the future,” seemed to lie
beneath a shroud of gloom. “I often think,” he went on, “that the dark view of life is the true one.” Cole frequently had such thoughts. In his diary, letters, prose writings, and poems, the words “gloom,” “melancholy,” and their various analogues appear again and again, from his first days as a landscape painter to the end of his life. Rays of sunshine did penetrate the shadows. His marriage to Maria Bartow, three months after that gloomy August day, proved a great source of contentment. The growth of strong religious feeling in middle age gave him a bulwark against despair. Yet dread, sadness, and hopelessness plagued him. As a young man, he wrote of the “darkness, doubt, and fear” that lay beyond the future’s “dim horizon.” In 1841 that future was still blank and mysterious, “lost in gloom.” His forty-sixth birthday, on February 1, 1847, conjured up once again his old, persistent vision of eternity as an unfathomable, dark gulf yawning before him.1 Gloom and ruin were recurrent themes in Cole’s art as well. Although he alternated between brooding pessimism and sunny moods, the darker vision always returned. Death cast a pall over his earliest ventures into landscape. The trees in his Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), one of the paintings that launched Cole’s career in New York after a summer sketching trip into the mountain wilderness (Fig. 1), stand leafless around dark, still waters, their trunks naked and branches
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figure 1. Thomas Cole, Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), 1825. Oil on canvas, 27 × 34". Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio.
broken. At left, corkscrewed boughs writhe as if in agony or despair. Two deer, antlers rhyming with the bare branches above, usher the eye from the stark pallor of the trees on the left to the deep brown shadows that obscure the right-hand side. Moldering logs stretch across the foreground. In the distance a mountain peak rises; above is a patch of blue and lavender in the cloudy, gray sky. The lake, however, is closed off on all sides. There is no way out of this graveyard, haunted by the ghosts of trees. Although there are signs of life—the deer and the healthy vegetation around the lake—Cole’s fascination with death, decay, and doom surmounts them. Some years later, he took pleasure in recollecting the sight of the dead trees, bare and spectral, their moss-draped limbs waving in the wind like “locks of gray,” and their reflections gently undulating “like immense glittering serpents playing in the deep.”2
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In the early years, Cole allowed his imagination to fly unchecked. Later, as a gentlemanly, upright, religious, and moral landscape painter, he was more careful to partition the dark side from the light, and to package his forays into murkier territory with uplifting messages. He could never curb his attraction to such themes, however, not least because he was able to channel into them the deep anxieties, conflicts, and frustrations that shadowed his interior world. His scenes of savage wilderness and cataclysmic destruction guide the viewer into a mental landscape, projected onto and fused with distinctive features of the world outside. Cole’s paintings also registered the broader political and social anxieties that preoccupied gothic writers in America. His early landscapes, ravaged and dark, figured the young Republic as a land haunted by the same violent and bloody history that shadowed the American wilderness of the novelist Charles Brockden Brown. Cole’s scenes of ruined castles and towers find a literary analogue in the tales and poems of Edgar Allan Poe, obsessed like Cole with contempt for and dread of the multitude that the new democratic order had spawned, and bedeviled like Cole by the conflicting demands of art and an increasingly commercial market. At once personal and political, Cole’s landscapes opened up a gothic space where that inner world of doubt and dread tangled with the outer world of haunting history and foreboding change.3 Cole was born in Bolton-le-Moors, Lancashire.4 His father, James, was a muslin manufacturer who aspired to middle-class gentility. Cole was the second-to-last child in a large family of girls. He was particularly close to his younger sister, Sarah, who seems to have been his chief confidante. In his ninth year he was sent to school at Chester. According to his first biographer, the Reverend Louis Noble, the small, sensitive child suffered so severely from harsh discipline, poor food, and sickness that traumatic memories of that period remained vivid in his mind all his life. At the age of fifteen, Cole became an apprentice engraver of designs in a Chorley calico factory, where he had to endure the uncongenial society of fellow workers he thought rude and coarse. He consoled himself with long walks in the country, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by sister Sarah. He read voraciously as well, especially the works of his favorite poets, William Wordsworth and Lord Byron. Never successful, Cole’s father decided to emigrate in the hope that brighter prospects awaited him in the United States. The family sailed from Liverpool to Philadelphia, landing on July 3, 1818. For the next few years James Cole tried to make his fortune, first running a dry-goods shop in Philadelphia, then manufacturing wallpaper in Steubenville, Ohio, and, when that failed, floor cloths in Pittsburgh. Thomas, meanwhile, found work as an engraver in Philadelphia. In January 1819 he voyaged to the island of Saint Eustatius in the West Indies, remaining there until May. After his return he walked the entire distance from Philadelphia to his father’s rented house in Steubenville. There he gave drawing and painting lessons in the young ladies’ seminary established by his sis-
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ters. Having learned the rudiments of oil technique from an itinerant portrait painter, Cole traveled on foot from one small town to another, attempting with little luck to interest citizens in having their likenesses recorded. In 1823 Thomas helped his father in the floor-cloth manufactory in Pittsburgh but late that year decided to become an artist, despite James Cole’s disapproval. He spent the winter of 1824 in Philadelphia, painting comical pictures for sale to oyster houses and saloons while studying from casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In April 1825 he rejoined his family, which had given up on the floor-cloth enterprise and moved to New York City late the preceding year. Cole now became a serious full-time painter. With the sketches from his trip up the Hudson in the summer of 1825 he was able to lever himself into the best cultural circles, attracting patrons such as the Baltimore financier Robert Gilmor and the Connecticut gentleman Daniel Wadsworth. In 1826 he became a founding member of the National Academy of Design, run by artists and supported by businessmen. From then on he exhibited landscapes regularly at the academy’s annual shows, as well as a variety of other venues in New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. Eager to refine his art and further his artistic education, he sailed back across the Atlantic in 1829, spending a total of three years abroad, in England and on the Continent. This is certainly an extraordinary tale. Young Thomas Cole had successfully made the transition from artisan (albeit a bookish one), producing cheap textile designs, to full-fledged fine-art painter. He had gone from reluctant association with crude apprentices to privileged acquaintance with some of the most prosperous cultural power brokers of the eastern United States. Yet his situation was highly unstable and his identity unfixed. For years he lived a rootless existence, traveling with his family or by himself from one town to the next, from one venture to another. He was an immigrant, who desired nothing more ardently than to call America his true home. Yet he could not shed his Englishness as if it were some worn-out skin. He painted American landscapes but beheld them with English eyes; he identified himself with his wealthy, aristocratic patrons and “genteel culture” but for years barely managed to retain his foothold in the nascent middle class. He was in-between, neither one nor the other, a transplant, a graft. Nor was the art world where he sought renown stable and fixed. Its institutions were young, its future uncertain.5 Cole suffered substantial and worrying insecurities. From the 1820s well into the mid-1830s he shouldered nearly all responsibility for supporting his father, mother, and sisters. As the Cole family’s movements suggest, father James failed in successive attempts to build a business, repeating the pattern of Lancashire, where financial ruin constantly threatened to reverse the family’s modest social progress and plunge it into poverty and disgrace.6 By the time the Coles moved to New York, James had given up any pretense of being the breadwinner, handing over that role to his son. On one occasion he wrote to Thomas that he was quite idle, had nothing to do, and did not yet
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know which business to follow. Like Dickens’s Mr. Macawber, he hoped that something would “turn out” and urged Thomas to take any offer for the paintings he was currently trying to sell in Boston.7 In his letters Cole lamented this heavy burden, which contributed greatly to friction within and beyond the family. Once he apologized for a misunderstanding with his patron, Robert Gilmor: “I hope you will find me excusable when I inform you that on the morning I saw you my mind was harassed and perplexed by several disagreeable occurrences in the family that had just transpired before I saw you.” Struggling to rise in the art world and to scrape together the money he needed to embark on his European travels, Cole felt that he was running hard but getting nowhere. As he explained to Daniel Wadsworth, “The chief cause of my low spirits . . . is that owing [to] the unavoidable expenses of my family—after the labor of several years with every advantage of ready sale and good prices for my pictures[—]I am as far as ever from attaining that for which I have laboured incessantly for a great length of time.” The problem was compounded by Cole’s obligation to pay off the money his father owed after his business ventures collapsed. Cole’s prospects had begun to brighten, he wrote, but “our large family . . . came on to me from the West, and with it debt, contracted by my father, for which I was bound. . . . Nearly four years I spent in Europe, not in the pursuit of pleasure, but in the earnest endeavour to acquire the means of supporting an affectionate family, and of paying those debts that crushed my very soul to think of.”8 Cole’s landscapes from the four-year period preceding his “escape” to Europe take on new dimensions when read against this narrative of frustration and despair. If anything haunted Cole at this time of his life, it was that soul-crushing encumbrance he was forced to take on at a critical stage of his career and his self-fashioning. Two drawings from that time graphically symbolize the painter’s state of mind: Hope Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick and Shipwreck Scene (Figs. 2, 3). In both, a tiny figure marooned on a craggy rock waves at an impossibly distant ship as the sun sets and storm clouds mass. Shipwreck Scene includes a fragment of wreckage bearing the word “fortune.” It is difficult to imagine a more transparent landscape metaphor. The elements here are conventional, well-worn even, and ubiquitous in the vocabulary of romanticism. However hackneyed, though, these little sketches offer a key to the subjective component in landscapes such as the Lake with Dead Trees, described earlier. Storms, ruin, entrapment, danger, death, and isolation made up a dominant strain in Cole’s landscape iconography, in his poetry and prose writings as well as pictures. During the 1820s he wrote several accounts of perilous, solitary journeys into the wilderness. In an early prose sketch, “The Bewilderment,” Cole describes himself as “alone & a stranger in the wilderness,” threading the “deepening shadows of the gloomy forest” at sunset. As he descends into a valley, the shadows deepen, and his twisted path becomes more and more obscure. He passes the scene of a recent
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figure 2. Thomas Cole, Hope Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick, 1828. Pencil on paper, 33⁄8 × 4G". Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph © 2001. The Detroit Institute of Arts.
figure 3. Thomas Cole, Shipwreck Scene, 1828. Pastel, 3G × 41⁄8". © Collection of The New-York Historical Society, 1944.376.
tornado, which has left desolation in its wake. Looking for a passage through the entangled roots and branches of the toppled trees, he becomes “perplexed and bewildered,” entirely losing his way. At length he struggles out, but before him lies a “pitchy blackness.” The earth suddenly crumbles, and Cole finds himself “plunging headlong” far down into deep, black waters, where he clings to a rock in “utter darkness.” Groping about, he discovers that perpendicular “walls of unscaleable stone” surround him. The only escape is to follow the course of the water through a cave that yawns “like a sepulchre.” “Where might it lead?” he muses. “Perhaps to unfathomable gulfs, into black labyrinths, into the dayless caverns of the earth.” Clambering onto a piece of driftwood, the lone man in the wilderness makes a “strange voyage” into the ever-deepening darkness, toward a furious whirlpool that he manages to evade by a hairsbreadth. Finally, he makes his way to safety, by moonlight, through a long, cavernous passage.9 Another narrative, “The Storm,” even more extravagantly incorporates elements of blackness, precipitous heights, abysmal depths, disorientation, and entrapment. Somehow, Cole finds himself “far from the earth careering through a permeable waste into some outer void, beyond the grasp of gravitation.” He flies through “illimitable plains” and over the “sullen waves of shoreless oceans,” ultimately entering a region of primeval chaos, where all things mingle “in mysterious confusion.” When he comes back to earth and his senses, he finds himself on the brink of a promontory, with a “headlong torrent” on either side plunging into the “deep obscurity of the valley.”10 Both tales end in deliverance. The lost wanderer stumbles to a friendly hunter’s cabin; the storm passes over, giving way to brilliant, glittering light. Cole, however, relishes the ordeal as much as the fortunate outcome. In “The Bewilderment” he finds “a kind of pleasure in the fearful sublimity” of his plight, and in “The Storm” his entrapment on the rock between roaring columns of water gives rise to “peculiarly romantic” sensations. Cole’s drawing conveys the same exhilaration and fear in the face of extreme peril. Everything is stupendously huge, except for the minute black silhouette of the stranded traveler sheltering beneath a ton of overhanging rock (Fig. 4). Mammoth trees writhe in the gale, and on either side the cataract, monstrously swollen, plunges down. The situation is dire; there is no way out. Yet the tiny man exults in his peril, standing near the edge of the precipice and stretching out his arms as if to implore—or embrace—the fury all around him. Danger is at once terrifying and irresistible.11 Although these narratives may have originated in actual events, given that Cole was an avid mountain hiker, he obviously embellished both writing and drawing for dramatic effect. Cole’s imagery is conventional, deriving from the aesthetics of the sublime and picturesque as well as the gothic effects of Salvator Rosa, the seventeenth-century Italian whose landscapes were visual textbooks of terror for romantic painters. Cole’s stories are also naturalized versions of a Bunyanesque pilgrimage through darkness and danger into light and life. That theme, emerging early in Cole’s
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figure 4. Thomas Cole, The Storm, ca. 1827. Pencil on paper, 8 × 43⁄4". Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph © 2001 The Detroit Institute of Arts.
oeuvre, would continue to serve as the structuring device for later landscape allegories. The quirky excess of Cole’s vision, however, suggests more than reliance on generic formula. The American wilderness served Cole as a platform from which to launch a thrilling and perilous journey of the mind. He nationalized and localized the topography of the gothic, hitherto associated with castles on crags, ruined abbeys, eerie crypts, and tortuous dungeon passageways.12 No fixed boundaries on either page or canvas separated the landscapes of Cole’s imagination from those he based on observation. Minus the volcano and wind-whipped palms, the “fallen” side of the landscape in Cole’s Expulsion from the Garden of Eden is a seamless stand-in for the “real” American wilderness Cole celebrated in his early works (see Plate 1). That Cole based his composition on John Martin’s 1827 illustration of the same subject from Milton’s Paradise Lost further emphasizes how much of the painter’s topography came out of his head (or books) rather
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than from nature. On the right side, the Garden of Eden glows in the radiant atmosphere of golden sunlight. There are palm trees (reminiscent, perhaps, of Cole’s voyage in the West Indies), swans, lush vegetation, and masses of flowers. The real, fallen world on the left, by contrast, is in every sense the dark side. Spears of light flame from the portals of Eden, but once those doors are sealed, only the flash of lightning and the red glow of the volcano will illuminate this perilous land, separated from the garden by a crumbling stone catwalk over an unfathomable abyss that draws our eyes downward into a headlong plunge. Around the banished pair soar craggy pinnacles; beneath them is the fall into nothingness. Storm-battered trees, broken and gnarled, bear witness to the violence of this gloomy realm. On the brink of a ledge in the left foreground, a snarling wolf begins to devour a deer, a vulture hovering nearby. As a mighty torrent crashes into the depths, inky clouds swirl above.13 Cole overlaid his American landscapes with a cloak of naturalism, basing them on sketches executed in the course of his tireless excursions into the remote reaches of the woods and mountains. Yet these “real” scenes bear the same marks of violent cataclysm. In Romantic Landscape broken trunks and snaking branches lie in the foreground, framing a still, dead lake (Fig. 5). Massive chunks of rock, long ago smashed and tumbled into ruin, repose in the waters. The sky is dark and stormy, though one long beam of light shines in from an opening in the clouds on the left. In Landscape with Tree Trunks a shattered, twisted tree stands on the shore of a dark lake; opposite rise brooding cliffs (Fig. 6). Black clouds tower threateningly on the right; far back on the left the sky clears and brightens. These distant portals of radiance are ambiguous. We might read them as the sign of a golden future, promising the proverbial calm after the storm. Or, reversing direction, we might imagine ourselves, like Adam and Eve, traveling from that splendid light, into the darkness of the fallen world.14 What are the implications of Cole’s ambiguity? Cole carried into painting what the American gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) had attempted to create in fiction: a dark vision of the American landscape as a place of mystery and terror.15 If Brown, raised a Quaker in Philadelphia, seems on the surface to have little in common with Cole, one solid link connects them. William Dunlap, Brown’s friend and first biographer, was also the author of an important early biography and critical assessment of Cole, based in part on information obtained directly from the artist. It is conceivable that Cole, a voracious reader, knew Brown’s work. I do not want to suggest that Cole sought somehow in his paintings to give visual expression to the writer’s gothic vision. But I am interested in the way Brown’s gothic American landscape offers a tool for opening up Cole’s.16 Brown wrote all six of his novels in the short span of years from 1796 to 1801.17 After that he turned to magazine editing and continued to contribute prolifically to periodicals in Philadelphia and New York. In his fiction he sought to discredit superstition and belief in the supernatural by
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recourse to rational explanation. Thus in his best-known work, Wieland (1796), a ventriloquist turns out to be the source of the mysterious, ghostly voices that drive Theodore Wieland to madness and the murder of his wife and children. Despite their ostensible argument for Enlightenment reason, Brown’s stories of insanity, delusion, disease, and fear produced “an almost obsessive sense of terror in the landscape and history of this country,” where mystery and danger lurked and threatened to unmake the promise of the new Republic.18 In Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), Brown rejected the shopworn literary conventions of the Old World to base his fiction in the conditions of the New. “One merit the writer may at least claim,” he wrote in his preface, “is that of calling forth the passions and engaging the sympathy of the reader, by means hitherto unemployed by preceding authors. Puerile superstition and exploded manners; Gothic castles and chimeras, are the materials usually employed for this end. The incidents of Indian hostility, and the perils of the western wilderness, are far more suitable, and, for a native of America to overlook these, would admit of no apology. These, therefore, are, in part, the ingredients of this tale.”19 In Brown’s hands, the English or German tale of terror metamorphosed into a tale of national terror, haunted woods supplanting haunted ruins, caves standing in for dungeons, and savage natives replacing evil monks, wicked aristocrats, and bandits. The setting of the novel is the backwoods of Pennsylvania. Edgar Huntly, the narrator, is a character who, like Cole, seeks solitude in the wilderness: “Thou knowest my devotion to the spirit that breathes its inspiration in the gloom of forests and on the verge of streams. I love to immerse myself in shades and dells, and hold converse with the solemnities and secrecies of nature.” In the course of the story, his journeys into the wilderness become voyages into a world of ever-darkening fear, danger, and violence. The plot turns on a mysterious sleepwalker, Clithero Edny, whom Huntly mistakenly believes the murderer of his best friend, Waldegrave. Haunted by Waldegrave’s death, Huntly sets out to determine the truth and, in the process, discovers both the horrors of the wilderness and the horrors in his deepest, most secret self. The wilderness through which Huntly tracks his quarry is gloomy, rugged, perilous, and desolate, exhibiting “a perpetual and intricate variety of craggy eminences and deep dells” walled by soaring, vertical cliffs. The landscape is a ruinous “chaos of rocks and precipices,” and even in the flatland “it is made rugged and scarcely passable by enormous and fallen trunks, accumulated by the storm of ages, and forming, by their slow decay, a moss-covered soil, the haunt of rabbets and lizards. These spots are obscured by the melancholy umbrage of pines, whose eternal murmurs are in unison with vacancy and solitude, with the reverberations of the torrents and the whistling of the blasts.” Every path is a maze, every opening terminates “sooner or later, in insuperable difficulties, at the verge of a precipice, or the bottom of a steep.”
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figure 5. Thomas Cole, Romantic Landscape, ca. 1826. Oil on panel, 16 × 22". North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina.
figure 6. Thomas Cole, Landscape with Tree Trunks, 1828. Oil on canvas, 26 × 32". Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Walter H. Kimball Fund.
When Huntly discovers the mouth of the cave where he believes Clithero has hidden, he plunges into its blackness, an “intense dark” that is, he observes, “always the parent of fears.” Groping blindly along treacherous passageways, he struggles to the point of exhaustion. He comes at last to a soaring chamber where a cataract dashes down into dizzying depths. There, across an impassable gulf, he sees Clithero, lying in a trance among the rocks. Roused by Huntly’s cries, the sleepwalker jumps up and vanishes. Only by felling a tree can Huntly cross the abyss and continue his pursuit. Needing an ax, he is forced to double back through the cave and make his way home. The following day, he returns to the edge of the abyss, chops down the tree, and fashions a rude log bridge, but before he can creep out on it, a violent storm crashes down: “Torrents of rain poured from above, and stronger blasts thundered amidst these desolate recesses and profound chasms.” The trees twist and bend violently in the howling blast of the wind. Beset by danger, Huntly (like Cole) nonetheless finds intense pleasure in the sublimity and grandeur of the scene. Unable to cross, he manages once more to find his way out of the cave, his quarry still at large. The next time Huntly penetrates the wilderness, he too becomes a somnambulist, waking to find himself deep in the same pitch-black cave. Hopelessly lost, desperate and starving, he encounters a panther and kills it with a cast-off tomahawk he has chanced upon in his blind gropings. Then, ravenous, he feasts upon the “yet warm blood and reeking fibers” of the brute, only to vomit up his awful meal in revulsion. Glimpsing light ahead, Huntly creeps toward it to find four “savages” around a campfire, and suddenly he is reliving the awful day when his parents and an infant sibling were murdered in their beds: “Most men are haunted by some species of terror or antipathy, which they are, for the most part, able to trace to some incident which befell them in their early years. You will not be surprized that the fate of my parents, and the sight of the body of one of this savage band, who, in the pursuit that was made after them, was overtaken and killed, should produce lasting and terrific images in my fancy. I never looked upon, or called up the image of a savage without shuddering.” Yet the horror is only beginning. Huntly steals off after rescuing a young girl held captive by the Indians, but he encounters them soon after at the site of a recent massacre. In the skirmish that follows, Huntly shoots and kills three of his enemies, who collapse in a heap of tangled limbs and gore. Appalled and sickened, Huntly contemplates the vastness of the destruction he has caused: “This scene of carnage and blood was laid by me,” he thinks. “To this havock and horror was I led by such rapid footsteps.” By the time Huntly, moving like a wolf or panther “upon all fours,” encounters the last of his foes, he himself has become “savage,” “led by such rapid footsteps” to the most brutal extremes of survival in the wilderness. From that point, he gradually returns to humanity and civilization, and in the end, all the complex mysteries are unraveled. Huntly, however, is a changed man, forever scarred by his ordeals.20
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As literary scholar Sydney J. Krause has noted, Charles Brockden Brown’s mind was prone to “gothicize the inner world by projecting it into nature.” In his dreamlike odyssey, Huntly walks “in the wild of the unknown Self.” Its topography at once psychological and concrete, the wild becomes the locale for a journey that impels “the emergence of the dark self.” With its labyrinthine passages, steep cliffs, and dank hollows, this is a landscape of desolation, a “fallen garden” where beasts roam and savage killers lurk. Brown’s gloomy, gothic American terrain was a metaphorical minefield, threatening republican virtue at every turn. The integrity of republican selfhood— self-governing, rational—depended entirely on the repression of the dark self or, better yet, its extermination. Edgar Huntly’s regression demonstrated how insidiously reason could fall prey to lower nature. The landscape in Edgar Huntly is historically dark as well, shadowed by memories of the bloody violence that attended Euro-American settlement.21 Like Brown’s landscapes, the desolate wastelands Cole conjured up on paper and canvas were fallen gardens in their own right, represented by an array of highly specific signifiers. In the year he completed the Expulsion, Cole wrote to Wadsworth, returned from a tour of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Cole told his patron that he had often imagined standing by his side in “that region of sublimity . . . amidst the ruins of mountains in the Notch, gazing awestruck, and amazed on its death-like desolation.” Wadsworth thought along the same lines. When he received Cole’s Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” (Fig. 7), he praised its magnificence, reserving his most fervent admiration for “the deep Gulfs, into which you look from real precipices,—The heavenly serenity of the firmament, contrasted with the savage grandeur, & wild Dark masses of the Lower World,—whose high pinnacles only, catch a portion of the soft lights where all seems peace.”22 Cole worked out his repertoire of “Lower World” scenery in four variations on episodes from James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, published in 1826. In that same year, Cole produced the first painting (Terra Foundation for the Arts, Chicago), commissioned by the Stevens family of Hoboken, New Jersey, to decorate their new Hudson River steamboat, the Albany. This painting depicted the murder of the self-sacrificing heroine Cora at the hands of the villainous Huron Magua and his warriors. Cole reworked the same scene in The Death of Cora (Fig. 8). In two other versions, he focused on an earlier stage in the sequence of events, when Cora kneels at the feet of the old sage Tamenund while he decides her fate. One went to Daniel Wadsworth (see Fig. 7). The other (1827; New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown) was for Robert Gilmor, who had directed Cole’s attention to the Cooper novel as a rich mine of subject matter to enliven and localize his sublime topography.23 Even though the subject was Cooper’s, the landscape was in essence Brown’s: Cooper freely appropriated his predecessor’s vision of the wilderness and, like Brown, used natural setting to ground and amplify moral drama.24 In Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” members of the Delaware tribe form a circle on the
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figure 7. Thomas Cole, Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund, 1827. Oil on canvas, 223⁄8 × 351⁄16". Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. Bequest of Alfred Smith.
ledge overlooking a deep chasm. Within this ring, Cora beseeches the patriarch while her sister Alice swoons. The Death of Cora represents the dramatic moment, a true cliffhanger, when Magua demands that the captive heroine choose between “the wigwam or the knife of le Subtil!” Kneeling and stretching her arms imploringly to heaven, Cora submits herself to fate while Magua struggles with his passion and anger. The virtuous Delaware Uncas appears, leaping down “from a fearful height” to save her, but it is too late: as Magua recoils, a henchman sheaths his knife in Cora’s bosom.25 The landscape in both paintings expresses a brooding sense of danger and imminent death. The figures in Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans” are minuscule in proportion to the huge rock towers soaring above, natural New World counterparts to the crumbling castle or ruined abbey of the Old. The precipices are, as Wadsworth wrote, “real” and dizzying. It is impossible to gain a secure vantage point. Viewers gain visual access by way of the slanting, deeply undercut ledge in
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figure 8. Thomas Cole, The Death of Cora, ca. 1827. Oil on canvas, 353⁄8 × 475⁄8". Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.
the foreground, but the eye is left poised, perilously, over empty air. Even the plateau beyond seems impossible to reach. Moreover, the chasm that divides the “savage grandeur” of the “Dark masses” from the calmer reaches of the mountain range beyond cannot be crossed. It is as if the bridge back into Eden had collapsed after Adam and Eve made their way into the fallen world. The Death of Cora takes place in a similar terrain, with the bottomless abyss, the dizzying brink, and the dark towers of rock. Cora, in white, kneels at the edge of the precipice while Magua stands over her. Across the chasm looms a perpendicular wall of rock shadowing the terrifying void below, and beyond the ledge writhing trees and shattered trunks block the way. The placid lake far off in the hazy distance only serves to accentuate the rough violence of the foreground. The tiny figure of Uncas, poised on a boulder, seems to express the hopelessness of survival against such mighty and pitiless odds. Even more poignant is the figure of Cora, positioned exactly at the center axis of the composition. How can such a minute slip of whiteness survive in a wilderness so
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excessively dark, deep, powerful, and vast? Indeed, another minute and nearly everyone will be dead: Cora; Uncas and the scout Heyward, stabbed by Magua; and Magua, shot by Hawk-Eye, lying at the bottom of the abyss, all of them swallowed up by inexorable darkness. For Cole, past brutality, suffering, and death reverberated in the present-day landscape, even in its most peaceful moods. His 1826 poem “Lines on Lake George” celebrates the lake’s purity and timeless tranquillity. Yet in 1757, during the French and Indian War, that unsullied paradise had been the site of the gruesome Fort Henry massacre. Again, Last of the Mohicans may have furnished inspiration. Subtitled A Narrative of 1757, the novel recounted this event, a factual anchor for Cooper’s romantic fiction. In the poem Cole remembers when the streams feeding the lake ran red with men’s “hot blood,” and “warm heart’s blood” trickled over the mossy boulder where a wounded soldier fainted and died. Savage Indians massacred defenseless victims, “Dying female shrieks, / And the weak plaint of feeble innocence; / Mingled with yells of Indians banqueting in blood.” To look upon that smiling, dimpled lake, one would never imagine it had seen such sickening horrors. Cole prayed that the calm and lovely days of peace might never be broken.26 Yet again and again he returned to the theme of violence—real and implied—in the American wilderness. The lost painting Chocorua’s Curse (1829) dealt unambiguously with the haunting presence of the bloody past. The idea arose from Cole’s 1828 tour in the White Mountains, where Mount Chocorua rose “like an immense pyramid” from its forested base. Curious about the mountain’s name, Cole learned that soon after the French and Indian War, the native Chocorua became the target of a white man bent on revenge. The legend told how this hunter and his party chased Chocorua to the very summit of the “high and almost inaccessible mountain” and gave him a choice: jump from the dreadful precipice, or perish by their rifles. Chocorua chose the latter rather than brave that “terrific leap.” He uttered a curse with his dying lips, and ever after, cattle grazing on his old hunting ground took sick and died.27 An engraving after the painting appeared in The Token in 1830 (Fig. 9). The hunted Indian lies stranded on a dark crag high over a dizzying abyss. Jagged, broken trees fill the opposite corner. The hunting party has just attained the summit, and their leader stands poised to shoot. Chocorua’s desperation is almost palpable, even in the crude reproduction. Rather than show the landscape at peace, Cole chose to represent the murderous act that had tainted this not-so-virgin wilderness. The darkest side of the landscape was the space of violence and deadly conflict that lay, or lurked, in even the most serene and domesticated prospect and echoed, however distantly, in the present. Cole staged his epics of strife between Euro-American invaders and native tribes at the time of relentless pressure to remove and exterminate Indians. In the wake of the Louisiana Purchase, white settlers flowed west in great numbers to cultivate lands inhabited by native peoples. Conflict in-
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figure 9. After Thomas Cole, engraving by George W. Hatch, “Chocorua’s Curse,” published in The Token, 1830. Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
evitably flared as Indians mounted violent resistance to the invasion and appropriation of the land. Their attacks and massacres allowed their enemies to claim the moral high ground in their own acts of violent conquest. The Indians were savage, primitive, bloodthirsty murderers of white men, women, and children. Andrew Jackson wielded such rhetoric during the Creek War of 1813–14, undertaken in revenge for the deaths of two hundred people at the hands of the Creeks at Fort Mims in Mississippi. Jackson’s election as president in 1828 marked the beginning of the massive Indian removal campaign that displaced some seventy thousand west of the Mississippi and killed one-third of the Indians from the South. The supremely cold-blooded killers, in the end, were the Euro-Americans, who displaced their own savagery upon the bodies of those they slaughtered and feared.28 Cole’s paintings of the American wilderness as “Lower World” seem on the surface entirely disconnected from such events. Set in a legendary past, they romanticize raw cruelty, violence, and bloodshed. Robert Gilmor on one occasion recommended that Cole add the figure of an “Indian
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Hunter . . . with his rifle leveled and one or two deer crossing an open space” to “assist the idea of solitude” in picturing the “desolate wilderness of American nature.” Later, Gilmor expressed delight with Cole’s rendering of the “savages” in Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans.”29 For Gilmor, and probably for Cole, Indians lived only in the mythic time glamorized by Cooper and elegized by Cole himself in “Lines on Lake George.” Thus they could take their place as accessories inhabiting the landscape in its primordial state. But the darkness, violence, and deathliness of Cole’s landscapes form a gothic pattern that allows us to trace the histories his paintings contrive to mask in the language of the sublime. In Cole’s gothic wilderness, the New World was a paradise lost almost from the start. As such, it was the fitting repository for all the painter’s melancholy fears. Like Brown’s landscapes, Cole’s are doubly haunted, by history and by the shadows of his own doubt and despair. Cole worshiped the beauty of nature and sought within it the presence of the divine. Nonetheless, often plummeting into his own bottomless abyss, he viewed the world as desolation, as the end rather than the beginning of time. Longing for stability and peace, he was irresistibly drawn to confusion, chaos, collapse, and disintegration. In the “Lower World” inner darkness and the darkness of history converged. Yet the longer Cole lived and struggled in modern America, the more it, too, seemed fatally tainted. Early on, Cole was acutely conscious of the vast divide between his old and new homes. Before making his first trip back to England and the Continent, he traveled to Niagara Falls and saw the city of Rochester, New York, which impressed him as a wonder of the world, a large, handsome town, risen in the midst of the wilderness. “But for the appearance of newness,” he wrote, “the traveller would imagine that it would have been the work of ages. Bridges, Aqueducts, Warehouses and huge mills which are the Castles of the United States are standing over the rushing waters and in future ages they shall tell the story of the enterprise and industry of the present generation—These edifices will not be hallowed by the deeds of noble knights. . . . No! But they will stand as monuments of the triumphs of peace and liberty—and the romantic interest of chivalrous days shall be dimmed by the brighter and happier exploits of peace.” These shining new castles of industry, material symbols of American progress and prosperity, would never molder under darkening skies.30 By contrast, the castles of Europe stood as emblems of a dark past. When Cole toured the dungeons under the fortress of Volterra in 1831, he found them “dreadful” and “fearful.” In their depths, the Medici had incarcerated their political foes, burying them alive. “The walls, I whispered to myself, have resounded to the moans of suffering and hunger, and the curses of despair,” Cole wrote in his travel journal. “As I retreated through the gloomy passages, the sense of human
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cruelty bore with a crushing weight upon my heart, and I was glad when we . . . stood again beneath the pure blue sky.” Ten years later, in Sicily, Cole pondered the lesson embodied in the ruins there. “Our only means of judging the future is the past,” he said. “We see that nations have sprung from obscurity, risen to glory, and decayed. Their rise has in general been marked by virtue; their decadence by vice, vanity, and licentiousness. Let us beware!” Haunted throughout his adult life by thoughts of impending cataclysm, Cole came to see in the ruins of Europe the specter of what America might become, its “Castles” reduced to heaps of rubble.31 Cole shared these forebodings with Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). In 1831 Poe drafted the first version of a poem about a ruined city, slowly sinking into the sea. It was published as “The Doomed City.” In 1836 he revised it and renamed it “The City of Sin.” The third and final title, from 1845, was “The City in the Sea.” From one title to the next, Poe’s imagery remained consistent, conjuring up an eerie metropolis: Lo! Death has reared himself a throne In a strange city lying alone Far down within the dim West, Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best Have gone to their eternal rest. There shrines and palaces and towers (Time-eaten towers that tremble not!) Resemble nothing that is ours.
“Melancholy waters” slowly engulf the solitary town. Poe describes its lurid light, streaming up from below and illuminating the domes and spires, the shrines, the kingly halls and the “Babylonlike walls.” All the while “from a proud tower in the town / Death looks gigantically down.” The sea is motionless. Not even a ripple curls along this “wilderness of glass,” so “hideously serene,” until the end, when the faintest breath of movement and a red glow upon the waves foreshadow the city’s disappearance into the depths of the ocean.32 A year after Poe drafted the first version of this poem, Cole produced his first painting of ruins, Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, showing a crumbling medieval tower on a hill above encircling waters (Fig. 10). In 1836, the year Poe revised the poem, Cole finished Desolation, the last painting in the five-part series The Course of Empire (Fig. 11). In it a lone Corinthian column, ivy surrounding its base, stands amid the colossal wreckage of fractured arches and tottering colonnades, half submerged in the waters of a dead-calm, moonlit harbor. In the mid-1840s, just when Poe published his final version of “The City in the Sea,” Cole wrote an apocalyptic prose sketch,
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figure 10. Thomas Cole, Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, 1832. Oil on canvas, 40 × 61". Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. Purchased through the Marion Stratton Gould Fund and with the gift of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas H. Hawks. Photo: James Via.
figure 11. Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: Desolation, 1836. Oil on canvas, 39 × 63". Collection of The New-York Historical Society, 1858.5.
“Verdura.” And one of his very last paintings, The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His Journey, showed the wayfarer at the gulf of eternity, where the ruined temple of Mammon lies, a jumble of rubble, on the shore (see Fig. 27). What to make of this striking convergence of vision in the art of the poet and the painter? Cole and Poe, though near contemporaries, never met. There is no evidence that Cole read Poe’s work, which until the 1840s was not widely known, or that Poe saw Cole’s. The nearly simultaneous emergence of ruin imagery in their work may be coincidental. Both had access to certain widely circulated and influential sources, such as Constantin François Volney’s Ruins (1793) and the work of Lord Byron, notably Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818), a romantic textbook of sorts on the meanings of ruin. The fact that they sustained an interest in the subject through the 1830s, though, suggests some shared response to the mounting turmoil and anxiety about the future that marked the Jacksonian era.33 In the 1830s and 1840s social and political establishments were under attack. The burgeoning market economy and industrialization, slavery and abolition, immigration, urban growth, the emergent working class, financial crises, and sectional strife generated tremendous unease and misgiving about the nation’s future. Abolitionism and nativist agitation were rampant, and rioting was out of control in the big cities. Particularly virulent was anti-Catholic feeling, which boiled over most horribly on August 11, 1834, when a mob sacked and burned the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Etchings published in 1836 by the Boston cartoonist David Claypoole Johnston show looters brandishing torches, trampling a crucifix, and dragging a dead nun from a coffin while flames engulf the building behind them (Figs. 12, 13). The aftermath displays “two monuments” together, the obelisk on Bunker’s Hill—commemorating the battle of 1775— and the convent ruins, “in commemoration of the glorious deeds of the heroes of 1834.”34 Civil disorder and natural disasters alike contributed to the visual iconography of ruin in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1835 a huge fire burned out the business and financial heart of New York, reducing hundreds of buildings to cinders and setting off “a very saturnalia of lawlessness.” When it was over, thousands gathered “in silent crowds about the great heaps of ruins that still sent up clouds of black and dismal smoke.” All around were horrible scenes of desolation.35 After the fire, Nathaniel Currier published John Bufford’s lithograph Ruins of the Merchant’s Exchange representing just such a sight: a gutted facade, still smoldering (Fig. 14). In 1845 another fire in the same area set off a terrific explosion and demolished two hundred buildings. Again, Currier published views of the cataclysm. In addition, his firm regularly issued prints depicting steamboat explosions and other disasters. These concrete catastrophes served to heighten already widespread anxieties about the nation’s ultimate disintegration. For Cole and Poe alike, the idea of democracy raised specters of disaster and decline. Both subscribed to the cyclical theory of history, especially as it pertained to contemporary conditions in gloom and doom
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figure 12. David Claypoole Johnston, “Anti-Catholic Doings,” published in Scraps, 1836. Wilson Library Annex, University of Minnesota Libraries. figure 13. David Claypoole Johnston, “The Two Monuments,” published in Scraps, 1836. Wilson Library Annex, University of Minnesota Libraries.
the United States. In that belief they were hardly unusual. Disorderly, expanding democracy provoked intense conservative fear that society was headed for a breakdown. Everywhere, signs were ominous; everywhere, ruin loomed. In 1838 the diarist Philip Hone, who owned Cole’s Lake with Dead Trees, feared that if the conservative Whigs suffered defeat, the country would dissolve in civil war, its republican institutions “broken into pieces” by Jacobin misrule.36 Cole became a naturalized American citizen in 1834, but he identified with his nouveau riche and upper-class patrons rather than the common man. He nurtured an aristocratic disdain for the masses and professed utter disgust at “all the ignorance, the flippancy, the slang, the falsehood that is daily vomited by the press, to feed the sickly & diseased appetite of the multitude.” By the mid1830s he despaired that the nation would survive. “Riot and public murder are common occurrences,” he wrote. “Every newspaper” brought accounts of lawbreaking not only by individuals but also by organized societies. Sorrowful, Cole anticipated the “downfall of this republican gov22
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figure 14. John H. Bufford, artist; Nathaniel Currier, printer, Ruins of the Merchants’ Exchange, New York, December 16 and 17, 1835. Colored lithograph. Museum of the City of New York, The Gerald LeVino Collection, 57.100.42.
ernment,” which would be “a death blow to Freedom. . . . The hope of the wise & the good will have perished, and scenes of tyranny & wrong, blood & oppression such as have been acted since the world was created, will again be performed as long as man exists.” Things were so little improved by the 1840s that Cole began to concoct even more lurid visions of eventual (and inevitable) annihilation. In his futuristic sketch “Verdura,” he foresaw the close of the twentieth century as a “fearful season in the history of man.” Hundreds of millions covered the vast American continent, and “vice, profligacy, irreligion and anarchy” reigned, letting loose humanity’s most fearful passions. Those few who remained true to the principles of religion and righteousness would be driven from their homes and forced to flee into the mountains.37 The same fears gripped Poe. His parents, both actors, died when he was very young. Raised as the ward of John Allan, a wealthy Virginia merchant, Poe had expected to come into a substantial inheritance. Chronically quarrelsome and rebellious, he eventually alienated his benefactor, who gloom and doom
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cut him off without a cent. Poe spent much of his life in cities along the eastern seaboard, struggling to make ends meet as a magazine editor and freelance writer. In the 1840s he became a highly visible and often notorious celebrity, but financial success eluded him. A displaced would-be southern aristocrat, he scorned the leveling tendencies of the age, doubted the benefits of progress, and deplored the mediocrity and extravagance of popular sensational fiction. In the epistolary narrative “Mellonta Tauta,” Poe condemned democracy. This satire, set in the future a thousand years hence, portrayed America in the 1840s as a chaotic, “every-man-for-himself confederacy, after the fashion of the ‘prairie dogs’ that we read of in fable,” a society based on the “queerest idea conceivable, viz: that all men are born free and equal.” Over that society loomed Mob, the specter of revolution and despotism. This giant was “said to be the most odious of all men that ever encumbered the earth . . . insolent, rapacious, and filthy; had the gall of a bullock with the heart of a hyena and the brains of a peacock.” Filthy and degraded, Mob ultimately died, exhausted by his own energies. He taught a valuable lesson, however: that democracy was “a very admirable form of government—for dogs.”38 Poe’s ruined cities and time-eaten towers serve as symbolic utterances of conservative dread, lost authority embodied in crumbling symbols of power. Betsy Erkkila writes that Poe’s apocalyptic vision in “The City in the Sea” also “registers a widespread—and still prevalent—cultural fear of the fall of the West that will come as a result of some sort of catastrophic uprising of the dark other, associated with blackness, the satanic, the Orient, the city, and death.” Poe’s prophecy was grounded in his fear “that the logic of the American republic,” based on the principle of equality, “would lead to the emancipation of slaves, or, even worse . . . to the extirpation of the white masters.”39 Cole’s Course of Empire too reads as a highly politicized, moralizing tract against the catastrophic consequences of Jacksonian democracy.40 The five-part series takes us from the dawn of culture in the Savage State to its pastoral morning, triumphant noontime consummation, fiery destruction, and twilight of decay. As his “motto” for the series, Cole adopted two lines from the fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “First freedom, and then glory; when that fails, / Wealth, vice, corruption.” For some reason he chose not to include the end of that second line, which foretold “barbarism at last,” not for the long-defunct Romans alone but for the present age as well. Cole suggested that outcome in the design of his allegory, however, implying that the savage state would inevitably succeed the melancholy dusk of Desolation.41 In their visions of cataclysm and decline, both Poe and Cole chose the high road of allegory over the low road of sensational reportage, achieving thereby the elevation and timelessness required of refined aesthetic expression. They made no direct reference to modern saturnalias of lawlessness, cities burned to rubble, rioters hell-bent on destruction, Jacobin misrule, or the specter of
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abolition, sectional division, and race war. Yet such circumstances help to bring their ruin imagery into focus as the metaphorical expression of pessimism and fear.42 What connected Cole and Poe went still deeper. For both, ruins embodied inner fantasy, conflict, and obsession. An examination of parallels in the recurrent imagery of death and decay in their work can lead us further into the dark side of Cole’s imagination. At the same time, this exploration yields insight into the shadow side of artistic selfhood during a period of rapid political, social, and cultural change. Even before he went to Europe in 1829, Cole dreamed of ruins. In a prose sketch of an idea for a painting based on Milton’s “Il Penseroso,” Cole planned a scene of “Twilight—a gothic ruin— the last gleam of sunset seen through delapidated arches & windows—overgrown with ivy—a still pond—deep & gloomy woods—a single figure—owls & bats.” More elaborate were his 1828 jottings for a subject entitled “Ruins or the Effects of Time,” which would eventually become Desolation. “In the distance vast mountains,” wrote Cole, “ruins of pyramids & temples—near a rocky coast with parts of the wreck of a ship. Near a broken cistern—a fountain flowing partly into it— a broken column—broken tablet—dead trees—broken vases, a human skull—a broken sword. The distant ruins should partly be standing in the sea as though the waters had encroached. . . . It must be a sunset—aquaduct broken with water pouring out of the end—.”43 When Cole finally had the chance to study actual ruins in Europe, he fit them into this preconceived set of gothic images. Beginning in February 1832 he spent several months touring around Rome and Naples, where for the first time he encountered ancient ruins on a grand scale. Filling sheets in his sketchbook with drawings of crumbling aqueducts, temples, and towers, Cole provided for himself a comprehensive visual archive of the iconography of decay. These sketches would serve as an important resource for the many paintings of ruins that he completed in the next decade. The first, Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, is a résumé of all the ingredients that make Italy a place of mystery and romance (see Fig. 10). Just to the right of center stands the round ruined tower, its battlements and cracked walls sharply profiled against the sky. High on an island promontory above a river, it looms darkly over the landscape as birds wheel about its broken crown. Below, a goatherd crosses to the island on a rudely repaired bridge. Women draw water and wash clothes in the river. A man reads under a tree at right, and at far left stands a brigand with a rifle, contemplating an elaborate wayside shrine to the Virgin Mary. Other banditti or soldiers have left their weapons as offerings. At the summit of a steep hill beyond the tower on the right stand the remains of a Roman temple, while in the village below, a religious procession files through the streets.44 With its picturesque detail and brooding, decaying tower, Cole’s painting is theatrical, a stage set meant to conjure up a certain mood. As Cole refined his imagery of lonely ruins, he amplified conventional forms with more personal meanings. A journal entry from 1838 offers a word pic-
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ture of the feelings Cole hoped to evoke in viewers of Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower, then on his easel (Fig. 15): I am now engaged in painting a Picture representing a Ruined & Solitary Tower that stands on a craggy promontory whose base is laved by a calm unruffled ocean. . . . This picture will not be painted in my most finished style; but I think it will be poetical; there is a stillness, a loneliness about it that may reach the imagination. The mellow subdued tones of Evening Twilight, the silvery lustre of the rising moon, the glassy ocean which mirrors all upon its bosom, the ivy-mantled Ruin, the distant Bark, the Solitary Shepherd Boy who apparently in dreams of distant lands . . . has forgotten that night approaches & his flocks are yet straggling among the rocks & precipices ’round—these objects combined must surely, if executed with ordinary skill[,] produce in a mind capable of feeling, a pleasing and poetical effect, a sentiment of tranquility & solitude.45
The painting highlights the dilapidation and melancholy isolation of the ruin, once so splendid and strong, now a vacant shell. Heedless sheep wander at its base. The shepherd, who perches on what looks like a cracked sarcophagus, gazes off into the silvery, satiny distances of the tranquil ocean and dreams himself away from the barren promontory. As in Desolation, completed two years earlier, the tone is quiet and somber. There are echoes here of Byron, whose alter ego Childe Harold roams Europe, meditating on the vanished glories of the ancient world.46 Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower is a more reflective and polished version of the slightly earlier Ruined Tower (Mediterranean Coast Scene with Tower) (see Plate 2). Smaller and looser in technique than the 1838 picture, this is a much more dramatic scene. The basic formula is the same; Cole repeated it with minor variations in nearly every one of his ruin paintings. In fact, Cole’s compositional structure was as conventional as his iconography of ruin, handed down from the seventeenth century, when Claude Lorrain perfected the scheme for representing Arcadian landscapes, with or without ancient architecture. The design came to Cole by way of the English landscape painter John Constable (1776–1837), whose stormy Hadleigh Castle Cole had surely seen at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1829, while he was living in London (Fig. 16). Having met Constable, Cole may have known that his English counterpart was still in the depths of inconsolable mourning for his much-loved wife, who had died of tuberculosis in 1828. Such meanings were neither public nor explicit, but they are inseparable from the image of the battered round tower and moldering walls atop a windswept hill overlooking the expansive plain where the river Thames meets the sea. The tower, riven from top to bottom, looks as if it might have been struck by lightning, like an old, hollow tree. Figuratively, it suggests a man in ruins.47
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figure 15. Thomas Cole, Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower, 1838. Oil on canvas, 34 × 46". Gift of The Circle of the National Gallery of Art, Photograph © 2001 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Ruined Tower is a mirror image of the Constable painting, the tower now on the right, the fertile plain below on the left. Beyond is the distant horizon of the blue-gray Mediterranean, tranquil after the storm that continues to buffet the rocky hillside. But for all its dependence on Constable, this painting is something more than Hadleigh Castle in Italy. The tower, with its corbeled arches under overgrown battlements, is a variant on the circular fortified turrets of Volterra, which Cole studied and sketched several times in 1831 (Fig. 17). Unlike them, Cole’s tower is decrepit. Deeply fissured and half strangled by ivy, the upper walls are on the verge of collapse. Below, cracks and holes scar the masonry. At the base an arched portal yawns, revealing darkness. Wind-whipped trees cling to the hillside, and in the foreground forbidding rocks jut from a rushing stream. Threatening clouds roll overhead, although (in characteristic counterpoint) pearly light glows on the left through a gap opening above the sea.
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figure 16. John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, The Mouth of the Thames—Morning after a Stormy Night, 1829. Oil on canvas, 48 × 64". Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
figure 17. Thomas Cole, Untitled [Volterra], 1831. Pencil on paper, 4H × 7H". Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. © 2001 The Detroit Institute of Arts.
A white-bearded wanderer rests with his staff and knapsack on the rocks a little way down the slope. Directly beneath this figure, Cole inscribed his signature. The old man reposes at the exact center of the composition, but he is not midway between the light and the dark. Black rocks, boiling waters, and a steep drop bar his access to the green meadows far below. Even there, all is not well. Offshore, the hull of a wrecked ship lies in the shallows. Equidistant between the rotting tower and the wreck, the old wanderer occupies one point of the compositional triangle that connects and implicitly equates all three. With its tellingly placed signature, the painting is Cole’s rumination on loneliness and death. The image is double, at once a contemplation of history and an oblique self-portrait of the artist as tattered victim of pitiless disregard. Like the poet in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the artist comes To meditate amongst decay, and stand A ruin amongst ruins; there to track Fall’n states and buried greatness. . . .48
Even without some meditating figure (old traveler or youthful shepherd), the ruined towers in Cole’s many paintings and drawings have complex connotations. Remnants of past ages and signs of the melancholy self, Cole’s towers and columns stand at the intersection of the personal and the historical. Cole was drawn to broken, fissured forms wherever he found them, both in nature and in culture. Probably in 1827, when he stayed in Connecticut at his patron Daniel Wadsworth’s summerhouse Monte Video on Talcott Mountain, Cole made a study of a huge rock, its sheer walls and nearly level top making it seem like a massive chunk of natural architecture (Fig. 18). Something, however, has split this mighty mass in two: a fissure runs through it as if a mythic giant had cleaved it. Out of the narrow cleft snakes a thick root, like the tentacle of an unseen monster. Several years later, in Italy, Cole sketched the ruins of a square tower, its fabric rent by a crack running from top to bottom (Fig. 19). The arched portal is dark, like the mouth of a cave, even though the roofless structure is open to the light of day. Although an ocean divides them, rock and tower, with their cracked walls and mysterious recesses, speak the same expressive language of form. In another drawing, a study related to Ruined Tower, the decayed edifice appears as an ominous bulk silhouetted against the last rays of the sinking sun (Fig. 20). Although almost no detail can be made out, the deep rift fracturing the tower’s upper walls is dramatically visible. Cole’s fascination with such forms points to another site of congruence with Poe. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” (first published in 1839), the ancestral mansion is the architectural analogue to Roderick Usher himself, the last of the line, and fatally tainted by some shameful family evil. During the course of the story, Usher gradually succumbs to madness as his sister, Madeleine,
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figure 18. Thomas Cole, Rock in Connecticut, ca. 1827. Pencil on paper, 7 × 131⁄16". Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph © 2001 The Detroit Institute of Arts.
his soul mate, wastes away and finally dies of some mysterious disease. Usher entombs her in the family vault deep in the bowels of the house. Madeleine, however, awakens from her cataleptic trance and makes a ghastly return to her brother, who finally dies with her in an agony of terror. The narrator never names the “family evil” that hovers over Roderick and Madeleine like a curse from the past, but there are insinuations of incest. The house is an entity, its facade and surroundings symbolizing the diseased psyche of its tenant. The narrator comes upon the “melancholy House of Usher” at the end of a dull, dark autumn day. At his very first sight of the house, “an utter depression of soul” settles on him as he gazes on “the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees.” He comes closer and reins in his horse at “the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn” of this “mansion of gloom.” Gazing down, he sees the inverted reflection of the “gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.” The whole mansion and its domain seem to be enshrouded in a mysterious, pestilent atmosphere, “dull, sluggish, faintly discernible and leaden-hued.” Age has darkened its wall, and “minute fungi” have crept over the whole exterior, “hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves.” At the beginning of the story, the house, despite evidence of age and decay, is intact. But there is one subtle
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figure 19. Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Mountains), ca. 1831/32. Black and white chalk over pencil, 8G × 111⁄8". Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph © 2001 The Detroit Institute of Arts.
figure 20. Thomas Cole, Untitled (Landscape with Building Fragment), ca. 1831/32. Black and white chalk over pencil, 8G × 111⁄8". Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph © 2001 The Detroit Institute of Arts.
sign of weakness: “a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.” Throughout the narrative, Poe returns again and again to the character and ambience of the house, its gray walls and turrets, the dim tarn, the moldy facade, the noxious atmosphere exerting its unseen but terrible influence on Roderick Usher. When the final horrific scene takes place, and the frightful siblings lie dead, the narrator flees through the stormy night. Seeing a wild light across his path, he turns: “The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure. . . . While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened—there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind—the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight—my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder—there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’”49 In the end, dynastic, personal, and architectural ruin coincide in a single catastrophic climax. The mansion’s facade splits and disintegrates as the last of the inbred, infected line expires in a mania of fear, his reason as much a ruin as his body. The crumbling manor, with its facelike front, is dramatically anthropomorphic. Like an actor, it carries the drama of the diseased and tortured Usher to its disastrous conclusion. Whether Usher— as man or mansion—functioned as surrogate of some kind for the author himself is not easy to determine. It is tempting to search for parallels, certainly, in Poe’s biography, which is a story of order precariously established and reestablished, only to slide over and over again into chaos as the writer struggled against his own disorderly demons of bad luck, poverty, and alcoholism. Although he nurtured sentimental fantasies of a rustic love nest in the country, he never had a stable or tranquil home, and his marriage to his much younger cousin Virginia Clemm ended sadly in her death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. His own death at forty was not unlike the House of Usher’s spectacular disintegration and collapse into the waters of the tarn. On his way back to New York from Richmond, Virginia, Poe disappeared. Disheveled and incoherent, he turned up a week later, on October 3, 1849, in a Baltimore tavern. Taken to the hospital of Washington Medical College, he fell into raving delirium and died early in the morning of October 7. The cause of his death has never been conclusively determined, but it is likely that alcohol played a part.50 The Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman notes that for Roderick Usher nothing stays buried; the past “endures with smothering weight, often fatally.” Like his characters, Poe did not overcome personal history but remained trapped in it. Near the end of his life, he wooed the Providence poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who later published an impassioned defense of his reputation. In it she traced a direct link from the poet’s mind to his architectural metaphors. In the story “Ligeia,” she
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wrote, “we look into the haunted chambers of the poet’s own mind and see, as through a veil, the strange experiences of his inner life.” His mind, she mused, “was indeed a ‘Haunted Palace,’ echoing to the footfalls of angels and demons.”51 It bears repeating that Poe and Thomas Cole were far from congruent, psychologically or biographically. Different demons plagued them. The painter eventually found his soul mate and enjoyed a fair measure of success, despite frequent setbacks. Yet even later in his career, he was unable to shake off the weight of family cares or silence his own self-tormenting pessimism. Did his personal demons—internal and external—prompt a continuing fascination and identification with ruins even when he would appear to have attained a stable and relatively prosperous middle age? Were his decayed castles and crumbling, solitary towers his own Houses of Usher? The cultural historian Joy Kasson has written of Cole as a man divided and rent between irreconcilable opposites: confidence and self-doubt, youthful idealism and mature disillusion.52 He was also torn by the pressures of the market, which buffeted him between the need to please and sell and the desire to fulfill his own lofty artistic aims. Cole’s career began and ended in the midst of the market revolution that transformed social relations in the United States. All transactions became money transactions; stable relations were supplanted by fluid ones in a culture of social mobility, and as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, money and not heredity enabled men to define their social place in America. Cole detested the freemarket conditions that affected even the world of art. In a letter to Luman Reed he declared that he would not “paint to please the multitude but only those few of taste.” Yet eventually he was forced to acknowledge the demands of the market, writing, “This painting for money and to please the many is sadly repulsive to me. Thoughts[,] conceptions crowd upon me at times that I would fain embody, but I am kept from them by necessity.” The multitude, indeed, were impervious to art’s message. Cole mused in his journal that his Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower would “probably remain on my hands; it is not the kind of work to sell; it would appear empty & vague to the multitude; those who purchase pictures alas! are like those who purchase merchandise[;] they want quantity, material; they want something to show, something palpable, things, not thoughts [italics in original].” “It is my impression,” Cole told his wife, “that pictures do not have the influence on society that they did have some years since—they are too quiet for these times of excitement.” In a climate of indifference and even hostility, he styled himself a “thin-skinned Artist” in the field, to be “hunted and torn and worried” by a ravenous, “mongrel pack of critics.” As Alan Wallach notes, Cole throughout his career could count on a fairly steady market for his landscapes, which in later years included pastoral scenes as well as sublime mountain views. His allegories and series, however, were much riskier propositions, and when uncommissioned met with mixed reception and flat returns.53
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Cole, self-doubting, hardly needed negative criticism to shake his wobbly confidence. The late 1830s were particularly discouraging times. A month after beginning the painting of the “ruined and solitary tower,” Cole poured out his frustrations in his diary: “The longer I pursue my Art and the more cultivated my eye becomes the more impotent is my skill to represent on canvas the ever varying features of Nature—and instead of appearing to approach nearer to perfection in imitation, I feel to be removed farther and farther away until at times I am overwhelmed by a melancholy fear that I am retrograding—that my season of improvement is past.” The past was creeping up, threatening to drag him back into its darkness. A month later he wrote to his friend the landscape painter Asher B. Durand, “This last day or two I have been engaged in drawing on the Canvass a sort of Giant Grumbo’s Castle, it will be well if it does not turn into the castle of the Giant Despair—myself his prisoner.”54 The weight of the past on the present was never far from his thoughts. In 1838, on commission from the wealthy Peter Stuyvesant, he made this the subject of an ambitious pair contrasting the splendor of an imagined medieval past with the melancholy scene of its remains in the present (Figs. 21, 22). Past is a festive vision of an imposing castle, its lofty, round tower and battlements washed with light. In the foreground two knights joust on elaborately caparisoned chargers. Hundreds of other figures make up an idealized cross section of the medieval social hierarchy, from peasants to aristocrats. Cole announced that he intended the whole scene to be “an illustration of Feudal power and splendor.” In Present, the castle—battered and overgrown—now stands in shadow as the sun sinks behind it. Cole wrote, “The Halls of the Castle are roofless; the sunlight and breezes play on the weeds and flowers, which cling to their ruined arches. The massive and lofty tower that seemed to bid defiance to man and the elements, is dilapidated and crumbling to decay. A stagnant pool stands on the tilting ground, and a solitary shepherd feeds his flock where once stood the Royal Pavilion and the Throne of the Queen of Beauty.” Veiled in darkness, the castle looms mysteriously, a fit site for haunting.55 The two scenes stand in strong contrast, yet an unbroken continuum of time connects them. Light and life fade at length into darkness and death. For Cole, this might have been an eloquent expression of his own sense of time and the accumulated weight of bygone years. In January 1835 he wrote, “The wings of time are heavier and heavier laden as he flies. Each hour brings its own trouble without dissipating that of the past. This reconciles one to death; rest is welcome to the weary soul.” Characteristically, Cole sought balance by hoping for a brighter side, if not in this life, then in the next. Still, for every ray of light or hope there seemed to be a shadow, spreading and deepening.56 The push and pull of conflicting claims played a dynamic role in shaping Cole’s aesthetics of opposition, the dialectic of lights and shadows in art (and in life) that underpinned so much of his
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figure 21. Thomas Cole, Past, 1838. Oil on canvas, 40 × 61". Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, AC 1950.189.
figure 22. Thomas Cole, Present, 1838, Oil on canvas, 40 × 61". Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, AC 1950.190.
production. On the dark side were shattered stumps, tumbledown arches, cracked turrets shrouded in ivy, shadowed and sinister castles. On the bright side were sunny meadows, tranquil lakes, grand mountain ranges, and the hope of a dazzling Hereafter. Unlike Poe, who pitched headlong into his own personal depths, Cole managed to stay aloft and keep the two forces in play. But there was always a gap between them, difficult if not impossible to bridge. The recurrent themes of the cracked wall and the split-open tower were the permanent markers of the painter’s embattled stance against the world.57 That embattled stance, finally, illuminates the theme of solitude that recurs time and again in Cole’s art. Even in the midst of family life, Cole thought of himself as an isolated man. He explored the subject from the earliest years of his life as an artist. Simeon Stylites, an idea for a neverrealized painting, conflates man with architecture, showing the desert anchorite standing on top of a lofty column, far above the heads of followers clustering at its base (Fig. 23). In Desolation, the last painting of The Course of Empire, a single tall, mighty column dominates the twilight scene (see Fig. 11). Wrapped in ivy, it serves as nesting place for a pair of herons. Cole wanted this last painting to be the “funeral knell of departed greatness,” expressing “silence and solitude.” He returned to the theme again in Taormina, Sicily, where in 1842 he sketched a solitary broken column, standing sentinel among ruined walls and cavelike arches (Fig. 24).58 Cole’s writings provide a running commentary on his preoccupation with solitude, which as concept and experience was multifaceted, varying with his age and situation. The quest for solitude and self-discovery in the wilderness made up the backbone of his art in the 1820s. In the 1830s his thoughts turned to marriage, which he professed to have little hope of attaining. To a recently betrothed friend, he wrote, “I am still single & alas likely to remain so. I am not so fortunate as you—I find no congenial spirit to mingle soul with my soul.” He thought of returning to Italy, since nothing tied him to his home: “Thus it is to be a bachelor—rootless!” Marriage and fatherhood failed, despite their joys, to dispel his sense of isolation or end his nomadic habits. Many a winter he was forced to stay in New York for weeks or months waiting for the Hudson River to thaw so that he could return to his wife and children in Catskill. Even in their company, he felt himself a lone traveler. In 1838, just after the birth of his first child, he wrote to Durand that he was “toiling up mountains . . . solitary and companionless.” The mountains in this case were on his easel, but the solitary ascent was characteristic. Melancholy, he wrote in one of his many poems, was always near the “lonely wanderer,” her pale face like the moon “when falls her gentle light / On some lone tower or antique arch.” His career suffering setbacks in the 1840s, he bemoaned his fate: “I am in a remote place. I am forgotten by the great world, if I ever was known. What a dismal situation!”59
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figure 23. Thomas Cole, Simeon Stylites, ca. 1828. Pencil on paper, 6H × 51⁄8". New York State Library. Photography by Dino Petrocelli. figure 24. Thomas Cole, Mount Etna from Taormina, 1842 (detail). Pencil on paper, 11 × 161⁄16" (sheet size). Founders Society Purchase, William H. Murphy Fund. Photograph © 1990 The Detroit Institute of Arts.
Cole’s domestic circumstances contributed to his chronic feeling of marginality. He met Maria Bartow at Cedar Grove, the Catskills estate of John Alexander Thomson. Maria and her three sisters were Thomson’s nieces and wards. When Cole and Bartow married, they moved together into a second-floor bedroom at Cedar Grove, and all three of Maria’s unmarried sisters occupied the other bedroom (the “Girls’ Room”) on that floor. In this ménage, Cole in a sense assumed the dependent position once occupied by his father, though of course the artist by that time was hardly empty-handed. Destitute of a place to call his own, he lacked patriarchal power and authority in the household, even to the extent of being required to pay boarding expenses. As the lone younger male, he was decidedly outnumbered if not overwhelmed. In 1839 he found some relief when Thomson let him have a temporary painting room in a newly built storehouse, enabling the painter to flee the “noise and bustle” of the family’s home. When Thomson finally died in 1846, Cole did not come into the property. Maria and her sisters jointly inherited the house and surrounding lands, with the exception of two acres Cole had purchased from Thomson some years before. At that late date he finally set about building his own studio on the one bit of land he actually owned.60 Nor did the happiness of marriage shelter Cole from the continued demands and sufferings of his own family. His parents both died in 1837, James of a stroke in February and Mary in October. Mary Cole suffered horribly in the months before she died. Visiting her in August, Cole wrote to his wife that his mother was in the grip of relentless pain. The family was in dire financial straits as well, exacerbated no doubt by the general climate of economic depression. The deaths of his impecunious father and mother did little to relieve Cole of his obligations, however. Dr. William George Ackerley, husband of Cole’s sister Mary, was as ineffectual as Cole’s father had been when it came to business. Sarah Cole, unmarried, lived with them and reported the woes of the household in letters to her brother. The doctor was always hard up and could not collect his fees from his patients. The landlord was coming after the rent, which they were unprepared to pay. They had not gotten their winter wood, potatoes, or flour. “We are in a pretty thin way in the money line,” she ended. “I am sorry it is so just at this time when your purse is so low for I am sure you must be harassed.” In 1842 the doctor became gravely ill and died with much suffering. The family continued to be short of money.61 Given that history, it is tempting to imagine a hint of self-portraiture in Cole’s Prometheus Bound (1847; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), with its titanic figure chained to a flinty mountain peak, waiting for the vulture that every day for all time will tear out and devour his self-regenerating liver.62 Cole aspired with all his being to rise to the heights of inspiration, exaltation, and spirituality in art. He conceived of his calling as a sacred, holy mission. Yet time and again the world, and the past (like Prometheus’s vulture), caught and pulled him down. Once, he lamented in his journal,
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figure 25. Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Manhood, 1840. Oil on canvas, 52 × 78". Munson-WilliamsProctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 55.107.
he had been absorbed in love of the beautiful in nature. Now the world, with its multitudinous affairs, was breaking in on his “former little kingdom of the mind. It is a hard battle that I have to fight. The fire which burns within me receives no fuel from without. Society is uncongenial, it is material, unspiritual.” Cataloguing recent reversals, he concluded: “I have been sadly thrown back in my pecuniary matters and I am yet struggling with poverty and obtain just sufficient money to supply the immediate wants of myself and family.”63 Significantly, the traveler in The Voyage of Life (1840; Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute) is a solitary man. In this monumental four-part allegory commissioned by Samuel Ward, Cole imagined life as a river journey, beginning at dawn in some tropical paradise and flowing on through bosky groves and green meadows. In Manhood, however, the weather turns bad (Fig. 25). Here the beleaguered voyager, in a now rudderless and battered boat, rushes helplessly on dark waters toward boiling rapids. Around him loom craggy pinnacles of rock and tormented, naked trees. Among the churning clouds hover shrieking demonic forms. Through a small clearing in the sky
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far above, the man’s guardian angel observes his plight but refuses to intervene. The rapids thunder around a bend in the river and crash down a steep, twisting, narrow channel. In the distance, the darkness lifts, and we can see the vast ocean of eternity. In this painting the landscape enacts a pantomime of the man’s torment. About to be hurled down the rapids, he stands poised on the brink. Twisted trunks and branches mirror his agony. The storm clouds become ghastly, portentous spirits, identified by Cole as the demons of “Suicide, Intemperance, and Murder which are the temptations that beset men in their direst trouble.” For all that the allegory delivers its message through a religious and supernatural language, the landscape elements are consistent with the “Lower World” vocabulary of natural forms Cole formulated, visually and mentally, at the very beginning of his career. The artist certainly intended The Voyage of Life to be an intensely public work of art, yet it follows the established course of his inner voyages as well.64 Cole’s Manhood represents the climactic stage of life’s journey, perilous and agonizing. Its topography is likewise the grand climax of his naturalized vocabulary of mental strife. Other paintings in the series exhibit different but equally telling landscape symbols: the cave of birth and its complement, the shadowy gulf or ocean of eternity, powerful metaphors for the beginning and the end. The end, more than anything else, harbored Cole’s fear of regression into the ultimate and irreversible state of nonbeing. When dark thoughts of failure and ruin beset him, he conjured up visions of nothingness. After he was dead, he ruminated, “my works and the worthiest reputation I may gain shall be as though they never were, swept by the wing of time into oblivion’s gulf. And shall it be? Shall not the spirit . . . sink also into the gloomy depths of nonentity?” Life’s journey was from darkness to darkness, from cave to grave.65 In Old Age, the last painting in The Voyage of Life, the now decrepit man, his boat broken, drifts down to the “vast and midnight” ocean of eternity (Fig. 26).66 Above his head appears a heavenly vision: beams of light transporting legions of angels, ready to welcome him home. This was Cole’s pious hope over the last decade of his life when he turned to conventional religion to cast light into the dark mysteries of eternity. In his allegories, however, light is almost always evenly balanced, or pitted, against darkness, reflecting the artist’s persistent fascination with the realm of obscurity and nothingness. The Cross and the World (1846–47), Cole’s last moralizing, allegorical series, dramatized the ambiguities that shadowed his vision to the end. This five-part visual narrative remained unfinished at the time of his death. The story follows two “pilgrims” through life, from youth to the journey’s end. As the title implies, the young men setting forth on their pilgrimage choose different paths, one through a perilous wilderness and the other through a voluptuous realm of wealth, luxury, and pleasure. As in The Voyage of Life, Cole’s own adventures in the wilds of his imagination
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figure 26. Thomas Cole, The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 1840. Oil on canvas, 52 × 78". Munson-WilliamsProctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 55.108.
served as template for the landscapes of his pilgrims’ progress. Although the original paintings are lost and the studies scattered, Cole’s descriptions chart familiar territory. When the young men part, the first directs his steps through a flowery meadow toward the “rugged gorge” rising beyond. A “dark mist” in the distance conceals the difficulties and sorrows that lie ahead. The worldly youth, by contrast, sets out for the radiant valley that lies at the bottom of a “graceful and winding way.” In the distance are the pinnacles and domes of a great city. The first pilgrim, grown to manhood, finds himself in a howling wilderness of black clouds, terrific chasms, and angry cataracts. He “pursues his way on the edge of a frightful precipice” in a moment fraught with peril. Light from the cross, however, keeps him on his narrow way. Finally, an old man, he attains the summit and catches his first view of the “boundless and eternal.” The cross now spills blinding radiance over the scene as angels advance to lead the pilgrim into the infinite. Meanwhile, the other pilgrim, having used up his allotment of worldly delights, has arrived at the “horrid brink” overhanging the “outer darkness” (Fig. 27). Surrounded by rubble from the Temple of Mammon and rotting trees from the gardens of pleasure, he looks out onto an endless black
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figure 27. Thomas Cole, study for The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His Journey, from The Cross and the World, ca. 1847. Oil on canvas, 12 × 18". Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.
ocean. In the sky hovers the fearful vision of death, a skull with vast, spreading wings. In this vision of the end, nature and culture alike stand in ruins.67 Such places and spaces—the precipice, the abyss, the ruin, the dark expanse, oblivion’s gulf, the ocean of eternity—had been in Cole’s head from his earliest years as a landscape painter and dreamer. His thoughts at the close of 1839 were entirely characteristic. As usual, he translated his anxieties about ruin and death into landscape metaphor: “The latest footsteps of the year are now being impressed on the sandy and unstable shores of time, that shore which skirts the ocean [of ] eternity. It is a narrow shore which man treads; before him spread thick mists and darkness[,] and ever and anon we hear the plunge of one who has fallen into the gulf into which we all must descend.” It is fitting that one of his last paintings should take that awful gulf as its theme. Never ready for that plunge, he nonetheless lost his own footing on the brink in February 1848. Taken with an inflammation of the lungs on the fifth of the month, he died five days later at the age of forty-seven. Was he destined for eternity in the light of the cross, or would he stand in the ruins, looking out at nothing?68
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Sober, religious, and fiercely earnest, Cole was no tortured, unraveling poet. Yet his many domestic difficulties, his hard-won yet always unsure foothold in a highly fluid art-world economy, and the many abrasive clashes between high ideals and market demands were more than enough to populate his own depths with a family of demons. His stormy scenes and visions of destruction are powerful, often extravagant, visual statements. Next to them, his Arcadian fantasies and pastoral landscapes, however sincere, seem bland. To the end of his days, Cole both nurtured and resisted a strong attraction toward darkness: the plunge into the abyss, the headlong rush down black rapids underground, the desolate contemplation of nothingness. His fascination with the bad ending was dead level with his yearning after the rapture of the good. Salvation and damnation were equally possible, and (perversely) equally interesting. Cole’s wilderness was the haunted ground of this tormenting and profound ambivalence. In turn, his dark vocabulary of wilderness, ruin, and doom would offer his successors an alternative to the sunny vision of the American pastoral. The alien terrain of ruin always lay just beneath and beyond the margins of the sunlit meadows and peaceful glades that proliferated in nineteenth-century art. The bloody frontier, the gaslit slum, the dismal swamp, and the blasted battlefield were landscapes of the “Lower World” that only a gothic language could represent. However fantastic and theatrical, Cole’s imagery was a point of access into that unquiet netherworld of history.
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2
THE UNDERGROUND MAN
ometime in 1859 or 1860, the Pittsburgh painter David Gilmour Blythe (1815–65) produced
S
the satirical self-portrait Art versus Law (see Plate 3). With palette in hand and canvases under
his arm, the artist stands at the top of a dingy stairway and stares at a “To Let” sign posted on the door of his studio. The sign advises that the landlord will waive the deposit and pay the water tax, “Provided the Tenant uses any water.” A smaller placard tacked up on the left announces, “No admittance till all conditions are complied with,” and another on the right says, “For further information apply way down stairs.” Prominent on the shabby door is a large padlock. The landing is cluttered with junk: broken crockery, a liquor bottle atop a battered keg, a jug by the door, and at bottom left a wooden crate, signed by Blythe and containing a broom, yet another bottle, and an upended pair of boots. The painter, as seedy as his surroundings, wears a ragged coat splitting at the seams and a bashedin top hat. His pants are patched, his shoes scuffed, his hair and beard shaggy. Glaring, sulfurous light floods the landing, but just over the painter’s head a black wedge of shadow slants down. The signs on the door reinforce the visual evidence of the painter’s condition. By implication, the cast-out tenant must be unclean. The instruction to apply “way down stairs” has a double edge, suggesting not only the location of the rental office but also the downward mobility and abject social destiny of this beggarly artist. Hemmed in by dark shadows and locked out of the higher realms
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of art, he has no choice but to descend. Art versus Law is a compelling visual paradigm of the artist as outsider, against the law in every sense. The jugs and bottles that litter the gloomy attic vestibule signal the probable cause of the artist’s undoing. The broken-slatted crate harbors further clues, easy to decipher once we know that Blythe’s nickname was “Boots.” A habitual punster, he sometimes signed his paintings with a pair of boots, or inscribed the word itself somewhere on the canvas. Surely it is no accident that in Art versus Law the upended boots lie jumbled with the liquor bottle in the bottom of the box, with its disquieting resemblance to a cheap coffin. These objects take on emblematic status as a disguised portrait of the artist and the drunkard’s doom that awaits him. The painting’s first owner, C. H. Wolff, took the image at face value. He had purchased Art versus Law directly from the artist in 1860. “This work,” he wrote, “portrays a true incident in the life of the artist when occupying a studio in Denny’s Building, corner of Market and Fourth St. Pittsburgh— his own form and suggestive features are admirably given—poor Blythe; all knew his faults—few his virtues.”1 It is more than a simple self-portrait, however. Transforming the stuff of everyday life into the language of visual metaphor, it maps the obsessions that haunted this painter, who operated on a dark urban frontier populated by drunkards, loafers, and dangerous guttersnipes. Unlike Thomas Cole, seeking his dark side in untamed nature or romantic ruins, Blythe explored his own lower depths in the modern urban wilderness. Pittsburgh was the nominal setting for his vision of the urban underground, but Blythe was no realist artist-reporter, nor was he driven primarily by social concern. In his canvases inner darkness fused with the subterranean, disorderly shadow world of the modern metropolis, a realm of deadly but irresistible temptation. At the same time, Blythe’s urban phantasmagoria both reflected and embodied emergent middle-class perceptions of the city as the locus of hidden but ever present menace from below. Mining the metropolitan underground for subjects, Blythe formulated his aesthetics of degradation, compounded of grotesque bodies, lurid effects, and spectacular decay. Following in the fated pathway of Edgar Allan Poe—an alter ego—Blythe was the flaneur of the dark alley and the seedy dive. In this chapter I explore these sites, moving from the realm of Blythe’s inner demons to the metropolitan underground and finally back into the painter’s own troubled interior.2 Blythe’s career as painter of the urban gothic was brief. Nearly all his topical paintings date from the last nine years of his life. Born in East Liverpool, Ohio, Blythe was the son of a Scottish immigrant cooper and an Irish mother. According to the Blythe expert Bruce Chambers, the painter’s rigorously Presbyterian parents gave him a strict moral education, a vivid sense of sin, and a strong commitment to individual rights and liberty. Blythe served an apprenticeship to a wood carver in Pittsburgh and became a ship’s carpenter in the U.S. Navy. Upon his discharge in 1840, he took up the life of an itinerant (and generally mediocre) portrait painter, eventually settling in Union-
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town, Pennsylvania, where he married Julia Keffer in 1848. The death of his young wife after less than two years of marriage may have been the prime catalyst of a long downward-spiraling journey. The commercial failure of his Great Moving Panorama of the Allegheny Mountains (1850–51; lost) probably helped accelerate this decline.3 After an interval of restless relocations, Blythe chose Pittsburgh as his base of operations in 1856 and began to paint the dark side of modern urban life, producing works both funny and corrosive. As disunion and conflict loomed in the late 1850s, Blythe took up more and more politically barbed subjects, which dominated his output during the war years. In 1865 the artist died at age fifty, probably from chronic alcoholism. Coming out of an artisan tradition, Blythe worked on the margins of the art world. He schooled himself in popular comic art and political caricature, appropriating images from past and present prints, illustrations, and cartoons. According to Chambers, “a large part of Blythe’s preparation for his works may have consisted of the haunting of Pittsburgh’s newsstands and bookstores in search of pictorial fodder.” He showed his works mainly in the display window of a print dealer, his friend J. J. Gillespie, his audience an ever changing stream of passersby. Blythe’s window exhibits were said to be “the talk of the town, and attracted such crowds that one could scarcely get along the street.” Such tactics underline the sensational and popular character of his urban scenes.4 An elusive subject, Blythe is doubly difficult to pin down because nearly all his papers are lost, bits and pieces surviving only in transcription. A handful of poems, the paintings themselves, scraps of critical response, and a few recollections, many based on tradition or hearsay, constitute the record. However scant, the evidence indicates that Blythe was a compound of striking oddities. Tall and rangy, he was known by his disheveled red hair and beard. According to the Uniontown historian James Hadden, after Julia’s death Blythe—unkempt inside and out—became careless of his dress and “utterly regardless of the opinion of his fellowmen.” Hadden detailed Blythe’s sartorial eccentricities: Having secured a piece of buffalo robe he decided to make himself a cap of it. He cut out pieces and sewed them together and put it on. Such an outlandish looking affair could scarcely be imagined. It covered his head from his eyes to his neck and his most intimate friends could not recognize him. He needed a coat so he purchased a piece of goods, took it to Ab. Guiler’s tailor shop where he spread it across the cutting board and without a single measurement cut out pieces which he thought, when sewn together, could be called a coat. He did all the tailor work himself and then put it on. . . . It fit him “like a shirt on a bean pole,” but nevertheless he wore this suit for years.5
By most accounts, Blythe rejected the gentlemanly codes of conduct that governed the behavior of more socially ambitious peers. He was remembered for his failure to “exemplify the virtues of industry and material success which dominated the business community.” He was rude to stu46
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dio visitors, took no interest in marketing his paintings, and “never seemed to care whether they pleased or no.” Shortly after his death, the Daily Post described him as the “peculiar local artist . . . singular, but gifted.” Thirty years later, the Pittsburgh Gazette claimed him as “our eccentric artist.” As Blythe’s biographer Dorothy Miller noted, despite inaccuracies arising from foggy memories, the published statements emphasized Blythe’s “eccentricities, his independence of character, his complete honesty, his passionate patriotism, his carelessness of dress, and his convivial nature.”6 The notion of the painter as tippler endured. One writer rated Blythe an outright genius who “but for whiskey, might have made himself a name among the highest in the country.” When the Whitney Museum mounted a Blythe exhibition in 1936, Time published a colorful profile of the painter, portraying him as “unkempt, red-whiskered, hard-drinking, and contemptuous of his popularity.” Bruce Chambers has made an effort to normalize him, arguing that there is no direct, compelling evidence that Blythe had a drinking problem or that Julia’s death caused his downfall. Yet his own writings and his many paintings on the subject of drunkenness suggest otherwise. And certainly the bottles on the studio landing in Art versus Law hint strongly that the problem lurked close to home.7 Blythe may have modeled himself on Poe in fashioning a down-and-out artistic identity. From several allusions in his own verse, it is clear that Blythe knew something of the poet, if only through reading “The Raven,” much admired and much parodied from the moment of its publication in 1845.8 An omnivorous consumer of newspapers and magazines, Blythe probably picked up many bits of information and misinformation. Beyond this, in the absence of evidence, it is impossible to establish how well Blythe knew Poe’s work and reputation, but the parallels are suggestive. A many-sided, brilliant, unstable figure given to self-defeating antagonisms and periodic bouts with the bottle, Poe inspired both love and hate, admiration and disgust. Adrift on the tides of the market revolution, he was chronically unable to hold down a job or to make even a subsistence living from his writing. His erratic, extravagant behavior gave rise to a myth of the artist as degenerate that began to form in his lifetime and colored his public image after his death. Chief among his detractors was the magazine writer and editor Rufus Griswold, with whom Poe had a rocky relationship over the course of several years. After Poe’s death, Griswold wrote an obituary for the New York Tribune in which he highlighted Poe’s dissipation, restlessness, and perpetual want of money and painted a word picture of the deranged poet as an intoxicated wanderer: He was at times a dreamer—dwelling in ideal realms—in heaven or hell, peopled with creations and the accidents of his brain. He walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses, or with eyes turned up in passionate prayers . . . or with his glance introverted to a heart gnawed with anguish, and with a face shrouded in gloom, he would brave the wildest storms; and all night, with drenched garments and arms wildly beating the wind and rain, he would speak as if to spirits. the underground man
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In later accounts Griswold improved on this portrait with even more lurid details of the poet’s disorderly conduct and drunken escapades. He recounted the circumstances of Poe’s death in Baltimore, where, having entered a tavern, he succumbed to drink: “His resolutions and duties were forgotten; in a few hours he was in such a state as is commonly induced only by long-continued intoxication; after a night of insanity and exposure, he was carried to a hospital; and there . . . he died, at the age of thirty-eight years.” Many took Griswold’s accounts as truth, riddled with exaggerations and inaccuracies though they were, and even Poe’s supporters saw his life, if not his art, as a disastrous downward slide. As George R. Graham wrote, “Let the moralist who stands upon tufted carpet . . . pause before he lets the anathema . . . fall upon a man like Poe! who, wandering from publisher to publisher . . . finds no market for his brain—with despair at heart, misery ahead . . . and gaunt famine dogging at his heels, thus sinks by the wayside, before the demon that watches his steps and whispers, oblivion.”9 Blythe dwelled on his own downward spiral in both verse and art. Like Thomas Cole, he was a poet-painter, producing almost seventy recorded poems. His poetic output ranged from pensive and sentimental to satirical and extravagantly bizarre. The sentimental verses are bland and conventional, although the artist on occasion liked to poke holes in his poetic gossamer. He began one poem, for example, in romantic cadences describing the fall of “mantling shadows” and “sable darkness” upon the sleeping world. He ended it, however, with a cheeky thud: “On that memorable night that Tom came / s’near breaking his neck on the back porch.” More malignant are his verses on the corruption of the world and of the body. These poems exhibit a striking fascination with the imagery of abjection: decay, vomit, swill, ooze, putridity, bodily disorder, and dissolution.10 Blythe’s verse portraits of drunkards are in that vein, steeped in a disgust that seems to fuse selfloathing with a caustic contempt for human frailty: Out from the cold black emptiness Of a Drunkard’s home, Slowly and hush’d as A Gnome-shade, vomited from the green pestilent Stomach of a sepulchre, comes forth a thing The suppliant tongue of charity might Hesitate to call a man.
The verses follow his “wayward feet” to a barroom, where “hot-breathed temptation stands” with a “blood-shot window / Winking him a welcome.” Quaffing the “demonizing draught,” the drunkard idles away the “God-bought hours.” His eye is like an “angry, ill-closed, half-heal’d / Wound,” his cheek “like blood-dip’t / Violets.” The poem ends on a note of what seems like sheer absurdity:
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He wakes: and like the Raven on “the palled Bust of Pallas,” falls the light in yellow Flakes upon his liquid cheek, simmering Similar to corn-dodgers frying on The red-hottedness of—the Lord-knows what.
The reference, of course, is to “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem, irreverently paired with those sizzling corn cakes. The conclusion mocks the highly colored language dramatizing the drunkard’s subhuman degradation, yet its nonsense seems to mimic the collapse of reason, decorum, and self-control in the last stages of chronic alcoholism.11 “The Drunkard’s Doom: By ‘Boots’” retraces some of the same steps, once more using images of decay: Did’st ever seriously think How awful is the drunkard’s doom? Trace, step by step and drink by drink, Until he sees his body sink Into its loathsome tomb.
This dour poem diagrams the drunkard’s sad history. He takes an occasional glass at first, but soon he is a full-time habitué of the grog shop, where with every drink a coin goes “clink” into the landlord’s till. His home is wretched, his wife and child heartbroken. At last “crime’s putrid wave” sweeps him from the earth, his body in some forgotten grave, his soul in hell. In another poem an exasperated wife throws a “washtub full of thickened swill” on her husband as he tries to enter his barred and bolted house. Afterward, the “moons pale ray” picks out a “great big drownded loafer” sprawled out before the unyielding door. References to drink abound in Blythe’s verse, sometimes riotous, sometimes rueful. One of them seems frankly confessional, though in an antic spirit. Referring to a night when he had scribbled some scabrous verses on the town of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, Blythe wrote: ’Tis very likely “Boots” was drunk And occupied a garret bunk, But what of that?
Finally, one of his rare aphorisms is a rumination on renouncing drink: “There is a philosophy in the remark, ‘I’ve quit drinking’: Yes, some people do quit some things: and some people quit quitting some things—and some people quit quitting to quit some things. There are a thousand things ought to be condem’d—a thousand things that to condem—we must condem ourselves.” This sug-
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gests many a vacillating attempt to renounce the habit.12 But in death, Blythe followed in Poe’s footsteps. On May 15, 1865, a friend came to visit and found the painter on the floor, mortally ill. Taken to the Passavant Hospital, he died the next day, the cause diagnosed as mania potu, or delirium from drink.13 Blythe’s verse narratives follow the formulaic tracks of the temperance novels and plays that abounded in the 1830s and 1840s, when legions of middle-class reformers attacked drinking as deadly to domestic happiness and social order. These didactic tales typically feature a clean-living innocent who by trickery gets hooked on liquor and descends inexorably into degradation. Spending every cent on booze, such characters lose their jobs, pawn their clothes, beggar their families, turn to crime, beat and sometimes murder their wives, and ultimately end up in jail—if not dead. The action is melodramatic, the language florid. One drunkard, for example, denounces the evil tavern keeper who has destroyed his manhood: “Eternal curses on you! Had it not been for your infernal poison shop in our village, I had still been a man—the foul den where you plunder the pockets of your fellows, where you deal forth death in tumblers, and from whence goes forth the blast of ruin over the land.” The only salvation lay in signing the pledge of total abstinence. Like a magic shield, the pledge was all-powerful against temptation—at least in fantasy.14 Blythe’s fascination with the most sordid details of inebriation and his vision of the drunkard as festering excrescence suggest something more than the rote rehearsal of well-worn tropes. His paintings on the subject are grimly comic essays, simultaneously attractive and repulsive. With few exceptions, these works fall roughly into the period from the mid-1850s to about 1860, suggesting that something during that time compelled Blythe to return repeatedly to the subject.15 Whether it was some zealous reformist campaign or the result of his own struggle with temptation is difficult to say. Temperance Pledge, however, hints that the choice represented on canvas was close to the artist’s heart (Fig. 28). This dark painting presents the case with the strictest economy of means. The man, seen closeup, is nearly bald. Amber light models the dome of his skull but leaves half his face in deep shadow, a metaphor for his uncertainty over which path to take—the bright one of sobriety or the dark one of dangerous yet pleasurable indulgence. Chin in hand, he knits his brow and grimaces in concentration, his lips compressed, the corners of his mouth drooping. Before him is the pledge, wrinkled and dog-eared, as if folded and unfolded many times between long spells in a pocket or a drawer. With its boldly legible inscription, it lies directly in the thinker’s line of sight. His gaze, however, focuses with single-minded intensity on the uncorked liquor bottle aligned with the shadow side of the composition. What will the outcome be? The painting gives no clues. The temptation of the bottle may prove too strong, or perhaps that crumpled sheet of paper will prevail.16 The ambiguity of Blythe’s image comes into focus if we compare the work with one by the popular genre
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figure 28. David Gilmour Blythe, Temperance Pledge, ca. 1856–60. Oil on board, 15 × 12". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of G. David Thompson.
figure 29. William Sidney Mount, Loss and Gain, 1847. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20". Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages. Bequest of Ward Melville, 1977.
painter William Sidney Mount, entitled Loss and Gain (Fig. 29). In it a rustic drunkard, in climbing a rail fence, has overturned his liquor jug. Unable to scramble to the ground to right it, he watches in dismay as its contents bubble out and drain into the ground. The message is unequivocal: he has lost his liquor, but gained sobriety. Ambivalence also suffuses Blythe’s paired paintings Good Times and Hard Times (Figs. 30, 31). Ostensibly the didacticism is more pointed in these grim little pendants. In the first painting a paunchy tippler in a red chair sucks mightily from an upturned jug, his lips, as the art historian Diana Strazdes has put it, forming a “perfect seal” with mouth of the vessel.17 The drinker’s face, cheeks puffed and eyes glazed, expresses blissful infantile oblivion. The very space he inhabits reinforces this notion. Gray and blank, it is the domain of nothingness. In the second picture, the toper, his face a mask of misery and his paunch collapsed, has been collared by a baton-wielding constable or watchman. The drunkard’s hat sits askew, covering one eye; his hands are hidden in the pockets of his drab and baggy coat. The burly constable glowers at his captive, his hard features contrasting with the other’s squashy flesh. As in Good Times, the space is empty, merely a dingy brown wall with a windowsill high up to the left, suggesting some back alley where glimmers of gaslight give way to deep shadows. The message seems clear enough in its cause-and-effect sequence. Yet the question lingers whether those blissful moments of primal, ecstatic suckling might after all be worth the price.
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figure 30. David Gilmour Blythe, Good Times, ca. 1854–58. Oil on board, 115⁄8 × 85⁄8". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of the Richard King Mellon Foundation. figure 31. David Gilmour Blythe, Hard Times, ca. 1856–60. Oil on board, 115⁄8 × 85⁄8". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of the Richard King Mellon Foundation.
That lingering question gets us to the heart of Blythe’s ambivalence. Walking an either-or tightrope, he fits the profile of what the literary historian David S. Reynolds has described as dark or immoral reform, in which the reformer is “drawn to the very vices he denounced.” In the 1830s and 1840s popular temperance literature became darker and more sensational. The Washington Temperance Society, established in 1840, was influential in this shift. Originally a working-class organization of reformed alcoholics, the “Washingtonians” sponsored flamboyant temperance lecturers such as the notorious John Bartholomew Gough, whose theatrical performances played up the “grisly details of alcoholism” rather than a cure. Correspondingly, temperance fiction dwelled more and more on the sordid details of crime and perversity, until what had started out as a campaign against vice seemed increasingly to take a voyeuristic pleasure in its exposure.18 Perhaps the most flamboyant exhibition of this doubleness was the tongue-in-cheek performance of the theater owner and actor Tom Flynn at the Chatham in New York in the 1840s. Goaded by Washingtonian activism in the city, Flynn, an inveterate drinker, proclaimed that on an appointed day he would renounce rum and explain his reasons to his audience. Onstage near the footlights was a table bearing a half-filled glass pitcher and a tumbler. Emerging from the wings to thunderous applause, Flynn filled his glass and, as Frank Kernan recalled: drank the contents in one draught, and then proceeded with his lecture. He was a brilliant and voluble talker, and his fund of anecdotes never seemed to be exhausted. The pathos and eloquence with which he pictured step by step the drunkard’s path down the abyss of moral ruin I will never forget, neither will I forget the laughter I enjoyed while listening to his side-splitting anecdotes. . . . One moment the sobs of men and women were distinctly audible throughout the whole building while Flynn drew one of his inimitable pictures of the curse of rum. At the next moment everybody was holding his or her sides in a strong effort to save themselves from bursting with laughter.
Eventually, some inquisitive temperance people discovered that “the pitcher which was supposed to contain water actually contained gin—old swan gin, which was Tom’s favorite beverage.” Flynn, they realized, had been “drawing inspiration for his lecture from the camp of the enemy, and . . . his exhaustion and final collapse were not due so much to the mental strain of the lecture as from the seductive and exhausting contents of the pitcher.” The whole ruse, Flynn later explained, was to discourage the temperance people from asking for the use of the theater, which “they never did.”19 Like Flynn, Blythe may have been powerless to resist the “seductive and exhausting contents of the pitcher.” The flavor of “dark temperance” reform infuses his images of temptation, drunken felicity, and sordid mishap. There is also at least a hint of Tom Flynn’s subversive mockery, as in
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Blythe’s Urchin, also called Boy Sipping Wine (Fig. 32). In this painting a very young curly-headed boy slouches voluptuously against a hogshead of wine. His clothes are in tatters, one pink shoulder exposed and a grubby knee protruding from a large hole in his trousers. With a dreamy expression, he sucks up wine through a straw poked into a crack between the staves. The ruby liquid has spattered and smeared his face, hands, arms, and chest. Two more kegs lie behind him, and there are sketchy indications of dockside pilings. The atmosphere is smoggy and brown. On one level, of course, the painting reads as a cautionary tale. About the same time, Blythe depicted a ragged boy stealing from a sugar bowl (ca. 1856–58; Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute) and paired it with a painting (now lost) entitled Man Peering from Jail. The Urchin might well be the child who is father to the man in Good Times and Hard Times. Yet this tender degenerate radiates an air of pure, sensuous pleasure that subtly undercuts the implicit moral of the story. Insouciant and self-contained, he flaunts his besotted idleness. If diligence, respectability, restraint, and cleanliness were the rules of order for middle-class success, this urchin has gleefully broken them all. Furtive he may look, but he is neither ugly nor malformed. He is a juvenile, streetwise Victorian Bacchus, embodying the outlaw spirit of license and revelry.20 Blythe took a stance as double-edged as the spirit of “dark reform” itself, brooding on the perversely alluring degradation of drunkenness and simultaneously poking fun at the rhetoric and imagery of the temperance campaign. In this capacity the artist straddled another line, tapping the topsy-turvy world of pictorial satire to furnish inspiration for his spectacles of drunken abandon and remorse. Boy at the Pump and Conscience Stricken offer signs of Blythe’s roots in the boisterous and irreverent realm of popular visual culture (Figs. 33, 34). In the first, the setting is some desolate corner of the city, an alley threading past a dilapidated building. Refuse litters the paving stones. To the left stands a pump bearing a sign that announces invitingly, “Ho! all ye who art thirsty come and drink.” Before it stands an impudent youth in baggy rags, wearing a hat pulled down to his eyebrows. He thumbs his nose at the pump and its message. Behind his back he holds a wickerwrapped jug, and from his pocket protrudes the neck of a corked liquor bottle. In the second half of the sequence, the same person, presumably, now grown to adulthood, stands knock-kneed before the vision of his own mortality in the form of a tall stone cross occupying the same position as the pump in the first picture. The setting is again an alley, this time with bricks exposed under scuffed and crumbling stucco. The cross looms in the dusky corner, and darkness envelops the upper portion of the composition. The sinner, hand over heart and hat in hand, casts his eyes aloft. Behind him a pick and shovel—tools for grave digging—lean against the wall next to that fatal jug. The drunkard’s shadow takes on a life of its own, creeping toward the cross like a murky cloud of smoke. Yet the scene is as comic as it is tragic. Caught between symbols of sal-
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figure 32. David Gilmour Blythe, The Urchin, ca. 1856. Oil on canvas, 25 × 30". Duquesne Club, Pittsburgh.
vation and the tomb, the drunkard may still reach for the jug, his penitence short-lived, his dissolution irreversible. The link between Blythe’s painting and cartoons is the bottle in the pocket, one of a set of codes used to identify the drunkard or the dark reformer. “The Total S’iety,” a song published in 1840, targets the hypocrisy of temperance reform and the hollowness of its resolves (Fig. 35). The setting is a hall where alcoholics have assembled to take the pledge and receive inspiration from the speaker. They have outsized heads, exaggerated features, and stubby bodies. On the wall are ironic references to the temperance movement’s obsession with the right kind of drink: a framed landscape of Niagara Falls and another of a waterspout. The lecturer leans over his pulpit and hands the pledge to a man rising from his seat to accept it. By bending forward, however, the speaker exposes his dark secret, his hidden weakness: like Blythe’s nose-thumbing boy, he has a bottle in his pocket.
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figure 33. David Gilmour Blythe, Boy at the Pump, ca. 1858–59. Oil on canvas, 14 × 121⁄8". Philadelphia Museum of Art: The W. P. Wilstach Collection, bequest of Anna H. Wilstach. figure 34. David Gilmour Blythe, Conscience Stricken, ca. 1860. Oil on canvas, 14 × 12". Philadelphia Museum of Art: The W. P. Wilstach Collection, bequest of Anna H. Wilstach.
figure 35. “The Total S’iety, A Comic Song,” sheet music cover, 1840. Courtesy of The Lester S. Levy Collection, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University.
Humor magazines abounded in this kind of imagery. “A Brandy Smash,” published in Yankee Notions, depicts a ragged alcoholic with a bashed-in hat, shuffling by a storefront advertising “Rum & Cigars” (Fig. 36). Behind him, a smirking boy is about to bring down a hammer on the bottle protruding from the drunkard’s coat pocket. Shabbiness, rags, ill-fitting clothes, and patches, all suggestive of some deeper bodily and mental disorder, were also standard accoutrements.21 The drunkard was a stock figure as well in the new genre of the city sketch. David Claypoole Johnston’s “Every Man for Himself!” was one of eight illustrations commissioned for Joseph C. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis (Fig. 37). “Ripton Rumsey; A Tale of the Waters” recounts the mishaps of a lowlife one rainy night. A chronic boozer, Rumsey is discovered sprawling in a waterlogged gutter, “saved from being floated away solely by the saturated condition of both his internal and external man.” In Johnston’s etching, Rumsey, his clothing in shreds, lies like a spouting fish in the street, just below the stairs leading to the door of a saloon. A gaslight brilliantly illuminates the lettering on this door but little else. A foxy dog peers out from under the
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figure 36. “A Brandy Smash,” published in Yankee Notions, May 1853. figure 37. David Claypoole Johnston, “Every Man for Himself!” published in Joseph C. Neal’s Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes in a Metropolis, 1844.
stairs; a rain barrel overflows with water, gushing from a downspout. A night watchman with a baton stands over Rumsey’s sodden figure, about to nudge him with his foot. The narrative takes up the next incident. The watchman gives Rumsey “a prodigious kick as an evidence of his amicable feeling” and warns: “If you don’t get up, you’ll ketch . . . the collar-and-fix you. Up with you, Jacky Dadle.” The subtitle of the story, like the pictures on the wall in “The Total S’iety,” makes ironic reference to the reformers’ efforts to displace liquor with pure, cold water.22 The drunk, disheveled, disorderly, and dissolute belonged to the shadow side of modern metropolitan life. The Philadelphia editor and humorist Neal (1807–47) made that shadow side his specialty, in the aptly named Charcoal Sketches (1838) and other publications. Little known today, Neal’s highly popular work went through multiple editions. His sketches were picturesque tours of the urban lower depths. Although contemporaries found his humor precious and quaint (which it certainly is), they recognized him as a connoisseur of lowlife. “The forte of Mr. Neal was a certain genial humor, devoted to the exhibition of a peculiar class of citizens falling under the social history description of the genus ‘loafer,’”stated one biographer. “Every metropolis breeds a race of such people, the laggards in the rear of civilization . . . who fall quietly into decay, complaining of their hard fate in the world, and eking out their deficient courage by a resort to the bar-room.”23 That Blythe made paintings not only of drunkards but also of street characters (for example, The Bum and A Loafer, both unlocated) suggests his familiarity with the city sketch genre. Indeed, he may have taken his nickname from Neal’s story, “‘Boots’: or, The Misfortunes of Peter Faber.” The main character is a “poor little man—poor grim little man—poor queer little man,” whose “monomania had boots for its object.” The farcical tale concerns Peter Faber’s strenuous, protracted, but ultimately “bootless” attempts to pull on his beloved footgear, only to break the straps and go somersaulting backward across the street. The night watchman witnessing this catastrophe mockingly dubs the unfortunate tumbler Boots.24 Blythe’s Man Putting on Boots portrays an analogous and equally absurd fix (Fig. 38). A stout man in a dressing gown and nightcap sits on his bed and hauls mightily on the straps of his right boot, while the left waits its turn. A look at the man’s still unshod left foot reveals why the struggle has twisted up his face into a rubbery and barely human mask of pain: the foot is several sizes too large for the dainty little boots in question. Although Blythe had a great deal in common with Neal as a painter of lowlife and tragicomic tipplers, Blythe’s style entirely lacked the fastidious gentility that characterized Neal’s. Blythe reveled in the city as the domain of chaos, crime, and grotesque bodies. His works, in evidencing that pleasure, aligned themselves with the newer and more disturbing genre of sensational city exposé, which from the 1840s through the 1850s proliferated in pulp fiction and garishly hued “true-life”
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figure 38. David Gilmour Blythe, Man Putting on Boots, 1860. Oil on canvas, 14 × 11". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Gift of Mrs. James H. Beal.
excursions to the dark side of the modern metropolis. Often these cheap popular books and pamphlet novels were wildly successful. One of the most lurid, George Lippard’s Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall (1845) went through twenty-seven editions, achieving a sales record surpassed only when Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, appeared in 1852.25 In all, more than fifty such “city mystery” exposés appeared before the outbreak of Civil War hostilities turned anxiety in a different direction. They were segments of a vastly extended discourse on the problems of urbanization, which had accelerated almost beyond control and comprehension since the 1830s. During this period, commerce, industry, and banking created new wealth and facilitated movement into upper- and middle-class status. An enormous influx of immigrants from European shores, supplemented by large numbers of fortune-seeking rural and small-town Americans, helped create an increasingly complex and class-stratified urban geography. The new city was a place of crowds, strangers, anonymity, enigma, and fear. The haunts of the poor gave rise to nightmarish visions of social breakdown and upheaval from the depths. There was some reason for such apprehension. As the historian Paul Boyer has written, among the urban poor, the period from the 1830s to the 1850s “was a time of almost continuous disorder and turbulence” in the form of gang wars, race riots, and other mayhem. It is impossible to read extensively in writings about the city during this time, notes Boyer, “without being struck again and again by the pervasiveness of fears aroused by street violence, riots, rowdiness, crime, and moral degeneracy in the slums.”26 The purpose of the city mystery narrative was to offer armchair tourists a view of the lower depths. Writers sometimes claimed moral justification for their inclusion of shocking, sordid, disgusting scenes. In New York by Gas-Light (1850), George Foster assured readers that he offered his descriptions, not in a spirit of levity, but to do good. Society needed “facts which show the actual consistence, color, and dimensions of the cancer that lies eating at its very vitals.” Dramatically, Foster flung back the curtain on the hidden city his narrative would reveal: “New York by gas-light! What a task have we undertaken! To penetrate beneath the thick veil of night and lay bare the fearful mysteries of darkness in the metropolis . . . all the sad realities that go to make up the lower stratum—the underground story—of life in New York!” Foster wrote of oyster bars, prostitutes, newsboys, drunkards, thieves, dance halls, theaters, and saloons. Although some scenes glittered with gaiety, many others were dreary and threatening. A prostitute’s childhood home in a “little back cellar down an alley in Orange Street” was a place where the sun never shone and “black mud and slime” oozed up through cracks in the floor. The notorious Five Points was even more horrific, a maze of danger. “Here, whence these streets diverge in dark and endless paths, whose steps take hold on hell—here is the very type and physical resemblance, in fact, of hell itself.” A den called “The Brewery” was home to vile people who had found their way down “to
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this hell-like den—little less dark, gloomy, and terrible than the grave itself, to which it is the prelude.” Like the rhetoric of temperance reform, Foster’s language is ripe and salacious, allowing readers to savor the forbidden pleasures and perversions of the very places such an exposé was supposed to render hideously repulsive.27 “Evening Amusements in New York,” published in the Lantern in 1852, is the pictorial equivalent to Foster’s prose, giving us voyeuristic access to the same realm of nighttime violence (Fig. 39). In it a band of ruffians has set upon a man in evening dress. Roughly pushed against a wall by two assailants, the man screams in terror as the third holds a dagger ready to plunge into his heart. Hemmed in by the scuffle, another victim falls to the pavement, wounded or dead. Around the corner, a woman flees from some other aggressor, while flames and smoke billow from the windows of a burning building. Meanwhile, at left, a policeman lounging on a squat post turns nonchalantly away from the uproar. The barbed message comments on the constabulary’s inability to control the spread of crime in the streets. At the same time, however, the image hints at deeper fears. Modern Pittsburgh, Blythe’s adopted home, provided the same raw materials to fashion into a vision of the metropolis on the edge. A heavily industrialized western frontier city with a large immigrant population of Irish and Germans, Pittsburgh suffered urban ills as intensely as did New York. At midcentury the swelling numbers of the poor combined with an unstable and depressed economy to produce an urban underclass that inspired fear and dread among the more prosperous. Riots erupted periodically. In 1851, for example, “a condition approximating anarchy ensued for a season.” Thieves and “midnight marauders” burned houses and robbed citizens unhindered until the mayor appointed a new police force to restore law and order. The lower class, according to one Pittsburgh historian, had more than its share of the mischievous and the indigent: “the poorer and more shiftless Irish immigrants, the drinking, fighting draymen, the canal and steamboat roustabouts, the railroad ‘Paddies,’ the quarrelsome washerwomen and charwomen, and the lads who worked in the glasshouses and iron mills instead of going to school or who ran in gangs instead of working in their fathers’ countingrooms or stores.” Such was the Pittsburgh of Samuel Young’s Smoky City: A Tale of Crime (1845). Pittsburgh, the “smoke begrimed city of the West,” is a place of sleazy criminals, repellent drunkards, and sepulchral dives with oozing walls and miasmic atmosphere. The plot involves fraud, robbery, suicide, and murder. In the end, fire levels the city, every mansion and hovel reduced to smoldering ruins.28 As Young’s title suggests, smoke—hellish, murky, suffocating—was the badge, or blot, of the city’s identity. Coal provided the energy for Pittsburgh’s manufactories and home fires, and its smoke cast a perpetual pall over the streets. James Parton reported in 1866 that from high up on the river bluffs the city appeared wrapped in darkness. “The entire space lying between the hills was filled
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figure 39. “Evening Amusements in New York,” published in the Lantern, October 9, 1852. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.
with the blackest smoke, from out of which the hidden chimneys sent forth tongues of flame, while from the depths of the abyss came up the noise of hundreds of steam-hammers.” The experience, Parton wrote, was like “looking over into hell—hell with the lid taken off.” Travelers favored this safely elevated vantage point. The English novelist Anthony Trollope, touring Pittsburgh, found it “the blackest place which I ever saw,” but when he viewed it from the proper height and distance, this “filth and wondrous blackness” proved picturesque. “I was never more in love with smoke and dirt,” he reported, “than when I stood here and watched the darkness of night close in upon the floating soot which hovered over the house-tops of the city.”29 In his paintings of urban life, Blythe offered sardonic or frightening glimpses beneath that sooty shroud. His Pittsburgh stands ever on the verge of explosion or disintegration. Post Office exemplifies the ever present tension in Blythe’s city scenes between confusion and control (Fig. 40). The General Delivery window is set deep under a classical arch, symbolizing clarity, balance, reason, and order. A marble bust vaguely resembling George Washington surmounts the window itself, reinforcing the message of the architecture. Beneath it, all is in tumult as a crowd, a tangled clot of humanity, vies for letters. At left a young woman in black (mourning garb, perhaps) scans an envelope she has just retrieved; at right a man in a top hat contemplates his prize. Between them is a lumpy man with his hat bent over one eye and a woman in a round red hat and a vast pink hoopskirt.
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figure 40. David Gilmour Blythe, Post Office, 1859–63. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20". Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Purchase.
Dead center, pushing his way into the mass, is a barefoot urchin. We can see only his posterior, since he has thrust his head and shoulders between the lumpy man and the hoopskirt. To anchor himself he has seized a fold of the lumpy man’s pantaloons, which have given way under stress, the sizable split in the fabric affording a glimpse of white undergarments. Realizing that he stands exposed, the victim squints over his shoulder; he is caught. Meanwhile, the hoopskirt, pushed up between the urchin’s bottom and a tilting shopping basket, swells into an explosive pouf of pink that dominates this array of disorderly backsides. Other individuals before the window are represented only in bits and pieces: a hat, a shadowy silhouette, the back of a head. Outside the archway on the left, as a man in a shiny top hat gazes at his letter, just unfolded, a barefoot ragamuffin picks his pocket. The man reads on, oblivious. Opposite, a bearded fellow slouches against the wall, looking down at his letter, while a long-nosed (nosy?) character with a carpetbag peers over his shoulder. Finally, a ragged newsboy, chomping on the butt of a cigar, perches on the top step with his bundle of papers.30 Blythe composed the scene with a classical balance, reiterating the symmetry of the framing architecture. Yet the individual parts—disheveled, irregular, misshapen—undermine the equipoise, as do Blythe’s style and technique: scribbly lines, sketchy faces, rubbery surfaces, smeary paint. This is the modern urban mass, the tumultuous crowd of the lower depths. Blythe questions whether the orderly architecture of the Republic can contain an increasingly unruly social body, bulging, thrashing, threatening to burst completely out of control. Who are the individuals that compose this disorderly crowd? Blythe in a companion piece indirectly answers the question. In the Pittsburgh Post Office (ca. 1859–62; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) is clearly the opposite of Post Office with its free-for-all stampede. An interior, it shows a group of assorted but generally decorous men quietly claiming and reading their mail. The sign on the wall above the delivery window identifies it pointedly as the “Gentlemen’s.” Rather than swarm, the figures stand alone or in small groups, framed by the columns of an arcade. They are not completely insulated from the crowd: a barefoot urchin with a basket and a blind beggar squatting in a corner represent the infectious masses outside. Still, order prevails, in contrast to Post Office, with its illegible clump of low-class denizens from the street. For all its confusion, however, Post Office allows a safe viewing distance. We are outside the arch, looking into its shadowed depths much as spectators gazed down on murky Pittsburgh from the lofty river bluffs. Humor, anxiety’s safety valve, operates effectively at that range. Midcentury periodicals and newspapers abounded in similar imagery. “An Obstruction of the Tear (tier) Duct,” published in New York’s Yankee Notions in 1860, shows a crowd of both men and women surging toward the stairs to the third tier of an unidentified theater (Fig. 41). Their passage blocked, they jostle, flail, and push, while treading the fallen underfoot. This kind of joke, Cameron C. Nickels notes, typifies midcentury urban humor, which reflected “the political, social, and cultural strains
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figure 41. “An Obstruction of the Tear (tier) Duct,” published in Yankee Notions, September 9, 1860. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.
of a nation becoming increasingly democratized and urbanized.” Such humor ridiculed the pretensions of the urban middle class while satirically exposing the “seamy side of urban low life— its poverty, vice, and violence.”31 As David S. Reynolds has written, beneath the lighthearted satire of urban humorists “lurked a dark anticipation of impending social chaos.” Humor furnished a refuge from the “volcanic” forces of disruption. From a safe distance, it was possible to laugh at things that at close range would metamorphose into nightmares.32 What were the consequences of abandoning distance, of plunging headlong into the urban stew? Penetrating the metropolitan wilderness, Blythe—by chance or design—followed in Poe’s footsteps, fashioning the city as a labyrinth. Although Poe set his urban stories variously in London, Paris, and New York, his cities were a generic compound of faceless flowing throngs, dinginess, gloom, and crime. His almost plotless tale “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) recounts an obsessive quest through the streets of London as the narrator dogs a mysterious old man he has seen through the “smoky panes” of a coffeehouse window. At first the narrator, a convalescent, observes the crowd, like a moving picture, as he sits inside with his cigar and newspaper. The flow is endless: “Two dense and continuous tides of population . . . a tumultuous sea of human heads” rush past the
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door. Soon, however, he begins to distinguish a myriad of details in dress, deportment, and gesture in the crowd. He amuses himself for a time identifying merchants, clerks, gamblers, prostitutes, drunkards, and sweeps, all in the “fitful and garish luster” of gaslight as night deepens. The old man’s face, though, rivets him with its confusion of expressions, ranging from avarice and coolness to bloodthirstiness and despair. Fascinated and seized by the desire to know more, he leaves his safe niche to pursue his quarry all night long, through fog and rain, from bright lights and busy markets to the desperate haunts of the poor. There, in dim lamplight, tenement houses totter; paving stones lie “at random,” choked in weeds; and “horrible filth” festers in the “dammed-up gutters.” They move on to a gin palace, where even at dawn wretched inebriates throng the portals. All the next day, the restless pursuit continues through the metropolis. When the exhausted narrator at last stands face-to-face with the object of his desire, he perceives him to be “the type and the genius of deep crime . . . the man of the crowd” who refuses to be alone. But there is nothing more to learn. The man remains an enigma, personifying the strangeness and fascination of the city itself.33 Dana Brand writes that Poe’s narrator starts out as a flaneur, or idler, confident in his ability to read the crowd and assemble a reassuring and controllable image of city life. This attitude changes when the old man’s face becomes a mirror onto which the narrator unknowingly projects his own desires. In pursuing his quarry, he too becomes the man of the crowd. Once in the thick of it, he can no longer maintain the comfortable distance necessary for the illusion of legibility. From the inside, the city is unreadable, an ever changing, chronically unstable kaleidoscope of fragments. There is plenty of detail on Poe’s urban stage, yet as Jules Zanger has observed, “Poe’s minimal city is the city as experienced rather than the city as regarded.” In Poe’s tales of the city, voyeuristic thrills give way to an invasion of the interior, whether a dark alley or some criminal’s mind. Poe was “an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul”—or the new city.34 Within the static confines of the picture plane, Blythe performed similar moves. Abandoning the safe framing of the crowd in Post Office, he descends in other paintings to the level of the pavement, or even below it, to give us the thug’s-eye perspective on the lowermost layers of urban life. Street Urchins (Fig. 42) depicts a huddle of moon-faced ragamuffins squatting on the pavement, watching impassively as one boy holds a lighted match to a toy cannon. Their faces, round, masklike, and blank, form a tight-packed phalanx, jammed to the margins. Their clothes are shabby, their hats shapeless. Behind the wielder of the match, one lights his cigar from the end of another’s, and two more smokers huddle to the side. One of them, seen in profile at the rightmost edge, leans against a large keg. Gaslight washes them all in yellow glare and deep shadow.
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figure 42. David Gilmour Blythe, Street Urchins, ca. 1856–58. Oil on canvas, 26 × 22". Courtesy The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio.
Intent on their fun, Blythe’s urchins seem less like ordinary children than dwarfish men, their grotesque physical irregularities emblematic of disorder in the larger social body. Yet their empty faces give nothing away. Are they harmless or malign? The cannon, strapped like a rocket to a length of plank, is set to go off directly into our space. Distance is impossible to maintain, the threat graphically symbolized by the projectile, about to burst out of the picture. The dense mass of flesh, compressed like human gunpowder, has the same explosive potential. Even Blythe’s paintings of solitary children are unsettling. A Match Seller pulls us down to the sidewalk, where we look straight into the unreadable eyes of a waif munching an apple, his large basket brimful of matches, enough to fuel a major conflagration (Fig. 43).35 The blunt force of Blythe’s vision overrides the needs of straightforward narration or even didactic commentary. The small but monstrous bodies, the theatrical light, and the sense of danger act as visual equivalents to the rhetoric of the sensational urban exposé. Nominally, of course, Blythe’s urchin pictures are reports from the front lines of urban disorder, poverty, and crime— but not products of direct observation. Rather, they are amalgams of contemporary discourses on modern urban evil. Like George Foster’s gaslit New York, Blythe’s streets are at once dangerous and alluring. But in refusing to preserve a margin of safety, and insisting on the enigmatic and perhaps unknowable nature of the city and its denizens, they confront us like the face of the man of the crowd, which could mean anything or nothing. Blythe’s images of urchins, close to the picture plane at eye and street level, might be our own images in some dark, flawed mirror. The Hideout, also known as The Hangout or Tramps’ Hideout, takes us down yet another level, below ground (see Plate 4) to a windowless chamber, enveloped in gloom. The scene is one of utter disarray, with cracked and peeling walls, and cards, cigarette butts, and a broken pipe littering the floor. One man, wearing a red bathrobe, has turned to look at a scruffy bearded character who has just lost his footing on the ladder descending from a dark hole in the ceiling. A third man is about to start the descent; we see only his shoes and pants from the knees down. Distracted by the commotion, the man in the bathrobe misses the pitcher into which he has been pouring milk. The liquid dribbles off the table and onto the floor, where a scrawny cat laps it up. Food overflows the table as well: a basket of vegetables, a loaf of bread, turnips, and some sausage links dangling alongside the limp necks of skinny dead fowl. A fourth man, shaving a face like melted wax, props his mirror against this jumbled heap. The furniture is rickety and makeshift: a fifth man sits on a broken chair, while the last, fully dressed as if ready for business aboveground, squats on a wooden box by the hearth while frying some eggs in a shovel. Broken shells lie scattered among the ashes that have drifted from the grate. On the mantel rests a corked liquor bottle. Behind the man with the milk pitcher, the only door to the room is firmly barred, suggesting danger on the other side and at the same time reinforcing a
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figure 43. David Gilmour Blythe, A Match Seller, ca. 1859. Oil on canvas, 27 × 22". North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh. Purchased with funds from the state of North Carolina.
claustrophobic sense of enclosure. The scene, oddly domestic, nonetheless turns domesticity inside out and upside down, subverting order with exuberant and total disorder.36 In 1854 the Reverend Edwin Chapin described the “Lower Depths” as “pools dark with indistinguishable horrors,” containing people “matted together in the very offal of debasement.” He might have been thinking of such a den, where things are muddled in an undifferentiated mass and even the paint is grubby, the predominant tone a brownish gray.37 On the far right is a brassbound trunk inscribed with Blythe’s signature. Directly below lies a pair of boots, thrown aside by the red-capped man mending his pants, his grimy toes and heels poking through large holes in his socks. The cast-off footgear once again serves as the painter’s surrogate in the picture. Like the pair of boots in the wooden crate in Art versus Law, these signal the painter’s identification with the down-at-heel tramps in their underground lair. Blythe, both inside and outside the picture, simultaneously marked his presence in that subterranean den of vice and peered into it from the other side of the picture plane. His “presence” in such a seedy dive is emblematic of his own sense of himself as a figure destined for mental and
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physical dissolution. Like his paintings of temperance and temptation, The Hideout testifies to Blythe’s precarious stance on the edge of ruin and his ambiguous status as one who produced and consumed the experience of urban decay, both physical and moral. It is ironic that Blythe should have shown his paintings of the dark alley and the den of crime in Gillespie’s display window for the entertainment of the passing crowd, who would find their own anxieties safely projected into another world behind the glass. It is impossible, finally, to separate Blythe’s sense of sin, failure, and self-disgust from the market economy in which, like Poe, he floundered and ultimately sank. The late self-portrait Prospecting portrays the American landscape as a dismal morass, recalling Blythe’s verses on the present as a “mixed-up black compound / Of vice and virtue,” where nameless evils lie “rotting in the pool of crime” (Fig. 44).38 Carrying a red satchel and a liquor jug over his shoulder, and a huge package labeled “greenbacks” under his arm, the artist reads the signs that point to a vast forest of oil rigs under a smoldering sky. The Pittsburgh petroleum boom that sent land values soaring in the early 1860s is symbolized here by a sign scrawled on a rock, offering the land for a price of one trillion dollars. This is a landscape not of opportunity but of ruin, both personal and social. The artist stands ankle deep in water. All around him in the mire lie dead, broken things: a bleached ribcage, a cow’s skull, a wagon wheel, a yoke, a keg, and nameless flotsam. The only living thing is a mud-colored turtle on a spar at left. Trees have given way to derricks, and agriculture to the pollutions of industry. America is a moral swamp in which money, the sole medium of exchange and the ultimate deceiver, represents nothing but itself and has no relation to real things. This was the moral swamp that overspread Blythe’s inner landscape as well. In addition to bodily corruption and the depredations of drink, his verse abounds in the imagery of inner blackness and despair. “My Hopes are withered—dead—and urn’d, / The ‘light of other days’ hath burn’d / Down to the socket,” he wrote. In this state, past, present, and future alike were “but a Mass / Of undefined darkness.” Some hidden crime or secret, masked by falsehood and deception, had reduced him to an “abject thing.” Happy days had flown, “And like dim shadows on the floor, / Gaunt memory sketches one by one, / Remembrance of things by-gone / Forever, ever, evermore.” The echoes of Poe are unmistakable. Even in more playful modes, Blythe associated himself with a rotting house or a battered wreck, destined for some “unknown ocean grave.”39 What are the prospects of redemption? Nil, the painting seems to say. The darkness is for good. In Prospecting, social and personal dissolution merge and sink into a desolate world of smoke and mud. Blythe, Poe’s Pittsburgh double, acted out the role of eccentric outsider, gadfly, tippler, widower, urban animal, and ragged genius whose inner torments imprinted themselves on his art and his vision of the modern metropolis. That such an identity could evolve just when artists of the
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figure 44. David Gilmour Blythe, Prospecting, ca. 1861–63. Oil on canvas, 121⁄8 × 91⁄8". Private collection, courtesy of Berry-Hill, Inc.
Hudson River school were celebrating the uncorrupted pastoral countryside and virgin wilderness is significant. Blythe, nonconformist and maverick, fashioned a dark complement and alternative to that bright vision. Importing the romantic ruin and stormy wilderness to the shadowy streets of the metropolis, he parodied, perverted, and modernized them, fashioning gothic images of new urban terrors. His was a realm of which midcentury landscape painters would never speak. But just beyond the edges of their sunny or stormy panoramas it lay in wait, a blighting, blackening presence that steadily encroached on the light.
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3
THE SHROUDED PAST
any people guard within themselves some never-told and perhaps untellable secret, which
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they carry with them to the grave. The artist Washington Allston, however, left his greatest
secret behind when he died suddenly but peacefully by his fireside late in the evening of July 9, 1843. Allston had kept the secret under wraps—literally and figuratively—for more than two decades: his gigantic painting Belshazzar’s Feast, in which the prophet Daniel tells the evil ruler of Babylon that his kingdom is about to be destroyed (see Plate 5). Allston had begun the painting in 1817. Twenty-six years later, it was still unfinished. Three days after the death of the artist, his brother-in-law Richard Henry Dana Sr., with his brother Edmund, son Richard junior, and the painter John Greenough, entered the studio in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, where the mysterious painting had long been concealed. Richard junior described the awful revelation in his journal: “At 4 p.m. we assembled to enter the painting room and ‘break the seal’ of the great picture. An awe had been upon my mind as though I were about to enter a sacred and mysterious place. I could hardly bring my mind to turn the key . . . to enter this solemn place . . . the scene of his distresses which no human eye saw, and no human spirits can comprehend! I turned the key & opened the outer door. We stood an instant in the porch.” Greenough rushed in, and the others followed to behold, spread out before their eyes, “the great sheet of painted canvas—but dimmed, almost obscured by dust & lines & marks of chalk.” All-
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ston’s secret stood exposed. The painting was a vast map of the artist’s failure not simply to finish what he had started, but even to create order out of chaos after making what later seemed a disastrous decision to change the perspective and, consequently, the scale and proportions of all the figures. All over the surface were the marks of adjustments in progress, the chalk outlines and rough patches of brushwork. The figures of Daniel and the queen were still there. “But where the king should have been, where Daniel’s eyes were fixed, was . . . a thickly painted coat, effectively blotting out the whole figure.” For several minutes the group stood dumbfounded. Finally, Richard senior murmured, “That is his shroud.” The body underneath that paint was not Belshazzar’s, but— metaphorically—that of Allston himself, driven to his death by the monster of his own creation.1 At such a time, it is not surprising that graveyard thoughts should come to mind. The whole painting, almost two hundred square feet of canvas, served as the shroud of Allston’s genius and ambition. Belshazzar’s Feast was the physical embodiment of an obsession that both haunted and hobbled its maker. Indeed, the painting itself was like a decaying body, mercilessly exposed to light after years of concealment. To Charles Sumner it looked like “a melancholy ruin”; to another, like the “gigantic fragments of the Temple of the Colonna Garden.”2 A quarter of a century earlier, Allston had stood poised for a breakthrough into the foremost ranks of history painting in England, and Belshazzar’s Feast was to be his vehicle. This story from the Old Testament Book of Daniel had a long genealogy in the arts, most commonly serving as a general-purpose moral tale to warn of God’s divine retribution against pride, luxury, and vainglory. Allston developed his idea for Belshazzar’s Feast soon after the collapse of the French Empire and may have been thinking of the subject as a grand metaphor for Napoleon and his ignominious defeat.3 With great enthusiasm the artist described the plan to his friend Washington Irving: Don’t you think it is a fine subject? I know not any that so happily unites the magnificent and the awful. A mighty sovereign surrounded by his whole court, intoxicated with his own state, in the midst of his revellings, palsied in a moment under the spell of a preternatural hand suddenly tracing his doom on the wall before him; his powerless limbs like a wounded spider’s shrunk up to his body, while his heart, compressed to a point, is only kept from vanishing by the terrified suspense that animates it during the interpretation of his mysterious sentence. His less guilty but scarcely less agitated queen, the panic-stricken courtiers and concubines, . . . the holy vessels of the temple (shining, as it were, in triumph through the gloom), and the calm, solemn contrast of the prophet, standing like an animated pillar in the midst, breathing forth the oracular destruction of the Empire!4
Allston chose the moment when the prophet decodes the cryptic words inscribed by a supernatural hand upon the wall of the Babylonian king’s palace. The message is one of doom: “Thou art
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weighed in the balances, and art found wanting. . . . Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and the Persians.” That very night, as recounted in Daniel, Belshazzar is slain and the Babylonian empire overrun by the conqueror Darius and his army. In the painting stern, bearded Daniel stands just to the left of the central axis and gestures, as he speaks, toward the spectral glow high above the heads of the scowling magicians and soothsayers huddling in bewilderment at right. At the far left, the ashen-faced Belshazzar clutches the arm of his throne and cowers as the awful words thunder upon his ears. The queen, in black, recoils with a fearful frown. Behind them in the cavernous room stretches a long table of revelers, staring and wondering, and on a dark balcony above, a crowd observes the action. Far beyond, at the summit of a colossal flight of stairs, sits an idol framed by massive columns. Tiny figures, dimly discernible, run along the steps. These, Allston explained later, were “principally Jews, exulting in the overthrow of the idols, and their own restoration” after long enslavement.5 Between Daniel and the magicians, several more Jewish slaves kneel in thanksgiving. The atmosphere is somber and shadowy, and the colors for the most part muted. Faint lamplight glows over the pagan statue, and slits of brightness reveal the banquet table. Most brilliant is Belshazzar, draped in slick cloth of gold and sitting amid his golden trophies, a foil to Daniel’s foreboding presence. The principal figures are large and statuesque, although the neck of one soothsayer is disproportionately long, and Allston in the process of alteration chalked in the man’s naked buttocks and thighs over the skirts of his robe. Allston had brought the partially completed painting from England to Boston in 1818, and early in the 1820s a group of twelve wealthy friends and patrons had drawn up a contract for advance purchase, paying $10,000 into a fund on which Allston could draw when needed. Disencumbered of the need to make and sell other works, Allston could, it was hoped, finish his great work. During the 1820s he seemed always on the verge of attaining his goal yet never arrived at the decisive moment. Despite strong encouragement, Allston’s momentum faltered and flagged. Some blame has attached to the portrait painter Gilbert Stuart, who in 1820 offered the critique that spurred Allston to make those disastrous and irreconcilable changes in the composition. In the winter of 1828–29, his own studio having been sold for a livery stable, Allston moved into the studio of the portrait painter Chester Harding while Harding visited Washington in search of business. On his return Harding found that Allston had never even unrolled the canvas. By that time, indeed, he had developed a pathological reluctance to show the work even to his closest friends, and he entertained superstitious fantasies about the consequences of letting other eyes behold the work in progress. On one occasion, after turning away his old Harvard classmate Leonard Jarvis, he explained that if the picture “were seen by any person, I should never finish it. I know . . . that this is a weakness, but I cannot help it.”6
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Allston let the painting molder for ten years but finally, in 1839, unrolled it in his Cambridgeport studio, where the immense canvas took up an entire end wall. More than ever obsessed with concealment, Allston hung a huge curtain in front of the picture and drew it closed whenever visitors came. This, as Allston’s friend Charles Sumner reported, served as “the breakwater of our curiosity.” Only John Greenough, spying through a crack in the door, managed a narrow glimpse of the work, reporting that the king was finished. But when the mourners came into the studio that solemn afternoon, Belshazzar lay hidden beneath the layer of paint that covered him like a pall.7 Belshazzar’s Feast soon took on amplified meaning as emblem of the painter’s own career. In 1855 the sculptor William Wetmore Story wrote: Allston starved spiritually in Cambridgeport—he fed upon himself. There was nothing congenial without & he turned all his powers inward and drained his memory dry. His work grew thinner & vaguer every day & in his old age he ruined his great picture. I know no more melancholy sight than he was—so rich and beautiful a nature, in whose veins the South ran warm, which was born to have grown to such height & to have spread abroad such fragrancy, stunted on the scant soil & withered by the cold winds of that fearful Cambridgeport. I look at his studio whenever I pass with a heartpang.
For many others, too, the ruined painting was emblematic of the romantic artist’s inability to thrive in pragmatic America.8 What prevented Allston from finishing his “great picture”? Or, perhaps equally to the point, why did he ruin it? Clearly there had been much interest in and considerable support for the work, and the story itself held meaning for the young American Republic. By painting Belshazzar, as David Bjelajac has suggested, Allston put himself in the prophet’s sandals, warning against the rise of Napoleonic tyranny in America. At the same time, Belshazzar’s Feast, as a representation of Jewish liberation, was an “emblem or type for America’s millennial promise and desire.”9 Earlier commentators, such as Story, faulted Allston’s environment or America’s provincial lack of taste for erudite, grand-style history painting. More recently, some have suggested that the sublime drama of Belshazzar became less and less congenial to the painter as he gravitated in later life toward quiet, introspective subjects. But none of these explanations accounts fully for the artist’s pathological obsession with the picture and his even more pathological need to conceal it behind locked doors and drapery.10 Allston had a great deal more to hide, in fact, than one ruined painting. He wanted to erase or elide whole passages of his past and his beginnings. In my view, the enshrouding of Belshazzar’s Feast serves as metaphor for the veil Allston habitually cast over his southern origins and his iden-
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tity as a member of the master class, that of plantation owners in the coastal lowlands of South Carolina. Belshazzar’s Feast tells of a past that haunted Allston all his life. It is a southern story, compounded of the slaveholder’s guilt and his overwhelming fear of revenge and retribution for holding an entire race in bondage.11 Allston’s family were rice planters and slaveholders along the Waccamaw River in Georgetown County. His mother, Rachel Moore (1757–1839), was the second wife of William Allston Jr., who owned large tracts of land divided among several estates on Waccamaw Neck. According to Washington Allston’s biographer, Jared B. Flagg, Rachel, in love with her cousin Neville, wed William Allston in 1776 under intense family pressure. Two years later, by sheer chance (or legend), Neville was the only survivor of a wreck just offshore from Brookgreen Plantation. He stumbled up to the house, where Rachel, supposing him long since dead, fell into a faint when she recognized him. Neville fled the house in confusion, dying soon after of yellow fever in Charleston.12 With William, Rachel bore five children, three of whom survived. Washington, born in 1779, was the middle child and the elder son. Her husband, who served as a captain in the Revolutionary army of General Francis Marion, returned home in 1781 from the Battle of Cowpens and succumbed to a mysterious illness. According to Flagg, he was thought to have been poisoned “by a trusted servant,” though other sources report that he contracted a fever in camp and was barely able to reach home before he expired.13 In 1784 the widow, reportedly against family opposition, married Dr. Henry Collins Flagg, son of a wealthy Newport shipping merchant. Flagg had been on the medical staff of General Nathaniel Greene’s army and elected to remain in the South after the war. Little Washington lived at Brookgreen Plantation on Waccamaw Neck until about 1784 or 1785, when his new stepfather sent him to Mrs. Meleseent Calcott’s school in Charleston. In 1787 Allston departed for Newport, Rhode Island, to enroll in Robert Rogers’s school in preparation for Harvard, where he studied from 1796 to 1800. The motivation for sending him away from Charleston was in part to discourage his artistic leanings. Newport was the logical choice not only because it was Dr. Flagg’s place of birth but also because the two towns had strong social and economic ties. Late in 1800 Allston returned to Charleston, where his stepfather was struggling with the illness that finally claimed him in April 1801. That was Allston’s last recorded visit to South Carolina. Having succeeded in his determination to embark on an artistic career, he set forth for London in May and spent the next seven years abroad, studying at the Royal Academy in London, finding his artistic footing, and living for extended periods on the Continent, chiefly in Paris and Rome. During those years he met and formed fast friendships with an international group of artists and writers, among them the poet Samuel
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Taylor Coleridge. In 1808 Allston returned to the United States, to Boston, where he married Ann Channing on June 19, 1809. His wife was the sister of William Ellery Channing, a friend from Newport days; the very long engagement dated from that period. Through this alliance, Allston became part of a network of Boston elites: clergymen, merchants, and lawyers. In 1811 the Allstons sailed back to England, and over the next several years Washington emerged as one of the most promising young history painters of the day. A catastrophic illness, however, followed closely by the sickness and death of his wife in 1815, drove the painter to the brink of madness. After a prolonged interval of grief he found solace in the dawning of new religious faith. In 1817 he began Belshazzar’s Feast, which he carried back to Boston the next year. In 1830 he married the well-to-do Martha Remington Dana, his first wife’s cousin. He lived in Boston and then in Cambridgeport for the rest of his life, inspiring lasting reverence as a reclusive dreamer, a Boston artist to the marrow. He never completely cut off his southern connections. In maturity he enjoyed the patronage of South Carolina gentry, including the Draytons and the fabulously wealthy Balls. Moreover, strong family ties especially with his mother, Rachel, connected him to South Carolina. Yet there seems to have been a consensus then, and there still is now, that Allston’s later experiences—his years in Newport, at Harvard, and in London, Paris, Rome, and Boston— neutralized his plantation background, leaving only traces in the form of southern charm and manners.14 But Allston never left the South behind. The threads of that past can be picked out in both his life and art. Once we discover and follow them, we get closer to the nature of Allston’s gothic vision, its tangled roots sunk deep into the soil of the plantation where he first saw the light. Allston grew up in an insular if opulent society in which Africans or African-Americans in the 1770s outnumbered Anglo-Americans by nearly eight to one, a ratio that reached nine to one by the turn of the century. South Carolina had begun very early to import slaves directly from Africa, primarily from Senegambia, the Gold Coast, and the Congo-Angola region. There were close ties between the South Carolina rice coast and Caribbean cultures as well.15 The young master at Brookgreen spent his early years amid great wealth and luxury, his every whim satisfied by slave attendants. When the Duc de La Rochefoucauld toured the southern states in 1795–96, he reported that a Charleston gentleman typically had at least twenty slaves in his domestic establishment and that even children had black maids and body servants.16 Allston undoubtedly had some such retinue, as well as his own personal attendant, the “young negro” his father bequeathed to him in his will. When he was an infant, an African wet nurse may well have suckled him, for the practice was customary in plantation households. Allston’s childhood epithet, “Little General,” referred playfully to his given name but also suited one who, even as a boy, commanded human property.17
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Allston owed his very identity as an artist to that property, in fact, since his inheritance enabled him to go abroad and to finance the critical early years of study and travel. When the aspiring painter arrived in London, he met Henry Fuseli, whose sublime and often extravagantly bizarre paintings on themes from Shakespeare and Milton had appealed to the young American ever since he first saw engraved reproductions of them in Charleston. Learning that Allston wanted to become an artist, Fuseli warned him that he had come a long way to starve. But Allston retorted boldly, “I have a certain patrimony.” That patrimony, which Allston received when he came of age, consisted of a plantation of three tracts of land, one on the Waccamaw and two on the seaside, totaling 879 acres. He sold one tract “at a ruinous sacrifice” before embarking for England. He deposited the funds with a London banker and drew on the capital until it was gone. In 1804 he sold the rest of his inheritance, which comprised the plantation Springfield and the other seaside tract. Included in this sale were twenty-four slaves and several head of cattle. The buyer, Benjamin Allston (probably Washington’s older half brother) paid £4,343, to be divided into installments: £1,000 down, and the rest in five equal parts to be finished by January 1, 1809. In a very real sense, Allston built his art on blood money, wealth generated by slave labor. Although he soon used up the cash, that tie remained.18 The slave system that helped finance Allston’s artistic education figured both literally and, in many ways, metaphorically as the dark side of American life, a specter brooding under the smooth surface of Enlightenment thinking. It is inconceivable that this real-world horror could have left Allston unmarked. As a young master on a profitable rice plantation, he surely witnessed the control and punishment of slaves. Although there are no records of exactly what methods were used at Brookgreen in those early days, there is every reason to believe that the slaves there, like those on every eighteenth-century plantation, were whipped or otherwise abused for disobedience and insubordination, real or imagined. The only variable in Allston’s case may have been the frequent absences and early death of William Allston Jr., since fathers played an important role in socializing their sons to the plantation regime. Presumably, however, overseers would have carried out disciplinary measures in the patriarch’s place. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s reflections on the worst excesses of slavery in South Carolina suggest what might have been seen not far from the Big House. Crèvecoeur is well known for Letters from an American Farmer (first published 1782), which extolled the goodness, integrity, and virtue of agrarian life in the early Republic. His fictional farmer narrator James paints a glowing portrait of this new world: “We have no princes for whom we toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be.” Yet everything farmer James encounters in the South tragically sullies that bright vision. Charleston, he discov-
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ers, is given up to dissipation, luxury, and pleasure, yet beyond the town, “scenes of misery overspread . . . the country.” Sketching a picture of cracking whips, ferocious punishment, and stark terror, James denounces the slave system as a “poison “ in the social body. He comes face-to-face with gruesome proof of this noxious influence while strolling through a peaceful wood on his way to dine with a planter at his mansion. Suddenly, he stumbles on a ghastly “living spectre”: a Negro, suspended in a cage and left there to expire! I shudder when I recollect that the birds had already picked out his eyes; his cheekbones were bare; his arms had been attacked in several places; and his body seemed covered with a multitude of wounds. From the edges of the hollow sockets and from the lacerations with which he was disfigured, the blood slowly dropped and tinged the ground beneath. No sooner were the birds flown than swarms of insects covered the whole body of this unfortunate wretch, eager to feed on his mangled flesh and drink his blood.
James gives the dying slave a sip of water and fervently wishes he had a bullet to end the man’s suffering. He leaves the scene at last and reaches the planter’s house. “There I heard that the reason for this slave’s being thus punished was on account of his having killed the overseer of the plantation. They told me that the laws of self-preservation rendered such executions necessary.”19 This account, as ghastly as any horror to be found in a gothic novel, vividly suggests how completely violence and terror permeated the fabric of planter society. That environment was Allston’s, too. Indeed, recall the story that Allston’s father died of poison administered by a “trusted servant.” Perhaps that was only a family legend, glamorizing an ordinary death by fever. But that such a story circulated at all suggests deep fear of such dangers even within the protective walls of the household. What else could that “trusted servant” be but a slave, and what could inspire greater dread than the threat of revenge and death embodied in such a figure? This tale pinpoints the perverse complexity of relations between the slave-owning class and their property. Physically and often psychologically dependent on their enslaved domestics, whites at the same time could hardly fail to sense, and fear, the anger that lay beneath the surface.20 Albeit through a distorting mirror, Allston’s southern past constituted the very foundation of his art. In some ways, he was quite candid about it, attributing his love of the wild and the marvelous to the influence of slaves on the plantation. He told the writer and critic William Dunlap that as a child, “I delighted in being terrified by the tales of witches and hags, which the negroes used to tell me; and I well remember with how much pleasure I recalled these feelings on my return to Carolina [in 1800–1801]; especially on revisiting a gigantic wild grapevine in the woods, which
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had been the favorite swing for one of these witches.” This facet of Allston’s southern experience was common currency, since Dunlap published the reminiscences in his monumental history of the arts of design in the then very young United States.21 What was left out was the degree to which the young master himself had been Africanized. Culture in the South Carolina Low Country evolved out of the dynamic process of creolization, in which white and black traditions, folklore, and behaviors interacted with and influenced each other. Language in particular exhibited the distinguishing marks of this interchange. The slaves of Waccamaw Neck developed the unique language of Gullah, which grew out of the need to attain common linguistic ground among groups hailing from different parts of Africa and their Englishspeaking masters. Over time, members of the planter class absorbed traces of Gullah into their own speech patterns. One observer in the nineteenth century even claimed that children of the best families were “apt to speak an almost unmodified Gullah” up to the age of four.22 Although we will probably never know if Allston in his tender years was fluent in Gullah, his recollections suggest that his “negroes” were familiar companions. Intimate daily contact between the youthful Allston and his slaves could only have impressed him deeply with the rhythm and texture of their speech and the expressive power of those tales told to him, perhaps by his mammy, his valet, or his groom. These stories were probably eclectic fusions of remembered African narratives and other sources. They revolved around a cluster of conventional themes such as animal tricksters, spells, ghosts, witches (hags, or boo-hags), and boo-daddies or conjuremen. Hags were especially dangerous and frightful. A hag could be the spirit of a dead witch or a living witch who slipped out of her skin at night to roam abroad and torment sleeping victims by riding them, causing horrible dreams. Although she was invisible without her skin, her presence was palpable, like warm, rubbery raw meat. The hag might also be a vampire. In one tale, as conveyed in transcribed Gullah, “Hag rides you. . . . De say hag sperit can go troo de keyhole of de do’ en ef dey lak you de goes in en sucks yer blood troo yer nose.”23 The real horrors and brutalities of slavery were reversed, displaced, and filtered through the stories that “terrified” the little master, the raw meatiness of the bloodsucking hag a pleasurably fearsome sublimation of the raw meat Crèvecoeur encountered hanging in the woods. The patrimony Allston inherited from the Low Country was not merely the territorial and human property that subsidized his study and residence abroad. It was also the dark and thrilling ghost lore of the slaves that dominated his social landscape during his most tender years. Allston’s nephew and biographer Jared Flagg sensed a mix of danger and allure in the contact with blacks: “The Southern negro is never so happy as when relating to infantile gentry legends and myths to startle and alarm. No training could be more effective in peopling the shades of night with spectral forms to terrify,
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than that to which this child of genius was subjected.” Flagg believed that Allston’s love of imagery in the realm of the supernatural, the dramatic, and tragic was “in great part a legitimate result of the negroes acting upon his highly imaginative nature.”24 William Dunlap considered Allston lucky to have been removed from his birthplace before “lessons more pernicious than could flow from the witch stories were taught by the negroes of the household or the plantation.” No one but another southerner, he declared, could conceive of “that species of education which is the lot of those who are surrounded in their childhood by swarms of slaves of all ages; some born in the country, some recently brought from Africa, scored with the marks of their high barbaric origin, but all ignorant of the duties, or even the decencies of life.” Dunlap himself, raised in the South, recalled and deplored “the words and actions of his father’s negroes, whose companion [he] was doomed to be until their words and actions made impressions never to be erased.”25 Dunlap’s words betray the fears of his class. Whites could justify their power only by constructing the image of black people as physically and mentally their inferiors (and opposites), that is, as savage, tainted, and primitive. Whatever blackness had gone into Allston’s makeup must be rerouted through filtering channels to remove traces of contaminating contact and leave only the innocuous memory of supernatural thrills.26 It would be difficult to exaggerate the power of the fears that underlay white mastery. During Allston’s youth and the entire antebellum era, the dread of slave revolt was ubiquitous. In South Carolina the bloody slave rebellion on the island of St. Domingue in 1791 brought visions of terror home. Charleston was one of the major American ports of entry for thousands of whites who fled the island, bringing with them tales of ruin and butchery. The South Carolinian Mary Pinckney wrote to a friend in 1798 that “we dread the future, and are fearful that our feelings for the unfortunate [white] inhabitants of the wretched island of St. Domingo may be our own destruction,” referring to the putative smuggling of some island blacks into the state by refugees. In 1792 the state of South Carolina, to keep out potential insurrectionists and radical ideas, passed a law prohibiting the importation of slaves.27 Published accounts, private papers, and letters used the same lurid rhetoric to describe what seemed the almost indescribable events of the St. Domingue revolution. The Jamaican planter Bryan Edwards witnessed the destruction of Le Cap Français in 1791 and told of the entire plain adjoining the cape covered with ashes and, as far as the eye could see, nothing but “ruins still smoking, and houses and plantations at that moment in flames.” Far worse, perhaps, were prolific reports of extreme brutality, such as the account in a Williamsburg, Virginia, paper about a passage boat with forty-four passengers taken by a “Negro barge,” and “every soul murdered. The women they put to the ignominious torture of boring their eyes out with a corkscrew, in ripping up the
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figure 45. Anonymous, Slave Revolt, mid–nineteenth century. Engraving. Library of Congress.
bellies of those with child and exposing the unborn infants to the eyes of their expiring mothers.” There were stories of insurgents holding “the body of a white infant impaled upon a stake,” and the planter whose black murderers tossed his severed head into the lap of his widow, sitting in grief on the veranda of her house. Some of these tales—so flagrantly lurid—are propaganda, but certainly the bloodshed was terrible, and wholesale slaughter took place on all sides. After thirteen years of struggle, St. Domingue, newly christened Haiti, achieved independence in 1804. The triumphant leader, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, massacred all remaining whites on the island. Over the years, the death toll reached one hundred thousand whites and more than sixty thousand blacks.28 Widely circulated, such gruesome descriptions of rebellion, anarchy, and slaughter made an indelible impression in the American South. Alfred Hunt writes, “It was at this time that many Americans drew their images . . . of what black emancipation might bring.”29 A nineteenth-century print seems mild by comparison (Fig. 45). Still, it embodies every planter’s nightmare: a deadly carnival of role reversal in which whites scream, beg for mercy, and fall under knives wielded without pity by black rebels, slaves no more.
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From the time of the uprising in St. Domingue, insurrection rumors were rife and paranoia high. Stories of impending rebellion flew wildly in 1793 and again in 1800 with the uncovering in Virginia of the Gabriel Prosser plot, thought to have involved as many as eight thousand slaves. In 1822 a slave conspiracy to take over Charleston and murder every white resident was foiled. Later the chief instigator, Denmark Vesey, was found to have Haitian connections and may well have been inspired by that island nation’s triumph over white oppressors. An account of the insurrection, published that year in Boston, alleged that “a malignant hatred of the whites, and inordinate lust of power and booty” had motivated Vesey and fueled his vision of “laying our city in ashes, and moistening its cinders with blood.” A few years later, in 1829, planters violently suppressed an uprising in the Georgetown district. Only two years after that, Nat Turner’s revolt in Virginia once more inflamed hysterical fears. These were only the most visible manifestations of the dangers, real or imagined, that stalked the planter class and stirred perpetual unease.30 By the time of the first St. Domingue uprising in 1791, Washington Allston had been in Newport for several years. His mother and stepfather with their children, however, remained at Brookgreen Plantation until about 1800. After Dr. Henry Flagg’s death, the widow probably went to live on property inherited from her father, in St. Thomas’ Parish, although according to the record she died in Charleston. Potentially, they were very much in harm’s way.31 Hundreds of miles removed, Allston was safe enough but acutely aware of events in St. Domingue. Shortly before he left Newport to begin his studies at Harvard, he completed a painting that directly referenced the revolution: St. Domingo Black Boy, apparently long lost. Jared Flagg described it as “a capital likeness” of the boy, who was “one of the house servants. He was represented with a liberty cap on his head, ornamented with a tricolored tassel and cockade, holding in one hand a boot and in the other a shoe-brush. This [Allston] took to Cambridge with him about 1796.”32 Whether the boy who sat for the picture was a slave brought from home or an actual refugee from St. Domingue is impossible to tell. But it seems unlikely that the household would accommodate a potentially dangerous insurrectionist. What inspired this portrait? To Allston, the thought of insurrection was both horrific and repellent. The mere notion of equality conjured up visions of some “hideous monster.” He viewed the French Revolution as the earthly incarnation of pure evil, the “consummation, for every possible sin,” since Cain murdered Abel. In a sonnet on the French Revolution, Allston wrote of a “mighty Kingdom” eating poisoned fruit from the deadly tree that first grew in paradise and now “struck . . . its roots in every land.” The fatal bite had cataclysmic consequences: Then from his throne stepped forth The King of Hell, and stood upon the Earth:
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But not, as once, upon the Earth to crawl. A Nation’s congregated form he took, Till, drunk with sin and blood, Earth to her centre shook.33
For the master class of the South, the Revolution, as the historian Jeffrey Robert Young notes, posed “too powerful a threat to the slaveowners’ hegemony to be ignored.” When the radical Jacobins attacked and destroyed what remained of social hierarchy in France, slaveholders feared greatly that “the French Revolution would become the catalyst for a general leveling of all social distinctions between rich and poor.” What had happened in France could all too easily repeat itself in the South, as the St. Domingue revolt so conclusively proved.34 Memories of St. Domingue lingered hauntingly up to the very eve of the Civil War. One defender of slavery wrote, “The atheistical philosophy of revolutionary France added fuel to the volcano of hellish passion which raged in its bosom, the horrors of [St. Domingue] became a narrative which frightened our childhood, and still curdles the blood to read.” (Interestingly, Allston’s earliest reported painting was of an erupting volcano.) Southerners feared that St. Domingue was the dress rehearsal for a race war that would annihilate their society, and for many the words “revolutionary” and “Negro” came to be interchangeable. In the mind of the Low Country planter Edwin C. Holland, the “Negroes” were “truly the Jacobins of the country . . . the anarchists and the domestic enemy; the common enemy of civilized society and the barbarians who would, if they could, become the destroyers of our race.” Such thinking reinforced a long-standing and deep-seated dread of emancipation, which many supposed could have only one result: a catastrophic war between the races.35 Allston’s sonnet suggests that like his southern peers he viewed the two revolutions as parts of a hideous and hellish whole; indeed, he might just as well have been describing the southerner’s nightmare of St. Domingue. What to make, then, of the St. Domingo Black Boy? The portrait sent mixed signals. There was the liberty cap, well-known symbol of revolutionary struggle in both the American and the French Revolutions, combined with the festive tassel and cockade. Taken by itself, the cap signified the victory of the enslaved African over the forces that bound him. The shoe brush and the boot, however, canceled out or at least trivialized his purported triumph. Shown performing a menial task, the “St. Domingo” revolutionary was nothing more than a deferential, domesticated worker. The “tricolored tassel and cockade” on the liberty cap worn by Allston’s “St. Domingo” boy were more than simple decoration. Identified with revolutionary France, the tricolor on the bootblack’s cap graphically signifies the twinning or even merging of the two revolutions in Allston’s
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figure 46. Richard Newton, A Real Sans Culotte, 1792. Hand-colored etching, 147⁄8 × 105⁄8". © The British Museum.
mind and betrays the anxiety that might be compressed into a satirical “portrait” of the insurgent slave. The tricolored ornamentation also serves as an early example of Allston’s veiled or coded visual language whose surface meanings sometimes overlie unarticulated, darker thoughts. Richard Newton’s satirical etching A Real Sans Culotte suggests what these thoughts may have been (Fig. 46). Made in the wake of the revolutions in France and St. Domingue, the print represents a fearsome colossus straddling England, one foot on France and the other on America. This monster is divided in two: one half is a French terrorist with a bloody dagger and the tricolor cockade in his cap; the other is a black demon spitting fiery snakes. This may have been the image the humorous spoof of St. Domingo Black Boy was calculated to suppress. Allston’s agenda was to make laughable what might otherwise be unbearably frightening. If we keep Allston’s use of coded language in mind, certain paintings, early and late, begin to make sense as the work of a transplanted southerner bound, despite geographic and chronological distance, to his culture and his place. I want to emphasize that this was a private language in that unlike conventional symbolic systems it did not function as a mode of public, readable, decodable visual speech. Rather, it was a manifestation of Allston’s mental makeup, his southernness amalgamated with the experience of his young manhood and maturity. Allston’s subjects were
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erudite, historical or literary scenes that at first glance make no reference to the South or slavery. Recurrent themes, however, reveal a preoccupation with confinement and restraint, fear and guilt, retribution and destruction. The paintings and related works that constitute this group, dispersed over the arc of Allston’s career, represent one strand of his output. Lighter strands counterbalanced the dark: angelic visions, Arcadian landscapes, women in reverie. But somewhere down below ran the undercurrent of grimmer thoughts and memories. At Harvard, Allston channeled his childish delight in the delicious terrors of slave ghost lore into a taste for more literary scares: German romances and the gothic novels of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe. According to his old classmate Leonard Jarvis, “he would sup on horrors until he would be almost afraid to go to bed until he had made sure that no goblin was under it or in the closet.” Violence also preoccupied Allston. Before he went to London, many of his early efforts were pictures of banditti, including one scene (unlocated) of robbers fighting over the corpse of a murdered traveler, in which, Allston recalled, “I thought I had happily succeeded in cutting a throat.” Rocky Coast with Banditti, another painting in this group, suggests something of the brooding atmosphere Allston sought to create, with its somber bluffs looming over a group of banditti engaged in smuggling or other skulduggery (Fig. 47).36 Darker still was Tragic Figure in Chains, representing a nearly naked man with his wrists in shackles (see Plate 6).37 This wild-eyed prisoner clutches at his chain with tense, white knuckles and stands poised on the balls of his feet as if about to leap out at us—or down into some abyss. All around him are deep subterranean shadows; only the foreground receives a few faint streaks of light. There is something maniacal about this “tragic figure,” with disheveled locks and devilish grin. Yet the chains, the darkness, and the confinement prompt thoughts of slavery’s shackles and oppression. The madman’s stance, however, suggests not the defeated victim but the ferocious fighter, striving to free himself of his bonds. True, the maniac is a white man. A lover of fantasy and romance, Allston would not and could not represent the deepest fears of his class literally. Tragic Figure in Chains is more like an echo, faint vibrations from some far-off source, transmitted through a disfiguring medium yet not distorted out of all recognition. As Allston defused the threat of the St. Domingo Black Boy with humor, here he muffled the disquiet of slavery by distance and camouflage.38 Distancing was Allston’s ruling passion—in many senses. After visiting South Carolina in 1800–1801, Allston stayed away from his birthplace for the rest of his life. His long periods of residence in Italy and England suggest, among other things, how far he wished to go. He saw his adoring mother when she made a trip north to New Haven in 1809. That was the last time they met, even though Rachel was to live another thirty years. Insensible to her pleas, Allston declined to visit her at home, remaining to the last a stubborn expatriate. By the time of his death, nearly
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figure 47. Washington Allston, Rocky Coast with Banditti, 1800. Oil on canvas, 133⁄4 × 19". Collection of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts.
half a century had gone by since he had set foot in South Carolina. His behavior mirrored his compulsion more generally to avoid conflict, in life and (increasingly) in his art. Nathalia Wright has gone so far as to characterize both as “escapist,” suggesting that Allston failed to revisit South Carolina after 1801 because he could not face any threat to the unity or harmony he craved.39 Although Boston in the end proved no safe haven, South Carolina might have brought social disharmony and conflict too threateningly close. Increasingly, Allston also strove to distance and elevate his art above mere physicality and sensation. As one critic commented, his art was one of suppression. Allston sedulously avoided glaring lights, strong contrasts, and colors too crude for harmony. He subjected his art to a regimen of chastening, purifying discipline, expunging (or repressing) the coarse and the vulgar. Evening Hymn (1835; Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey), for example, is a serene vision of a young woman playing the lute, a classical portico in the background. Enraptured by her own music, she seems to look off into some ideal realm infinitely beyond the material.40
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Allston’s obsession with ideality bordered on the pathological. In 1819 he wrote to his friend the painter Charles Robert Leslie, “What a world is that of thought! And what a world does he possess whose thoughts are only of the beautiful, pure, and holy. How fearful then is his where the vindictive and base and sensual make the sum.” Baseness and savagery were linked in Allston’s mind: “No one,” he wrote in Lectures on Art, “would refer to the savages of Australia for a true specimen of what was proper or natural to the human mind; we should rather seek it . . . in a civilized child of five years old.” The ignorant, brutal mind could not approximate even the most inferior emotions, “the character of which is purely mental.” It was self-evident that the “man of education and refinement has not only more, but higher pleasures of the mind than a mere clown.” Allston rarefied the supernatural, too, as an emanation of the “unknown Infinite.” Even in his person he was delicate and sensitive in the extreme. Reportedly, he refused to touch his india rubber overshoes, using tongs to put them on, and he so disliked contact with metallic doorknobs that he “usually interposed the skirt of his coat or a handkerchief between his hand and the metal.”41 What underlay Allston’s aesthetic and personal delicacy? His ideas about art evolved from complex sources. But it is telling that he displaced savagery onto the Australian aborigine rather than locate it closer to home. That one statement suggests Allston’s powerful compulsion to elide or neutralize the black roots of his art. It may have been more than that, too. Sensuality, coarseness, and ignorance all were relegated to the black side of the racial dividing line, which must at all costs remain indelible to prevent what Thomas Jefferson called “mixture” and the fatal “staining” of whites that would degrade and ultimately destroy the white Republic.42 Such fears bedeviled southerners and also many northerners in the antebellum decades. In this respect Allston’s fastidiousness symbolically expressed an untainted and inviolate whiteness. It is ironic that Allston associated ideality with his earliest memories, saying, “I seldom step into the ideal world but I find myself going back to the age of first impressions.” If his memories of African horror stories figured among those first impressions, then what was the “ideal” but an inversion and a whitewash, so to speak, of those dark origins?43 Allston’s years abroad buffered him from events across the sea as he studied and prepared himself to win acclaim as a history painter. For all his striving after distance and ideality, however, Allston could not insulate himself entirely from history and present circumstances. Even in Boston, so remote geographically and culturally from the South, it was impossible to ignore the signs when the political climate darkened, prompting the most ominous predictions of turmoil and ruin. In that climate Allston explored anew the themes of guilt, dread, and terror. Saul and the Witch of Endor, commissioned by the Boston merchant Thomas H. Perkins, is, as William Gerdts has noted, a “miniaturized Belshazzar, complete with the confrontation of king and prophet and the foretelling of destruction” (Fig. 48).44 In a gloomy cave King Saul, whose dis-
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obedience has incurred the wrath of God, recoils before the sulfurous apparition of the prophet Samuel. Conjured up by the powerful witch, the ghost predicts that on the morrow the Philistines will defeat the Israelites in battle, and death will come to Saul and his sons. Behind Saul, panicstricken soldiers turn to flee. As if to underscore the sinful monarch’s impotence in the face of certain disaster, the witch traces a circle around his sword, which he has dropped in the dust. Neither his armor nor his commanding rank will protect him from his doom. In the tall, muscular figure of the sorceress we witness the sublimation of those terrible hags who figured so prominently in the slaves’ ghost stories of Allston’s nursery years. Some ten years later, Allston took up the subject of all-consuming guilt in Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand (1831), now known only through an engraving (Fig. 49). Although the engraving is no more than a faint shadow of what Allston considered one of his “best pictures,” it conveys something of the effect that made the original so creepy and sinister. The painting was commissioned by the wealthy Charleston planter Hugh Swinton Ball (1808–38), who chose the subject among several Allston mentioned when artist and patron conferred at some point in 1829. At that time, Allston already had a rough sketch of it on canvas.45 Allston’s source was Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian (1797), a gothic romance featuring Schedoni, a Catholic priest of boundless wickedness. Charged by a powerful patroness to prevent her son’s intended marriage to a social inferior, Schedoni hires the assassin Spalatro to carry out the deed. As the two stealthily approach the dungeon where the fair Ellena sleeps, a disembodied, bloody hand suddenly appears before Spalatro and beckons him forward. The evil Schedoni, holding up his lamp, seizes the dagger from the terror-stricken assassin. Spalatro, immobilized by an overwhelming consciousness of guilt, draws back, clutching at the priest’s fingers and pointing toward the alcove where the apparition has so horribly materialized. In a shadowy corner behind Schedoni hang chains and implements of torture, and a gravedigger’s pick and shovel lean against the entry to the alcove. The atmosphere vibrates with dread.46 A pencil study of Spalatro’s head conveys better than the engraving Allston’s representation of elemental emotion in the assassin (Fig. 50). Allston used conventional, rather stagy academic formulas for the furrowed brow and flaring nostrils, yet the whole transcends the parts: the pale, staring eyes, almost popping from their sockets, the grimacing lips, the knotted forehead shape a lurid mask of fear. Charles Fraser, a friend in Charleston who reviewed the painting on its exhibition there in 1842, responded to its expressive intensity, praising Allston’s suggestion of “a terror-stricken conscience” in the figure’s “every limb and joint and sinew and extremity.” He relished the “midnight gloom” of the dungeon and admired Allston’s portrayal of the “vilest impulses that agitate the heart and distort the features” and his dramatization of the “depravity stamped by nature on every trait, and nurtured in deeds of violence and bloodshed.” Perhaps the most powerful element
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figure 48. Washington Allston, Saul and the Witch of Endor, 1820–21. Oil on canvas, 345⁄16 × 471⁄8". Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, AC 1947.96.
figure 49. After Washington Allston, “Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand,” 1831. Engraving published in Clara Clement’s Handbook of Legendary and Mythological Art, 1871.
figure 50. Washington Allston, Spalatro’s Head, for “Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand,” 1830. Graphite on off-white wove paper, 47⁄8 × 4G". Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, loan from The Washington Allston Trust. Photo Barry Donahue. © President and Fellows of Harvard College.
in the picture, though, was the one unseen: that gory, hovering hand, signaling doom as surely as the spectral hand that inscribed Belshazzar’s fate upon the wall. Whose bloody hand was it?47 The year Allston first conceived the picture was rife with ill portents for the American Republic. Imagine an “expatriate” South Carolina aristocrat in Boston, the first city in the new Republic to emancipate its slaves—in 1790, the year before the revolution broke out in St. Domingue. In 1829 the Boston-based black activist David Walker published the militant pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which went through three printings and strongly influenced northern abolitionists. Walker’s words, which urged slaves to rise up against their masters, using whatever means necessary to overthrow them, stirred up great consternation in the South. In the same year the abortive slave rebellion in Georgetown, South Carolina, renewed fears that the history of St. Domingue might yet repeat itself on American soil. Allston’s nephew, the planter Robert F. W. Allston (to whom Allston gave an inscribed copy of his book Monaldi in 1841), was a member of the court that condemned the slave Charles Coachman to death for his role in plotting the insurrection. That Allston—plantation master and slave owner—found the idea of emancipation intolerable: it would mean giving the country over to the “ravages of the black race and amalgamation
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with savages.” The Nullification crisis also began in earnest in 1829, when South Carolina threatened to secede from the union in protest against the Tariff of 1828, which favored northern interests. Three years later, South Carolina asserted the right to declare null and void any federal law the state deemed unconstitutional. Although slavery was not directly at issue, the doctrine of states’ rights was a milestone on the path to rebellion and disunion.48 However much Allston insulated himself from politics, these events, directly involving his home state and his own family, must have left him shaken. As a supporter of the Union, he would have found the Nullification controversy worrying and the implications of the Georgetown uprising profoundly unnerving. Worse, here in his adopted city were free blacks, fomenting a rebellion that would bring ruin to the South. When he selected an episode from The Italian, was it to serve as scaffolding for a horror story with recognizably American contours? Did the bloody hand call to mind the murderous black slave or the brutal hand of the master? Was it, like the “preternatural” hand in Belshazzar’s Feast, a sign of some imminent and terrible disaster, some new massacre on the scale of St. Domingue? In January 1831 the fiery Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison launched the first number of the Liberator, advocating immediate emancipation. His inaugural editorial issued a dire warning: “Let Southern oppressors tremble—let their secret abettors tremble—let their Northern apologists tremble—let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble.” Was it by mere happenstance that in Boston in 1831 Spalatro’s Vision was exhibited under the title The Bloody Hand? Indeed, Garrison later included the grim imagery of “Red-Handed Slaughter” and the slave “with the blood of the oppressor on his hands” in the rhetoric of his antislavery crusade.49 Perhaps it is not coincidental that in the year he first conceived Spalatro’s Vision Allston began a sketch for The Angel Pouring Out the Vial of Wrath over Jerusalem (Special Collections, Boston University), which he said came to him in a dream during a severe illness. Like Belshazzar’s Feast, this painting was never finished. And by 1829 Allston had given up all pretense of work on Belshazzar’s Feast, which lay tightly rolled, just as it had when he took it to Chester Harding’s studio late the preceding year. On marrying in 1830, Allston fled Boston for rural Cambridgeport, thus distancing himself from the increasingly aggressive abolitionist activism that racked the city during the 1830s.50 Considering the circumstances, it is perversely fitting that the final destination of Spalatro’s Vision was Charleston, South Carolina. Its buyer, the profligate Hugh Swinton Ball, was a member of a wealthy and powerful family of plantation owners and slaveholders. His father, John Ball, had been Allston’s classmate at Harvard. Hugh married the New England heiress Anna Channing (first cousin of Allston’s first wife). They had several children, but all died in infancy. The couple traveled widely and enjoyed an opulent lifestyle, supported by Pimlico Plantation in St. John’s Parish.
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From time to time they sold a few slaves, perhaps, as Edward Ball writes, when they were in need of cash. In 1838 the steamboat on which they were traveling from New York back to Charleston blew up, and they both drowned. After a highly publicized lawsuit revolving around the question who died first, the Channing family won Anna Ball’s southern inheritance. Reportedly, the family wanted to sell most of the slaves so that they could bring the money home to Boston.51 Wedded to a woman who but for one letter in her name might have been Allston’s wife, Ball was the image of the planter Allston might have become had he not left the South behind. The money that paid for Spalatro’s Vision was probably “blood money” in that it came out of the forced labor of black bondsmen, or from their sale. Even the Ball marriage, an alliance linking Newport, Boston, and Charleston, reiterated the social and economic ties that still bound Washington Allston to his old home and continued to burden his conscience, despite his evasive maneuvers. With Spalatro’s Vision, Allston went home again, figuratively speaking. With these thoughts in mind, I want to return, finally, to the incompletion of Belshazzar’s Feast and the gothic dimensions of Allston’s last years in Cambridge. Allston seems to have coped with uncomfortable facts by strategies of displacement, distancing, and concealment. In this, he resembled his friend Charles Fraser, who so warmly appreciated the horror, guilt, and implied violence of Spalatro’s Vision without ever making the connection with the violence and cruelty of real life in South Carolina. For all that, Allston’s southern past ran headlong into his present when he and his siblings inherited sixteen slaves on the death of their mother, Rachel, in December 1839. These slaves, with the exception of two living in New Haven with the family of his half brother Henry, had been hired out for some time to the planter Alard Henry Belin. At no time, apparently, did Allston contemplate granting freedom to the slaves that fell to him. Perhaps the stringently prohibitive antimanumission law South Carolina had passed in 1800 deterred him from following that course, although it was still possible to ship slaves out of state and emancipate them elsewhere. In a series of letters to his Charleston friend and confidant John Stevens Cogdell, however, he never expressed any wish to set them free. His only concern was that these “helpless Creatures” be in the care of a good master so that they would be “as happy as their condition of servitude would allow.” At first Allston refused to sell the slaves, wishing them to remain with their de facto master, Belin. When that plan fell through because of legal entanglements, he insisted that the families at least should not be separated: “Could they not be so divided that the same family—say, husband wife and child—be sold to the same person?” Finally, although the fixed price per slave stood at $550, Allston begged Cogdell to make a private deal with Belin to buy his three slaves at a steep discount, $300 for the lot.52 Allston claimed no interest in the money. All he wanted out of this transaction was “peace— which is a treasure far above gold. And at this time especially do I need peace of mind, in order to
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do justice to the important work on which I am now engaged.” The “important work” was Belshazzar’s Feast, to which he had returned in 1839 after a decade of neglect. What was on his conscience? No doubt (as I discuss later) he labored under the burden of unfulfilled obligation to the subscribers who had demonstrated their faith in him by establishing the trust fund, by that time long exhausted. Just as clearly, he was troubled by the sudden and unavoidable collision of southern past with Boston present. He fervently wished the whole problem of the slaves to be resolved, to go away. As he told Cogdell during the course of the same correspondence, “I have already had too many troubles during my past life not to wish to avoid every thing that may endanger my peace of mind.”53 Whether he felt guilt pangs about his human property is difficult to say. But its intrusion into his life was insupportable, not least because, as John R. Welsh has noted, “his closest friends and inlaws in New England were liberals who . . . were actively opposed to everything the South advocated. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., for example, was an energetic defender of fugitive slaves and refused any pay for his legal services.” Also in Allston’s circle was the antislavery activist and future U.S. senator Charles Sumner. Surely one of Allston’s greatest concerns must have been to ensure that these friends would never discover the seamier side of his southern heritage, his trafficking in human property. Should they find it out, Allston’s world would crumble. Was it any wonder that when Charles Sumner visited the studio in 1840, he reported that Allston had unrolled Belshazzar’s Feast across one entire side wall of the studio but had carefully curtained it from view?54 In Belshazzar’s Feast we can ferret out the story Allston desired to veil, which had almost come to the surface with the affair of the inherited slaves. Consider again the contours of the tale: an evil, wayward monarch, luxury and decadence, captives in bondage, fear and guilt, warnings of doom, slaughter and pillage, a kingdom divided, slaves at long last freed. Belshazzar may have started his career as Allston’s biblical stand-in for Napoleon. But the subject assumed another constellation of meaning in relation to the racially charged landscape of Allston’s memory and present circumstances. I do not believe it likely that Allston saw the drama of Belshazzar as a play-by-play forerunner of the social and political conflicts that mounted around the issue of slavery in the early nineteenth century. Nor should the picture be seen as a passive and literal reflection of things going on beyond its borders. That is, Belshazzar does not symbolize the southern slave owner or Babylon the South.55 Rather the subject served as an arena for staging, at some safe distance, a fearful drama of guilt and impending catastrophe that in terms any more transparent would be intolerably threatening. The mounting burden of guilt that weighed on Allston stemmed most directly from his failure to meet the expectations of those well-wishers who in the 1820s had raised the money meant to relieve him of financial need while he completed his masterpiece. From that time Belshazzar’s Feast
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became his “master.” In 1825, when he was still actively working on it, he wrote to Cogdell of their recent visit together: “I should have liked to have talked whole days with you about the Art, and to have hunted up together every picture in the Town and neighborhood; but of that pleasure, as well as many others, I was constrained not to think, being then (as I still am) Belshazzar’s slave [italics in the original].” So extreme was the anxiety plaguing him that he imagined it as a gigantic hand stretching forth from his picture, about to crush him to the floor. In 1828, when he occupied Chester Harding’s studio, he ignored the rolled-up canvas and instead “smoked incessantly, became nervous, and was haunted by fears that his great picture would not come up to the standard of his high reputation.” In the very last letter he ever wrote, he explained to William Ellery Channing’s widow that he could not finish a promised portrait until he had finished Belshazzar: “But once freed of this importunate, heavy load, I shall be, I trust, another man.”56 He blamed his chronic shortage of funds for his need to paint small potboilers instead of working on his great picture. As he explained to a friend, “I must be free in mind before I venture to finish it. . . . It is a great desideratum with me . . . when I once more become free . . . to confine myself chiefly to large works [italics in original].” Later he asserted, “I could long ago have finished this and other pictures as large, had my mind been free.” “Debt is slavery,” he complained on another occasion (italics in original). Allston (his patrimony long gone) seems to have been utterly unconscious that in the long process of unfinishing his great painting, he gradually internalized the abject status and identity of the slave.57 Images of confinement pervaded his thinking as well. When three friends bailed him out of debt in 1835, he felt as if they had taken him “out of the squirrel cage.” He was paralyzed by the sense of self-incarceration, which sometimes took the most literal form. As an old man he recalled a foggy London night when he labored under such an intolerable burden of depression, the “dread of imprisonment in my own self forever,” that he felt “it would be a relief to get out of such a dungeon, even into the cold, raw, wretched November.” Like the man in the early Tragic Figure in Chains, Allston’s Angel Releasing St. Peter from Prison (1814–16; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), which dates from those London years, graphically symbolizes this enduring fascination with forms of captivity and deliverance.58 Paradoxically, Allston’s aging body became increasingly pale and ethereal, as if in denial of its bondage. Numerous acquaintances remarked on his fragile appearance, his snowy, spun-sugar hair, and his luminous, white skin. James Russell Lowell, for example, described him as if he were already a ghost: “A nimbus of hair, fine as an infant’s, and early white, showing refinement of organization and predominance of the spiritual over the physical, undulated and floated around a face that seemed like a pale flame. . . . Here was a man all soul, whose body seemed a lump of finest clay, whose service was to feed with magic oils, rare and fragrant, that wavering fire which
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hovered over it.” Such impressions prevailed, despite Allston’s reputation for epicurean tastes. Fittingly, he had the personality of a magician or seer. When the art critic Anna Jameson spent an evening with him, the time flew by until it was “very, very late,” and she came away with “the feelings of one who had been magnetized,” that is, hypnotized. He was also famed for his vivid way with tales of the supernatural. As Washington Irving recalled, “For a ghost story none could surpass him. He acted the story as well as told it.” Allston thus unceasingly replayed his distant past, substituting his spectral, pallid self for the black tale spinners who had filled his ears with delicious terror.59 Finally, Allston himself decayed and crumbled. His health had failed in 1813, when, after working nonstop for months on his monumental Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (1814; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), he suffered an intestinal obstruction of some kind that required surgical intervention. From that time, reportedly, he was never again entirely well. In his letters of the 1830s, references to illness recur again and again. By the last year or two of his life, he was so sick and feeble that he became, as Richard H. Dana put it, a “broken-down, failing man.” Allston cultivated the same self-image, portraying himself as “an old, broken-down man.” At the end of his life, he merged with the persona of Monaldi, his fictional artist double, who under the weight of guilt and delusion, became “a human ruin.” When he died, the funeral took place in the evening, just after dark, “when the white moonlight streamed on the statuesque face of the dead master and the burial service was read by the light of lanterns.” His ghost lingered on. His studio, wrote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, was “like a haunted chamber of which men spoke with awe.” Wrapped in mystery, it entered into the ghost lore of the neighborhood children.60 In the end, the “Little General” metamorphosed into the slave, the ghost, and the ruin, a romantic figure haunted by his past and his wrecked masterpiece. Much of his artistic production constituted a denial of that past, and even his preference for restrained classicism might be seen as a veiling of the darker side of his outer and inner lives, his avoidance of chiaroscuro in his later work a metaphor for his desire to draw the curtain over discordant or disruptive aspects of his history. That classical restraint bears comparison with the conventional image of the southern plantation house: the beauty of its chaste symmetries and white colonnades purchased at a hidden cost, that of black lives whose blood and suffering could never be guessed at from the pristine grace of the facade. I am not bringing in this comparison as an opportunity for finger wagging. After all, the Parthenon in ancient Athens rose on wealth from silver mines worked by slaves. Rather, I want to point out how Allston’s visionary paintings, despite appearances, are gothic to the core. In important ways the gothic served Allston as an elaborate sublimation of racial fears otherwise so well concealed
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that their existence could hardly be suspected or even articulated. Only Henry James, reflecting on Belshazzar’s Feast, detected a faint vibration in it of something indefinable yet fundamental: “The unfinished, the merely adumbrated parts . . . would certainly have boded sufficient ill had it not been for the beauty of these other portions which shone out like passages of melody . . . in some troubled symphony or sonata; and the lesson of the whole picture, even for a critic in the groping stage, seemed to be that it was the mask of some impenetrable inward strain.”61 What was this “inward strain” James sensed so strongly? In Belshazzar’s Feast, Allston planted one subtle clue. Just behind Daniel to the right, and directly below his commanding, gesturing hand, is a beautiful black woman in a dark gray cap and plain gray gown.62 While her companions look toward the prophet in bewilderment and fear, she alone gazes up in wonderment at the glowing letters that spell her deliverance from bondage and the destruction of the master’s kingdom. Her body graphically symbolizes the “inward strain” soon to rend Belshazzar’s world asunder. In her we catch a final, telling glimpse behind the mask Allston so carefully and for so long held up before the world.
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4
THE DEEPEST DARK
ohn Quidor’s flamboyantly grotesque painting The Money Diggers is about stark nighttime fright
J
(see Plate 7). Based on a story by Washington Irving, the picture spotlights the moment when
three midnight treasure seekers behold what they take to be a long-gone pirate’s ghost, scowling down at them from a rocky ledge. Two of them, white men, are frozen in postures of alarm and fear; the third, a black, clambers wildly out of the deep black pit that yawns in the exact center of the composition. Tom Walker’s Flight, taken from another Irving story, is again a visual tale of terror (see Plate 9). Here, the moneylender Tom, precariously astride a rearing, ebony steed, looks back in horror at the burly grinning devil who is about to pack him off to hell. Although Quidor (1801–81) made these paintings more than two decades apart, they have several themes in common. Both deal with human greed and its dire consequences. Both portray humans panicked, paralyzed, or undone by the shock, and fear, of the supernatural. Both mix the ludicrous with bizarre and terrifying effects. All these features are self-evident. Even someone who does not know the literary sources has no difficulty getting the gist of what is going on. Less obviously, both of these paintings are powerful visual metaphors for what we might call fear of the dark in white antebellum culture. Taken together, the black man climbing out of a black pit and the black devil about to send the white man to eternal damnation signify the power of blackness as a haunting, threatening, terrifying presence in a racially divided nation of tenuously
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united states. These figures show how easily the line could stretch from man to devil and back again, on a continuum of blackness bearing all the connotations of evil, danger, and mystery. In a visual landscape largely populated by images of black men as childlike, ingratiating, and passive, Quidor’s devil suggests an alternative: the black as object of fear, a monstrous and powerful threat to white America, North and South alike. Similarly, the black man emerging from the pit reinforces the implied connection between blackness and the sinister subterranean world. Quidor’s blacks are points in a far-flung constellation of related images, in print and visual culture, that conflated blackness with monstrosity, malevolence, and death. They afford a port of entry into the dark realm of white anxiety and guilt, mapped onto the body of the black man. At the same time, Quidor’s paintings—wild, rude, and irreverent—permit a glimpse into the anxiety of an artist fated to be odd man out from the beginning to the end of his career.1 The facts about Quidor’s career are scant but sufficient to assemble a rough profile. Born in Tappan, New York, he was brought up in New York City from the age of ten and sometime between the years 1814 and 1822 entered the studio of the portrait painter John Wesley Jarvis as an apprentice. The relationship did not flourish; according to one source, Quidor’s father unsuccessfully sued Jarvis for failing to provide the young artist with marketable skills.2 Quidor first exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1828 but showed there only sporadically in the 1830s. During that decade he also exhibited three times at the American Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1837 he took his family to Illinois, where he engaged in land speculation. In 1844 he bought a 520-acre farm east of Columbus, Illinois, for $8,000, payable in the form of seven immense religious paintings for the seller, a Mr. R. E. Smith. Although Quidor completed the commission, Smith reportedly sold the farm out from under him, taking the painter’s bond and “the one that he [Smith] held” and throwing them “both into the Fire.” Presumably crushed and furious, Quidor moved back to New York in 1849. Two years before, he had rented space at the National Academy of Design to show three works from the Smith commission, including Death on the Pale Horse. He continued to paint but exhibited only two more times, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. After the mid-1860s, he faded from the art world altogether, living out his last years with a daughter in New Jersey. Most of his thirty-odd known paintings illustrate episodes from tales by Washington Irving.3 Quidor sought recognition in the official art world. That he made his living designing banners and devices for New York’s fire engine companies provides a clue to his status as chronic outsider and specialist in the bizarre. Until the mid–nineteenth century, the New York fire department (like most others) consisted of ferociously competitive volunteer companies. These groups expressed their rivalry in the elaborate decoration of their engines as well as in vicious turf wars. Companies strove to “wash” rival engines, pumping water into them until they overflowed, their ornamenta-
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tion ruined. Volunteers engaged in furious street rows, even brawling before burning buildings to gain precedence in dousing the flames. While fighting fires (or each other), the men drank prodigiously, making fire departments choice targets for temperance reformers in the 1840s.4 In certain respects the fire companies were artifacts of the emergent and highly volatile culture of labor at a time when urban strife and class conflict were rising to the boiling point, targeting blacks, abolitionists, and the Irish with increasing frequency from the 1830s on. The rivalries of the firemen were at their height during the “great riot era” of 1830–50, when New York was “so torn by election and abolition disturbances, and outbreaks by the criminal gangs of the Bowery and Five Points, that soldiers were frequently called upon” to suppress the disturbances. These tightly knit fraternal organizations were socially mixed, but young, often rowdy, working-class men made up a sizable component. Where the middle class strove for decorum and self-control, lack of restraint was a hallmark of firefighters’ culture.5 Whether Quidor shared the outlook of that clientele is an open question. His connection with such groups, however, marked him as an artist not of the salon but the street. His work was on view when fire companies paraded their gorgeously embellished engines before an admiring populace. Other painters of the early Republic occasionally put their hands to such work, but as a sideline rather than a speciality. Quidor, by contrast, was better known for these decorations than for his easel paintings.6 Quidor not only painted for the firefighters but also, according to the few shreds of recollection that survive, behaved like them. Much like David Gilmour Blythe (and unlike his exact contemporary Thomas Cole), Quidor challenged prevailing notions of decorum and formality. The maverick painter adopted neither the bearing nor the conduct that the National Academy of Design expected of its artists: he refused to act the gentleman. He extended his working-class roughness to his studio as well. In 1830 he set up shop near the corner of Centre and Pearl Streets, at the heart of rowdy Five Points, even then a breeding ground of street gangs and crime. T. B. Thorpe, an aspiring painter, spent several months in Quidor’s Pearl Street studio, purportedly to learn the trade, though during that time the master gave his students nothing “but easel room, and one or two very common engravings to copy.” The studio was “without adornment of any kind; a coat of primitive dust lay undisturbed on the window sills and the mantel-pieces, and the floor was checkered and dirty. A long bench and two or three dilapidated chairs composed the furniture.” Quidor was a lackadaisical instructor at best. “He would absent himself from his studio for days and weeks together. When present, if not painting on a banner or engine back, he would generally lie at full length on the long bench . . . which, we found out after a time, also served him for a couch when he felt indisposed to go to his home.” It is not unlikely that the alcoholic Quidor sometimes benched himself in a drunken haze.7
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His friendship with the unconventional sculptor John Browere (1790–1834) is another index to Quidor’s habitual defiance of gentlemanly codes. Browere, a lifelong antagonist of the National Academy of Design, lived near Quidor’s studio in his own “plaster factory,” which, according to Thorpe, was a “long, uncouth-looking building . . . [on the] corner of Centre and Pearl streets.” To Thorpe and the other students, Browere cut a strikingly odd figure: “This man was a giant in strength, and was very fond of telling us ‘boys’ the particulars of his nearly strangling Jefferson to death when he took a plaster cast of that immortal statesman’s face. And he delighted to make the hair on our heads stand on end with the horrible details connected with his digging up the corpse of Hicks, the Unitarian Quaker, for the sake of securing a mask of the face; and he ended off with terrible imprecations upon the heads of those who interrupted him in his artistic work.” Fierce, funny, and ghoulish, Browere liked to display his strapping physique with as little restraint as any fireman. Sometimes in his “eccentric humors,” reported Thorpe, the plaster caster would “strip himself like a boxer and show us the muscles of the chest, shoulders, and what he called the torso of the fighting gladiator and Hercules in repose; all of which struck our unsophisticated minds as illustrating ‘high art.’” In his build and deportment, Browere resembled legendary brawlers of the day, such as the fireman Old Mose (Moses) Humphreys, “a huge man with a great shock of flaming red hair.” As a giant who stripped like a boxer, Browere allied himself with working-class masculinity and its cult of bare-knuckle boxing and other forms of violent physical contest.8 That is nearly the full extent of our information on Quidor. Nothing further is known about his personality, habits, politics, or domestic life. Beyond the certainty that he read the works of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, no data on his taste in literature remain. It is evident that as man and artist he stood awkwardly between the refined, the comfortable, and the working classes. His friend Browere scorned the National Academy, yet Quidor attempted to make a name for himself by exhibiting there. In 1832 he won election to associate membership in the American Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1801 as a gentleman’s club to support artistic enterprise. By that time, however, this organization was fast losing ground to the rival National Academy of Design, established by artists in 1825. Quidor’s admission to the wrong club betokens his status as artistic odd man out.9 Still, Quidor obviously had hopes of professional success when he settled on Irving (1783–1859) as his principal literary source. By the late 1820s Irving’s seriocomic tales and sketches mythologizing the history of old New York had given him an international reputation augmented by his travels abroad over the course of nearly three decades. During his first tour of Europe in 1804–5, Irving visited art galleries with his friend Washington Allston. After a subsequent fifteen years of wandering in England and on the Continent, he finally returned home for good in 1832. Irving lived out the rest of his life at Sunnyside, his picturesque villa in Tarrytown, New York. His sto-
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ries, loved and venerated, inspired a host of American painters and illustrators. Although a vein of broad and even bawdy humor ran submerged in his work, he shifted increasingly toward a sentimental and moralizing mode to suit the middle-class market. In 1817 he told Allston that if he had his History of New York (first published in 1809) to do over again, he would “conceive the scenes in a much purer style” and correct the “grossierté” into which the sentiment of a humorous work was apt to run.10 Socially and culturally, Irving positioned himself firmly on the elite side of the tracks that Quidor so awkwardly straddled. The choice of Irving as a source for literary paintings could have been a strategy to gain artistic respectability and popularity. Yet Quidor’s reviews, few in number, were mixed. When The Money Diggers hung on the walls of the American Academy in 1833, the reviewer for the New-York Mirror thought it “among the worst of the artist’s productions. . . . It is too much exaggerated both in coloring, action, and expression.” That strain of criticism carried over into 1838, the year Quidor showed Battle Scene from “Knickerbocker’s History of New York” (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) at the National Academy. The writer found it a “sad medley of broken shins and bloody noses; a confused, ill-assorted mass of flesh and smoke, almost without form and without colour,” though redeemed—slightly—by one square inch of real humor.11 Such comments clearly indicate how Quidor transformed his source. Under his brush, Irving’s enameled word pictures became chaotic and even monstrous caricatures, excess displacing the author’s careful moderation. Indeed, in both form and content, Quidor’s paintings revel in the very “grossierté” that Irving desired to purify or purge.12 Compare Quidor’s Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, for example, with William Sidney Mount’s mannerly Dancing on the Barn Floor (Figs. 51, 52). Mount’s style, like Irving’s prose, is polished and winsome. His forms are clear, his figures balanced, his paint slick and smooth. His dancers, however rustic, move and gesture gracefully within the frame of the barn door. Quidor’s painting, by contrast, glories in pictorial licentiousness. Based on another episode from Irving’s History of New York, it shows Antony blasting out a tremendous note on his uplifted trumpet before the peg-legged Stuyvesant and various other listeners. Laced with phallic puns and zigzagging lines, Quidor’s interior barely restrains this riot of grotesque bodies, thrusting, bulging, and capering. Van Corlear’s swelling belly splits his buttons; Stuyvesant lolls in his chair like a lump of putty, his stiff sword dangling suggestively between his thick legs. Behind these corpulent forms are the frenetically gesturing figures of a black man and a ragged codger; under the window on the right a dog flings back his head and howls. A scowling man with a rifle braces himself against the door jamb; outside is an ill-defined space packed with figures. Quidor’s sketchy and fluid style quivers with the scene’s excessive energy, muddy tones interrupted by jarring accents in blue and red. Figuratively speaking, Quidor was the bull in the artis-
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tic china shop, or the brawling fire laddie in the bourgeois parlor, always threatening to pulverize the conventions of pictorial decorum that were emerging as the principles endorsed for painting by the National Academy. Creature of a social and cultural netherworld, Quidor recklessly explored its racial tensions and roughly probed the social fault lines of antebellum America. His lack of pictorial restraint dredged up what Irving carefully kept submerged, packaging it in relatively innocuous ways. Irving portrayed the black fisherman Mud Sam, for example, as an amphibious creature of the lower world, intimately familiar with every “hole and corner of the Sound, from the Wallabout to Hell-gate, and from Hell-gate even unto the Devil’s Stepping-Stone.” In bad weather, Sam might be taken for “one of the hobgoblins that used to haunt that strait [Hell-gate].” Although the connotations are not subtle, the language is circumspect. In private, Irving could be a great deal less so. In a letter to the southern novelist John Pendleton Kennedy, he complained about the “detestable slave question. . . . I wish to heavens nature would restore to the poor negroes their tails and settle them in their proper place in the scale of creation. It would be a great relief both to them and the abolitionists, and I see no other way of settling this question effectually.”13 Quidor, with little of Irving’s public circumspection in his paintings, laid bare the writer’s hidden strain. Irving’s work, however polite, incorporated sharp tensions between past and present, progress and nostalgia, New World and Old. Quidor’s pictorial translations burlesque those tensions in Irving while carrying them to gothic extremes and focusing much more explicitly on blackness as the color and the medium of terror. Black men in Quidor’s paintings embody threatening energies that Irving took care to dilute with mannered comic touches, acknowledging his true fear and revulsion only in private communications. Whether the resulting vision was more Quidor’s than Irving’s remains an open question, but fear of the dark is the thread that unites the two. In many respects The Money Diggers is faithful to the details of Irving’s story, which is set in the early days of Dutch Manhattan. Wolfert Webber, a placid cabbage farmer, feels the pressures of urbanization as the town gradually encroaches on outlying agricultural land. As the cost of living escalates, Webber embarks on a crazed quest for treasure, said to be buried by pirates all around the island. He recruits Mud Sam to take him to the spot where many years ago the black fisherman witnessed a gang of sinister boatmen burying a mysterious heavy burden in the dead of night. Joining Wolfert and Sam is the local healer-necromancer, Dr. Knipperhausen, equipped with magical herbs, a divining rod, and a book of spells. When they reach the spot, Sam takes up a pickax and digs down till he strikes something hollow. At that moment Wolfert sees what he takes to be the ghost of a drowned buccaneer, grinning down hideously. “Wolfert gave a loud cry and let fall the lanthorne. His panic communicated itself to his companions. The negro leaped out of the hole, the doctor dropped his book and basket and began to pray in German. All was horror and confusion.”14 106
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figure 51. John Quidor, Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, 1839. Oil on canvas, 273⁄8 × 341⁄16". Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Museum of Art, Utica, New York, 64.136.
figure 52. William Sidney Mount, Dancing on the Barn Floor, 1831. Oil on canvas, 25 × 30". Long Island Museum of American Art, History and Carriages. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1955.
Quidor’s painting illustrates this horrid moment, pulling out all the gothic stops for maximum effect. Tree branches twist and curl like claws; rocks cast weird shadows; and Knipperhausen’s fire emits a spooky glow that freezes each figure in an attitude of absolute terror. Behind them, blackest night veils the landscape while a sliver of moon peeks over the buccaneer’s rugged ledge. Quidor meticulously reproduced the costumes described by Irving: Wolfert wore a “large flapped hat tied under the chin with a handkerchief of his daughter’s” and his wife’s long red cloak, which she had flung about his shoulders. Knipperhausen’s green spectacles, black velvet cap, cocked hat, and long, dark robe also follow Irving’s description. But what of Sam? For this figure Irving provided only the sketchiest outlines. He is old; his hair is grizzled. He has a round black face and—when terrified— white goggling eyes. As mentioned, Irving likens him to a hobgoblin at one point and makes a similar allusion in the money-digging scene, when any beholder “might have mistaken the little doctor for some foul magician . . . and the grizzly-headed negro for some swart goblin, obedient to his commands.”15 The connection between the “goblin,” the black arts, and, by extension, diabolical powers is unmistakable. Goblins, however, are stunted, dwarfish creatures. Quidor’s Sam, by contrast, is a hulking giant. This Sam is monstrous. Old he may be, but he has the body of a young black Hercules. As David Bjelajac observes, the black man in the painting is “stereotypically identified” with dark creatures from the underworld, such as the frog perched opposite him on the hole’s rim.16 That beast is the painter’s own contribution to the narrative, illustrating Sam’s amphibious nature. Denizen of the ooze, the frog also reminds us of the fisherman’s nickname: Mud Sam. The body of Quidor’s Sam is splotched with mud: a smear on the knees of his breeches and a large stain on his bottom. But the dirt is not only on the surface. Black as the pit from which he crawls, Sam himself, like the golem of Jewish legend, might be a monster made from mud and given life by the infernal spells of the magician who now stands quaking as the creature he has summoned emerges from the depths. At one level The Money Diggers satirizes the new market conditions of Jacksonian America at a time when speculation was rampantly on the rise. At another, it is, as Bryan Jay Wolf describes it, “a tableau inverting the Enlightenment vision of man” that is acted out by “creatures of the dark.” Sam is the image of darker energies, and the black pit the “true subject of the painting.” Wolf, however, does not view the black pit or the “darker energies” in racial terms, instead pursuing a Freudian reading in which the pit symbolizes the depths of a “private, gothic, and inherently unsocializable” self.17 While Wolf’s reading offers a new light on the psychodynamics of The Money Diggers, it does not address the racial question. Yet in the painting itself, the white light of Knipperhausen’s pungent fire, brilliantly etching Sam’s contours, illuminates the fearsomeness of the black body, a source
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of terror in its own right. Note the way that body is put together. Wolfert and Knipperhausen are anatomically coherent, if ludicrous in their craven posturing. Sam, in contrast, is misshapen, his massive torso so contracted that his limbs seem to sprout from it like the legs of a spider. His crooked left arm mirrors the hind leg of the squatting frog. He faces in opposite directions at once, half of him stretching and straining forward, but his head swiveling 180 degrees on his beefy shoulders. Mouth agape and eyes staring, his face is a nightmarish mask. What has come from the pit is not the gold the two men desired, but a monstrously disordered and disorderly black body. In Quidor’s work, the black body was never anything but disorderly and dangerous. Another example, the dancing black man in Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, was Quidor’s own invention; this figure does not appear in Irving’s story.18 Ragged and barefoot, coattails flying and hands waving, he surrenders himself to the trumpet’s vibrations. Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg and cane fence him off from the rest of the room and from our space. He would seem quite harmless were it not for his face, where the ingratiating smile of black deference has metamorphosed into the mask of the Gorgon (Fig. 53). Wide, rubbery, and intensely red, that smile is more grimace than grin. It is not the mouth alone that produces the effect, however, but the jumbled expressive coding of the whole face. Compare the figures in Nicolino Calyo’s Negro Dancer and Banjo Player (Fig. 54), in which musician and dancer sport the conventional entertainer’s grin, their features harmonizing to produce an innocuous effect, with wide-open eyes and arched brows. Quidor’s dancer, by contrast, narrows his eyes and knots his brows in a ferocious scowl. This face, like the body of Sam the fisherman, is incoherent, monstrous, and, accordingly, unpredictable. The mismatched halves of Sam’s body and the dancer’s face convey the anxiety and ambivalence that so thickly clouded the issue of black presence in white America, North and South, during the antebellum years. Other than what the visual evidence tells us, we have no way of knowing Quidor’s views on African Americans, slavery, and freedom. He produced these images, however, during the decades when, as Leonard Cassuto notes, American society was “heating to a boil that would, in less than a generation, become uncontrollable.”19 In the North, abolitionism and the blackface minstrel show emerged almost simultaneously in the 1830s and developed into powerful agents of social action and expression. The growth of abolitionism, largely a middle-class movement, precipitated a mounting series of murderous attacks on its leaders and mob violence against black neighborhoods. Racism was particularly virulent among the working classes of the North. The wildly successful minstrel show, which catered to such audiences, was structured on the volatile mix of attraction and repulsion that characterized working-class attitudes toward African Americans. But the majority of abolitionists were ambivalent too, seeing in slave nature a mix of childlike innocence and fearsome savagery. With one foot
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figure 53. Gorgon, relief sculpture from the pediment of the Temple of Artemis, Corfu, Greece. ca. 600–580 b.c.e. Copyright Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. figure 54. Nicolino Calyo, Negro Dancer and Banjo Player, 1835. Watercolor, 10 × 14". Collection of Leonard L. Milberg.
in working-class culture and the other tenuously planted in middle-class ground, Quidor was in all likelihood as ambivalent as his cohorts on either side. Even if his subjects, inspired by Irving, were not about blackness per se, his grotesque and monstrous black men betray his own unease.20 For all the extravagance and distortion of his figural style, Quidor was a skillful draftsman. Acquainted with academic conventions, he studied and borrowed liberally from prints. His blacks, however, had no parallel or source in academic painting; they came straight from the rowdy precincts of the cartoon. The popular English illustrator George Cruikshank was one of his models. Closer to home, depictions of black men in the working-class illustrated almanacs, such as those promiscuously published under the name of Davy Crockett, exhibited the same unrestrained, callous energy. To be sure, the Crockett almanacs abounded in grotesque characters, white and black, crudely drawn, engraved, and printed. But, given the climate of racism that prevailed in the 1830s, when the almanacs were highly popular, their caricatures of black men appear particularly savage.21 Consider the woodcut “James Crow, Esq., of Kentucky; from a painting by Trumbull, in the Capitol at Washington,” published only a few doors from Quidor’s studio in New York (Fig. 55).22 Although the figure sports a shirt, vest, and tie, his features are scarcely human. Smashed together are mouth, bulbous nose, and beady eyes, little more than white slits. Like the face of Quidor’s dancer, this one is a contradictory jumble. By itself, the mouth can be read as smiling. In combination with the lowered brows and squinty glare, however, the smile becomes a snarl. Easel painting and crudest woodcut alike betray anxiety and confusion in the representation of the black body. Like their brethren in the almanac business, writers of cheap pamphlet novels also endowed their black characters with ludicrous or horrific deformities. City exposés and mystery stories routinely portrayed black men as either savages or clowns. Relegated to menial toil as chimney sweeps or bootblacks, they “lay drunkenly on the stoops, cavorted about the streets partially nude, or frothed at the mouth as they battled in the gutters like wildcats.” Entirely typical is “Nick, the negro” in Samuel Young’s Pittsburgh tale, The Smoky City. Denizen of the most squalid haunts and aide-de-camp to hardened gangsters, Nick has a “most villainous” face. “His low forehead receded above, and projected singularly over his full red eyes; his countenance was black—so black that charcoal must succumb to it. In his eye was a singular leer, of a deep designing order.” So filthy is Nick that his once-white trousers have become as black as he is, and his coat is “ragged and torn.”23 It is in the work of Edgar Allan Poe that we encounter the most troubling and morbid figurations of racial monstrosity. The shift from popular fiction to Poe is a lateral move rather than a step up, in the sense that Poe’s black men are equally grotesque. Poe is a particularly interesting case, since he identified in fantasy with the southern ruling class. He shared in its paternalistic justification of slavery and condemned abolitionists as rabid and dangerous fanatics. In early man-
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figure 55. “James Crow, Esq., of Kentucky; from a painting by Trumbull, in the Capitol at Washington,” published in Crockett’s Yaller Flower Almanac for ’36, 1836.
hood he lashed out against the neglect of his benefactor, John Allan: “You suffer me to be subjected to the whims & caprice, not only of your white family, but the complete authority of the blacks.”24 Such subjugation of white under black was the stuff of trauma. Although blacks were seldom more than bit players in Poe’s writings, when they did appear, they were either grotesque clowns or dangerous ogres, or, like Nick the negro, a blend of both. In “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” the old slave Toby is hideous, with “swollen lips, large white, protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head [i.e., an indentation in the crown], pot-belly, and bow legs.” The black Pompey, in “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” is shrunken and deformed; he has no neck, and his ankles, improbably, are “in the middle of the upper portion of the feet.” In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the perpetrator—a huge and bloodthirsty orangutan—serves as a stand-in for the black murderer whose deeds, reported in the Philadelphia Saturday News, served as impetus for Poe’s story. Indeed, the disguise is thin. When the detective Dupin ferrets out the orangutan’s role in the murders, the animal’s owner, a seaman, confesses the circumstances of its escape and subsequent rampage. Returning home after some “sailor’s frolic,” he discovers the ape wielding a razor and trying to shave. He flourishes his whip in an effort to subdue the creature, but it bounds out of the room and into the street, brandishing the deadly blade. Subsequently,
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as the sailor watches helplessly, it invades the apartment of a mother and daughter and kills them in a vicious frenzy. Once it sees its master, and thinking “no doubt of the dreaded whip,” the animal cowers, all passion spent. The tale allegorizes white fear of violent black revenge.25 Poe published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket only a year before Quidor painted his menacing black dancer. In this tale, bodily blackness becomes the medium of terror, destruction, and death in a fateful voyage to the farthest southern reaches of the globe. The story begins with a stowaway, a mutiny, and a shipwreck. The desperate survivors encounter a Dutch vessel and think they will be saved. As the vessel approaches, they see a “stout and tall man, with a very dark skin,” who smiles constantly, displaying “a set of the most brilliantly white teeth.” The vessel draws closer, and they reel under the assault of a powerful, suffocating stench. All on board are putrescent corpses; the smiling man, a black-faced, eyeless, lipless cadaver. Later, in extreme southern latitudes, they encounter a race of brawny, thick-lipped, coal black savages, clad in shaggy black hides. Terrified of whiteness, these savages at first befriend the travelers but later massacre nearly all of them by engineering a landslide. Huge numbers of the natives pursue Pym and his two remaining companions. “In truth,” declares Pym, “from everything I could see of these wretches, they appeared to be the most wicked, hypocritical, vindictive, bloodthirsty, and altogether fiendish race of men upon the face of the globe.” Escaping in a canoe with one black prisoner, they find themselves swept with terrible velocity through a milky ocean, toward a vast curtain of watery vapor on the horizon. The black prisoner dies of fright, but they hurtle on. Finally, the awful veil opens to reveal a stupendous shrouded figure of “the perfect whiteness of the snow.”26 Poe’s fantastic visions of hideous, savage, deathly blackness (and its opposite) take us to the point where South and North converged. Despite their deep-seated differences, both sides traded in images of black monstrosity, the embodiment and projection of hatred, guilt, and fear. For many, slavery in the abstract was the monster. The passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 prompted the Albany Evening Journal to lament the undoing of what the Founding Fathers had put into place to “guard the domain of Liberty.” This wall had now been “flung down by the hands of an American Congress, and Slavery crawls, like a slimy reptile over the ruins, to defile a second eden.” In the South slave owners in constant dread of slave rebellion insistently characterized their bondsmen as subhuman aliens, too degraded and brutal to be entrusted with freedom. Antiabolitionists, north and south, warned that emancipation of the slave population would have the most dire results for the free white labor market, throwing mechanics and workingmen out of their jobs in preference for the cheaper and more subservient black. Perhaps in part that fear underlay descriptions of black men’s purported bloodlust. As one of the pamphlet novels claimed, blacks desired “not so much to kill as to observe the blood of a victim fall drop by drop, as to note the convulsive look of death, as to hear the last throttling rattle in the throat of the dying.”27
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Visions of the black man as a new model of Frankenstein’s monster incorporated the full measure of white horror and fear. Mary Shelley’s famous novel, published in 1818, was widely read and often reprinted. It was first adapted for the stage in 1823. Onstage, as H. L. Malchow has noted, the monster became a stereotype, an image of the dark Other. An engraving in the Illustrated London News (January 1850) shows a dainty Frankenstein in flowing academic robes quailing at the sight of the creature, hulking, black, and seminude. In caricature, Malchow notes, Frankenstein’s monster (ethnically stereotyped as an apelike Irish workingman) commonly served as a metaphor for radicalism during reform agitation in the early 1830s, the Chartist era, and the mid1860s.28 In the United States the monster unmistakably took on the character of the powerful, dreadful, and relentless black giant whose awakening portended disaster for all. Frank Bellew’s “Modern Frankenstein” appeared in the New York humor magazine Lantern in 1852 (Fig. 56). This targets Horace Greeley, the fiery antislavery editor of the New York Tribune. Greeley-Frankenstein proclaims his triumphant creation of a living, sentient human creature out of an assortment of body parts. He turns and sees, to his horror, the monster of emancipation, climbing down from the pallet where it has been cobbled together. Cringing, the abolitionist stares up in dread as the creature, an enormous black man bare to the waist, glowers, showing a mouthful of sharp teeth as he prepares to rise to his full height. The monster rose again in Henry Louis Stephens’s Vanity Fair cartoon, “The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster ‘Rebellion.’” In this instance, monster and maker are of equal size (Fig. 57). The president of the Confederacy, though, flails helplessly in the grip of the black colossus who lifts him like a rag doll over an abyss billowing with thick smoke. This monster, clad only in a loincloth, is muscular and well proportioned. We cannot see his face, but two tufts of hair standing up from the top of his head subtly suggest devilish horns. The cartoon itself, easy to read, is not so subtle: the fearsome thing is about to pitch Davis into the fiery pit of death and eternal damnation. Although the wrathful creature nominally stands for rebellion rather than for slavery per se, his darkness unmistakably links one with the other. Both of the Frankenstein cartoons associate blacks with death. The monster, a rude assemblage of mismatched pieces, is a creature of and from the grave. Looming over the puny white man in “The Modern Frankenstein,” the creature incarnates the threat of destruction that many feared, should the nation rend itself into warring halves. In the Vanity Fair cartoon, the monster is of and from the infernal abyss into which he flings his victim. In both, the black man is at once agent and embodiment of white doom.
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figure 56. Frank Bellew, “The Modern Frankenstein,” published in the Lantern, January 31, 1852.
figure 57. Henry Louis Stephens, “The New Frankenstein: A Glimpse of the Horrible Fate in Store for Jeff Davis at the Hands of the Monster ‘Rebellion,’” published in Vanity Fair, May 10, 1862.
During the Civil War such associations became a great deal more explicit, nowhere more so than on the battlefield. Gary Laderman has observed that many linked African Americans with death and corruption merely because the “physiological processes of decomposition reminded some . . . of markers that differentiated the races, particularly skin color.” Harper’s Weekly unambiguously connected blacks and death in a report on the aftermath of the battle at Antietam. “The faces of those who had fallen in the battle were, after more than a day’s exposure, so black that no one would ever suspect that they had been white. All looked like negroes, and they lay in piles where they had fallen, one upon another, they filled the bystanders with a sense of horror.” Like the corpses on board the death ship in Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, these white soldiers, in death, had become ghastly black carrion.29 Images of black gravediggers reinforced these associations. In 1864 Harper’s Monthly published an illustration of Jacob, a black man plying his trade in the cemetery (Fig. 58). Not at all monstrous, Jacob is neatly groomed, with hat, vest, and scarf, and his features are neither exaggerated nor mismatched. He seems calm, even meditative. Only his upper half is visible; the grave in which he stands conceals the rest. Off to the right, a tilted headstone commemorates the wartime death of a soldier from the Nineteenth Wisconsin regiment. Behind the digger rises another grave marker,
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figure 58. “The Grave-digger,” published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 24, no. 171 (1864).
an obelisk. We know, of course, that Jacob himself has dug the hole. Yet at the same time, he appears to emerge from it, as if it were a portal to some netherworld from which he has journeyed to the surface. Half aboveground and half below, he is amphibious, Mud Sam’s counterpart in the modern world. The same constellation of meanings informs David Gilmore Blythe’s own variation on the theme, Ole Cezer (see Plate 8). The setting is Blythe’s customary milieu, a dark alley in the underworld of Pittsburgh. A door flush with the pavement has been flung open, and the figure of an ancient black man climbs up from the murky depths. He has just set down a bucket of whitewash and turns to confront the spectator. Like Jacob the gravedigger, he stands with legs below ground, head and torso emerging into the drab, yellowish glare of the gaslight. His figure is hunched and misshapen, with stubby hands and an enormous egg-shaped head, neckless like Poe’s Pompey. He has long ears, a bulbous nose, and a long chin that comes to a point like the tip of a spade. His eyes are ragged, vacant holes. So powerfully monstrous is this visage that it is difficult to give credence to Bruce Chambers’s assertion that the painting “possesses the ring of authentic street portraiture.”30 Rather, “Ole Cezer” (the name inscribed on the wall) is, like Quidor’s Mud Sam, an emissary from below, a nightmare in black.
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A sign behind Ole Cezer advertises “whitewasn don hea,” along with graffiti, reading “ole cloves bot and sold.” In the shadows on the left, assorted garments lie draped over a railing, while on the opposite side a pair of boots—Blythe’s emblem—dangles from a rope or nail affixed to the crumbling wall. Boots and whitewash bucket are multilayered visual puns on the condition of blackness and its ineradicable taint. “Bootblacking” and “whitewashing” both had racial connotations, often aired in print. The satirical paper Yankee Notions published a cartoon (June 1859) in which a “common nigger boot-black” confronts a “swell darkey” about money owed. Crude jokes coupling black men with whitewash abounded. Another Yankee Notions cartoon (July 1864) featured a “Black-smith”: a black man with outsize lips loitering amid baskets of shells. The sign above his head proclaims: “J. S. Smith Oysters & Whitewashin.” Still a third conflated blackness and Irishness (Figs. 59, 60). In this paired sequence, “Sambo” offers his whitewashing services but is turned away. He coats his black face with whitewash and comes back as “Pat Sambo.” This time, he gets the job. Even Harriet Beecher Stowe made such connections, describing the free black G. D. as “three-fourths black; whitewasher; from Kentucky.”31 The humor, such as it was, hinged on the idea of whitewash as a veneer, a cover-up, a deception, a mode of temporary concealment. Unlike the white minstrel show performer, who could wash away burned cork makeup at the end of the evening, the black man could never change. Even “Pat Sambo’s” disguise would eventually rub off, revealing his true color. This trope had a long vernacular history, in fact. Sixteenth-century emblem books used the motif of whites scrubbing a black man to illustrate the idea “Impossible.” In the eighteenth century the Dutch phrase “washing the Moor” meant to undertake some impossible endeavor. Later in the nineteenth century, blacks often appeared in advertisements for body and laundry soaps.32 In Ole Cezer’s case, the burlesque hinges on the like impossibility that the whitewash could change the fright mask of his face, any more than pushing him back down into the black hole of the basement would make him disappear for good. Cezer can make anything white, except his own dark skin. Then, too, in such a murky alley, Cezer’s bucket of whitewash is inadequate, a miserable puddle of brightness in a place of encroaching shadows, the most ominous of them Cezer’s own. Finally, the boots dangling in the upper right corner alert us to the artist’s self-inscription in the scene. Something about them is not quite right. They hint at gallows or suicide and look as if they might still be attached to a dead man’s feet. This morbid visual pun casts the whole scene in an even deeper shade, suggesting that no amount of whitewash can ever camouflage the horrors of the lower depths. Although Blythe’s representation of Ole Cezer may be only incidentally a statement on race, it is impossible not to see in it the veiled expression of racial fear as well as personal despair.
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figure 59. “Sambo the Whitewasher,” published in Yankee Notions, October 1863. figure 60. “Pat Sambo the Whitewasher,” published in Yankee Notions, October 1863.
Absent the whitewash, Quidor’s Mud Sam is an aggregate of such connotations. Like Frankenstein’s monster, he is a hideous assemblage of mismatched parts. He is jet black: as black as the sun-baked corpses on the drifting Dutch vessel Pym encounters in midocean. Like Blythe’s Cezer he seems a denizen of the depths. Not by accident does he climb out of a black pit. Directly above his head, his rumpled jacket lies under a gravedigger’s pickax, next to a liquor bottle. Above these objects is the ghastly visage of the drowned buccaneer, lit not by the flames—which veer in the opposite direction—but by the pallid light of the rising moon. Sam’s side of the picture is in every way the darker side. But Mud Sam’s own blackness may be even more sinister. In the nineteenth century (if not earlier) a long-standing tradition of marrying blackness and the devil fused with the image of the African American male, slave or free. The color black had acquired negative connotations of sin and darkness in the early Christian era. Conventionally opposed to light as the symbol of goodness and grace, blackness as an idea at first had no links to skin color. As Jan Pieterse has pointed out, in time it gained such associations, becoming the color of the devil and demons. During the Crusades, black became part of the “enemy image” of Muslims, generating the tradition of the devil “as the Black Man and the black bugaboo.”33 Marcus Wood notes that this basic color symbolism was very much alive in the eighteenth century. Although “not all . . . black bodies are in fact African,” the black man’s symbolic status remained fluid, hovering “between devil and African.”34 In the United States, the black man might not always be a devil, but the devil was almost invariably a black man. This personification had deep roots in Puritan culture. Jonathan Edwards preached that the raven “by its blackness represents the prince of darkness. Sin and sorrow and death are all in Scripture represented by darkness or the color black, but the Devil is the father of sin, a most foul and wicked spirit, and the prince of death and misery.” In his autobiography, one Robert Bailey recalled that his mother told him never to lie, because if he did, a “great black ugly clubfooted man called the Devil” would take him to hell. After subsequently misbehaving, the boy had a vision of “a great black something in the shape of a man, with horns on his head; and with a loud voice saying ‘I will catch you.’” In The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Poe described the black cook on the Grampus as “a perfect demon.” Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter wove analogies between the baleful Chillingworth—the Black Man—and the devil, a Black Man who haunts the forest, on the prowl for souls.35 Most notably, Washington Irving represented the devil as a fiendish and powerful black man in “The Devil and Tom Walker,” which furnished Quidor with subjects for two paintings in the 1850s. The story unfolds in colonial Massachusetts, early in the eighteenth century. Tom, a notorious skinflint, wends his way home one day through a dreary, treacherous swamp, the site of an old In-
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dian fort. Drawing near this place, Tom stumbles on a half-buried skull, cleaved by a tomahawk. As he picks it up, a gruff voice bids him leave it alone. He looks up to see “a great black man” seated opposite on a tree stump and dressed in rude half-Indian garb, belted with a red sash. His face is “dingy, and begrimed with soot,” as if he had been toiling at a forge. He has a “shock of coarse black hair” standing out from his head in all directions, and he carries an ax on his shoulder. Very quickly, Tom surmises that the stranger is the “Old Scratch” himself. After various plot twists and machinations Tom, in exchange for his soul, reaps a hoard of buried pirate treasure and becomes a wealthy moneylender in Boston. As he grows older, he begins to dread the ultimate outcome of his bargain and embraces religion. On a hot summer afternoon, he is in his counting room, about to foreclose on a mortgage. Pointing out that the usurer has already made a great deal of money out of him, Tom’s ruined victim begs for a reprieve. Tom loses patience and exclaims, “The devil take me . . . if I have made a farthing!” At that moment, three loud knocks sound on the door, and there stands a black man “holding a black horse, which neighed and stamped with impatience.” He has come for Tom. Although Tom shrinks back, he is defenseless. “The black man whisked him away like a child into the saddle, gave the horse the lash, and away he galloped, with Tom on his back, in the midst of the thunderstorm . . . his white cap bobbing up and down; his morning-gown fluttering in the wind, and his steed striking fire out of the pavement at every bound. When the clerks turned to look for the black man he had disappeared.”36 Even though Irving at the outset notes that the devil is neither African nor Indian, he refers to him consistently as “the black man.” This is a key to deciphering the coded references to race in Quidor’s Devil and Tom Walker and Tom Walker’s Flight (Fig. 61; see Plate 9). In the first painting, Tom has paused on his way through the gloom of the densely overgrown swamp. His walking stick leads our eyes to the grisly skull, which gazes up at Tom with its empty sockets. On the far right, the black man with his ax sits on a tree stump and fixes Tom with a menacing glare. A path of light leads directly from quizzical Tom to the leering devil: we know from it that Tom is headed for hell. The woods are doubly haunted: by the vanquished and vanished natives and by the satanic bogeyman who bars the way. Tom Walker’s Flight is much wilder. It vividly suggests the power of darkness, embodied in the devil and his horse. These two figures dominate the composition, steed and demon in perfect counterpoint. Mane and tail streaming, the ebony charger rears, eyeballs glaring white and nostrils blasting hot breath. There is a saddle but no bridle, only a lead rope, snapped and fluttering free, its other end still fastened to the hitching post at left. Grinning gleefully, the devil stands blocking the door of Tom’s brokerage office, his legs spread wide. The angles of his up-flung arms echo the ramping lines of the horse, while his backward cant pulls in the opposite direction, like a visual slingshot
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figure 61. John Quidor, The Devil and Tom Walker, 1856. Oil on canvas, 27 × 34". © The Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001, Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1967.18.
poised to launch a projectile. Tom Walker’s figure is a foil to both black bodies. Ridiculous in nightcap and dressing gown, he clings to the horse’s neck and looks back in abject terror. One of his slippers, lost in the struggle, has fallen on the sidewalk. The skirts of his robe fly up, ignominiously exposing a thinly covered backside. Quidor designed his setting to reinforce the sense of impending and inexorable doom. A hellish glow bathes the scene. Across the foreground an amorphous shadow creeps from behind the rickety wooden fencing on the right. Horse and devil also cast long, forked shadows. The door of Tom’s brokerage yawns open onto the darkness within; from the windows three clerks gaze in astonishment as their master embarks on his wild ride. A little dog, flattened out in a flying gallop, races past the hitching post, and a long way down the street, a man flees. Neither dog nor man casts a shadow. Steep gables on either side of the street farther back frame the snorting charger’s
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head, and lightning zigzags from the black clouds overhead. There is no middle distance. Everything is either up close or very far away, and the street behind the black steed stretches out like rubber. The spatial distortion, the grotesquely exaggerated forms, and the yellow light produce a feverish, hallucinatory effect. In some respects Quidor’s conception of the devil is faithful to Irving’s. The vaguely Indian tunic and sash are there, as is the ax, leaning against the doorjamb. The devil’s face is neither dingy nor sooty, however. It is a dark, glossy brown, round and shiny, his muscular limbs a shade or two lighter. Unlike Irving’s devil, he has a pair of thumb-size horns, and a beard as dense and black as his hair. Trick perspective and lighting create the illusion of a cloven hoof where the right foot should be. Take away the horns and “hoof,” and the figure becomes a black man full of rage. The St. Louis painter Charles Deas used the identical device in his version of The Devil and Tom Walker (1838; private collection), portraying the devil with “dark skin and negroid features,” as Guy C. McElroy has pointed out.37 Similar “horns” had appeared in another context some years earlier, on the sheet music cover of the minstrel show song “My Long Tail Blue,” published in New York and elsewhere in several versions during the 1830s (Fig. 62). A black dandy poses with a walking stick, a watch and chain, and a cutaway coat with tails reaching almost to the ground. He has sideburns and a bushy thatch of hair, sticking out in tufts under the brim of a shiny stovepipe hat. The hat’s narrow brim curls up on both sides, looking for all the world like a dainty pair of horns. This feature repeats in four out of five versions of the same design, issued by different publishers.38 Is this the forerunner of Quidor’s devil? Impossible to say, though the parallels are striking. This image suggests the currency of the black man– devil equation in popular culture even if, as here, the context is humorous and the performer a white man, W. E. Pennington, in blackface. That alone is suggestive, since it hints at the fantasy of appropriating (and neutralizing) the black male’s imagined potency. Only one year before Quidor painted Tom Walker’s Flight, the New York Picayune published a visual spoof on Shakespeare’s Othello in silhouette. As Othello strangles Desdemona, his scabbard swings out behind him, unmistakably suggesting a devil’s tail (or an ape’s). The subtext, not difficult to read, links demonic black potency with the destruction of white womanhood.39 Tom Walker’s plight is nearly the same as that of Desdemona under Othello’s murderous assault. Every line of his body, clinging so awkwardly to the horse’s back, expresses fear, helplessness, and vulnerability, dramatically reversing the order of things as they really were in midcentury America. That is, in real life, the black man was expected to assume such postures, and the white to stand in the position of power. This white man, however, is completely under the black man’s control. The painting serves as a metaphor for the power of blackness to strike terror into white hearts.
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figure 62. “My Long Tail Blue,” sheet music cover, 1830s. The Lester S. Levy Collection, Milton S. Eisenhower Library, The Johns Hopkins University.
Quidor’s Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane is a variation on the same theme, the headless horseman astride a huge black horse—Daredevil—identical to the devil’s own steed in the Tom Walker painting (Fig. 63). Ichabod, fleeing on his white nag Gunpowder, is in total disarray, with saddle slipping and reins flapping. Like Tom Walker, he looks back in consternation as his pursuer makes ready to hurl his “head”—a hefty pumpkin—squarely at Ichabod’s cranium. The full moon sheds a bright noonday glow over the landscape of gnarly trees and thickets, but the horseman is cloaked in shadow. Through an opening in the trees behind the madly galloping Gunpowder is a small church, the weeping willows and tombstones of its burying ground plainly visible even at a distance. Ichabod believes that once he has crossed the wooden bridge leading to the church he will be saved, but the horseman pursues him relentlessly, finally hurling his “head” and knocking Ichabod senseless to the ground. After that fateful night, Ichabod vanishes from the village for good.
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In the Irving tale that inspired Quidor, the horseman is Brom Bones, Ichabod’s rival for the hand of Katrina van Tassel, a wealthy farmer’s daughter. Ichabod Crane, the gawky schoolmaster of mythical Sleepy Hollow, lives in a dream, his mind full of ghost tales and visions of sumptuous comfort as Katrina’s triumphant suitor. Bones is a brawny and mischievous trickster who in David Reynolds’s view embodies the go-ahead spirit of modern America. Ichabod in this reading “represents the powerlessness of the American past to withstand the onslaught of the ever-changing present,” symbolized by the “rapidly riding Headless Horseman,” an “appropriate emblem of the mindless fury” Irving associated with the nineteenth century.40 Whether Quidor saw the same meaning in Irving’s tale is impossible to say. But certainly both Tom Walker’s Flight and Headless Horseman are powerful expressions of some haunting fear, an oppressive sense of imminent danger. What in the end reignited Quidor’s interest in Irving? For some fifteen years, he had all but abandoned Irving as a source. But in the mid-1850s he rapidly turned out the Tom Walker paintings plus several more based on episodes in other stories.41 In nearly all of them, the personal, the political, and the racial interlace with tropes of power and danger, greed and temptation, terror and flight. Why did Quidor return to Irving just at that time? It was a decade of boom and bust. Intense new speculation in land and stocks inflated an outsized bubble that burst in 1857, when a fortune in gold bound by ship for New York banks sank to the bottom of the sea, catalyzing a disastrous run on the banks and initiating widespread economic collapse, bankruptcy, and panic. Quidor produced the Tom Walker paintings just as the bubble was about to break. As one whose own ventures in land speculation had ended badly, Quidor chose a subject to suit the times: an unscrupulous moneylender on his way to a well-earned doom. Significantly, Quidor at this time also painted a new version of The Money Diggers (1856; art market, 2001).42 Fantasies on racial role reversal and menacing black manhood, The Devil and Tom Walker and Tom Walker’s Flight are also mordant critiques of the culture of money fueled by the desire for accumulation and the worship of capital. Although Quidor sold two paintings to a nouveau riche Philadelphia engineer in the middle of the decade, he otherwise depended on his commercial work to earn whatever money came his way.43 Bereft of institutional support or a professional network, he made his living tenuously on the shadowy margins of the art world, embittered in middle age by chronic failure and haunted, perhaps, by the specter of debt. The political tensions of the decade were even more dire than its economic woes. With the Compromise of 1850, followed immediately by the Fugitive Slave Act, tension and strife increased as disunion loomed and war became imminent. The passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854 ignited bloody struggles between pro- and antislavery forces in the heartland while the debate over abolition raged on. In 1858 Abraham Lincoln and Senator Stephen A. Douglas debated the ques-
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figure 63. John Quidor, Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, 1858. Oil on canvas, 267⁄8 × 337⁄8". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase made possible by the Catherine Walden Myer Endowment, the Julia D. Strong Endowment, and the Director’s Discretionary Fund.
tion of slavery in seven passionate encounters that riveted national attention. The following year, John Brown’s raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, finally set the stage for the Civil War that was to bring wholesale chaos, death, and destruction to North and South alike. After two centuries, slavery had become a fierce monster that the nation, fragmented beyond repair, could no longer escape. Quidor’s imagery of black devils and devilish black riders could not have been neutral in the troubled antebellum years. The meaning of blackness in Quidor’s art ranged from the demonic to the monstrous, the murderous, the ghoulish, and the bizarre, all those meanings rooted in popular print and visual culture and emblematic of fundamental anxieties about America’s past, present,
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and future. Above all, Quidor’s paintings embodied the fearful apprehensions and racial nightmares of the antebellum era. Mud Sam, clambering out of the black pit, was a reminder that the repressed and the oppressed always stood ready to return. Quidor’s hulking black demons suggested the monstrous potential of slavery to undo the increasingly tenuous social and political order of the United States. And his nameless black rider, bearing down on a hapless quarry, was a rude reminder (in comic masquerade) of relentless and manifold evils that sooner or later would catch up with history.
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5
THE SHADOW’S CURSE
illiam Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit is a famously enigmatic work in which dark shadows
W
add menace to a spooky chase through the halls of some strange Middle Eastern palace (see
Plate 10). On the left, cloak and tunic flying, a man runs desperately toward the steps to a darkened alcove where smoke drifts from an unseen censer. He lunges ahead, precariously poised on one sandaled foot. Every line of his wiry body expresses the fear and desire that propel him. His shadow flows up the stairs and into the mysterious sanctuary. His features are goatlike, with hooked nose and jutting bearded chin. He wears a headband, a gold ring in his ear, and a dagger in his belt. He flees through halls richly decorated with arabesque inscriptions. Beyond the corridor through which the hunted man dashes are other halls, arch framing arch as far as the eye can see. The fleeing man’s spectral double, interrupting this vista of receding arches, races along a parallel corridor, matching the foreground figure’s stride, eyes riveted on the quarry, staring out through a filmy veil. Instead of a dagger, the ghost carries a scimitar poised for action. As it runs, it casts a pale shadow. But an even greater menace looms on the right: a dark, forked wedge of shadow, cast by something unseen. Is it one entity or two, human or monster? Is it a horse and rider or huge horned demon? It is impossible to determine, but whatever it might be, it is hot on the heels of its prey.
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Who is the man with the dagger? What has he done? Why is he in flight? There is no answer. The image is wide open for interpretation, and those seeking a solution to its riddle have reached strikingly different conclusions. One proposes that the painting is an allegory of John Surratt’s role in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln; another that it refers to the 1811 massacre of Mameluke warriors by the Turkish Pasha Mohammed Ali; still another that it is a Transcendentalist allegory of a man fleeing his conscience. Recently, Charles Colbert has argued for a metaphysical reading, positing that the scene reflects the thinking of the eighteenth-century mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, according to whose doctrine of correspondences the material realm was but a mirror of the spiritual world. In this scenario, spirits from hell (symbolized by the shadowy pursuer) have invaded the fugitive, driving out all good. However much he longs for sanctuary, he longs in vain.1 It is possible to tease out even darker layers of meaning. Doubly haunted, Rimmer’s work intricately conjoins the artist’s strife and torment with an uneasy rumination on America. A figurative cross section of the painting would reveal at least two strata, fused like translucent panes of tinted glass. One is a narrative of the artist’s own subjectivity, perpetually oppressed by a strange birthright. The other is an allegory of slavery as the dark double and inexorable shadow of the white nation. As fused together, these layers conjure up a dense pictorial riddle, a perpetual cliff-hanger in which ghost and shadows close in on the fleeing man, who always continues to elude them. Although at first glance the exotic locale and mysterious circumstances of the painting seem remote from the artist’s own world, in the end the gothic vision of Flight and Pursuit is intimately connected to it. The meanings of Flight and Pursuit are tightly bound into the story of Rimmer’s life (1816–79), itself a gothic tale.2 His father, Thomas (1785–1852), believed himself the Dauphin—only surviving son of Louis XVI and heir to the French throne. During the Revolution the Dauphin was imprisoned in the Temple with his parents, who were executed in 1793. Loyalist supporters smuggled him out of prison in 1795 and sent him to live with a South Lancashire family named Rimer. In their care he received an education meant to fit him for his princely duties once he came into his rightful inheritance. He became an officer in the British army while waiting to claim the throne of France. After Napoleon’s defeat, however, the allies brought back the dead king’s brother to rule as Louis the XVIII. The discredited “Dauphin,” fearing that supporters of Louis XVIII might seek him out and murder him to further secure his uncle’s right to the throne, relinquished his commission, married an Irish servant girl, and fled to Liverpool. His first son, William, was born there, but after two years the family immigrated to North America and eventually settled in the Boston area, adding the second “m” to their surname in 1827.3 Mrs. Rimmer bore four more children, and Thomas eked out a meager living as a laborer and boot maker. Still in terror of French assassins, Thomas Rimmer forced his family into strictest seclu-
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sion, educating the children at home and fostering the belief that they were the heirs of a tragic hunted king. All hope shattered, he became an alcoholic. There is some evidence that Thomas’s obsession had a basis in history. Or he could have been a deluded megalomaniac. Whatever the case, it was the core of the family’s world and the sum of their reality. William, as the eldest, inherited the heaviest burden of the Dauphin’s legacy, which haunted him all his life and overshadowed his art as well. When still in his teens, he worked to help support his parents and siblings. He set type, made soap, painted signs, and did portraits. In 1840 he married a New Bedford Quakeress and became an itinerant portrait painter. As his family grew, he took up shoemaking. He also studied anatomy and began to practice medicine after a term of apprenticeship to a Brockton physician. Late in the 1840s his father’s failing bodily and mental health necessitated his removal to a cottage in Concord; Ralph Waldo Emerson helped with the cost of nursing the invalid. Thomas died miserably in 1852, a lunatic shrieking imprecations against the fate that had so malevolently turned prince into pauper. After that dreadful but probably welcome death, William continued his own struggle for survival. He carved, painted, cobbled, and healed, or tried to. All four of his sons and one daughter died very young; three daughters lived to adulthood. By the late 1850s he was beginning to enjoy a reputation as an expert in artistic anatomy. He published books on the subject in 1864 and 1877, lecturing during these decades at the Lowell Institute and the Museum School in Boston and the National Academy of Design in New York, among others. In New York he also served several terms (1866–70) as director of the School of Design for Women, Cooper Union, but quit in the face of administrative conflicts and attacks on his teaching methods. From the 1840s on, he produced paintings and sculpture on a range of subjects from the Bible, myth, history, and literature, many focusing on conflict, struggle, and death. Although he exhibited in Boston and occasionally in New York, he remained an outsider to the art world and was better known as an anatomist and lecturer. In the spring of 1879 Rimmer suffered a breakdown and moved to the home of his daughter Adeline; he died on August 20 at the age of sixty-three. On learning of Rimmer’s death, the young sculptor Daniel Chester French, who had studied with him in 1871–72, wrote: “The poor long-suffering doctor! His was an unhappy and unsuccessful life. He just missed being great.”4 The story of the Rimmer family is one of obsession and paranoia, of being hunted and haunted.5 These are the themes of Flight and Pursuit, which Rimmer painted at the age of fifty-six. The painting is in no way a literal retelling of the family’s dark and delusional tragedy and the fateful burden passed from father to son. Yet in its form and mood it recapitulates one of Rimmer’s earliest efforts, the drawing Midnight Ride (Fig. 64). This sketch, which the Rimmer authority Jeffrey Weidman dates to 1853, is a later copy or tracing of the original, which the adolescent Rimmer made
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figure 64. William Rimmer, Midnight Ride, 1830/ca. 1853. Pencil on paper, 6 × 7". The Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.
in 1830 to illustrate his poem “The Midnight Ride, a Tale.” Image and text alike vividly picture the story of a father on horseback clutching his little boy and galloping wildly through a dark forest thick with fearsome demons and bogeymen. Faint as it is, the drawing reads like an early map or initial projection of Flight and Pursuit. The horse, legs stretched out in a flying gallop, barely evades the wolf running hard at its heels. Cloak flying (much like that of the fugitive in the later painting), the father urges on his steed and holds his son close. A gigantic horned demon glowers down at them, and a monstrous creature, beast on top and man below, lunges into their path. Another figure tumbles as if to trip the horse in midstride. On the far left is an enormous, slobbering head in profile, and other menacing faces materialize in the background. As the poem makes clear, the tilting cross at right marks the border between safety and the “damned ground” into which the riders have dashed.
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Rimmer’s verses embroider luridly on the imagery of his sketch. At the beginning, father and son approach the Black Wood; the moon is going down and the night darkens. There is danger all around; the father urges his son to “Pray on! my Son—Pray on!—Pray on! For the road looks strange and wild. And down by my Side doth Something run, ’Tis a Demon! Pray on my Child—” The Boy pressed his Cheek to his father’s Breast, And Shud’dring Clasped him round. For he Glimpsed ’neath his mantle and saw its crest, As it noiselessly Sped o’er the Ground.
As they ride on, a “Black Hound” runs at their heels and the trees glow ominously red. The little boy has fallen silent, and the father fears he has died: The Boy answered not, but he grasped him Tight, For a sprite had his eyes fixed on him. Close—close to his own, ’twas a fearful sight, And Strangely they burnt upon him.
At this point the meter shifts. The rest of the poem describes an extravagant carnival, an orgy, with bats, owls, toads, imps, fiends, witches, bleeding nuns, risen murderers and torture victims, and a “man, with a purple tide / Flowing fast, from his deep gashed neck.” Hail pelts down, lightning flashes, and thunder peals as father and son fly through the Black Wood. In the end they reach sanctuary: a “goodly Cross reared by the way,” which no goblin or wizard may traverse: they are saved.6 “The Midnight Ride” strikingly resembles the “Erlkönig,” or “Erl-King,” Goethe’s romantic ballad, which Rimmer may have known through Sir Walter Scott’s translation. The Erl-King (OakKing) is a fiend who dwells deep in the forest and preys on hapless travelers. In Scott’s translation the ballad opens with a scene similar to Rimmer’s: O Who rides by night thro’ the woodlands so wild? It is the fond father embracing his Child; And close the boy nestles within his lov’d arm, From the blast of the tempest to keep himself warm. “O Father, see yonder! See yonder!” he says.
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“My Boy, upon what dost thou fearfully gaze?” “O, ’tis the Erl-King with his staff and his shroud.” “No, my Love! it is but a dark wreath of the cloud.”
The Erl-King speaks seductively to the boy, promising him toys and delight if he will only come away with him into the woods. The terrified child clings to his father as the Erl-King woos him, hovering near. At length the spirit seizes the child in his cold grasp, and the boy shrieks in terror. Suddenly fearful, the father gallops on and reaches home only to discover that the child in his arms is dead.7 In reading the “Erl-King,” how could Rimmer have failed to see himself and his father, pursued by a deathly fiend with his staff and shroud? Rimmer, who stocked his variation on Goethe with a complement of grisly gothic clichés, ended his poem on a hopeful note, with father and son safely out of danger. Even so, the poem dramatically evokes familial fears, with its images of a father in peril and a son in danger, pursued by demons. The outcome—an anticlimax after the elaborately detailed nightmare of the Black Wood—might only be wishful thinking. As Jeffrey Weidman has written, the psychological inheritance of the Dauphin history generally affected Rimmer’s choice of artistic subjects, inclining him toward themes of “profound suffering in the face of obdurate Fate.”8 Flight and Pursuit at one level recasts “The Midnight Ride,” expressing the same sense of endangerment by some mysterious, stealthy, deadly, relentless enemy. There is no happy ending, though: the outcome is perpetually in doubt. Flight and Pursuit, as an enigmatic, orientalist fantasy, displaces Rimmer’s burden into some faraway time and place. It also makes veiled references to the trauma of the nation’s recent past. Weidman maintains that most of Rimmer’s work is “mythic at a most profound level,” in the sense that his paintings, drawings, and sculpture function as symbolic stories, their meanings “openended and creatively allusive.” Myth gave Rimmer the “creative means to transmute subjects like his supposed royal lineage, his personal suffering, and the nation’s anguish from the Civil War into lasting artistic statements.”9 And even though Rimmer almost never referred directly to the war and to slavery, his poignant symbolic language expresses his intense engagement. In several drawings Rimmer represented the conflict as a new Trojan War, its soldiers robed in the garments of classical myth and epic history. In Secessia and Columbia, for example, two muscular champions combat each other, the crest of Columbia’s helmet a screaming eagle, that of Secessia’s a coiled snake (Fig. 65). Dedicated to the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers is dramatically topical despite its mythic trappings (Fig. 66). It is a tribute to the first black regiment mustered into service by the North. Commanded by Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, great numbers of these troops were to perish in the failed Union assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina, only a
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figure 65. William Rimmer, Secessia and Columbia (Combat of Giants), 1862. Graphite pencil on paper, 173⁄8 × 24". Gift of Mrs. Henry Simonds, 22.2. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2000 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved.
figure 66. William Rimmer, Dedicated to the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers (Warriors against Slavery), 1863. Graphite pencil on paper, 17 × 243⁄8". Gift of William R. Ware, 09.6. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2000 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved.
few months after the regiment’s formation. In the center of this composition four superbly muscled, classically garbed figures march in perfect synchrony toward a hideous beast crouching under the fronds of a wilted palmetto and guarding an imploring figure in chains. In the right background, counterbalancing the southern monster, is the shining figure of Justice with her scales. The four warriors, spears and swords energetically aloft, carry shields emblazoned with symbols of faith, hope, liberty, and light. They are heroic figures, generalized beyond any evidence of race. That photographs of this drawing were sold as fund-raisers for the regiment serves, perhaps, as a measure of Rimmer’s political conviction and commitment. After the war Rimmer continued to dwell on the deep scars it had left behind. A group of drawings based on the Iliad and the death of Pompey the Great at the hands of Julius Caesar took up the themes of war, death, betrayal, and assassination.10 Especially moving among them is the drawing of Pompey’s freedman Philip (1867; Harvard University Art Museums), preparing a funeral pyre for the fallen leader. Although Rimmer stripped away all traces of recent history and dressed those who figured in the assassination story in classical garb, references to the murdered Lincoln and the emancipated slave are easy enough to decode. That same year, 1867, Rimmer sketched the first idea for Flight and Pursuit (Fig. 67). Such timing lends credence to Marcia Goldberg’s theory that the painting allegorizes the role of John Surratt in Lincoln’s assassination.11 The terrible murder undoubtedly continued to haunt Rimmer long after the event, which, if Goldberg is correct, cast its shadow into 1872, when Rimmer finally created the painting. The drawing bears the inscription “oh for the horns of the altar,” a reference to the ancient tradition of granting asylum to any murderer who could reach the sanctuary of a temple and grasp the horns surmounting the altar there. Goldberg’s interpretation becomes more persuasive still if we imagine Lincoln as a larger-than-life patriarch, father of the reborn Union, conflated in Rimmer’s mind with his own father, living in perpetual terror of assassination. Lincoln’s death would then be the ghastly realization of everything both Thomas Rimmer and his artist son dreaded so profoundly. Unlike the image dedicated to the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth, or the drawing of Philip building Pompey’s funeral pyre, Flight and Pursuit is highly ambiguous in its narrative and symbolism. We can decode the first two down to the last detail. Everything in those drawings contributes to the meaning and the message. There is no mystery, no space for uncertainty: they mean what they mean, and their symbolism is perfectly legible. Flight and Pursuit, by contrast, is anything but clear. Its story is a knot that stubbornly resists attempts to pick it apart; it is full of shadows that obscure both narrative and sense, leaving us guessing. Because of this ambiguity, Flight and Pursuit is ultimately open-ended, leaving us free to look further for clues, if not to meaning, then to what else might haunt these mysterious halls, cast that shadow, chase that fugitive.
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figure 67. William Rimmer, Oh for the Horns of the Altar, 1867. Pencil on paper, 117⁄8 × 14". Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library, Clements C. Fry Print Collection.
Rimmer lived and worked in abolitionist Boston, a highly charged political culture focused intently on the question of slavery and freedom, North and South, and the agonizing passage from one to the other. Given this context, I want to explore the possibility that Rimmer modeled Flight and Pursuit on the fugitive-slave narrative. Images of runaway slaves circulated widely in the antebellum years as advertising for the capture and return of escapees. These crude pictures endlessly recycled the standard figure of a male running with a bundle on a stick or a female resting with her bundle by her side. As abolitionism intensified, narrative and visual representations of the runaway took on dramatic urgency and political edge.12 One of the best-known episodes in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) featured the beautiful slave Eliza, her little son in her arms, crossing to freedom over the ice floes of the dangerously swollen Ohio River. Often illustrated and reenacted onstage, this episode Americanized the gothic scenario of innocent maiden fleeing murderous monk or cruel seducer through the halls of a crumbling castle. The lithograph Perilous Escape of Eliza and Child shows the young woman clutching her child and running barefoot over the jagged, frozen slabs (Fig. 68). She glances back fearfully: on the bank is the slave trader she has eluded with only seconds to spare. In mortal peril, the new-world maiden flees the dark prison of her life in bondage. Eliza leaps to freedom over the frigid waters of a river dividing North and South. Other images setting scenes of attempted escape in the South, with fugitives running through forest or swamp chased by bloodhounds and men with rifles, gained currency after the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Act that inspired Beecher to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin.13 Like earlier images advertising
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runaways, these illustrations adhered to a set of conventions and even did double duty on occasion.14 “Running Away,” which appeared in the Suppressed Book about Slavery (1857), exhibits the standard iconography of the escapees—this time a slave family—sprinting toward a riverbank (Fig. 69). Close on their heels is a pack of hounds, followed by several armed men on horseback. Even if the hapless family reaches the water, they will never cross. Men in a boat patrol the river, deploying poles to push back a slave attempting to swim to the other side, while two men on the bank aim their rifles at the back of his head. Thomas Moran’s Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia is the darkest and most dramatic realization of this vision (Fig. 70). Painted in England to raise funds for the painter’s return to the United States, this work or another version of it may have been exhibited at one of the northern Sanitary Fairs during the Civil War. Reportedly, there was an engraving of it as well.15 Moran’s imagery conjures the widespread northern vision of the southern landscape as an endless tract of swampy wilderness, dark, sinister, and deadly. The historian Francis Parkman likened Florida’s cypress swamp to a “vast sepulchre,” its Spanish moss like veils of mourning, “tomb-like” in its stillness and solitude.16 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped cement the association of escaped slaves with marshy wilderness tracts, writing vividly of hunted slaves eluding pursuit in the trackless labyrinth of Virginia’s Dismal Swamp. In Dred, a Tale of the Dismal Swamp (1856), Harriet Beecher Stowe used the swamp as emblem of the South and the fateful consequences of slavery, a “wildly vegetating swamp of human souls, cut off . . . from the usages and improvements of cultivated life.”17 Such iconography surely contributed to the look of Moran’s imagined South. In the foreground, a black man and woman wade through dark, stagnant water. Above them leans the pallid trunk of an enormous dead tree, festooned with trailing vines. All around are tree trunks, tilting, twisted, fallen, and encroaching vegetation. Yellowish light falls on the slaves and the ghostly trees, but thick shadows obscure almost everything beyond. The slaves, pursued by men and dogs, are in mortal danger. The man, grasping a stick and a bloody knife, has killed one of the hounds, now sinking into the black water, but two others leap from the tangled banks. Farther back on the right, two trackers with rifles press forward. The outcome remains uncertain, but the claustrophobic atmosphere is charged with foreboding. In this painting the South itself is the national dungeon or haunted castle, the slaves its persecuted innocents, fleeing in panic. Generically, there is much to tie images such as Moran’s with Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit. Given the pervasiveness of abolitionist fugitive slave iconography and Rimmer’s support of the cause and sympathy with the downtrodden, the gothic slave hunt emerges as a plausible prototype for the painter. The fugitive’s mad dash for the altar recalls Eliza’s frantic scramble toward sanctuary and freedom on the northern banks of the Ohio, or slaves desperately trying to elude their pursuers in
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figure 68. Perilous Escape of Eliza and Child, 1850s. Lithograph. From Harry Peters’s America on Stone, Indiana University Fine Arts Library. Indiana University Library Collection.
the dusky maze of the swamp. The pallid specter is the relentless tracker, bent on preventing the quarry’s escape. The same atmosphere of menace, suspense, and impending violence pervades Rimmer’s painting as well. Yet there are just as many differences. In Flight and Pursuit, there is no swamp but a Moorish labyrinth, lavishly embellished—or overgrown—with stylized organic and geometric forms. We have no idea whether the fugitive is victim or evildoer. The running man is not African, though his features set him off as a particular type in Rimmer’s physiognomic glossary. Weidman points out that the fugitive’s profile in both the 1867 drawing and the painting is “not heroic” but conforms rather to Rimmer’s schema denoting the “aggressive and conquering races,” identified by their “retreating foreheads, Roman noses, and prominent chins.” Rimmer, like the majority of his peers, admired the antique ideal of perfect verticality from forehead to chin. The greater the deviation from that standard, the lower the type. Rimmer’s fugitive, indeed, strongly resembles both the Moorish and Gothic types the artist juxtaposed with an ideal Greek profile in a drawing from about 1867 (Fig. 71). Not a black African, the figure nonetheless exhibits the marks of “lower” racial status.18
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figure 69. “Running Away,” published in The Suppressed Book about Slavery, 1857.
figure 70. Thomas Moran, Slave Hunt, Dismal Swamp, Virginia, 1862. Oil on canvas, 34 × 44". Gift of Laura A. Clubb, The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 1947.8.44.
figure 71. William Rimmer, Faces: Greek, Goth, Moor, ca. 1867. Pencil and ink on paper, 11I × 93⁄8". The Boston Medical Library in the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine.
Although we can trace the contours of the fugitive slave narrative in Flight and Pursuit, they seem distorted, as if Rimmer transposed them into a new key. He presents the story in new clothes, or with the tables somehow turned. The artist echoes and plays on the images of slave flight and pursuit in telling (or declining to tell) the story of his own mysterious fugitive. Neither history nor a meditation on history, Flight and Pursuit might be history as dream or nightmare, refracted through Rimmer’s own obsessions and anxieties. In this respect, the choice of architectural style is suggestive. Rimmer based his setting on Moorish interiors illustrated in a book presented to him by his students at the Cooper Union. Moorish structures, according to that source, were like fairylands, so fanciful that they seemed not built but “only dreamed.” They were sites of enchantment, where the world’s reality was forgotten. In that power of enchantment, however, lay the flaw: it was all an illusion, a lie, and a snare.19 The Moorish halls of Flight and Pursuit—architectural analogue to the swamp—could be just such a trap, leading to fatal bewilderment. Like the swamp, too, these halls are draped in shadow, none more sinister than the forked wedge gliding over the floor on the right. By its very nature amorphous and obdurately illegible, this shadow
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defies us to guess its source. To insist on some specific, identifiable body beyond the edges of Rimmer’s pictorial space would be an exercise in futility, Rimmer being the very opposite of a literalist. As we have seen, though, he was keenly attuned to the momentous issues of the day and, oddly enough—considering the high-flown character of his own art—was “always interested in the political and social cartoons and paragraphic journalism of the day,” as Bartlett noted.20 With that in mind, we can follow the shadow in Flight and Pursuit to the dark side of history and the specter of race. In the eyes of abolitionists and others who feared the worst for the future, slavery was a hideous monster portending the nation’s doom. In this discourse shadows acquired a specifically racial connotation, their grotesque distortion a symbol of the nation’s profound moral deformity. In Herman Melville’s gothic tale Benito Cereno (1855) the shadow plays a powerful symbolic role in amplifying the horrors of slavery. The story concerns a slave revolt aboard the San Dominick, a Spanish ship under Cereno’s command. During the uprising, the blacks savagely slaughter most of the whites, commandeer the ship, and replace the figurehead of Christopher Columbus with the ghastly skeleton of the slave Babo’s murdered master. In the moonlight the bones cast a “gigantic ribbed shadow” on the water. Babo now becomes the master, the captain subjected to his every desire and demand. When the San Dominick encounters the American ship Bachelor’s Delight, Babo enforces Cereno’s silence with a hidden dagger at the ready. In the end, the American captain Amasa Delano rescues Cereno; his crew overcome the mutineers and retake the San Dominick after a bloody battle. Babo is tried and executed in Lima, his body burned and his head mounted on a pike in the plaza. Cereno, however, is broken beyond repair and dies soon after.21 The story, complex and ambiguous, defies easy interpretation; it admits reading as an antislavery polemic or a horrific vision of black savagery.22 Whichever way the argument swings, the atmosphere Melville paints is ominous and deathly. The dawn is hushed and gray, the sea leaden: “shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.” Like a southern swamp, the San Dominick is draped in “dark festoons of sea-grass” resembling “mourning weeds.” When the ship’s bell sounds, it is like a “grave-yard toll.” Melancholy clings to Cereno even after Delano has rescued him. The American expostulates, crying, “You are saved . . . you are saved: what has cast such a shadow upon you?” In reply, Cereno utters only two words: “The Negro,” and falls silent, “gathering his mantle about him, as if it were a pall.”23 The shadow metaphor, as extrapolated to the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, is apt and compelling. The “Negro” in the abstract, that is, slavery, cast a monstrous shadow over the political and social landscape. A scene from William Douglas O’Connor’s abolitionist novel Harrington: A Story of True Love (1860) suggests that the South, too, became the shadow side of the North. The book begins in the gloomy swamplands of Louisiana. The sunlight is so hot and thick that it scorches the plantation until every shadow is strangely and intensely black. And so sinister are those shadows that “a dark
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fancy might have dreamed them a host of devils, disguised as shadows, and mustered to prevent the escape of a soul from Hell.” In the fields, slaves are plowing beneath the eye of the overseer: The reeking mules . . . had their monstrous jags of sooty shadow, like the malformed beasts of a devil’s dream, jerking along with shapeless instruments beside them. The black drudges, men and women, plodding and tottering in the sweltering heat . . . had hunched and ugly goblin dwarfs of shadow, vigilantly dogging their footsteps, and bobbing and dodging with their more active movements. The burly demon on horseback had his horsed demon of lubber shadow, which aped his every gesture and movement, ambling fantastically with him hither and thither among the rows, and grotesquely motioning into squirms of phantom glee the shadows of the writhing slaves on whom his frequent whiplash fell. Up around the planter’s mansion, shadows as fantastical, as black and demoniacal as these, wavered or lay in the fierce, yellow glow. And among them all there was none uglier or more seemingly sentient than one within the room opening on the veranda—a black, hellion shape which floated softly as in a pool of oil, on an oblong square of sluggish sunshine shimmering on the floor, just behind the chair of Mr. Lafitte.24
This passage dramatically illustrates the power of shadow symbolism in a vision of the South as living hell, no shadow more hideously demonic than that of the slaveholder himself. In visual culture, the expressive use of looming, distorted shadows as metaphors for darker forces dated from at least the seventeenth century. “The Shadow Dance,” a picture in Samuel van Hoogstraten’s 1675 treatise on painting, showed how to manipulate light sources to produce such effects, the basic principle being that the closer the source, the greater the magnification and deformity of the projected shadow (Fig. 72). In the engraving the shadows of three ordinary people have metamorphosed into towering, scary devils. O’Connor summoned the same illusion in prose, using sulfurous southern light to conjure up a phantasmagoria of hell on earth. Henry Louis Stephens’s Vanity Fair cartoon “Substance and Shadow” makes telling use of just such a demonized shadow (Fig. 73). A squat black man playing the bones (minstrel show castanets) capers in front of an enormous globe of the Earth. On the ground lie a scythe and an hourglass, and at the man’s feet is a dark lantern flooding him with brilliant light and vastly distorting his shadow, which darkens a good portion of the globe. In looming silhouette, the bones player becomes a black bogeyman, clownish yet menacing, with a blank eyehole and hands like tentacles. He is Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant, in blackface, casting a shadow as demonic as those so luridly described in O’Connor’s novel. Stephens drew this cartoon when Douglas, then senator from Illinois, was making a vigorous run for the Democratic nomination in the 1860 presidential campaign. Although Douglas had made
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figure 72. “The Shadow Dance,” published in Samuel van Hoogstraten, Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst, 1675. All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. figure 73. Henry Louis Stephens, “Substance and Shadow,” published in Vanity Fair, January 21, 1860.
a strong start the preceding fall, he was losing momentum as the New Year began. At issue was Douglas’s inflexible support of the principle of popular sovereignty in deciding whether a state or a territory should be slave or free. This principle underlay the controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, which Douglas had engineered and successfully sponsored in 1854. Only popular sovereignty, he insisted over and over, could preserve the Union. The South, at first seizing on the doctrine as a mandate for the expansion of slavery, rejected it after the loss of Kansas to free-soil interests. “Douglasism” in the South became a synonym for virtual abolitionism, spurred on, perhaps, by abolitionist efforts to derail Douglas’s drive for the nomination. In October 1859 the antislavery paper National Era warned that if the South accepted Douglas, it would foment insurrection among the slaves. John Brown’s October 16 raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, only confirmed southern fears of slave revolt while goading both North and South into a furor. For their part, northerners often blamed popular sovereignty for turning the entire west into a legalized haven for slavery. Horace Greeley, firebrand abolitionist and editor of the New York Tribune, warned that the doctrine would only foster a new “slavocracy” there. By January 1860 Douglas was under attack from both sides.25 The Vanity Fair cartoon, published as Douglas was losing political ground, mocks his stature and aspirations, adding to the insult by transforming him into an undersize minstrel show performer. To northern readers (who made up the bulk, if not the whole, of the magazine’s audience), the silhouetted bogeyman was slavocracy casting its pall over not just the west but the whole world.26 To pro-slavery southerners, in contrast, the cavorting shade was the looming apparition of abolition and slave revenge. In either case, it is Melville’s shadow of the Negro on a global scale. At the same time, by showing the puny “substance” that casts such an outsize shadow, the cartoon undercuts the threat that Douglas and his principles represented to any faction of either party. The scythe and hourglass, graveyard symbols, also have a double edge, suggesting the death of Douglas’s political ambitions and the imminence of some cataclysmic crisis. Two years later Stephens published “The Highly Intelligent Contraband” (Fig. 74). This cartoon reverses the relationship between source and shadow by juxtaposing the hulking figure of a black man with a diminutive silhouette. At first glance, figure and shadow seem to match, but once more, there are telling differences. The black man, bundle in one hand and rough staff in the other, wears a peaked cap and a ragged yet dandified suit of clothes. He slouches along, head thrust forward as if intent on some quest. His profile is grotesquely deformed, the slope of the forehead approaching the horizontal, the rest bunched up and pushed out. The shadow, cast on a wall abutting the pavement, slants forward at the same angle, legs rhyming with the black man’s. However, the shadow is obviously running, not slouching along. Hatless, it has a windblown tuft of hair and a ruff of chin whiskers. As it flees, its coattails stream out behind, and its hands, empty, stretch out
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figure 74. Henry Louis Stephens, “The Highly Intelligent Contraband,” published in Vanity Fair, April 26, 1862.
before. The flying foot at the leftmost edge of the frame tells us that the shadow belongs not to the black stalker but to a man racing away from him. His top hat has tumbled to the ground, the masthead of the Tribune poking out of it. The shadow belongs to Horace Greeley. The subcaption explains that the contraband “has come all the way from ‘down South’ to visit Mr. Greeley, but Horace ‘doesn’t see it!’” “Contrabands” were fugitive slaves used in various capacities by the Union military establishment. The Tribune heartily endorsed this practice, on the grounds that every contraband meant one fewer slave to work in aid of the rebellion. In an editorial Greeley predicted that if the president told the South the government would henceforth refuse to recognize rebel slaveholding, Union commanders would immediately see a “general stampede of slaves from all the districts within fifty miles of any Union force” straight to their camps.27 Throughout 1862 the controversy about emancipation intensified. In his editorials Greeley tirelessly championed emancipation, calling again and again on the government and the president to take that crucial, final step.28 Fingering Greeley as a hypocritical purveyor of empty insincerities, Stephens’s cartoon invites readers to imagine what the editor might do should the contraband stampede into the camp of the Tribune. Stephens also upended the topos of the slave hunt, showing the slave in pursuit, the white man—the shadow—running away, not desperately but in craven fear. The shadow of the Negro has become substance and now stalks (or haunts) the streets; the white man has dwindled into a two-dimensional fleeing shade. The theme of the baleful shadow presence reappeared, finally, in “The Slave Owner’s Spectre,” Frank Bellew’s cartoon in Harper’s Weekly, published exactly five months after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation took effect on January 1, 1863 (Fig. 75). The drawing parodies Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” transposing it to the murky chamber of the embattled slave owner, where a raven with the head of a black man perches on the bust of Horace Greeley and croaks out the word “Nebermore.” Clutching a dagger, the wild-eyed slave owner glares up at the apparition above the chamber door. Smoke billows from the lamp, and the room is full of shadows. Prominent in the foreground is a spittoon labeled “Constitution” next to a map of the Confederate States. A few lines of doggerel under the caption burlesque the last stanza of Poe’s poem, in which the raven “never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.” Now it is the “horrid bust of Horace” where the grotesque hybrid sits, never flitting, and at the end, when the slave owner roars, “‘Will you blacks again be Cattle, as you used to be before?’ / Cries the Chattel, ‘Never more!’” Predictable racist stereotyping marks the image and the accompanying verses. Yet the cartoon conveys a real sense of haunting terror embodied in the bizarre figure of the man-raven. Implicitly, the actual closing lines of “The Raven” echo here:
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figure 75. Frank Bellew, “The Slave Owner’s Spectre,” published in Harper’s Weekly, May 30, 1863.
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted—nevermore!29
That Bellew—even in the spirit of travesty—should appropriate Poe’s most famous vision of the memory-haunted, shadow-blighted mind for his own purposes suggests how readily shadow imagery could accommodate multiple meanings. The “raven,” as metaphor for the white mind haunted by slavery and its legacy, casts its shadow over North and South alike. Were such shadows in Rimmer’s memory when he returned to the theme of Flight and Pursuit some five years after the initial sketch? Could that shadow sliding swiftly through the Moorish halls in Flight and Pursuit be the demonic and demonized shadow of Melville’s Negro, or the baleful bogeyman of slavocracy capering behind the Little Giant? And might the fugitive, whose profile fits that of the “aggressive and conquering races,” be on the run in a futile attempt to outstrip the haunting history whose shadow will never grow pale, will float forever on that floor? Yet Rimmer’s meaning continues to elude us. The historical context of the fugitive-slave narrative, the racialized shadow offer tantalizing hints for interpretation, but to squeeze Rimmer’s suspended story into that mold would be to force out every drop of ambiguity and enigma. At most, we can say that just as the fugitive-slave narrative may have seeped into Rimmer’s vision of flight and pursuit, traces of the morphology and meaning of the racialized shadow might lie just beyond the picture’s margins. Threads of tragic, national history may wind through those Moorish halls. But there they mingle and blend with strands from the haunted precincts of Rimmer’s interior world, where light and dark, good and evil, victor and victim were locked in perpetual opposition. Chased by his own demons of persecution and overshadowed by the specter of failure, Rimmer incorporated those baleful presences into his work. In Flight and Pursuit we glimpse his inner conflicts and divided self in both the specter and the shadow, each one in its way the artist’s double or shadow self. With respect to Rimmer’s own biography, the figure of the double is compelling. The concept of the doppelgänger, or double, fundamental to Sigmund Freud’s theory of the uncanny, provides a useful perspective on Flight and Pursuit. The uncanny, or unheimlich, literally unhomelike, is the feeling of “dread and creeping horror” arising from the unbidden return of repressed events, memories, and fantasies, in particular infantile complexes and primitive fears (of the dead, for example) displaced and discredited by modern rationalism. What has been locked away breaks out and
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returns in bizarre, disturbing forms to haunt the conscious mind. The operative principle is the blurring or subversion of boundaries between the real and the unreal, reason and imagination, the external world and the world inside, self and other. The uncanny double poses a threat to the very integrity of the self, which loses its bearings and breaks apart in confusion as if lost in a hall of mirrors.30 Freud drew upon a German romantic literary tradition that bore fruit in American letters as well. E. T. A. Hoffman made the double central to his fantasy and fairy tales, in turn suggesting the device to Edgar Allan Poe (one of Rimmer’s favorite poets). Poe’s short story “William Wilson” vividly illustrates the process that the double sets in motion. As a schoolboy, the narrator encounters a classmate who resembles him in every way. The two boys become inseparable companions and bitter rivals. The double dogs Wilson’s every step, whispering advice that most often goes unheeded. On the occasion of a particularly violent quarrel, uncanny feelings overwhelm Wilson, who thinks he discovers in his rival’s appearance a startling and deeply interesting “something” that brings to mind “dim visions of my earliest infancy—wild, confused, and thronging memories of a time when memory itself was yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me, than by saying that I could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having been acquainted with the being who stood before me, at some epoch very long ago—some point of the past even infinitely remote.” The sensation fades, but the double remains. Later, at Oxford, the double exposes Wilson’s cheating at cards, forcing him to withdraw from the university in shame. Wilson travels to the Continent, where he leads a life of dissipation. But, as he cries, “I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation, and proved, indeed, that the exercise of its mysterious dominion had as yet only begun.” No matter where Wilson goes, the double finds him and thwarts his plans. “From his inscrutable tyranny did I at length flee, panic-stricken, as from a pestilence, and to the very ends of the earth I fled in vain.” Finally, at a masquerade ball the double appears wearing an identical costume, a black silk mask concealing his face. Wilson flies into an uncontrollable rage, thrusts the double against the wall, draws his sword, and plunges it repeatedly “through and through his bosom.” The double tears his mask away and, dying, confronts the murderer. To his utter horror, Wilson sees his own face as if in a mirror, though “pale and dabbled with blood.” As the double expires, he utters a fateful pronouncement: “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead—dead to the World, to heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist—and in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself.”31 It is not difficult to tease out the metaphorical drift of the tale. Wilson and his double are two halves of the same person, a mind divided, good self and bad in unending conflict. Wilson can no more flee his double than he can step out of his skin. The triumph of the bad self over the good—
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or desire over restraint—inevitably results in dissolution and death. The alter ego is the ego. As Kenneth Silverman notes, doubling is extensive in Poe’s tales. Many of his heroes and heroines are difficult to distinguish from each other and often have the physical and mental traits of Poe himself.32 Is the wraith in Flight and Pursuit the fugitive’s double? Long ago, James Thomas Flexner suggested that the two figures were “aspects of the same man,” the ghost a deadly alter ego.33 The wraith doubles and mirrors its quarry, its cant and stride precisely paralleling those of the fleeing desperado. The specter is nebulous, veiled, translucent; the fugitive sharply drawn, exposed, strained, and terrified. The ghost has a weapon poised and ready, the fugitive a dagger in his belt. The apparition is pale, the fugitive swarthy. We can almost imagine Rimmer’s fugitive crying out, like William Wilson, “I fled in vain. My evil destiny pursued me as if in exultation.” Freud might say that in Flight and Pursuit we witness the return of repressed events in “bizarre and disturbing forms.” The painting itself is the uncanny double of The Midnight Ride, which in turn references the Rimmer family’s bizarre legacy and the grip of fears that neither Rimmer nor his father was ever able to loose. Whether that legacy had any basis in fact is beside the point: to the Rimmers it was real. If the ghost is one kind of double, what of the enigmatic forked shadow that falls across the floor on the right? Without it, there would be little of the electrifying tension that triangulates fugitive, specter, and shadow. Indeed, the shadow is so significant in this suspended pictorial narrative that it reverses the conventions of left-to-right textual reading, demanding that we step into the picture on the right and join the pursuit with our eyes. The psychologist Charles A. Sarnoff sees Flight and Pursuit as an “exceptional painting” because it contains a “protagonist shadow.” “It is so amorphous,” he writes, “it can represent so many things. . . . Without the benefit of verbal modifiers or explanations, the appearance of a shadow in visual representations expresses something ominous and threatening.” What might that “something” be?34 The world of nineteenth-century fantasy, in fact, abounded in protagonist shadows, symbolizing death and all manner of evils. Two scenarios available to Rimmer offer particularly striking parallels to the topos of his picture: Adelbert von Chamisso’s popular moral fantasy The Wonderful Tale of Peter Schlemihl (first published in 1814) and George MacDonald ’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance (1858). Peter Schlemihl is the story of a man without a shadow. The hero sells it to a man in gray in exchange for a bottomless purse of gold. He soon discovers that without a shadow he is nobody, a freak: others shun him or try to do him harm. Later he discovers that the man in gray is the devil, who in exchange for the shadow demands that Schlemihl surrender his soul. Refusing to comply, Schlemihl hurls the purse into an abyss, and the devil vanishes. Forever shadowless and alone, Schlemihl wanders the world in a pair of seven-league boots, studying and measuring the earth.35
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George Cruikshank’s illustrations appeared in the 1823 English edition and again in an edition of 1867. One of them gives graphic life to an episode in which Schlemihl desperately attempts to catch a stray shadow. He is crossing a sandy plain when he hears a rustling noise and looks around; no one is there, but “in the sunny sand there glided past me a human shadow, not unlike my own, which wandering there alone seemed to have got away from its possessor.” Longing to claim the shadow as his own, Schlemihl launches himself after it, thinking that if he can only attach it to his feet it will stay. “The shadow, on my moving, fled before me, and I was compelled to begin a strenuous chase of the light fugitive. . . . It flew towards a wood, at a great distance, in which I must, of necessity, have lost it. I perceived this—a horror engulfed my heart, inflamed my desire, added wings to my speed. . . . I came continually nearer, I must certainly reach it.” Suddenly the shadow turns and faces him. Schlemihl tackles it, only to realize that he is grappling with an invisible body, which then materializes as the devil.36 Cruikshank’s “Pursuit of the Shadow” is an almost perfect inversion of Rimmer’s formula (Fig. 76). Instead of a bewildering Moorish palace, the setting is an alien wilderness. Schlemihl, a mirror image of Rimmer’s fugitive, runs from left to right, one foot on the ground, the other extended behind, one arm reaching out in front, and coattails flying. The shadow, a stick figure stretched along the path, flees toward the gloom at the edge of the pitch-black forest, just as Rimmer’s fugitive races pell-mell toward the dark haven of the sanctuary. Schlemihl is about to lunge at his quarry in a last attempt to hold it fast; the shadow in Flight and Pursuit is about to engulf the figure flying ahead. Cruikshank shows a man shadowing a shadow; Rimmer a shadow shadowing a man. Cruikshank’s drawing indicates graphically that man and shadow belong together. In the space between them is the story of an eerie and profoundly unsettling rupture. Schlemihl is a man split in two, desperately seeking to unite one part of himself with the other. The man in Rimmer’s painting is equally intent on outdistancing whatever darkness so swiftly narrows the gap that still divides them. But does he elude a part of himself, or some unknown entity? Another evil shadow plays a major role in George MacDonald’s Phantastes. MacDonald (1824–1905), a Scottish cleric, lecturer, and prolific writer of imaginative tales and novels, is not well known today, but in the nineteenth century, he was famous in the English-speaking world. His writing was warmly received in the United States, and when he visited the country in 1872, he enjoyed celebrity treatment in Boston and New York. For all his Calvinist heritage, MacDonald was intensely drawn to mysticism and magic. As one biographer reports, he read widely in the Kabbalah and pored over the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. He may even have attended Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture on Swedenborg, delivered in London in 1848.37 Rimmer and Emerson, in turn, intersected in Concord in the late 1840s, when Thomas Rimmer was confined there during his decline. Swedenborg, fountainhead of the American Transcendentalist doctrine of corre-
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figure 76. George Cruikshank, “The Pursuit of the Shadow,” published in Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, 1823. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.
spondences, was a major source of MacDonald’s unwavering belief in a parallel realm of spirits— demons and angels alike. Although it is impossible to determine whether Rimmer read Phantastes, MacDonald’s scene painting evokes Rimmer’s again and again. The new edition of the story appeared in 1871, placing it in chronological alignment with Flight and Pursuit. The 1867 drawing shows that initially Rimmer was thinking only of the running man. In 1872 ghost and shadow entered the picture. Phantastes is the tale of a young man’s adventures in fairyland. Essentially a quest romance, the story takes the protagonist, Anodos, through marvelous realms of the spirit in pursuit of a mysterious goal. He meets goblins, sprites, and ogresses. Traveling through an enchanted forest, he becomes anxious and fearful: something is following him. In the moonlight the shadow of a huge, knobby hand falls across the path, and then he sees what cast it, a strange, “vague, shadowy, almost transparent” figure with hideous features and devouring eyes. Terrified, Anodos springs to his feet and speeds “I knew not whither, only away from the spectre. I thought no longer of the
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path, and often narrowly escaped dashing myself against a tree, in my headlong flight of fear.” A benevolent tree spirit rescues him at the last possible moment. Later, deep in the woods, Anodos enters a low hut. Inside, a strange woman reads him a passage about the eternal power of darkness, which ever treads upon the steps of the light. Against her bidding, he opens a rude door in one corner and discovers what first appears to be a broom closet but soon reveals itself as a long, dark passage framing the night sky at the other end. Then the terrible thing happens: But, suddenly, as if it had been running from a far distance for this very point, and had turned the corner without abating its swiftness, a dark figure sped into and along the passage. . . . On and on it came, with a speedy approach but delayed arrival; till, at last, through the many gradations of approach, it seemed to come within the sphere of myself, rushed up to me, and passed me into the cottage. All I could tell of its appearance was, that it seemed to be a dark human figure. Its motion was entirely noiseless, and might be called a gliding, were it not that it appeared that of a runner, but with ghostly feet.
Having moved back to let the figure pass, Anodos finds that he cannot see it. He asks the woman where it is and she points to the floor behind him. “I looked round over my shoulder; and there, on the ground, lay a black shadow, the size of a man. It was so dark, that I could see it in the dim light of the lamp, which shone full upon it, apparently without thinning at all the intensity of its hue.” When Anodos demands to know what it is, the woman replies, “It is only your shadow that has found you. . . . Everybody’s shadow is ranging up and down looking for him . . . yours has found you.” From then on, the shadow is ever present, casting a pall over everything Anodos sees. It becomes his evil demon, “in my heart as well as at my heels.” After many more wanderings, Anodos reaches the intricate and ravishingly beautiful palace of fairyland. For a time the shadow fades, and he hopes for deliverance. Anodos spends dreamlike days and nights drifting “through one lighted arcade and corridor after another,” discovering a series of strange and splendid halls. He pursues the marble statue of a beautiful woman and brings it to life with a song. When he touches her, she darts away behind a pillar. Anodos follows “almost as fast,” but he is too late; his “white lady” has vanished through a heavy, nail-studded oaken door. Heedless of warnings, Anodos opens it and finds himself on a windy hill; the palace has disappeared. Searching in vain for the white lady, Anodos survives more perilous adventures. He kills three ogres and rescues their prisoners, then lives for a time at a grand royal court, in a constant round of festivity. But the shadow returns in all its blackness to haunt him, and he flees once more. On his way he encounters a powerful knight who imprisons him in a dreary tower deep in the woods.
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The shadow follows Anodos into the tower and lies “black upon the floor.” Day after dismal day, Anodos suffers alone with his evil demon. Finally, under a woman’s magic spell, he discovers that the door he has supposed impassable can be opened with ease. Humbled by his ordeal, he strips off his knightly armor and sets off again, feeling for the first time the “delight of being lowly.” “‘ I have failed,’ I said; ‘I have lost myself—would it had been my shadow.’” Anodos, looking around, discovers that the shadow is nowhere to be seen, and he realizes that “it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost.” The shadow had been his pride. Having lost that part of himself, Anodos comes to a momentous understanding. Another self has arisen “like a white spirit from a dead man, from the dumb and trampled self of the past. . . . Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? Or a clear morning after the rain?”38 In Rimmer’s mind, too, the shadow (in the abstract) connoted death, danger, revenge, and damnation. Somewhat incoherently, he wrote: “Alas! for adulterers and thieves, and murderers . . . who can fancy the shadows that follow them? things of another world on whom corruption hangs from their graves. Half on earth, ten fold in hell, whose only rest is in the passion that begets the blackest crimes!”39 Does some emissary from hell cast the shadow in Flight and Pursuit, or might it be another double, the dark side of the self? Like the fictional Anodos, Rimmer was a man in perpetual conflict with himself, the spiritual and the material at odds. He labored under the conviction that the deck was stacked against him and, indeed, he endured a life of poverty and disappointment, exacerbated by what Lincoln Kirstein labeled “Yankee bad luck.” His one important monumental commission, a granite figure of Alexander Hamilton (1865) for Boston’s new Commonwealth Avenue, met with an indifferent reception. The New York Tribune attacked his Cooper Union anatomy classes in 1868. His appointment as director of the school expired in 1870. Declining an offer to remain there in a subordinate position, he returned to Boston. Various business failures also beset him: a “scientific aquarium” that went bankrupt even before opening; a “dubious photo-sculpture concern” to which he lent his name.40 It is no wonder that Rimmer railed against the all-consuming nature that held dominion over a hard world “where the cold wind has no mercy, the storm no feeling; where all the elements do their will, and all the powers move at pleasure.” Men, himself included, were miserable mites, wretched vermin. He believed in the existence of a spirit world and immortality, he wrote, but “what good does that do us? Has this fact saved us any pain, clothed, fed, or cared for us, either now or in past days?” Yet it was his own inner nature that may have defeated him in the end. His early biographer Truman Bartlett reported that while Rimmer preserved an unshakable faith in
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“the government of the world by a divine Being,” that belief came only “after long years of severe struggle and examination. His knowledge and understanding of the constructive character of things were at times in violent antagonism with his imagination.” He was morbidly sensitive, and so touchy that, according to one account, he had the habit of “tearing up a sketch, or knocking to pieces a clay model” if severely criticized. An unsympathetic acquaintance recalled the impression Rimmer made on others: “He was stubborn and unmanageable. In spite of the unartistic condition of things about him, he was his own worst enemy. He expected princes and kings to come to him. . . . The slightest thing put him out. He could have no relation with anybody. Poverty and neglect not only depressed him, but stopped his art. Even when he had a chance, he failed to do his best” (italics added).41 Rimmer’s philosophical narrative, “Stephen and Phillip,” is an allegory of that self, doubled and divided. He worked on it sporadically from about the time of his father’s death until the end of his own life more than two decades later and spent the last days of his life rereading it.42 Stephen and Phillip are two angels, one symbolizing the light and the other the dark side of the soul. In conflict at first, they ultimately achieve reconciliation, unlike William Wilson and his double. Rimmer used the two characters to explore themes of contrast between sanity and madness, good and evil, spirit and flesh. In Weidman’s view, this was Rimmer’s device for coping with his father’s strange life, horrible death, and haunting legacy.43 It is just as likely that “Stephen and Phillip” was, in addition, an extended metaphorical narrative of the artist’s struggles, both within himself and with the hostile forces he perceived all around him. Rimmer’s father had died a human ruin, brought down by delusion and dementia. Surely fear of succumbing to the same ills shadowed the son, who dreaded that he may have inherited that taint along with his royal blood. Stephen and Phillip ultimately merged into one balanced whole, and perhaps Rimmer, too, at last learned how to make peace with “his own worst enemy.” Even near the end of “Stephen and Phillip,” however, he seems to insist that human nature can only ever be all animal or all soul: those who “follow the flesh and live in its gratification” are beasts; those who “master the body and believe in the soul and the conscience are men, be they high or low.”44 Life was thus an unending war of one against the other. Such themes are embodied in the later works: gladiators in combat; centaurs in their death throes; ferocious battle scenes; and the monumental drawing Evening (The Fall of Day), in which a colossal nude angel plummets like Icarus into the sea, his drooping wings unable to lift him above the earthly realm (Fig. 77).45 Viewed as an allegory of the internally divided self, Flight and Pursuit comes into sharper focus. A “William Wilson” transposed to a Moorish fantasyland, it might connote the weak, degraded animal self ever shadowed by its spiritual counterpart, so like yet so unlike. Wilson flies in vain to the very ends of the earth; his double—his better, higher self—will never let him go. In
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figure 77. William Rimmer, Evening (The Fall of Day), 1869–70. Crayon, oil, and graphite on canvas, 40 × 50". Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Everett Fund and William Sturgis Bigelow Collection, Mrs. J. M. Forbes and E. W. Hooper, 81.110. © 2002 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Rimmer’s picture, too, the flight and pursuit are never ending. Whether one or the other will triumph or the two in the end will become one (or annihilate each other) is left unresolved. Rimmer’s obsessions dovetail with MacDonald’s fantasy as well. Anodos and his shadow could be twins to Stephen and Phillip, Rimmer’s light and dark angels of the soul. Anodos does not really lose his shadow; like a butterfly, it undergoes metamorphosis and rebirth into a higher, better state. Stephen and Phillip—two in one—in the same way share an unbreakable bond. The infinitely receding Moorish arches and corridors in Flight and Pursuit could with little stretch of the imagination fit within the fairy palace where Anodos endlessly wanders. And certainly the mysterious shadow, always on the fugitive’s heels, could be the double of Anodos’s shadow, relentlessly following and lying “black upon the floor.” Characteristically, MacDonald’s symbolism has a “multiplicity of
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meanings.”46 Here, too, the congruence with Rimmer is suggestive. This is not to say that Rimmer’s painting illustrates MacDonald’s tale any more than it replicates (and reverses) Cruikshank’s illustration of Peter Schlemihl chasing after his shadow. Rather, those resources could have prompted and amplified Rimmer’s own flights of fancy. Flight and Pursuit ultimately may not be an allegory of anything we can ever know. In it, dark traces of recent national history intertwine with the subjectivity of an artist perpetually on the edge, threatened both by external circumstance and by his own dark side, his inner demons ever ready to seize control. At the outset I suggested that, figuratively speaking, Flight and Pursuit is like two fused layers of translucent, tinted glass, each subtly impinging on the color of the other. Other metaphors occur to me now. The elusive meanings of Flight and Pursuit are like the layers of rubble and silt that obliterate ruined cities, over which in later centuries other buildings, other cities, rise as if on virgin ground. Those layers, when excavated, tell of different times in the selfsame place, like the Roman streets and buildings deep under modern London. The ruin at the very bottom of Flight and Pursuit is Rimmer’s father, haunted and driven mad by the Dauphin legacy. The traumas of recent history constitute the top layer, with its veiled allusions to the shadow of slavery, the Lincoln assassination, the slave hunt. The layers between are those of Rimmer himself, haunted and split into a light side and a shadow side, tirelessly at war with each other. There is not one ghost in this painting but many. And, like Quidor’s Headless Horseman, Rimmer’s mysterious painting hints that neither nation nor individual can hope to outrun relentless fate.
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6
MENTAL MONSTERS
ince it first appeared in public in 1864, Elihu Vedder’s Lair of the Sea Serpent has been a mys-
S
tery (see Plate 11). A deceptively simple painting, long and low in format, it shows us a tender
blue sky and an azure sea, waves rolling gently toward the shore. In the foreground are a few stunted shrubs. Dunes covered with dry brown grass undulate back to a narrow spit that stretches out into the ocean. The beach is completely ordinary except for the immense serpent looped and coiled in its sandy mounds and hollows. Its head resting on the foremost dune, it seems to look out to sea but at the same time fixes on us one black, lidless eye. As many have noted, the startling effect depends on a wrenching discrepancy of scale. A serpent so huge seems like a creature from some other world of infinitely vast dimensions. Yet there it sprawls on this unremarkable, entirely mundane strip of sand and scrub. Lair of the Sea Serpent was among a small group of bizarre and visionary paintings that Vedder (1836–1923) executed in New York City during the Civil War. He had spent three years abroad, first in Paris and then in Florence, producing mostly down-to-earth studies of ancient Italian towns and the countryside around them. In New York he made an abrupt and radical departure, into the mysterious and sometimes dangerous territory of his own mental universe. Traumatic early memories fueled this journey, but the vehicle—a magic carpet of sorts—was of more recent vintage. Lair of the Sea Serpent is our port of entry into the strange world of Vedder’s inner wanderings.
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The painting incorporates nearly all of Vedder’s obsessions in a distinctive visual and symbolic language. Beaches, for example, he associated from an early age with waste, destruction, and death. That association spilled over into a predilection for desolate desert places. Disruptions of proportion and scale mark the realm of vision, nightmare, and dream where Vedder staked his claim. The brooding serpent, finally, signals the artist’s fascination with monsters and monstrosity, often linked specifically with horrific and sometimes serpentine visions of feminine evil. In his midseventies, the recently widowed Vedder published his chatty memoirs, The Digressions of V. Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends. Voluble and meandering, the narrator presents himself as a droll, sociable bon vivant with an inexhaustible stockpile of anecdotes. Scattered through the text are reproductions of fantastic and mundane subjects from Vedder’s brush. Like the sea serpent on the beach, these mystical and visionary figures are at loggerheads with the image of “V,” the clubman with his cigar and brandy, enthroned in a leather armchair and spinning yarns. In Digressions Vedder told even the grimmest tales with a light touch, rendering pain and horror as little more than picturesque effects. Although his loosely strung stories, the highly colored reminiscences of a very old man, can hardly be taken as biographical gospel, they suggest that youthful encounters with death, mania, and mysticism marked him deeply and for life.1 Vedder, the younger of two surviving sons, was born in New York City. The family moved from house to house until 1842, when his father, a dentist, decided to improve his fortunes on the island of Cuba. He stayed there for ten years, his wife and children joining him for extended periods. Young Elihu also spent time up north with his grandparents in Schenectady and Brooklyn. In 1852 his father returned to the States and rejoined his wife and children in a new house in Brooklyn, but the family’s happiness was cut short by the sudden illness and death of Vedder’s mother. The family broke up, and Vedder went to live with friends before moving to Shelbourne, New York, to study with the painter Tomkins Matteson. He visited his father again in Cuba, to recuperate first from pneumonia and later from an accidental gunshot wound. After persuading his father to subsidize a voyage for further study in Europe, the young artist set sail for Paris in the summer of 1856, copying plaster casts in the Atelier Picot for several months. He traveled on to Italy and made Florence his base of operations until the end of 1860, when Vedder senior called him home. Death often hovers like a shadow over Vedder’s recollections of these early years. His very first memory is of an early brush with fatality: he tumbled from the back of his new rocking horse and knocked himself senseless on the mahogany arm of a sofa. “In a few days,” he goes on, “I was to see a completed specimen of [death’s] work.” A “dear old fellow” was rooming in the attic. “I was sent up to call him to breakfast. I found him crouched on the floor, his head leaning against the wall. He had a comb in his right hand. I thought him asleep, his face was so peaceful; I tried to
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awaken him, but could not. He was dead.” Vedder claimed that the face of the dead alchemist in his painting of that name (1868; Brooklyn Museum of Art) faithfully reproduced that of the stricken lodger. Later, death came close again when Vedder mistook a bottle of nitric acid for root beer. One sip set his mouth on fire, and “where I threw down the bottle and the contents had run out, the floor was burned black.” A quick-thinking doctor managed to save him.2 At times Vedder’s memories conjure a picture of his childhood as a long-running Halloween. In Schenectady an old family graveyard had to be relocated, and someone took little V. to the new site. He recalled going some distance out of town on a cold, gloomy day and climbing a bleak hillside with a view of snow-covered flats fading into the distance. “At our feet, on the frozen ground, was a broken and decayed coffin with the lid gone, and in it a tall skeleton to which clung bits of shroud that fluttered in the chilly wind,—and this was, or had been, my Uncle Uri. A strange meeting, indeed.” Another uncle, by marriage, was an Englishman who suddenly began to buy up “all the iron he could find in the junk-shops, with the intention of turning it into gold. But finally, becoming violent, he had to be sent to the Asylum for the Insane,” where he remained, an incurable madman. The deep gloom that followed the death of Vedder’s mother never entirely dissipated. “I never lose my sorrows,” wrote Vedder, “but fold them up and put them away under lock and key; but they are there all the same, and there I leave them while good, old-fashioned, and somewhat heartless life goes on.”3 The most horrific confrontations with mortality occurred when the family took up residence in Cuba, the exotic and troubling converse of New York. Like an enraptured tourist, Vedder described the white beaches, the sea breezes, the coconut palms, the flamingos and alligators, the “strange fruits” never seen in the North, and the slave children, “little black things with bright eyes and skins smooth as satin.” Even here, though, “our old friend Trouble” lurked “under the shade of the sombrero.” A favorite walk took Elihu and his brother along the Playa de los Judios (Beach of the Jews), strewn with beautiful shells and stranded jellyfish. But it was also the place where the unbaptized were “thrown out. The buzzards loved the spot. . . . You see what burial Christians gave those who were not. Of course Christian meant Catholic in Cuba. There had been the usual yellow fever or cholera, and there you would see the half-burned bedding; or, on lifting rude boards, in the hollow beneath, the entire skeleton—quite clean, for your industrious ant and old uncle buzzard are famous for preserving skeletons.” This ghastly beach littered with “gruesome half-burned rags” was the deepest layer in the palimpsest of random imaginings and recollections that Vedder fused afterward in The Plague in Florence (ca. 1867; private collection) and other extravagantly morbid paintings.4 During later visits to Cuba Vedder saw even deeper into the shadows of this dazzling tropical world. His own father kept a handful of slaves and on one occasion told Elihu about the brutal
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suppression of a supposed insurrection. “When you heard a volley of musketry from over the river, you knew that a line of poor wretches fell and were hurried into a long trench and covered up, alive or dead; and the sound of the whip was so incessant that my father had to close all the doors and windows to keep it out.” One night he went fishing near the island of Mono Grande. The beach there was strewn with broken conch shells and studded with black crosses marking the place where “the consumptives of Cardenas mouldered away.” The water was tranquil, shimmering, and so clear that Vedder was able to look down “and see on the bottom the blackened ribs of the burnt slaving schooners, burnt after landing their wretched cargoes.”5 On the same excursion he witnessed “a vision of sudden death which I have never forgotten.” Wading waist deep, he saw on the bottom some unnamed creature, “a vigorous mass of vitality, of a rich velvet brown, and . . . large eyes.” He called the padron, who tore the animal from the rocks. It laced its tentacles around the arm of the old fisherman, who, unconcerned, “brought it to his mouth and gave it a quick, sharp bite. At once over this rich brown thing, spreading to the end of its arms, passed an ashy pallor; the arms fell limply off, and he threw the dead thing into the basket at his back.” For Vedder, death was ever present in life, especially where land meets sea. Perhaps for that reason the uncanny realms of vision and dream were at least as real to him as the material world.6 For Vedder and many in his family, there were realities beyond the physical and phenomena that science could not explain. They believed in omens and portents. Vedder recounted the night his grandfather died: “He saw that the clock was wound up; he wound up his watch and said he would die about three o’clock in the morning, and I believe he would have been very much put out had he not died at that hour.” An encounter with a fortune-teller also burned itself into Vedder’s memory. His mother, painfully anxious about her husband in Cuba, consulted the fortuneteller, who assured her that things would come out all right and advised her to take her boys and join him there. “But this was not all,” Vedder went on. “The Fortune-Teller told her that there seemed to be no reason why she should not live to a good old age, except that in a certain year all was very dark; could she get through that year alive, she would live a long time. She gave the year, and in that year my mother died.”7 Vedder thought that an aunt on his father’s side who claimed to experience heavenly visions “resembled perfectly” one of Michelangelo’s Fates. “I have never lost the impression made on me when she related with deep emotion her last Vision,” Vedder recounted. “She no more doubted the truth of these visions than I doubted the fact of my existence.” The visions always came just before dawn. In one, as she told her nephew, “‘I was standing in a barn with wonderful beams, and up in the beams it was full of beautiful little angels all singing softly and playing on curious instruments, and they made the sweetest music I ever heard.’” A beautiful angel came and asked
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her to name her heart’s desire, which was to look on the face of her Savior. “‘Slowly a great light grew about me and I knew some one stood before me, and I knew it was the Lord, and I covered my face and did not look.’” Overwhelmed by a sense of unworthiness, she hid her eyes until “‘the light went away and has never come back again.’”8 Although he expressed wonder at his aunt’s unquestioning faith, Vedder believed strongly in his own dreams. He acknowledged that bodily discomfort could affect a dream, but to him it was always more than the product of mere aches or pains. He dreamed once of finding himself in “a kind of cell or tomb, under a mountain of granite which must have been at least five miles high. . . . And the roof was descending, I could feel it within a few inches of my face. ‘I am lost! What can I do?—Fool! There is only one way to save yourself!’ And with all the strength of my being I made a last desperate effort and burst through one seeming awakening after another, until I awoke and was saved. Had I not made that last great effort, I believe I should have been found dead in my bed.” So powerful an impression did the nightmare make that material reality suddenly seemed vaporous: “I am constantly meeting men and women who come and go and are more vague to me than that dream. Thinner than dreams—quite insubstantial—the mere stuffing of life—saw-dust.”9 Vedder, who in most day-to-day affairs probably had no doubt about what was real and what was not, bears witness in that statement to the existence of a viable, alternative universe where the mind could travel freely. What he said about his life in Florence in the late 1850s applies neatly to his existential situation. He had lived in “full Bohemia” in Paris, whereas Florence “was full of opportunities for quitting it.” Instead of opting for a more regular life, however, he reported that he “lived in a sort of Limbo, or borderland. . . . I went on tampering with both sides.” He also inhabited the border between the land of dream vision and the world of concrete, physical life. Depending on his position at the time, he could see either region as ghostly and insubstantial.10 Vedder later described his border crossings and the strategies that kept him from losing his way. He denied being a mystic, although he had read and thought a great deal on mystical matters. “And so it comes,” he stated, “that I take short flights or wade out into the sea of mystery which surrounds us, but soon getting beyond my depth return, I must confess with a sense of relief, to the solid ground of common sense; and yet it delights me to tamper and potter with the unknowable, and I have a strong tendency to see in things more than meets the eye.” It was a great deal more, since Vedder (like his old aunt) claimed to “conjure up visions” with ease. “This faculty if cultivated would soon enable me to see as realities most delightful things, but the reaction would be beyond my control and would inevitably follow and be sure to create images of horror indescribable. A few experiences have shown me that that way madness lies; and so, while I have rendered my heaven somewhat tame, at least my Hell remains quite endurable.”11
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So far I have tracked Vedder’s own construction of himself, repeating his dreams and memories as given. I have even allowed his claim to authentic if cautious visionary experience. What sense can we make of that claim, and of the connections between his dream world and his art? Do his “visions,” lived and painted, address the world beyond his own life and subjectivity, or are they merely arabesque figments of his imagination? In them, does he gather up social and cultural threads, weaving them into new extravaganzas of weirdness? And if so, can we find these threads in the finished weave? Vedder’s Digressions tantalizingly hints at answers, especially in recounting the New York years that followed his blissful time in the “Eden” of Italy. The young painter had sailed first to Cuba and then to New York via Richmond, Virginia. The very day of his arrival in Manhattan, he noted, the “first gun was fired on Fort Sumter.” Rootless, insecure, very poor, and in debt for Florentine expenses, Vedder found life in the big city harrowing and difficult. He drew some cartoons for the satirical weekly Vanity Fair and designed some comic valentines for another publisher. His childhood friend Ben Day helped him secure a room at 48 Beekman Street, an old colonial mansion where Ben’s father had offices. That room, equipped with the barest necessities, afforded a view of “plain brick walls and iron shutters.” Vedder earned a great deal of money at times and “sometimes next to nothing.”12 Depressed, the young painter contemplated suicide and spent his nights alternately in ecstasy and in torment. “The ancients said that each man was accompanied by his demon, or familiar spirit, who might be good or bad. On the floor, huddling in my single blanket, I too had dreams, of angels and devils, and that mattress became by turns a throne or a rack, according, I suppose, to the day’s affairs or the day’s fare. It was there I conceived ‘The Fisherman and the Genii,’ ‘The Roc’s Egg,’ ‘The Questioner of the Sphinx,’ ‘The Lost Mind,’ ‘The Lair of the Sea Serpent,’ etc.— but I lacked the means; I could not carry out the ideas.” His father’s second wife proved a fairy godmother. After Vedder had been in New York for about six months, she traveled north, found him lodgings a bit farther uptown, at Broadway and Bond Street, and gave him money for materials. He eventually painted and exhibited most of his dream subjects in a span of about two years, from 1863 to 1865.13 Fisherman and the Genie hints at visionary experience in teasingly elliptical language (see Plate 12). In this small panel painting based on the tale in The Arabian Nights, the fisherman has hauled in his nets to discover ensnared therein a heavy copper vase, sealed with lead. When the fisherman opens it, dense clouds of smoke pour forth, spreading over the shore and producing a thick mist from which a huge genie appears. The genie announces that he has vowed to kill the one who releases him and commands the terrified fisherman to choose the manner in which he wishes to die.
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Much more business ensues, but Vedder chose to picture the stupefying moment when the fisherman sees the apparition forming in the black billows that gush up from the mouth of the vase.14 In an early sketch Vedder (who had read the Arabian Nights in boyhood) adopted a vertical format to dramatize the genie’s magnitude (Fig. 78). Here the monster, with vast wings and fierce claws, towers above the tiny, cringing fisherman, its hair streaming upward from a leonine mask. For the painting, the artist decided on the horizontal, to emphasize the genie’s head with its flamelike hair and red-rimmed, glaring eyes. As the apparition materializes over the dunes, the fisherman looks up in awe. Head thrown back, he sits paralyzed on the nets that brought this terrible thing ashore. Nearby crouches an outsized crab; on the right, conch shells and seaweed litter the sand. Behind the fisherman stands a cluster of beach cypress trees, their writhing trunks and branches miming agitation and terror. Beyond, the sea is a deep emerald green under sullen clouds. No mere fantasy, the painting alludes in coded language to the recreational drug use that pervaded Vedder’s bohemian milieu in the early 1860s. When Vedder returned to New York, he gathered about him a small group of kindred spirits, impecunious artist bachelors whom he dubbed “the Boys.” They included his old friend Ben Day and William Hennessey, DeWitt C. Hitchcock, and Sol Eytinge.15 These five visited each other, drank and caroused together, and engaged in pranks and horseplay of all kinds. When visiting at 48 Beekman Street, they would dispose themselves “on the chairs, the table, the trunk” or stretch themselves “luxuriously on the mattress.” They introduced Vedder to their favorite resort for fun, Pfaff’s Restaurant on Broadway near Bleecker Street, a twenty-minute walk from Beekman. When Vedder moved to Broadway and Bond, the restaurant was just around the corner. As Vedder noted, he “became for a time one of the Pfaff crowd of Bohemians, as they were called.” Run by the German immigrant Charles Pfaff, the restaurant (sometimes described as more of a saloon) was the center of a disaffected group of writers, including for a time Walt Whitman and the free-spirited stage performers Ada Clare and Adah Mencken. This “bohemian” circle came together so regularly in Pfaff’s beer cellar, beginning about 1857, that Pfaff installed a long table for them in a low-ceilinged chamber directly under the sidewalks of Broadway. Their inspiration was the bohemian Paris of Henri Murger, author of Scènes de la vie de bohème (1847–49), and their idol was Edgar Allan Poe, both as writer and as perceived outcast from conventional society. The author Henry Clapp launched the antiestablishment weekly Saturday Press there, and the place was also the original social center of the group that made significant contributions to Vanity Fair: George Arnold, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Fitz-James O’Brien, and Fitz Hugh Ludlow. Vedder personally knew Aldrich and Arnold (another one of the Boys) and probably had some contact with the others. The Civil War spelled the end of this café society: some died young and others reentered middle-class life. In the early sixties, however, its bohemian glamour still cast a spell.16
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figure 78. Elihu Vedder, Sketch for Fisherman and the Genie, ca. 1863. Pencil on paperboard, 8 × 99⁄16" (sheet size). Collection of Harold O. Love Family.
It is a matter of record that Ludlow (1836–70) experimented extensively with hashish. That was the subject of his sensational confessional The Hasheesh Eater (1857), which by 1862 had run through four editions. The popular poet and travel writer Bayard Taylor (1825–78), another Pfaff’s habitué, discovered hashish during his journeys in the Near East at midcentury. Fitz-James O’Brien (1828–62), a once wealthy young Irishman who squandered his fortune and lived with bohemian abandon, knew something about opium. Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1836–1907) tried hashish but found it frightening and never developed a habit. These writers describe similar drug-induced effects of oriental imagery, dramatic flights through vastly expanded dimensions of space and time, and out-of-body experiences. Also symptomatic was a rhythmic cycling between the poles of intense rapture and abject terror, between visions of heavenly bliss and hellish misery. In many respects, such accounts tally with Vedder’s descriptions of his own “visions.” Those correspondences produce a body of evidence that, if circumstantial, remains persuasive.17 Ludlow claimed that Taylor’s vivid writing on hashish ignited his curiosity to try the drug himself. Taylor’s story “The Hasheesh Eater” (1856) later strengthened Ludlow’s resolve to quit.18 Taylor offered this chronicle as a warning against the siren song of the drug, yet his descriptions dramatize its allure. Presented as fiction, the tale has the ring of fact. The narrative offers a nearly complete inventory of the images, sensations, and terrors consistently associated with hashish in the literature. A cluster of conventional orientalist tropes in the very first paragraph set the stage. The narrator tells us that he took his first dose of this “wizard of plants” in Damascus. “It was among shadowy gardens, filled with oriental loungers, and in Saracenic houses, gay as kaleidoscopes with gilding and bright tintings, that I made myself the slave of the hasheesh.” Here he fabricated “that palace of alternating pleasure and torture which was for years my abiding place. In this palace I sometimes reveled with a joy so immense that I may well call it multitudinous; or I ran and shrieked through its changeful spaces with an agony which the pen of a demon could not describe suitably; surrounded, chased, overclouded by all the phantasms of mythology or the Arabian Nights; by every strange, ludicrous, or horrible shape that ever stole into my fancy, from books of romance or tales of spectredom.” He indulges in the “weed of insanity” for several years, sinking bit by bit into a stupor. At last the onset of an intense and prolonged fever enables him to resolve that he will “fling the habit aside forever.” Clean and sober, he embarks for his Connecticut home, only to discover that the drug visions continue to plague him in the form of terrible dreams and painful reveries “almost as vivid, and as difficult to break as dreams. . . . I was . . . haunted by sultans, Moors, elephants, afreets [genies], rocs, and other monstrosities of the Arabian nights.” The homeward journey itself becomes the stuff of dreams, and the narrator begins to “journey in spirit, night after night,” without rest or goal.
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His ultimate hashish experience takes place back in America in the house of an old friend. By chance a shipment of goods from Smyrna arrives, among them a small wooden box containing a mass of that “terrible hasheesh.” The narrator yields once more to temptation and in a short time feels “the sudden nervous thrill, followed by the whirl and apparent prodigious enlargement of the brain. My head expanded wider and wider, revolving with inconceivable rapidity, and enlarging in space with every revolution. . . . I spun away into its great vortex, and wandered about its expanses as about a universe. I lost all perception of time and space, and knew no distinction between the realities around me, and the phantasmata which sprung in endless succession from my brain.” In his “drugged insanity” he imagines that he has plunged a knife into the throat and heart of his beloved. The rest of the trip is a steadily worsening nightmare of degradation and despair. On returning to his senses, he resolves never again to succumb to the influence of the “hasheesh demon.”19 Only three months later, in the same magazine, Ludlow published “The Apocalypse of Hasheesh,” nominally a response to Taylor’s story but featuring the identical blend of extravagant visionary rapture and anguish. The full-length Hasheesh Eater, written as a therapeutic exercise during Ludlow’s withdrawal, played elaborate variations on the same themes. The topography of Ludlow’s drug landscape is varied, but oriental motifs recur frequently. “It is not one of the least singular facts of hasheesh that its fantasia almost invariably takes an Oriental form,” he noted. “A delicious sky, a luxuriant vegetation, and scenery like that of the Bosphorus and Damascus are eminently calculated for fascination to dreams and poesy, but then hasheesh comes bearing an unutterably grander and richer gratification of the same music and odor haunted sense.” Ludlow in one vision wanders in oriental gardens, dancing among fountains with houris, pelting exotic birds with figs, quaffing sherbet and wine, and finally slumbering beneath “citron shadows.”20 Ludlow, like Taylor, experiences a sense of boundless expansion in time and space. He soars into stratospheric realms of ecstasy, his soul parting company with his body. On a summer afternoon, in “the full possession of hasheesh delirium,” he realizes “the infinity of space. Vistas no longer converged, sight met no barrier; the world was horizonless. . . . Joy itself became terrific, for it seemed the ecstasy of a soul stretching its cords and waiting in intense silence to hear them snap and free it from the enthrallment of the body. . . . I thrilled upward . . . on visionless wings.” Rising to the “very cope of heaven,” he beholds the spheres revolving below and suddenly understands the harmonies of the universe.21 But for every ravishing dream there is some excruciating vision of hell. Once Ludlow imagines that he awakens in his own bedchamber only to behold a putrid, grimacing corpse on a bier in the middle of the room. Demons emerge from the sulfurous twilight and sing him infernal lullabies. One of the fiends thrusts a white-hot pitchfork into his side. Over and over again, Ludlow finds
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himself in the grips of the “insanity” brought on by a powerful intoxicant. In the end, his personality in fragments, he fears that he is truly going mad.22 Whether the mental travelers generated their visions spontaneously or saw and felt what they expected and desired is an open question. But the language of their accounts seems to have been quite specific to the drug experience. Opium was also freighted with such orientalist associations and trappings, though with somewhat different effects. In one of his ghost stories, Fitz-James O’Brien describes two opium smokers who regularly indulge together. On most occasions these men can channel their visions with positive thoughts, resulting in images “dyed with the splendors of an Arabian fairy-land,” gay bazaars, harems, and golden palaces. But on this evening a “strange perversity” dominates, and their thoughts flow into lonesome realms of shadowy gloom.23 Finally, O’Brien’s close friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich—whose flirtation with bohemian life was brief—published a poem on the highs and lows of hashish. The speaker, “stricken with dreams,” wanders through the night and sees a great palace rise before him: Great Sapphire-studded portals suddenly Opened on vast Ionic galleries Of gold and porphyry, and I could see, Through half-drawn curtains that let in the day, Dim tropic Gardens stretching far away.
A flight of crystal stairs beckons. Just then, terror seizes him, and he shrieks for deliverance. As he labors up the staircase, a dark hole opens up below. Out of it crawl “Fanged, warty monsters, with their lips and eyes / Hung with slim leeches sucking hungrily.” So terrible is this vision that the speaker renounces the vile drug, this “Honey of Paradise, black dew of Hell!” The verses seem just a bit tongue-in-cheek, especially the vision of warty monsters. Given that Aldrich expunged this poem from later collected editions of his work, however, it is tempting to think that he had something to hide. As a respectable elder man of letters, he perhaps felt it behooved him to cover up the misadventures of his bohemian youth.24 In relation to the hashish narratives of Taylor, Ludlow, and the rest, Vedder’s accounts of his “dreams” on the thin mattress in his Beekman Street room take on a different cast. Like the others, Vedder talked of angels and demons, his bed becoming a throne or a rack depending on the nature of his visions. All the subjects he claimed to have conceived could easily be drug induced: the genie or afreet emerging from a bottle, the roc’s egg (also the subject of a tale in the Arabian Nights), the monstrous serpent, the Egyptian desert and the mysterious Sphinx, the lost mind. Indeed, the page on which Vedder sketched ideas for Fisherman and the Genie contains a thumbnail
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sketch of the sea serpent as well as a demonic head adorned with a nimbus and a long twisted beard. Could this be the visual diary of a hallucinatory adventure? Even before Pfaff’s, Vedder probably knew about hashish and had access to it. Physicians in nineteenth-century America prescribed marijuana, or Cannabis indica, for a number of conditions ranging from rheumatism to mental depression. From 1850, the United States Pharmacopeia listed Extractum Cannabis, cannabis extract, as a legitimate medicine and apothecaries routinely stocked it among their pharmaceutical supplies.25 Ludlow, at age sixteen, first discovered hashish through his acquaintance with a pharmacist in Poughkeepsie, New York. Accustomed to lounging with his druggist friend, Ludlow had already experimented with the effects of chloroform, ether, and a range of opiates, all then available in various forms without prescription.26 One morning the apothecary pointed out his new stock of medical extracts, among them a vial of Cannabis indica. At first opportunity, young Ludlow began to experiment with doses until he found just the right quantity.27 Vedder’s father, as a dentist, probably kept cannabis extract on hand in addition to chloroform or other opiates. Nineteenth-century dentists knew that cannabis was an effective topical anesthetic, especially for the mucous membranes of the mouth and tongue. Vedder, moreover, had his own apothecary friend, a Cuban in the little town of Guanahai, where Vedder senior sent his son to recuperate after a bout of poor health up north. Guanahai, in Vedder’s account, was an easygoing place, where the young artist could wear a sombrero, spurs, and a handkerchief knotted around his waist. “And the day consisted of a visit to a coffee or sugar plantation, and the evening of sitting with chair tipped against the wall of the apothecary his shop.”28 What, if anything, is Vedder telling us? The dreams and nightmares on Beekman Street, the sea of mysticism, the fears of madness, and the out-of-body transports all form a vivid picture of a man who had experience with psychedelic drugs. It may have been only a brief interval in his youth, most probably those two years of his confused and disordered bohemian existence in New York. I do not discount the force of his own imagination or other founts of inspiration. But if we follow this track a little farther, what more will it reveal? The genie or afreet in Vedder’s painting may be the key. As noted, Bayard Taylor reported horrific flashback visions of afreets and other Arabian Nights monstrosities. Ludlow also used the image of the afreet over and over as signifier of hashish and its powers. In the 1856 Putnam’s essay, he alluded to his many wrestling bouts with “the hasheesh-afreet.” The figure recurred in The Hasheesh Eater, where the “hasheesh genie” seized him by the hand and whirled him off on extraordinary inner excursions. But that same figure also symbolized the dangers of losing control: “When the Afreet who was of old your servant becomes your lord, he is as deaf to petitions as you were avaricious in your demand for splendors.” Even renunciation was fraught with peril. As the tormented
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mind struggled to find its way back to sanity, “a phalanx of monstrous Afreets with drawn swords of flame” stood, menacing, on both sides of the road. The opium smokers in Fitz-James O’Brien’s tale also confronted these monsters. As they struggled to focus their thoughts on exotic eastern fairylands, “Black afreets continually arose from the depths of our talk, and expanded, like the one the fisherman released from the copper vessel, until they blotted everything bright from our vision.”29 Is the genie/afreet in Vedder’s painting only a fairy-tale fantasy, or is it emblematic of the exhilarating and perilous psychic voyages of the hashish eater? The apparition’s enormous size and foreboding, red-rimmed glare suggest that danger lies ahead. Even though the fisherman, at the end of the story, outwits the genie and bottles him up again, it is not at all certain in this scene that the hero will gain control. Small and defenseless, alone on the beach, he seems woefully ill equipped to resist the powers of his looming adversary. Like Lair of the Sea Serpent, this is a painting of a borderland, a narrow, tenuous strip between the mundane here and now and the marvelous reach of Vedder’s inner space. One foot in his dreamworld and the other in the everyday, he belonged in both, or neither. Vedder’s New York paintings testify eloquently to his state of mind. Insecure, anxious, and rootless, he lived in physical and mental disarray. Although the old raconteur of the Digressions drops only a few oblique hints, there was a moment of crisis when he hit bottom during the grim days at 48 Beekman Street. “It was in this bare room,” he writes, “that I made my great prayer—the last. I only asked for guidance, not for anything else, and it was an honest prayer. The only answer was—the brick walls and shutters.” Vedder does not tell us why he prayed, or what kind of guidance he craved, but clearly he suffered a collapse of whatever faith he had. His mother had been a Universalist, Vedder revealed, and had taken him to chapel in Schenectady, where other “good Christians” took delight in persecuting the congregation by throwing stones at the windows. In Cuba he had found the ritual and trappings of Catholicism seductive, and in Italy he lived, immersed, in a deeply Catholic culture. During his New York years he even produced a handful of paintings on visionary Christian themes that posited a union of the spirit realm with that of the living, and in later life he ranged freely among world religions looking for wisdom and inspiration. Religion ultimately failed him, however. Whether drugged or not, he undertook his mental odysseys in a quest for meaning beyond what the physical eye could see. The old spiritual universe was dead: was there another that could take its place?30 Vedder’s Questioner of the Sphinx is, as Leigh Schmidt has suggested, a “dreamscape of that loss” of religion and religious vision (Fig. 79).31 In this painting it is night in the Egyptian desert. A blue-black band of sky overhangs a barren expanse of eerily illuminated sand, from which rises
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figure 79. Elihu Vedder, The Questioner of the Sphinx, 1863. Oil on canvas, 36 × 42". Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer, 06.2430. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2001 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved.
the colossal head of the Sphinx, timeworn yet monumentally imposing. The figure of a swarthy desert wanderer crouches before the huge head. He has laid down his staff and bends his ear to the stony lips. Hand to chin, he has the air of an intent listener. We do not know what he has asked, and the Sphinx, of course, keeps her silence. A skull in the right-hand corner testifies to the futility of seeking any answers in such a place. In the middle distance lie ancient, toppled columns, drifted over with sand. Schmidt, looking at Vedder’s painting against the backdrop of rationalism’s triumph over religious belief systems, argues that like many of the artist’s works, it ponders the Enlightenment’s demystification of the supernatural. Rational skepticism had silenced once magical voices: those of saints, prophets, oracles—all extinguished and made dumb. Vedder’s “orientalist imaginings of desolation,” writes Schmidt, “allowed [him] to (melo)dramatize his own prison house interiors of lost Christian faith.” Like the fervent prayer that yielded only the blankness of brick walls and shutters, the wanderer’s question in this desolate dreamscape evokes only “fatalistic silence.”32 The Questioner of the Sphinx also gathers up other strands of Vedder’s experience. A way station on his visionary journey, this painting, like Fisherman and the Genie, ushers us into the land of unsettling dreams colonized by the tourists of hashish. Predominantly Middle Eastern, the geography of drug-induced visions encompassed the Saharas as well as the oases of the mind. Unlike the oriental gardens associated with the ecstatic phases, these were landscapes of terror and
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despair. Ludlow on one occasion had a vision of ancient Memphis, where he beheld “awful Egyptian gateways” frowning down, under the “grisly stare” of the Sphinx. Aldrich’s dream of the Sphinx traversed this terrain as well: Fantastic sleep is busy with my eyes I seem in some waste solitude to stand Once ruled of Cheops: upon either hand A dark illimitable desert lies, Sultry and still,—a realm of mysteries; A wide-browed Sphinx, half buried in the sand, With orbless sockets stares across the land, The woefulest thing beneath these brooding skies, Where all is woeful, weird-lit vacancy.33
For the bohemian dreamers haunting Pfaff’s basement, the dark weirdness of the Egyptian desert might well have represented their own sense of alienation. As a self-consciously declassed group, they followed a cult of personal freedom, flouting respectability and seeking to escape the straitjackets of materialism and rational thought by entering the realm of the strange and the marvelous. Social migrants, unmoored and drifting downward, they critiqued and subverted bourgeois norms of discipline, industry, and restraint. They wanted to walk in the footsteps of their idol Poe as voluntary exiles from the mundane and the conventional. Their self-annihilating escapism also gathered momentum in the climate of intensifying crisis that ushered in the years of war.34 Vedder in New York traced a similar pattern. His paintings proclaim his self-propelled exile into a mental desert—sandy wasteland or barren seashore—graphically symbolizing his marginal status as a declassed young artist precariously situated in wartime New York. At the same time, they suggest his ambiguous position between the narrow bounds of rational thought and the limitless horizons of visionary space. Rooted in memories of sudden death and skeletons under tropical sands, they probe the margin where life becomes nonlife, and body, nobody. The Lost Mind (1864–65; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Hermit in the Desert (1867; Newark Museum), and Prayer for Death in the Desert (1867; Brooklyn Museum of Art) also explore that frontier. Vedder hinted as much when he replied to a query about the location of the beach in Lair of the Sea Serpent, asserting: “[I] drew it all out of my head with a common lead pencil.”35 Vedder’s serpent lies in its own unsettling border zone where nature and the imaginary merge in a facsimile of seemingly objective truth, a vision perplexingly couched in the most material of appearances. Fitz Hugh Ludlow stated that the “tendency of hasheesh-hallucinations is almost always toward the supernatural or the sublimest forms of the natural.”36 Vedder’s painting, insist-
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ing that we believe in a reptile the size of Leviathan, situates a superserpent on an unremarkable shore. Surely it exemplifies the “sublimest” form of the natural. Its seamless blend of the real and the fabulous, however, masks Vedder’s deep ambivalence toward nature. This painting marks the pictorial onset of Vedder’s obsession with the monstrous in female and often serpentine form. For him as for many contemporaries, nature and the female were intimately entwined, and in his art, accordingly, he conjoined them. The sea serpent’s progeny appear over and over in Vedder’s work from the late 1860s onward, not as snakes but as hybrids, above all the recurrent figure of Medusa. Why did Vedder’s imaginings take such forms? Were the demons they embodied personal or cultural? Do they tell us anything about the unstable world of shifting gender relations in which he made his way? The sea serpent forms an enormous, scaly, undulating wreath, looping the end of its tail under its body, just behind the head. A slightly darker finny ridge accentuates the swooping curve of its spine. Despite its size, it is in harmony with the terrain. The dunes echo its undulations, and even its trail (in the right-hand corner) reinforces the interlacing of curvy rhythms. A strange and graceful creature, it nonetheless exudes an aura of menace. It seems watchful, vigilant, as if anticipating its next victim. Perhaps when it spies a ship on that peaceful horizon, it will slither purposefully into the water. It is at once beautiful and monstrous. What is its sex? It is conventional to refer to this creature as “he” or “it,” but what if it is a sheserpent? In memory and imagination alike, Vedder linked the shore with nature’s power of destruction, almost invariably gendered as female. In his late poem “Neptune’s Siesta,” the sea god has abandoned the shore at day’s end, leaving the “twilight dim o’er empty beach and bay / Where only deadly Sirens stay—and the sea moans, / While they sing and play, with dead men’s bones.” The Sphinx of the Seashore of 1879 alludes to the same deadly power of femininity in a related monster, the ravenous, feral cat-woman crouching among the skulls and bones of her victims on a beach awash with the detritus of shipwrecks (Fig. 80). Though not explicitly female, Vedder’s serpent, by inference, surely could be.37 As the literary scholar Janet Adelman has pointed out, “Despite our Freudian expectations, serpents are frequently associated with women.” We can trace this link to both classical and Christian traditions. In both, “the female serpent is a dangerous enemy, whether she is Python’s dragoness companion or the feminized Satan of medieval painting.” Mermaid-sirens, the snake-woman Lamia, and Medusa are also part of this clan. Indeed, Medusa’s own mother was the sea serpent Ketos.38 In 1867 Vedder made a tiny pencil drawing of Medusa among a group of twelve fantastic and mostly disembodied female heads (Fig. 81). The inspiration, according to the Vedder scholar Regina Soria, was Hawthorne’s tale “The Gorgon’s Head,” first published in A Wonder-Book for Girls
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figure 80. Elihu Vedder, The Sphinx of the Seashore, 1879. Oil on canvas, 16 × 277⁄8". Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III, 1979.7.102.
and Boys in 1851.39 Hawthorne’s version roughly follows the classical myth. The young hero Perseus, to save his mother, Danae, from the wicked king Polydectes, must find and kill the Gorgon Medusa, one of a race of monstrous, snaky-headed women the sight of whom turns to stone anyone who gazes on them. After assorted adventures, Perseus arrives at the Gorgons’ lair, a small island where the monsters sleep at the base of a precipice on a “beach of snowy sand.” These Gorgons are like immense insects, with steely scales, golden wings, white tusks, and brazen claws. Snakes hiss and twist over their foreheads. When Perseus sees the face of the Gorgon Medusa mirrored in his magical shield, “It was the fiercest and most horrible face that was ever seen or imagined, and yet with a strange, fearful, and savage kind of beauty in it. The eyes were closed . . . but there was an unquiet expression disturbing her features, as if the monster was troubled with an ugly dream.” Perseus descends, lops off her head, stuffs it into a magical purse, and flees.40 Vedder’s first drawing of Medusa represents the horrific moment when she sees her reflection in Perseus’s shield. At the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Vedder certainly saw the ghastly, lifeless Head of Medusa, then attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, as well as Caravaggio’s Medusa on a shieldshaped canvas (ca. 1598), her snake-crowned visage a grimacing mask of rage. Unlike those works by his predecessors, Vedder’s Medusa—monstrous yet human—is at once appalling and pitiable.
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Her features twisted in disgust and grief, she stares, stricken, at the terrible image that confronts her. Her eyes, large and luminous, brim with tears, which roll down her cheeks. Fat, hideous snakes spring from her deeply furrowed brow and twist about her head and ears, flicking their forked tongues; below her chin, two more have looped about each other. There is a good deal of ambiguity about the image. The face, with its soulful eyes, is sentient, aware, yet the neck has been severed and oozes blood. Is she alive or dead? At some point Vedder learned the variant of the myth explaining Medusa’s origin as a human woman, a cursed beauty raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. The wrathful goddess, her sanctuary violated, changes the hapless victim into a monster with serpentine locks. Vedder wrote his own adaptation of the Medusa myth in 1872. In that tale the narrator hears the “True Story of the Head of Medusa” from an ancient serpent, who describes the young Medusa as an adored and beautiful child with golden hair and rose-colored wings growing from her temples. During her girlhood, little golden serpents begin to sprout around her forehead. As the golden snakes proliferate, some townsfolk continue to worship her beauty; others begin to fear her. The fateful transformation occurs when she flies into a rage and kills a man who has defamed her lover. As she stands over the bleeding corpse, “eyes on fire, her hand still dripping, the snaky crown stretched wide and swaying to and fro,” her lover rushes in and beholds “Medusa the Fiend.” Stricken with horror and madness, he shrinks away from her in revulsion. Shunned and abandoned, Medusa makes her way to the Gorgons’ island. The snakes bite off her wings, and when she sleeps, her terrible dreams arouse the serpents, making them stand up ferociously all over her head. Vedder’s drawing The Young Medusa shows her before the dreadful metamorphosis: a pensive, clear-eyed beauty with masses of golden curls and two jaunty little wings (Fig. 82).41 By the time Vedder wrote his Medusa story, he had begun to cultivate connections with the English Pre-Raphaelites and through them probably knew William Morris’s poem “April—The Doom of King Acrisius,” in The Earthly Paradise, published in 1868–70. Morris’s Medusa, like Vedder’s, is a victim; she is still beautiful, but serpents have invaded her golden hair, transforming her into a repellent freak. Perseus’s murderous deed is a deliverance in disguise, freeing her from an unbearable burden.42 Vedder’s story, however, offers a variation that recalls the 1867 drawing: Medusa dies when she sees her terrible face in Perseus’s magic mirror. The Gorgons entomb her on the island, and from the buried serpents of her head grows “a strange weird clump of snake-like trees yielding a poisonous fruit.”43 Vedder still had decapitation on his mind when he returned to the subject in 1875. In one study Perseus, standing beneath the star-studded arc of the firmament, triumphantly brandishes the severed head, which bears a look of profound dismay (Fig. 83). Still alive, the snakes wrap themselves about the hero’s arm. Two of them have come loose and fall toward the ground in a writhing knot.
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figure 81. Elihu Vedder, Medusa, 1867. Pencil and ink, 415⁄16 × 33⁄8". Brooklyn Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. and Mrs. Lawrence Fleischman. figure 82. Elihu Vedder, The Young Medusa, 1872. Pencil on paper, 53⁄8 × 41⁄8". The Mark Twain House, Hartford, Connecticut.
figure 83. Elihu Vedder, Perseus and Medusa, ca. 1875. Charcoal, white and blue chalk on paper, 12" diameter. Collection of The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York. Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 55.24B.
At the bottom of the circular composition lies Medusa’s nude, headless body, her legs curled up, torso twisted to display shapely breasts, and arms bent back over her raw and bloody neck. Snakes coil about her forearm and slither away on the sand. The body lies on a beach. Water laps the shore, and in the distance are the jagged silhouettes of islands, one of them an erupting volcano. The other drawing, much larger, zeros in on the headless corpse itself (Fig. 84). Perseus has flown off with his trophy, and Medusa’s body lies on the sand, fully exposed. From the neck down, she is a voluptuous nude, but from the neck up, a fearsome, abject thing. Where there should be a head are only snakes; what should be streaming locks are rivulets of her blood, trickling into the water. For all its stillness, it is an image of unspeakable and revolting violence. What drew this painter over and over to the subject of Medusa? What allegorical resonances did it offer? What desires did it fulfill? The Medusa story was not a common subject in midcentury visual art, although since the early nineteenth century the snake woman in various forms had fascinated writers: Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Walter Pater.44 In his flamboyant study The Romantic Agony Mario Praz defined romanticism in Medusan terms: “This glassy-eyed, severed female head, this horrible, fascinating Medusa, was to be the object of the dark loves of the Romantics and the Decadents throughout the whole
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figure 84. Elihu Vedder, The Dead Medusa, 1875. Charcoal, chalk on paper, 15G × 223⁄8". Delaware Art Museum. Gift of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
of the century.” Jerome McGann sought to prove that the romantics “took the Medusa for their muse, that they might be driven toward their better selves.” In the twentieth century Medusa became the subject of Sigmund Freud’s famous essay “Medusa’s Head,” setting forth the theory that the severed head symbolizes the female genital region, terrifying as sign of castration and dangerous by virtue of the phallic power invested in snakes.45 More recently, feminist critics have reexamined the myth with reference to Victorian gender conflicts. Adrienne Munich analyzes the relation between Medusa and Andromeda, the princess whom Perseus rescues from a terrible sea serpent and later marries. The Victorians, she argues, appropriated the entire Andromeda myth as a “cipher for gender politics, useful for reinscribing traditional authority.” Munich proposes that Medusa and Andromeda are mirror images, Andromeda a “civilized version of the petrifying female” who can be “domesticated into an acceptable
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wife. . . . By slaying the Medusa and freeing Andromeda, the hero tames the chaotic female, the very sign of nature, simultaneously choosing and constructing the socially defined and acceptable female behavior. He thus assures himself of licensed rather than unlicensed sexuality, legitimate progeny, and protection of his household name.” The context for male anxiety, of course, lay in women’s activism and mounting pressure for political and personal freedom, on both sides of the Atlantic.46 How does this context advance our understanding of Vedder’s morbid fascination with bodiless heads and headless bodies? Did he harbor hostile feelings toward women? Did women threaten him? Do his Medusa images speak of personal complexes and political fears? In his Digressions Vedder, giving little away, drop hints here and there. Those hints, combined with profiles of the women in his life, prompt further speculation on the personal and cultural meanings of his Medusa and, by extension, his fascination with the serpentine line. Romantically and sexually, Vedder was strongly attracted to women. From an early age he enjoyed erotically charged flirtations. In Cuba there was the young girl Dolores, with eyes that “one could sit and wander and wonder and dream in.” In New York there were some “charming girls” who helped brighten his “somewhat darkened young prospects.” In Florence there was a “sweet girl” who “waited for him under the olive trees.”47 But the most important woman in his life when he was young was neither sweet nor dreamy eyed but self-reliant and iron-willed. Kate Field (1838–96) was the daughter of two well-known American actors and heir to the fortune of a wealthy uncle. Widely traveled, she cultivated a cosmopolitan circle of literary and artistic friends. In Florence, where she first met Vedder in 1860, she circulated among the Trollopes, the Brownings, and other English expatriates. In the 1860s she embarked on a career in America as a freelance journalist, writing travel pieces and reviews. Her uncle disinherited her when she refused to curtail her activities and moderate her abolitionist ideas. She fiercely guarded her independence, rejecting a position on the staff of the New York Tribune because she insisted on writing only what she believed, not what others wanted her to say. In the late sixties she toured as a professional female lecturer, one of the first, and earned a handsome income. Highly visible and controversial, she was also a sportswoman who boasted of shooting a fine two-hundred-pound buck in the Adirondacks. On visits to Rome she associated with the resident colony of American women expatriates, including the maverick sculptor Harriet Hosmer. Although she had intense relationships with men, she never married. The young poet and editor Richard Watson Gilder provides us with a gauge of her power over men. He wrote to her, “Farewell, Witch. I like you, and I’m afraid of you.”48 From Florence in March 1859 she wrote to her aunt back in Boston, “There is a young American here, Mr. Vedder, very talented and very poor, to whom I wish somebody would give an or-
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der.” Shortly thereafter she commissioned her own portrait from Vedder and, taking him in hand, began to introduce him to the writers and critics in her circle. As an old man, Vedder recollected that Field, “the first woman of charm and intellect I had seen, . . . quite bowled me over. . . . I felt a strong inclination to live up to her level, but never could.” They became good friends. Vedder, like other young men in Florence and elsewhere, may have fallen in love with her, though nothing came of it. She exercised a strong hand, however, in managing his life and directing his career.49 In 1863 Kate Field arrived in New York and set about weaning Vedder from his unhealthy bohemian habits. “She not only attempted to improve my mind but gave me sound advice as to the body.” She told him that if he did not stop smoking he would never sire offspring, and she carted him off along with her mother for a therapeutic visit to Sharon Springs, New York. She assisted him materially as well, persuading her aunt to buy several of his Italian landscapes. This money enabled him at last to paint those visions that had tormented him on his mattress at 48 Beekman.50 Not only did Kate Field advance his career and look out for his health, but in a sense she also secured him a wife. Vedder met young Carrie Rosekrans in Paris during the summer of 1866. A romance developed, and Vedder proposed, but Carrie’s father—Judge Rosekrans of Glens Falls, New York—opposed a match with the impecunious artist. At Vedder’s request Kate, back in New York, got to know Carrie, approved of her, and vigorously petitioned the judge to give his consent. From Rome Vedder wrote to “Dearest Kate,” expressing the most fervent gratitude: “It is needless to say how much obliged, nor how much I thank you, nor how noble I think you. . . . I will try and be somewhat worthy of you.” The wedding took place in July 1869.51 Once the couple had settled in Rome, Carrie Vedder proved Kate Field’s equal as a manager. Vedder, chronically in debt, must get commissions and execute them as expeditiously as possible. Carrie actively scouted out buyers and in time worked out a contractual system to make sure that no one reneged on an order. Vedder chafed under the pressure of having to turn out salable pictures, but the former bohemian had little choice in the matter, given the needs of a growing family. Carrie was very much the lioness, fearless where Vedder quailed. She wrote to her mother, “I have taken to facing the banker . . . this winter, and I think it works much better. Vedder was utterly unstrung and knocked off his painting whenever [the note] had [to be renewed] and now I just do it myself. Perhaps I have Father’s tongue for inspiring confidence, but at any rate I get the money.”52 Carrie’s strong hand on the reins was a source of endless friction. We can sense Vedder’s feeling from correspondence during a trip to Egypt as a guest of the Rhode Island industrialist George F. Corliss in the winter of 1889–90. Carrie, anxious about lost income, wanted Vedder to concentrate on producing marketable views of the pyramids and the Nile, and throughout the trip she
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wrote letters urging him to work harder. Finally, he lashed back: “I had been in a state of joy and excitement at the near prospect of sailing for home but your beastly letter took all the pleasure out of me. . . . nothing can satisfy permanent discontent. If you had kept back all troubles and annoyances then you had better have gone on doing so and not spoiled it all. . . . if that is the sort of thing I am coming back to I had rather stay away.”53 As a would-be carefree spirit who enjoyed the company of “the Boys,” Vedder himself was in some ways a perpetual adolescent. To say so is not to discount the sad and sobering experiences of middle age, including the loss of the couple’s first two children. But his marriage in itself was calculated to satisfy his more juvenile needs. Early in the courtship he wrote to his father, “I think her in every way adapted to make me happy—one of her names is Bessie and another Carrie, so she unites the names of my two mothers [i.e., his mother and stepmother]. She reminds me more of Mother than any woman I ever met.”54 On one level this sounds like the hoariest of clichés. On another, though, it clarifies the oedipal pattern of Vedder’s relations with women, since he was attracted to those who, both commanding and nurturing, allowed him to avoid many of the conventional responsibilities associated with adult middle-class manhood. In other words, there was something phallic about them—even the demure and charming Carrie. One of the most revealing anecdotes in the Digressions is about Kate Field’s “advanced views.” It details an encounter that took place during the vacation at Sharon Springs in 1863: We were stopping with a couple by the name of Morgan; [Kate] at once made a fervent convert of the wife, in the matter of Woman’s Rights, until it came to such a pass that when the meek husband ventured to give his views, his wife would say with great spirit, “Now Morgan, you jest hold your jaw.” Morgan would subside and take me out to the barn and show me his snakes,—for he was a snake-charmer. He kept them in barrels and told me how careful he had to be to keep only those of the same size together, from a habit they had of eating each other. . . . Morgan had a habit of going about with a snake coiled around his wrist as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I dare say his wife broke him of the habit when she became advanced enough. Kate Field thought the wife the better man; I liked the gentle Morgan best.55
On the same page appears a reproduction of The Lair of the Sea Serpent. With Vedder playing a major part in the design of the book, that placement was not fortuitous. No doubt it struck him as witty, given the matter of his snake story. But from a different slant the powerful, devouring monster on the shore slyly signifies the phallic woman. In the novel Elsie Venner (1861), Oliver Wendell Holmes (hostile to female aggression and intellectuality) explored the double nature of such a heroine, half woman and half snake, with cold, glittering eyes and poisonous instincts.
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Male anxiety about feminine power pervaded Anglo-American culture in the mid–nineteenth century, expressed (both outright and subliminally) in gendered language in all media.56 In the United States the Civil War had decimated the male population, leaving a surplus of women. A new generation of feminists came aggressively into public view in the late 1860s. Some, such as Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, campaigned for women’s complete sexual liberation; they and many others pressed for voting rights. Women established their own clubs on the model of the men’s clubs that played an important part in sustaining elite and middle-class masculine bonds in the nineteenth century. Women’s colleges began to spring up on both sides of the Atlantic, prompting loud cries of alarm that too much education would unsex young women and unfit them for their “natural” vocation of marriage and motherhood.57 Younger women seemed especially deviant, breaking out of the traditional mold and fashioning themselves into strange new shapes. The “Girl of the Period” became the symbol of this novel and disturbing waywardness. The English writer Eliza Lynn Linton coined the phrase and used it as the title of an article in the Saturday Review in 1868. It swiftly gained currency in the United States, where critics construed it to mean a young woman selfish, greedy, and transgressive, who modeled her appearance on the “maniac or . . . negress” and her behavior on the whore. Worse, she appropriated masculine freedom of address, talking slang like a man and speaking of risqué topics without inhibition. Criticism of young women’s artifice and extravagance ran rampant as well. The American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazar approvingly quoted the French historian Hippolyte Taine, who maintained that modern women were evolving into something like Hawthorne’s scaly Gorgons: “Woman, by modern education and dress, has become a sort of beetle, tightened about the midriff, mounted on a pair of dry and shiny feet, and covered with a glistening envelope. . . . Like an insect, too, nothing is seen of her face but the eyes and the expression. Her whole body has the restless activity of a buzzing fly.” Even the young woman’s hair was undergoing metamorphosis. Dio Lewis, a vocal proponent of dress reform, decried the masses of false hair women piled up on their heads. Filthy and unnatural, such hair was a foreign intruder that ruined and broke a woman’s own natural tresses. Worst of all, female idleness, spending, and luxury were sucking the nation dry and threatening to bring on a crisis that could only lead to ruin.58 The popular press disseminated images of the monstrous, transgressive hybrid. Cartoonists mocked the fashions of the late 1860s, which featured those masses of false hair Lewis so detested as well as huge bustles and spindly high heels. “The Modern Sphinx” represents a Girl of the Period in profile, crouching like a lioness on an oblong platform (Fig. 85). An ungainly, bulbous wad of hair distorts the shape of her head, and the voluminous bustle mimics the outline of feline hindquarters. In Thomas Nast’s corrosive caricature of the feminist Victoria Woodhull, the free-love advo-
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figure 85. “The Modern Sphinx,” published in Harper’s Bazar, May 1, 1869.
cate appears as “Mrs. Satan” trying to lure a working-class woman down a rocky path to perdition (Fig. 86). For a promiscuous temptress, Woodhull is surprisingly modest in dress. Her neckline is high, her skirts unrevealing. But her head, with two thick horns sprouting from her brow like Medusa’s snakes, and her body, with its devilish bat wings, unequivocally signify her monstrous nature. In Vedder’s network of acquaintances and enemies one woman above all embodied that same dangerous and transgressive power: the celebrated and notorious American actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–76). Kate Field’s father had performed with Cushman, and Kate was part of Cushman’s community of women artists, formed in 1852 when the actress settled in Rome with a circle of female friends. Vedder described her as “a large woman—a generous and good friend, and, I believe, an equally good hater. . . . She was fond of having notabilities about her, and I shall never forget the deep voice and tragic way she had, on being informed that a noted young man was in town, ‘What! Simmet here? Bring him to me!’—at the same time grasping the air with ‘hooked hands.’ I thought of the small, tender, plump Simmet within that grasp [italics in original].”59 Cushman was indeed a large woman, tall and powerful. At the height of her career she was America’s greatest actress and enjoyed an international reputation. She played “strong-minded” female roles such as Lady Macbeth and Meg Merrilies, the gypsy witch in Sir Walter Scott’s melodrama Guy Mannering. She also played male roles, including that of Romeo. Although it was not uncommon for women to perform as men, Cushman’s Romeo was disturbingly androgynous. The actor George Vandenhoff, who played Mercutio in the play in 1843, considered Cushman’s Romeo a “hybrid performance.” Charlotte looked “neither man nor woman.” The part of Romeo required
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figure 86. Thomas Nast, “Get Thee Behind Me, (Mrs.) Satan,” published in Harper’s Weekly, February 17, 1872.
a real man; “a woman, in attempting it, ‘unsexes’ herself to no purpose . . . she denaturalizes the situations; and sets up a monstrous anomaly. . . . There should be a law against such perversions [italics in original].” Rich and successful, Cushman further undermined socially prescribed boundaries by living an independent life with a group of like-minded single friends. She had passionate relationships with a series of women. Like many others, William Wetmore Story, an American sculptor in Rome, saw her as “man-ny.”60 As Lisa Merrill has written, Cushman straddled the line between masculine and feminine.61 It is easy to sense how frightening Vedder, despite his jocular tone, found this “monstrous anomaly,” to use Vandenhoff’s words. She was the ultimate phallic woman, intolerably ambiguous and powerfully threatening, if only on a symbolic level. Adrienne Munich defines the monster in the Andromeda-Medusa myth as sexually undifferentiated, potentially representing the gender of both sexes. “The monster’s unspecified gender, sufficient in itself to make it monstrous, first opens to question the duality of the sex/gender system. . . . Perseus affirms male and female identities by killing off other possibilities.” Like Cushman, the monster is a liminal figure: “On the boundary between sea and land, both in and out of nature, both in and out of culture . . . it exists as a symbolic borderland.” Only its annihilation can ward off danger, tame chaos, and restore order. Lying at the water’s very edge, Vedder’s headless Medusa—daughter of the sea serpent—is, or was, precisely such a monster. This abject body is an expression, both personal and cultural, of profound ambivalence, hostility, and fear.62 Vedder’s pictorial discourse of female monstrosity collected strands of social unease and interlaced them with his own. His Medusas and Sphinxes are not literally about the destabilization of power relations between men and women, any more than they are direct, unmediated statements of personal resentment, frustration, or hostility. The path to Vedder’s deadly beaches was circuitous, the relation between his mental monsters and biographical or cultural circumstance covered over, as drifting sand erases tracks. Myth permitted the utterance of things that were otherwise inexpressible or even inadmissible. Vedder wrote that the creature under the lurid red sky in Sphinx of the Seashore personified all-devouring nature, but implicitly she embodied as well the all-engulfing power of the feminine, unchecked and undomesticated.63 As Vedder became a more public figure engaging in ambitious public and decorative art projects, he covered his old tracks almost completely. The overtly grotesque disappeared from his work or hid beneath a veneer of classical regularity and beauty. Even a Medusa of 1878 (San Diego Museum of Art) is much more sedate, representing a stern young woman in profile against a dark sky. There are no serpents in her golden hair, although the tendrils coil in serpentine rhythms. The Sphinx of the Seashore, painted soon after, was probably the last work in which the artist approached the raw edge of the earlier years.64
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figure 87. Elihu Vedder, The Phorcydes, 1868. Pencil on paper mounted on paperboard, 5 × 3". Elihu Vedder Papers, 1804–1969, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.
When Vedder carried out a commission to paint The Phorcydes—another episode of the Medusa story—he explained to his patron why he made the figures more beautiful than they had been in an earlier drawing (Fig. 87). The Phorcydes were three sisters, daughters of the same sea serpent that bore Medusa. Ancient crones, they had only one eye, which they passed around in turn so that one of them could always see. When Perseus visited their island to ask for help in slaying the Gorgon, he stole the eye and refused to return it until they agreed. Vedder’s initial drawing was part of the series of small sketches—including the first Medusa—that he had begun in the 1860s. His Phorcydes are three bony hags on the beach, the ocean behind them. Their hair rises in serpentine swirls above their heads. The middle sister has the eye, which goggles out at us; the other two sisters, groping about, flank her. The painting, however (1878; private collection), shows the same women as full-figured, bare-breasted beauties. Only the hair is the same, twisting in snaky undulations above their brows. Vedder wrote to the buyer, Mrs. Theodore Shillaber, saying that he could not permit himself to spoil so fine a group by making them ugly, even though Mr. Shillaber had expected them to be much more devilish. In the letter, Vedder explained his reason for the change. “As they are at present they are more in harmony with the Greek idea from which they
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were drawn, that is the element of beauty enters more largely into them than into the small drawing from which they were ordered, which is pretty gothic, but you will see for yourself and I am sure you will agree with me and approve of this change when you care to think that they are to go on a wall and be present to the eye continually [italics in the original].”65 What precipitated that act of repression? The need to market his work played a part, although in the case of The Phorcydes the buyers at first wanted something wilder and more “devilish.” Vedder understood what separated the “gothic” from the “Greek.” The “gothic” was the dark, uncontrollable, and ultimately all-consuming energy that churned just below the smooth surfaces of the classical ideal and classic “beauty.” As his work became increasingly cool, dry, and stylized, Vedder withdrew farther and farther from the seashore where “all devouring Nature” squatted. When he designed the figure of Natura for the mural Rome, or the Art Idea (1894) in the Walker Art Building at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, he rendered it as a perfectly proportioned ideal female nude on the central axis of a group including wisdom, thought, and form. Behind her are the seething blue waves of cosmic space, safely confined in a circular frame. Convention, gentility, and public decorum together mandated the cleanup of the ghastly beach where dead men’s bones, bloody fangs, and voracious femininity made mock of everything masculine culture strove to transcend. The earlier, less mediated work opens a chink in the wall that Vedder later erected around his primal experiences and fears. Through it we can tap directly into the source of his visionary life and can understand it as both subjective and cultural expression. The mysteries of death and transcendence had haunted Vedder from his earliest years. Adrift from all social moorings during the bohemian interlude, he discovered the hallucinogenic dreamland that became the beachhead of his art. From there he launched his boldest explorations into the murky territory of wonder and fear. It was the combination of naturalism and the bizarre that made Vedder’s early work disturbing and strange. In retreating from naturalism, Vedder distanced himself from the feminine, that is, the realm of danger, chaos, doubt, and death that had shaped potent early memories and still bedeviled his thoughts. Yet he was never able to move beyond their shadows. In sublimated form, the sea serpent and Medusa’s strangling locks continued to haunt his art. Over and over in the later work the undulating, wriggling, swooping line insinuates itself in floating hair, flying draperies, and abstract patterns.66 Snaky whiplash rhythms often animate even the most classical and static of Vedder’s designs. Hidden and disguised, the sea serpent continued to lurk in its first and only lair, the artist’s mind. Vedder’s images of disorientation, decapitation, and savage nature, finally, serve as an index to the depth of masculine unease in the shifting social sands of the later nineteenth century.
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7
CORROSIVE SIGHT
or the Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins (1844–1916) the human body—strong, healthy,
F
natural—was the foundation on which he built his art and the axis on which it turned. In art,
he celebrated the physical beauty and superb fitness of oarsmen, baseball players, boxers, and bathers. Himself an amateur athlete, he rowed, hunted, and swam in the disciplined pursuit of bodily strength and vigor. He admired and celebrated brains as well, producing over the course of his career many reverential portraits of scientists, doctors, scholars, and thinkers. Nature, science, and reason were his watchwords. How, then, to reconcile this image of vitality and balance with the assessment of the young critic Sadakichi Hartmann, in his History of American Art? Hartmann praised Eakins for the frankness, dignity, and masculine power of his art. Yet toward the end of his commentary, he sounded a radically discordant note, stating that the Philadelphia painter’s art and even his personality reminded one of “the dissecting-room” where he had “spent so many hours of his life.” Although Eakins portrayed surgeons in the operating room, not the morgue, for Hartmann those paintings were all about “the pallor of corpses” and “the gleam of knives spotted with red,” their atmosphere “calm, cool, deadly . . . with the light concentrated upon the dissecting table, while the rest of the room is drowned in dismal shadows.”1 The particular work Hartmann had in mind was Eakins’s monumental portrait The Gross Clinic of 1875, showing the eminent Philadelphia doctor Samuel Gross demonstrating surgical technique and lecturing to a group of medical students in the cavernous operating theater of Jefferson Med188
ical College (see Plate 13). Gross presides over an operation to remove a piece of diseased bone from the thigh of a young patient stricken with osteomyelitis. Suited in stiff and formal black, with a pearl shirt stud and gold watch chain, Gross has just made a long, deep incision in the leg and now turns to explain the procedure to his audience. He lectures calmly, light modeling the dome of his forehead and casting his deep-set eyes in cavernous shadow. His fingers and scalpel glisten, wet with the patient’s blood. Radically foreshortened, the body of the patient is an incoherent jumble. At one end the anesthetist muffles the patient’s head in a chloroform-soaked towel; at the other an assistant grips the lower legs, clamping them down on the table. The feet, in worn gray socks, lie like two lumps on the mattress. Two assistants (one almost entirely concealed behind Gross) pry apart the edges of the wound with retractors, while another, Dr. Barton, inserts a probe into the incision with one bloody hand and holds a blood-soaked sponge in the other. Blood trickles from the raw slit and spatters white linen and naked skin. A clerk holding a red pencil records the operation on the left; directly opposite, on the far right edge, sits Thomas Eakins, eagerly watching and sketching.2 Metallic tools glitter in the foreground; in the background, dark shadows obscure the onlookers in their ascending tiers. At the lower left behind Gross is a veiled woman in widow’s weeds. Her face hidden, she shields her eyes and rakes at the air with one bony hand as if unable to bear the sight of so much gore. With its crude brushwork, abrupt contrasts, and bleak tonalities, the painting projects a mood of austere dread. Now one of the canonical works in the history of American art, The Gross Clinic commands the respect of scholars, who venerate it as a landmark, a courageous epic work of American realism.3 Hartmann’s comments, however, represent the tenor of the response that greeted the painting during Eakins’s life and for some time thereafter, when “dissecting-room,” for all its inaccuracy, emerged as the principal trope for organizing perceptions of the work. Much of The Gross Clinic’s value in twentieth-century American culture has depended on writing horror and disgust out of its narrative and exalting the work as a celebration of modern medical progress and masculine scientific rationality. Elizabeth Johns’s important study exemplifies this celebratory and even worshipful approach. Such constructions, hinging in part on the assumption that earlier reviewers were merely squeamish Philistines unable to appreciate the painting’s grand theme, have in turn facilitated Eakins’s insertion into the modernist myth of the avant-garde genius, misunderstood yet ultimately vindicated.4 While a handful of scholars—notably Michael Fried and Eric Rosenberg—have more recently acknowledged the gory fascination of this painting, the general tendency has been to heroize what the artist’s contemporaries—with good reason—saw as a genuinely horrifying picture.5 The Gross Clinic was not commissioned. Eakins undertook it on his own, intending it as his most important contribution to the American art section of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876. The selection committee, however—repelled by both subject and treatment— corrosive sight
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rejected the painting, which ended up in the United States Army Post Hospital exhibit instead. In 1879 Eakins sent The Gross Clinic to New York, where it hung in the second annual exhibition organized by the Society of American Artists. Its appearance there brought forth a tidal wave of revulsion. Almost to a man (and woman), critics condemned the painting for its violence, brutality, and horror. “For people with nerves and stomachs,” wrote the art critic of the New York Tribune, “the scene is so real that they might as well go to a dissecting room and have done with it.” Complaining about the obscurity of the patient’s body—visible as little more than “a long and shapeless lump of flesh which we conclude to be a thigh”—this writer found that “the Professor himself, holding up a bloody lancet in bloody fingers,” gave “the finishing touch to the sickening scene.” The work was horrible and morbid, all to no purpose: “The painter shows his skill and the spectator’s gorge rises at it—that is all.” The critic marveled that the society thought it proper to hang such a picture in a room where “ladies, young and old, young girls and boys and little children” would see it. Indeed, even “strong men” found it difficult to linger before such a nauseating display. Others strongly concurred. Susan N. Carter, writing for Art Journal, found the picture of the “dissectingroom by Eakins” so revolting that the treatment and the subject alike amounted to nothing less than “the degradation of Art.” Critics found the old woman particularly troubling. “It was noticeable,” wrote one, “that the horribleness taught nothing, reached no aim; and that especially disgusting . . . was the presence of the mother of the sufferer, wringing her hands and apparently screaming in horror.”6 Why did critics identify the setting as a dissecting room even when they knew the patient was alive and the procedure lifesaving? Why did the writhing woman in black turn their stomachs? Why did so little blood cause so much distress? And why did Hartmann link not only Eakins’s art but also his very persona with the dissecting room, which is manifestly not the subject of The Gross Clinic? In this chapter, I search for answers to these riddles. Eakins, the son of a writing master, lived nearly all his life under his father’s roof in Philadelphia. He was the eldest of four and the only boy. He attended Central High School and enrolled in life drawing classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1866 he sailed for Paris, where he studied principally in the atelier of the academic realist Jean-Léon Gérôme. He returned to Philadelphia in 1870 and began his painting career. His father’s generosity made it unnecessary for him to earn a living from his art. His mother, about whom little is known, succumbed to mental illness about this time and died at home in June 1872. During the seventies Eakins painted athletes, home scenes, and portraits. In 1879 he became professor of painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy and in 1882 director of schools there. He married a student, Susan MacDowell, in 1884. Two years later he left his job at the academy under a cloud of scandal after removing a
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male model’s loincloth before a female class. The imbroglio precipitated a nervous breakdown requiring an extended sojourn in the Dakota Territory. Eakins recuperated and resumed his professional activities, doing teaching stints at various institutions, painting unsparing portraits of relatives and friends, and seeking recognition, which late in life finally began to come to him. But The Agnew Clinic (1889; University of Pennsylvania), his second large-scale surgical portrait (showing an operation on a cancerous breast) encountered the same resistance as its predecessor and failed to win admission to shows at the Pennsylvania Academy or the Society of American Artists in New York. Eakins brought extreme scientific discipline to his painting practice. He based every composition on elaborate, mathematically complex perspective grids. Equally important was the mastery of anatomy. To achieve it, Eakins committed himself to dissection. As a young student he took anatomy courses at Jefferson Medical College, beginning to dissect before he was twenty years old. He continued his anatomical studies in Paris, where students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts went to the dissecting room of the Ecole de Médecine. Eakins resumed his association with Jefferson Medical College in 1874, attending surgical demonstrations by Samuel Gross and anatomical lectures by Dr. Joseph Pancoast, and in 1876 became dissection assistant to Dr. William Keen at the Pennsylvania Academy. Eakins incorporated dissection into his own teaching at the academy and regularly returned to it himself in an ongoing professional quest for anatomical and artistic enlightenment. Modeling himself on the anatomists and surgeons he so admired, he was a self-created medical insider, impervious to the fearful sights and smells of the morgue.7 Others regarded dissection differently, and their sentiments spurred the hostility that greeted The Gross Clinic in New York. Doubt and controversy about dissection had been mounting for decades. The issue was how and where medical schools procured the dead bodies used for anatomical study. Medical men insisted repeatedly that they used only the corpses of suicides and executed criminals, but the populace suspected, with justification, that grave robbing (called resurrection) supplied the bulk of the hapless subjects destined for the dissecting room. On several occasions public anger about the shady side of dissection flared into rowdy “resurrection riots” in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other urban centers. The professionalization of medicine and the growth of medical schools in the nineteenth century increased the demand for bodies to be cut, probed, and dismantled in institutional dissecting rooms. Many states, responding to public alarm, eventually passed anatomy acts, legalizing the medical use of unclaimed corpses—usually those of the homeless and indigent—to discourage grave robbing, still an endemic and highly profitable enterprise. Pennsylvania finally passed its first such law in 1867, but grave robbing continued almost unabated there while running rampant all over the Northeast and the Midwest.8 In the 1870s metropolitan newspapers such as the New York Times and the Tribune regularly
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chronicled episodes of body snatching and related grisly doings in sensational language, echoing the well-established rhetoric of horror that flourished in pulp fiction. George Lippard’s midcentury best-seller The Quaker City may have set the standard. Devil-Bug, the hideous villain, at one point sits in a putrid “dead vault” littered with bones, recalling a recent escapade: “The doctor sent for me last night; the one what wants me to steal dead bodies for him. . . . He pays me well; and I likes the business. Sich a jolly business! To creep over the wall o’ some graveyard in the dead o’night, and with a spade in yer hand, to turn up the airth of a new made grave! To mash the coffin lid into small pieces . . . and to drag the stiff corpse out . . . with the shroud so white and clean, spotted by the damp clay! To kiver the corpse with an old over-coat or a coffee bag, and bear it off to the doctor, with his penknife’s and his daggers and his gim’lets! Hoo, hoo!”9
The real-life grave robbers of the 1870s were Devil-Bug’s heirs. One from Louisville described his methods in the New York Times, embellishing the account with a high level of ghastly detail. The disinterment procedure itself was simple enough, involving a spade, a keyhole saw to cut open the coffin (the saw making a noise like sobs and groans), and a rope for hoisting the body out of the hole. On one occasion, he recalled, “the whole head of a woman whose neck we tied the rope around came off in our grasp.” Stripping the body and tossing the shroud back into the grave (stealing apparel was a felony), the robbers would double it up nose to knee, “dump it” in a sack, and carry it to “a certain place where there’s a vat of considerable size. A vein in the neck is opened, arsenic run through to preserve the body, and then the ‘stiff’ is stored in the vat [described in another report as the ‘pickle-tank’].” Most of the bodies came from Potter’s Field, and about 150 might be “put in pickle” during the summer season.10 So bold were body snatchers that they even took advantage of public transportation on occasion. A resurrectionist was caught in 1874 with the body of a young woman jammed into a trunk for transport to Cincinnati, where he had planned to sell it for thirty dollars. In 1878 the Times reported on a furious outcry in Cincinnati when the body of John Scott Harrison, the president’s son and an erstwhile congressman, was discovered a very short time after burial, hanging from a rope in the dissecting room of Ohio Medical College. The subjection of such a distinguished body to horrible indignities greatly aggravated public rage. Students pursued their anatomical studies under the most revolting conditions as well. As late as 1910 one observer found still surviving in some places “the dingy, ill-lighted, malodorous dissecting rooms, where inexpert boys hack away at a cadaver until it is reduced to shreds.”11 “The Body Snatchers,” a wood-engraved illustration in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, vividly evokes the atmosphere of dread and horror associated with all such scenes (Fig. 88). Fit-
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figure 88. “The Body Snatchers, A Recent Actual Occurrence in the Vicinity of New York City,” published in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 18, 1868. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.
tingly, it is a dark and stormy night in a graveyard. The robbers have excavated the coffin and removed the lid. Now, two of them are hauling on the ends of a rope attached to an iron hook around the dead woman’s neck, causing her body to rise like a pale ghost out of the ground. She is in a shroud, hands crossed on her breast, and a chaplet of flowers still on her head. Two other men loom in silhouette at the foot of the grave, one huddling under an umbrella, holding an unseen lantern. Beside the cart that will transport the body to the dissecting room, another man nonchalantly lights up a smoke. The two observers are physicians, eager to examine the remains of a patient who has just died of a baffling, untreatable disease. These doctors, Leslie’s explained, had requested “the privilege of a post mortem examination” but the family “peremptorily prohibited” a procedure so “repugnant to their feelings.” The claims of science, however, have ridden roughshod over ethical scruples, and the doctors, undeterred, have hired a team of “grave ghouls” to assist in this nefarious act of repossession.12
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Jefferson Medical College, where Eakins had his closest ties in the profession, depended for many years on a ring of “resurrectionists” to make up for the dearth of legally available corpses. In 1882 the Philadelphia Press uncovered that operation in a sensational exposé, which reported that most of Jefferson’s bodies had been stolen from Lebanon Cemetery, an urban burial ground for African Americans. Even the venerated surgeon David Hayes Agnew, the subject of Eakins’s 1889 portrait, reportedly had a hand in the business. “His experiences in procuring dissecting material were many and peculiar,” according to Dr. J. William White. Agnew “did not hesitate in the case of unknown vagrants or paupers, where no feelings would be lacerated or shock inflicted upon surviving relatives, to step slightly beyond the strict letter of the law in the interests of science, and [had] even gone out to the Potter’s Field at midnight, resurrected a body, placed it in a sack in the seat of his buggy alongside of him, and driven it to his Chart Street dissecting room.”13 This was a normal aspect of medical life, something professionals could even joke about. But the failure of Eakins’s critics to distinguish between therapeutic operation and grisly autopsy discloses the perception on the part of a great many laypersons that surgery and dissection were fully interchangeable, if not identical, practices, one indelibly tainted by the connotations of the other. The Civil War contributed to surgery’s negative image. By the 1870s the surgical profession in the United States had gained credibility as a rigorous, scientific discipline. Yet its horrific associations were difficult to shed, kept alive, in part, by lingering memories of the war and the epic scale of its dreadful carnage. Wound management and surgical technique had advanced significantly during the war, but evidence of progress was at least evenly counterbalanced by the sheer magnitude of the blood, slaughter, and mutilation: 620,000 dead, 130,000 disfigured for life. While Timothy O’Sullivan’s famous photographs of corpse-littered battlefields were no longer in circulation by the 1870s, few places lacked living reminders: the disabled veterans, lacking a leg, an arm, or worse. On the Union side alone, of over 250,000 wounds treated, 30,000 had been amputations. Little wonder that when the landscape painter Sanford Gifford went off to the war, the artist Eastman Johnson wished him good luck, honor, and “a whole body when he returns.”14 In addition to being the most common surgical procedure, amputation—conducted under primitive conditions, often without anesthetic—was understandably the most terrifying. As agent of pain and dismemberment, the Civil War surgeon became the “sawbones” caricatured in the “comic” Civil War valentine showing a skeletal Grim Reaper in uniform, a saw standing in for a scythe, with a bag of other implements—cleavers and knives—to “mangle, saw, and hack” his victims (Fig. 89). Louisa May Alcott, in her Civil War memoir Hospital Sketches (1869), sarcastically described how just such a surgeon, who “seemed to regard a dilapidated body very much as I should have regarded a damaged garment, . . . turning up his cuffs, [began] cutting, sawing, patching, and piecing. . . . The more intricate the wound, the better he liked it. A poor private, with both legs
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figure 89. “To the Surgeon,” Civil War valentine, ca. 1861–65. Courtesy of William H. Helfand.
shot off, and shot through the lungs, possessed more attractions for him than a dozen generals, slightly scratched.”15 The Army Medical Museum in Washington, D.C., became the great repository of all those damaged, shattered, and severed pieces. Established in 1862, the museum’s mission was to document and study battlefield injuries. After the war, the collection of bones and other grisly exhibits went on public display and became a tourist attraction and shrine. For many, it was a grim and disturbing place. When Mary Clemmer Ames visited the museum in the early 1870s, she commented, “It cannot fail to be one of the most absorbing spots on earth to the student of surgery or medicine, but to the unscientific mind, especially to one still aching with the memories of war, it must ever remain a museum of horrors.”16 In visual culture, amputation and dismemberment rose to the level of metaphor, signifying the fragmentation of the country itself into warring sections. H. L. Stephens’s Vanity Fair cartoon from
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1862 represents three surgeons general who struggle mightily to pull a wounded soldier asunder, while Columbia, denouncing the doctors as “a precious lot of saw-bones,” attempts to claim him for the Union (Fig. 90). References to surgical butchery inscribed themselves as well on the mutilated bodies of survivors in several well-known postwar pictures: the amputee on crutches in Eastman Johnson’s Pension Claim Agent (1867; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco) and Thomas Waterman Wood’s Veteran (1866; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); the one-armed man whose lady companion takes the reins in Winslow Homer’s “Empty Sleeve at Newport” (published in Harper’s Weekly, August 26, 1865).17 Long after the war, the surgeon-sawbones association lingered on. Fernando Miranda’s cartoon for the New York Daily Graphic in 1885 looks very much like a Gross Clinic run amok, with its disassembly line of surgeons, aproned like butchers, industriously hacking off the limbs of anesthetized charity hospital patients, whose coffins lie waiting beneath the operating table (Fig. 91). The text accompanying Miranda’s front-page exposé belittled the “cheap doctors” employed in charity hospitals and decried the “butchery, cruelty, delay, and avarice” that predominated in their day-to-day operations.18 What does all this have to do with perceptions of The Gross Clinic? After all, it was this surgeon’s innovative technique in the treatment of bone disease that made amputation unnecessary, and Eakins’s imposing clinical portrait was meant to celebrate that achievement. Whereas the “heroic” surgeons of the past never hesitated to dispose of entire limbs to eradicate disease, Gross excised the affected spots only, preserving healthy bone and leg alike. He was the very opposite of the stereotyped hacksaw-wielding butcher. Yet Eakins’s visual message fell on blind eyes. Neither the critics nor the general audience were disposed to understand Eakins’s technically nice distinction between the model of progressive, enlightened surgical competence, exemplified by Gross, and the sawbones of popular imagination. What they noticed were knives, blood, a gaping wound, and body parts (that ambiguous thigh), on display in a murky chamber that could easily pass for one of those “horrid dissecting-rooms” so often described in fiction and the news. In their eyes Gross, no merciful healer, was a frightening bloodletter and inflicter of pain, a butcher as eager to undertake an amputation as an autopsy. Even this predisposition to conflate surgery and dissection, however, fails to explain the extreme revulsion and disgust that greeted the painting. To understand those reactions, we need to consider the vivisector, key villain in the emerging animal protection movement.19 Highly visible and active in the 1870s, this movement championed a variety of causes, focusing with special intensity on experimental physiology, which in its customary exploitation of living animals as subjects exemplified the extreme of scientific cruelty. In England, where the movement took off, activist women embraced the campaign. Their leader was the energetic and outspoken Frances Power Cobbe, who combined antivivisectionist zeal with equally ardent support for women’s rights. The English cru-
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figure 90. Henry Louis Stephens, “A Hint for State SurgeonGenerals,” published in Vanity Fair, July 5, 1862.
sade quickly spread to the United States, where organizers—notably George T. Angell in Boston and Henry Bergh in New York—formed humane societies and inveighed tirelessly against scientific investigation involving animals. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), chartered by the New York legislature in 1866, opposed all forms of vivisection and engaged in a number of skirmishes with doctors, including a set-to in Philadelphia when surgeons attempted to secure dogs from the newly formed local chapter. In the minds of animal protection crusaders there was no difference between the practice of vivisection and surgery, in which women and the poor all too often were subjected to hazardous, painful, unproven procedures.20 A revival of interest in the eighteenth-century English satirist William Hogarth provided antivivisectionists with a graphic emblem of their message. In 1875 John Ireland and John Nichols’s three-volume opus Hogarth’s Works gave fresh and heightened currency to the artist’s moralizing series The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751), in which Tom Nero begins by tormenting animals and ends by murdering his pregnant mistress. Ultimately he himself falls under the dissector’s knife
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figure 91. Fernando Miranda, “Hospital Circumlocution—Even Charity Must Be Barred Out,” detail, published in New York Daily Graphic, January 15, 1885.
after being hanged for his crimes. Even in black and white, The Reward of Cruelty is a frightful scene: surgeons gouge out the eyes, slit the stomach, and scoop out the intestines of the dead man. In the foreground, a skinny mongrel is preparing to devour the murderer’s heart (Fig. 92). Ireland and Nichols’s comments suggest that for nineteenth-century observers, there were no heroes (except perhaps the dog) in Hogarth’s operating room. “Our legislators, considering how unfit such men are to determine in cases of life and death, have judiciously excluded both surgeons and butchers from serving upon juries,” they wrote. That was because “a frequent contemplation of sanguinary scenes, hardens the heart, deadens sensibility, and destroys every tender sensation.” The image of Tom’s ghastly if well-deserved deconstruction, later used by animal protection groups in their publications and flyers, helped solidify existing links between vivisection, dissection, and surgery and notions of violence, crime, and horror. The Gross Clinic immediately reminded one American viewer of Hogarth’s gruesome picture. The painting, wrote this critic, “ought never to have left the dissecting room. . . . The scene is revolting in the last degree, with the repulsiveness of its almost Hogarthian detail.” In this observer’s mind, there was little to distinguish Eakins’s scene from the grotesquely revolting autopsy going on in Hogarth’s print.21 In New York, Henry Bergh, the president and driving force of the ASPCA, was the most prominent, and unquestionably the most visible, campaigner against animal cruelty. In 1866 Bergh launched the first of an extended series of clashes with medical college professors over the practice of vivisection. By the 1870s he was in the news nearly every week for chastising horsecar drivers or urban dairymen who habitually abused the creatures in their charge. Bergh was frequently the target of the cartoonist’s pencil. In 1874 a Daily Graphic cartoon ridiculed him as a spindly horse doctor, feeling the pulse of an equine patient tucked up in a cozy bed. So sensitive was Bergh to violence and its corrupting power that he feared its sensational display in any medium. In the 1880s he attempted unsuccessfully to force the Eden Musée, an upscale wax museum, to close down its gory chamber of horrors, which featured scalping, beheading, and lynching tableaux.22 In April 1879—coinciding almost exactly with the debut of The Gross Clinic in New York— Scribner’s published a long and glowing article about Bergh’s work on behalf of animals. For the magazine’s reporter, walking into the society’s headquarters was like entering a wax museum. The organization was housed in a building at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-second Street, barely more than a block from the gallery of the Society of American Artists in Madison Square. In the main business office on the first floor were exhibited “instruments of cruelty to animals, of brutal and ingenious patterns, and the effigies of bloody game—cocks and bull-dogs, and photographs of pitiable horses—a veritable chamber of horrors.” In his own office Bergh had erected a shrine of sorts to modern cruelty at its worst, in the shape of François Majendie, under whose lithographed por-
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figure 92. William Hogarth, The Reward of Cruelty, 1751. Engraving, 135⁄8 × 115⁄8". © The British Museum.
trait he had scrawled in “bold handwriting” this “scathing commentary: ‘A French physiologist, otherwise known as the “Prince of Brute Torturers,” who dissected, alive, 40,000 dumb animals, and ere he died confessed that vivisection was a failure!!’”23 French experimental physiology loomed large in the antivivisection campaign as the fountainhead of the heartless cruelty that pervaded modern science. Majendie had played a vital role in establishing experimental physiology as the modern and purely objective method for disclosing the fundamental material facts of life and death. His pupil Claude Bernard, who carried on his work, became an even greater villain in antivivisection literature. One of the foremost experimental physiologists of the time, Bernard (who died in 1878) acquired a large international following through his teaching and publications, which promulgated a model of progressive scientific objectivity that stifled all feeling in the disinterested pursuit of truth. In his influential Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, first published in 1865, Bernard described himself, the modern researcher, as a superman of frigid rationality, who viewed
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the science of life as “a superb and dazzlingly lighted hall which may be reached only by passing through a long and ghastly kitchen.” Nothing was too terrible to deter such a scientist from his quest: A physiologist is not a man of fashion, he is a man of science, absorbed by the scientific idea which he pursues: he no longer hears the cry of animals, sees the blood that flows, he sees only his idea and perceives only organisms concealing problems which he intends to solve. Similarly, no surgeon is stopped by the most moving cries and sobs, he sees only his idea. . . . Similarly again, no anatomist feels himself in a horrible slaughter house: under the influence of a scientific idea, he delightedly follows a nervous filament through stinking, livid flesh, which to any other man would be an object of disgust and horror. After what has gone before we shall deem all discussion of vivisection futile or absurd.24
Opponents of vivisection ferociously targeted this model of scientific detachment. Its impervious cruelty disturbed them as did—even more—the corrupting effects of the spectacle of suffering. Viewers of such spectacles, like those at a public execution or a bullfight, risked addiction to secret, powerful thrills experienced only in the presence of pain. The resulting pleasure acted like a drug on the senses. It often happens, argued a contributor to the Boston journal Our Dumb Animals, “that medical students, corrupted by hospital teaching, imbibe such a love of it that when they visit their homes they practice it for its own sake.” The love, need, and greed for cruelty, instilled by hospital training and laboratory practice, produced the heartlessness that infected modern medicine and society alike. Calling vivisection rooms “earthly hells” and “torture-chambers of science,” in her polemical treatise, Bernard’s Martyrs (1879), Frances Cobbe identified the cardinal vice of the modern age: “the Vice of Scientific Cruelty,” distinguished not by its heat but by an inhuman coldness. Modeling himself on Bernard, the most notoriously cruel of all the vivisectors of the Continent, the new experimental physiologist was “calm, cool, and deliberate, understanding the full meaning and extent of the waves and spasms of agony he deliberately inflicts.” This passion, which Cobbe named “the new Vice,” possessed “not the ignorant but the cultivated, well fed, well dressed men of science.” Appearances to the contrary, it was these men and not “some wretched, filthy brute” who inflicted “these horrors—the bakings alive of dogs, the slow dissections out of quivering nerves.”25 In scenarios of pain envisioned by Cobbe and other antivivisection campaigners, the surgeon or vivisector was invariably male, and the victims female, or at least feminized by their helplessness and pain. The pathetic dogs strapped to operating tables, illustrated in Bernard’s Martyrs, represented but a step on the way to even more monstrous cruelty to women and children “for the
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sake of science” (Fig. 93). According to the historian Coral Lansbury, Dr. George Hoggan’s account of the canine victims in Bernard’s laboratory roused the public to unprecedented fury in 1875: “Even when roughly grasped and thrown on the torture trough . . . they would continue to lick the hand that bound them till their mouths were fixed in the gag, and they could only flap their tails in the trough as the last means of exciting compassion.” Bernard, of course, proceeded to carve them up, presumably with relish. Cobbe got to the nub of the issue: “I am persuaded that what . . . is described . . . as the ‘Joys of the Laboratory’ are very real ‘joys’ to the vivisector; that is, Schadenfreude—Pleasure in the Pain he witnesses and creates.”26 Did such images and associations lie behind the hostile reception of Eakins’s painting in 1879? Is it going too far to associate Gross—a benevolent, humane lifesaver—with the heartless fiends conjured up by the antivivisectionists? On the surface, Gross does not fit the pattern. The patient on the table lies in a drugged sleep that renders him (or her) unconscious of present pain, and Gross, far from dismembering, is in the process of saving the afflicted limb. But once again, we must look at the scene from the vantage point of the layperson. As the historian James Turner has argued, even though few medical scientists (i.e., experimental physiologists) in the last third of the century practiced medicine, in the public mind they were closely identified with physicians by the aims of their work, a connection cemented by the medical societies’ unanimous defense of vivisection. Thus the surgeon shared in the brutality of the vivisector, and in his schadenfreude. Whether Gross was “really” the very opposite of such a profile was, from this perspective, quite beside the point. The surgeon, the dissector, and the vivisector all were cut from the same cloth. Indeed, it is obvious that like Bernard’s impassive surgeon, Gross—not to be stopped by the “most moving cries and sobs”—sees “only his idea.”27 Some of Gross’s own statements and practices suggest that he had more in common with the heartless vivisectionists than may at first appear. Early in his professional life he had “sacrificed” nearly one hundred dogs in research on the nature and treatment of intestinal wounds. He claimed that the experiments had entailed a “great sacrifice of feeling. I am naturally fond of dogs, and my sympathies were often wrought to the highest pitch, especially when I happened to get hold of an unusually clever specimen. Anaesthetics had not yet been discovered, and I was therefore obliged to inflict severe pain. The animal while under torture would often look into my eye, as if to say ‘Is it possible you will torment me this way? What have I done to deserve all this . . . ?’” Gross vigorously defended his aims as lofty, selfless, and laudable. Had they been less worthy, “I should consider myself a most cruel, heartless man, deserving of severest condemnation.” Progress in the healing art had more than justified the means; the work of Majendie and others put to flight “the ill-timed sentimentality of the societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, which have made so much ado about this matter.”28
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figure 93. “Chien fixé sur la table à vivisection,” published in Claude Bernard’s Leçons de Physiologie Opérative, 1879.
Gross’s rationale for the use of anesthetics (when they became available) on human subjects was strikingly congruent with that of the vilified physiologist Emanuel Klein, who in 1875 admitted to the Royal Commission on Vivisection (in England) that he used anesthetics only as a convenience and had no regard at all for the agonies of experimental animals. For Gross, the alleviation of pain and suffering was at best secondary: “Anaesthetics . . . by placing the patient in a passive condition, give the surgeon a control over him which he could not possibly obtain in any other manner,” wrote Gross in his widely used System of Surgery. He believed that children required anesthetics no more on account of their tender sensibilities than because it immobilized them, making them “perfectly quiet and tractable” and enabling the surgeon to “deliberately proceed.”29 His drug of choice was problematic as well. By the 1870s many physicians had begun to substitute ether for chloroform, which was so risky that a contemporary writer blamed it for 80 percent of the deaths caused by anesthetics. Gross nonetheless favored this drug as a more effective means of subduing the poor and retarded subjects on whose bodies a great deal of experimental surgery was carried out. The patient in Eakins’s Gross Clinic, in fact, has been immobilized in just such a fashion.30 What “selfish end” might have found gratification in wielding the bloody scalpel flourished so
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dramatically in The Gross Clinic? The walls of Gross’s discipline seem unbreachable. Yet unguarded fissures allow a glimpse of inner conflict. Gross described surgery as “a most corroding, souldisturbing profession,” a “terrible taskmaster, feeding like a vulture upon a man’s vitals,” all too often making him unfit for normal family life. The tools of the trade themselves emblematized the corrosion and gnawing anxiety. In his Autobiography Gross wrote, “Persons have often come to me saying they had understood that I was very fond of using the knife . . . nothing could be more untrue or unjust. I have never hesitated to employ the knife when I thought it was imperatively demanded . . . but that I have ever operated merely for the sake of display or the gratification of some selfish end is as base as it is false.” Gross’s evident need to refute such assumptions publicly suggests his awareness of the scalpel’s connotations and his desire to distance himself from the image of the surgeon or vivisector habitually pursuing secret, dreadful pleasures. At the same time, he took pains to assure his public that he was a man of feeling, plagued by incessant worry about the lives he held in his hands: “What other profession or pursuit is there that involves so much mental anguish, so much awful responsibility, so much wear and tear of mind and body?” Source of intractable anxiety, the cutting of flesh was also an act of absolute power over the body, alive or dead: one of Gross’s passions, indeed, was dissection.31 Spectators in 1876 or 1879 had no access to Samuel Gross’s emotional life or inner struggles. All the same, his portrait by Eakins seems to allude perversely to the very things Gross wanted to deny. The painting is a theatrical and exciting display of pain and gore. Bright spotlighting fixes the gaze compellingly on the spectacle of the patient’s blood-flecked thigh, scored like a roast ready for the oven, and on the surgeon, whose crimson-lacquered fingers compete for attention with his lofty cranium. All else is plunged in shadow, rendering the operating room a stage set, its action suspended at a moment of high tension. Thus treated, clinical procedure takes on the quality of a mysterious, compelling ritual. A well-dressed man of science, Gross is as calm, cool, and deliberate as Frances Cobbe’s archfiend, the experimental physiologist. His expression—eyes narrowed and blank, teeth glinting between parted lips—is inscrutable but hardly reassuring. The patient, like one of Bernard’s dogs, is “bound” by Dr. Briggs’s tenacious grip and “gagged” under that thick, toxic wad of cloth. No matter that the sleeper’s quivering nerves are at this moment insensate. The pain of the picture is all in the looking: in making the connection between the sharpedged, bloody blade in the doctor’s fingers and the deep, raw, distended cut in the defenseless thigh. If the patient felt nothing, the painting inexorably set viewers’ nerves aquiver while accentuating the cold and sinister detachment of the doctor’s pose. All this suggests why the lone woman in Gross’s surgical theater generated such disgust and apprehension and why the Tribune’s critic found it shocking that the Society of American Artists had chosen to hang the painting where all could see it. What could be more disturbing to a Victorian
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audience than the potential of such a spectacle to corrupt innocent eyes, to plant in sentimental hearts the terrible seeds of schadenfreude?32 It was no accident that large numbers of women were involved in the antivivisection movement. Second-class citizens, unable to achieve full autonomy in a patriarchal society, they tended strongly to relate to and even identify with the sufferings of creatures under the vivisector’s knife or the surgeon’s scalpel. Stand-in for a whole class of powerless subjects—dogs, children, women—the “mother” in Eakins’s Gross Clinic articulates the agonies visited on the dumb and the weak in the quest for knowledge.33 As the “additional element of horror,” she amplified the fear, nausea, and revulsion that gripped so many beholders of the picture. Without the blood, though, other details would not signify in quite the same way. As the Tribune’s critic indignantly observed, the professor, with “bloody lancet in bloody fingers,” gave the finishing touch to a profoundly sickening scene. Why did the blood, more than anything else, excite so raw a response? The painting is nowhere near as gory or macabre as many a French academic showpiece. Nonetheless, when the critic Susan N. Carter saw The Gross Clinic in New York, she thought at once of the French painter Henri Regnault’s Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings of Grenada (Fig. 94): Many of our readers will recall to mind Reynaud’s painting of a decapitation in the gallery of the Luxemburg, and will remember the fiendish expression of the murdered man as he gazes up with a look still full of life into the face of his murderer. Pools of blood cover the floor, and their truth to nature renders this one of the most disgusting of modern works of Art. The picture of the dissecting-room by Eakins has many of the same revolting features, and the surgery and the red dabblings were not offset . . . by the great skill shown in the beautiful modeling of the hands.
Many American viewers associated Gallic art with perversion of one kind or another, including a marked taste for whatever was ghastly, painful, and gory. The diarist George Templeton Strong, for example, had powerful reservations about the illustrator Gustave Doré: “I think [he] represents the highest (or lowest) type of Parisian art, which delights in sensuality and (by some inscrutable law) loves carnage and torture as an inverted or perverted sensualism. It is certain that he—Doré—is brutalized by the atmosphere he breathes.”34 French art, in other words, had the same effect on its makers (and presumably viewers) as surgery and vivisection were thought to have on their practitioners. Yet French painting was for those very reasons magnetically fascinating. The same Centennial Exposition that banished The Gross Clinic from the halls of art admitted extravagantly gory French works such as George Becker’s Rizpah Protecting the Bodies of Her Sons from Birds of Prey (1875; location unknown). This gi-
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figure 94. Henri Regnault, Execution without Judgment under the Moorish Kings of Granada, 1870. Oil on canvas, 1181⁄8 × 57H". Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
gantic canvas, which afforded the spectacle of seven corpses hanging from a gibbet, drew large crowds. According to Leslie’s critic, these people wondered as they looked at “this bloody, terrible picture, why so ghastly and repulsive a subject was chosen at all. . . . But there is no accounting for the tastes of a French artist.”35 Had Eakins overlaid his grand portrait with French sensationalism in an attempt to emulate his Parisian masters? If so, the strategy backfired. With its contemporary clinical setting, The Gross Clinic was more repellent than even the most ghastly French works with their orientalist displacements of violence to distant, different locations. On the walls of the Kurtz Gallery in New York, Eakins’s tableau attained maximum shock value. Most of the paintings in the society’s show were conventional portraits, genre scenes, flower still lifes, and innocuous landscapes. In such a setting, Eakins’s “dissecting room,” with its intimations of midnight “resurrections” and the brutalizing torture chambers of modern science, was perverse indeed.36
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Why did Eakins make these choices? Was it, as Elizabeth Johns maintains, because as a literal realist he had to show the operation in just such a way in order to describe it faithfully? Or was it because the sight of vulnerable flesh, cutting instruments, and trickling blood was the source of the same schadenfreude that supposedly thrilled surgeons and vivisectors in their cold mastery of helpless bodies? It is true that with the exception of the two clinic pictures and the grotesquely naturalistic Crucifixion (1880; Philadelphia Museum of Art), there are no mutilated, cut, or bleeding figures in Eakins’s oeuvre. Yet his work, dedicated to the celebration of the body in strength, health, and wholeness, was rooted in the invasion and scrutiny of the abject dead. Was Eakins merely a “boyishly simple” innocent, as Lloyd Goodrich insisted?37 Or was he driven by some pathological compulsion—rooted in his formative years—to know and utterly control the physical body, which he saw as an erotically fascinating machine? The Civil War, which so darkly tainted the popular image of the surgeon, may have left an indelible impression on Eakins, too. He did not fight in the war: instead, he paid to sidestep the military draft when he came of age. Yet in Philadelphia it was impossible—especially for a young artist already absorbed in the seductions of anatomy—to ignore the war’s bloody consequences. Geographically, the city was well situated to serve as a center for the treatment of casualties. In 1864, for instance, 130 out of 174 members of the Philadelphia College of Physicians were connected in some way with the Union army. Several of the doctors with whom Eakins was later involved worked in the hospitals, which in all had twenty-six thousand beds for the sick and wounded. David Hayes Agnew, for example, was commissioned to the Mower General Hospital at Chestnut Hill. In that facility, often so crowded it housed more than five thousand cases, large numbers of operations were performed: “amputations of all sorts, trephinings, extraction of balls and missiles.” During the war John H. Brinton, painted by Eakins in 1876, headed the new Army Medical Museum, collecting and preserving specimens for study and display; later he edited the multivolume Medical and Surgical History of the War of Rebellion. For some months Samuel Gross was in charge of the surgical ward at George Street Hospital, where he amputated thighs and excised shoulder joints. William W. Keen, too, was involved in the treatment of battlefield trauma and later recalled operating “in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats.” Keen also reported that at Jefferson Medical College Dr. Gross would operate “on the same table on which the cadaver was demonstrated by the professor of anatomy.”38 The war experience of S. Weir Mitchell, a Philadelphia physician, inspired his story “The Case of George Dedlow,” published shortly after the end of conflict. Dedlow is a fictional alumnus of Jefferson Medical College, serving in the Union army. In the course of the war he endures unimaginable mutilations. Battlefield surgeons lop off first one arm, then both legs (to the hips), and finally the other arm at the shoulder joint. “Against all chances I recovered,” writes Dedlow, “to find my-
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self a useless torso, more like some strange larval creature than anything of human shape.” Thus reduced, Dedlow is “forwarded” like a mail sack to Philadelphia for treatment at the “Stump Hospital,” which overflows with monstrously disfigured amputees of every description. Finally, after many more months of mental and physical anguish, Dedlow attends a séance where, briefly reunited with his phantom legs, he walks—only to fall to the floor, and reality, on his stumps again, once the illusion is dispelled.39 The war made Dedlow a freak—as it did many thousands of others in real life. Mitchell’s macabre tale suggests how deeply the war haunted even the medical men who had performed the dire operations. Dedlow’s body, moreover, had larger significance. As the historian David Yuan writes, the figure of the damaged male body was of great ideological importance during and after the war. That body was a reminder of the war’s toll and an emblem of the nation itself. Yet the health of the body politic as a whole was dependent on its recuperation. After the war, accordingly, the icon of the “immaculate” white male body elided the damaged body as national icon.40 It may be no coincidence that Eakins, on his return from Paris, immediately began to study vigorous oarsmen, celebrating their highly developed physiques, perfect coordination, and winning spirit in a series of portraits. There is no way to know exactly how the medical side of the war affected Eakins. It is difficult to imagine that living in the midst of a wartime hospital city, with its thousands upon thousands of wounded, broken bodies—bodies on stumps and crutches, truncated bodies—would leave no trace. As a noncombatant, Eakins ran no personal risk. Already in the orbit of doctors directly involved in treating casualties, however, he could not have failed to be aware of the horrific mutilations that young men his own age were forced to endure. Did his obsession with whole, strong bodies stem in part from exposure to the bodily consequences of the war? Did he fear the loss of his own health and physical integrity? There is only the smallest scattering of clues to guide us. Eakins wrote to his father, Benjamin, from Paris that his great goal was to paint what he loved: “sunlight & children & beautiful women & men their heads & hands & most everything I see.” He fulminated against the falseness of contemporary French nudes, divested of all body hair. “I can conceive of few circumstances wherein I would have to paint a woman naked, but if I did I would not mutilate her for double the money.” To call such editing “mutilation” seems out of all proportion to the case. Eakins fervently admired the art of Velázquez—strong, reasonable, and unaffected, like nature itself—but loathed that of Rubens. From Spain he wrote: “Rubens is the nastiest most vulgar noisy painter that ever lived. His men are twisted to pieces. His modeling is always crooked & dropsical . . . his people never have bones . . . there must be monsters too for his men are not monstrous enough for him. His pictures put me in mind of chamber pots & I would not be sorry if they were all burnt.” Why did he choose such vehement words to describe the Flemish painter’s bodies: monstrous, twisted,
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crooked, boneless? Did those men “twisted to pieces” recall by some oblique channel the mutilated bodies in wartime hospitals? Why were they so deeply repellent that the only thing he could compare them to was human waste, abject, foul, and formless? Eakins had the same low tolerance for bodily irregularities in life. The inbred villagers of the Swiss Alps horrified him (as they did many travelers of the period, admittedly). He wrote: “They live in the filthiest manner possible in the lower apartment being privy & barn combined & they breed by incest altogether. Consequently goiters and cretins only. If I was a military conqueror & they came in my way I would burn every hovel & spare nobody for fear they would contaminate the rest of the world. . . . An earthquake some years ago was a godsend in destroying half of them.”41 For Eakins, healthy art and bodily integrity alike demanded that deformed, diseased, and mutilated matter be expelled by whatever means possible. Rubens’s paintings should all be burned; physical or mental defectives exterminated. Eakins’s fierce devotion to dissection perhaps helped compensate for his fears and gave him a measure of power over the body that generated such anxiety. Experimental physiology provided him with a model of scientific detachment and masterful control. The doctors and anatomists who were his teachers and professional associates subscribed to Bernardian principles. Indeed, the Jefferson Medical College professor William W. Keen, the noted surgeon most closely involved with Eakins in the study and teaching of anatomy, published Our Recent Debts to Vivisection in 1885 and in other writings explicitly linked progress in surgery with the practices of experimental physiology. As an artist, Eakins had no need to engage in vivisection, but he built his approach to dissection on the same scientific spirit.42 Late in the 1870s the New York critic William Crary Brownell visited the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to research an article for Scribner’s. One illustration in it reproduced a painting by the student Charles H. Stephens showing William W. Keen making a point with a live male model on a platform also occupied by plaster casts, a skeleton, and an upright cadaver suspended from a hoist directly behind the speaker. The other illustration, by Thomas Anshutz, showed art students in a dissecting room, probing the neck of a dead man stretched out on the table (Fig. 95). Brownell viewed those practices—unique to the curriculum of the Pennsylvania Academy at that time—with deep disgust and questioned their usefulness to aspiring artists. The atmosphere of the dissecting room was disturbing; the “material” there was “ugly, not to say horrible,” aggravated by the “arsenal of dread-looking implements” lying ready to carve up some cadaver into a “dismembered semblance of what was once a human being.” How could utilitarian concentration on mere mechanics—and such morbid ones at that—possibly nurture a student’s imagination and creativity? Did students really need to learn how to paint the face by dissecting not only human heads but also those of horses, cats, dogs, and sheep; must they observe individual mus-
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figure 95. After Thomas Anshutz, “Dissecting Room,” published in Scribner’s, September 1879.
cle groups in action by running electrical current through dead flesh? While Brownell conceded the logic of the system and admired its strict discipline, he feared its crippling effects on inspiration and creativity. Denying that the academy was in the business of turning out surgeons, Eakins defended his philosophy. He acknowledged that it was “dirty enough work at best.” Nonetheless, it was essential. To draw the human figure it is necessary to know as much as possible about it, about its structure and its movements, its bones and muscles, how they are made, and how they act. . . . If beauty resides in fitness to any extent, what can be more beautiful than [a] skeleton, or the perfection with which means and ends are reciprocally adopted to each other? But no one dissects to quicken his eye for, or his delight in, beauty. He dissects simply to increase his knowledge of how beautiful objects are put together to the end that he may be able to imitate them. . . . This whole matter of dissection is not art at all, any more than grammar is poetry. It is work, and hard work, disagreeable work.
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He hastened to add that he cared nothing for anatomy “as such” and paid no attention to the viscera or the functions of the spleen. Only the structure and action of the body’s bones and muscles concerned him.43 Eakins’s 1885 photograph recording a differential-action study demonstrates the application of these principles (Fig. 96). The artist designed this procedure to show how groups of muscles work together. Leaning over most precariously, the assistant on the ladder is poised to bend the entire hind leg of a horse, stripped down to the muscle. The fetlock still sports a crisp ruff of hair, which fleetingly evokes the once-living creature from the flayed fragment. For any observer not caught up in the spirit of the occasion, this is an image at once repellent—with its wiry tuft, stringy sinews, gleaming bones—and absurd. A man bearing down on a dead horse’s leg as if it were a crutch could only be a mad butcher, or geek. For Eakins the artist-anatomist, however, this photographic record of his experiment was the visual epitome of his aesthetic and scientific convictions. The beauty of his art, grounded in the body, was the aesthetic equivalent of Claude Bernard’s science of life, a “superb and dazzlingly lighted hall.” Like Bernard, Eakins could reach this transcendent place only through the same “long and ghastly kitchen.” His philosophy was the aesthetic equivalent to that of Bernard, who affirmed that “the mechanisms of life can be unveiled and proved only by knowledge of the mechanisms of death.”44 Just as perspective offered a system for regulating disorderly and fluid nature, the body’s mechanical functions were for Eakins the all-important medium of containment and control over its messier and infinitely more disturbing offal. As long as the machine worked smoothly, there was nothing to fear. Eakins’s methodical photographic documentation of the nude figure was a related mode of scrutiny that brought his artistic enterprise into the scientific sphere. In the early 1870s Francis F. Maury and Louis A. Duhring began publishing the journal Photographic Review of Medicine and Surgery, which documented the symptoms of syphilis and reproduced photographs of grievous congenital deformities. Here medical science crossed paths with the freak show. The pictures in such “legitimate” journals differ very little in kind or effect from those that circulated in the world of popular entertainment: the dime museum and the side show. Indeed, as Robert Bogdan writes, scientists and medical practitioners aided and abetted such displays by visiting, commenting on, and examining exhibits.45 When Eadweard Muybridge undertook his photographic studies of animal and human locomotion at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s, his sponsors included the physiologist Francis X. Dercum, a specialist in nervous diseases at Jefferson, who was interested in the motor action of pathological conditions such as polio and epilepsy. Accordingly, some photographs in Muybridge’s series display severely handicapped bodies in motion: a naked girl hobbling on painfully bowed legs, a legless boy swinging himself down from a chair. Another scrutinizes the compulsive
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figure 96. Thomas Eakins, DifferentialAction Study: Man on Ladder, Leaning on Horse’s Stripped Hind Leg, While Second Man at Left Looks On, 1885. Platinum print, 13 1 ⁄16 × 19⁄16". Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, 1985.68.2.1004.
movements of Robert Connolly, a hysteric diagnosed and treated for years (without success) by S. Weir Mitchell (Fig. 97). While studies like these have some medical justification, they are akin to freak photography in their spectacular exposure of physical abnormalities and their sometimes gratuitous baring of flesh, as in Connolly’s case, which involved tics and twitches of the upper limbs. In addition, by cutting the flow of movement into slices, these sequences systematically act as photographic “dissection,” designed to pinpoint the body’s muscular and skeletal mechanics.46 Eakins devised his own photographic apparatus for motion study and worked closely with Muybridge. He did not take pictures of freaks or amputees. Yet some of his photographs—like a bold, invasive stare—can still be thought of as visual “dissections.” In the “Naked Series” (ca. 1883) Eakins and his students produced a substantial group of photographs in which nude figures—young, old, black, white, male, female—are seen from front, back, and side in a sequence of standard poses. The models include a bearded old man, a very young boy, and several women with masks that erase their identities, after the fashion of the chloroform towel in The Gross Clinic (Fig. 98). As if they were specimens in some anatomy laboratory, these subjects stand stripped and exposed
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from all angles, allowing the viewer to pore over every feature, every peculiarity, even of their most private parts (including Eakins’s own, since he too posed in the series). Eakins’s photographs of nude children, in particular those of a nameless, prepubescent African American girl posed like an odalisque or a French Venus (ca. 1882; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), skate perilously close to what would now be considered a forbidden category of representation. Nor did his youthful relatives escape. In the mid-1880s Eakins made studies of the Crowell children (his nephews and nieces) outdoors on the family’s farm at Avondale, posing them nude from the rear in some cases for the camera’s (and the artist’s) possessive scrutiny.47 Eakins’s photographic project was also tied in with the private nude posing sessions involving his own students, male and female. He refused to curtail such activities even when scandal engulfed him and rumors of sexual impropriety began to fly. Things came to a head in 1890, when his nieces Ella and Maggie left the Avondale farm to live and study with their uncle in Philadelphia. Their father, William J. Crowell, sent a long letter to his brother-in-law, earnestly urging him not to make the children pose nude. “The thought of their naked living bodies being used as instruments either to illustrate scientific truth, or to gratify an artistic (even an ‘artistic’ whatever that is) lust of the eye, is unspeakably revolting to me,” he wrote. He accused Eakins of setting up the “worship of the nude as a kind of fetich” and told him that if any of his children came to believe that “chastity of mind or body is a matter merely of taste or whim, that feminine purity is chiefly shown by an alacrity in displaying their naked forms for the bishop of ‘art,’ that your favorite Rabelais motto ‘Fay ce que vouldras,’ contains the true philosophy of life, they will be to Fanny a living constant torture, to me a bitter memory.”48 Crowell’s pleas were to no avail: the nude posing took place. We might easily dismiss Crowell’s fears as the expression of stereotypical Victorian prudery, but the issue is hardly that simple. Crowell put his finger squarely on the nature of Eakins’s obsession, which was compounded of both science and passion. Eakins’s “lust of the eye” combined a seemingly heartless, methodical medical scrutiny with relentless and searching desire. Possessed by the need for mastery and driven by the allure of intimate secrets, outside and inside the body, Eakins trained on his subjects a gaze at once sexual and pathological. Is this so far from what the surgeon Cecil Helman sees as the link between dissection and pornography? Helman writes that the dissecting room “shows us the difference between erotic art and pornography, between human experience and the worship of parts. . . . It is the same reduction of the human image into slices of helpless meat, ripped out of context. Whatever the caring aim of medicine, all this is only one stage beyond those vermillion cuts of meat you see hanging in a butcher’s shop.”49 Eakins, too, worshiped and fetishized parts, as much as he worshiped and fetishized the nude in one piece. In the course of his teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy, he made some seventeen
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figure 97. Eadweard Muybridge, Local Chorea, Standing, published in Animal Locomotion, plate 557, 1887. Courtesy Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.
casts of dissected human anatomy—torsos, arms, legs—as study aids. Those fragments (like the flayed horse’s leg in the differential-action study) reduced the body to its clinically objectified components. Parts of the living body held the same eroticized fascination. When Weda Cook posed for The Concert Singer (1890–92; Philadelphia Museum of Art), Eakins would scrutinize her throat and mouth again and again “as if through a microscope” as she sang the opening phrases of the aria “O Rest in the Lord” from Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah. On another occasion he told a young woman, “You have a nice back—much like that of a boy. I would like to paint you nude.” More than once he poked his sitters’ chests to feel for bones. Reportedly, he said that he cared more about the character of the muscles than the character of the person he portrayed. His obsession with parts and their machinery took fetishism to a clinical extreme. As the historian of dress Valerie Steele writes, “Men often fetishize body parts . . . and might well describe themselves as ‘leg men,’ ‘breast men,’ or ‘ass men.’” Eakins was a “leg man” and so on, but also, and even more, a “larynx man,” a “rib man,” and a “quadriceps man.”50 In this respect he was not so far from Poe, whose tales abound in images of fragmentation: the teeth or eyes of dead lovers, the telltale heart, the ghastly head of the murder victim in the Rue Morgue. For Eakins, the body was a puzzle, to be taken apart and put back together, time and again. Both the beauty and the reassurance of art came in and through the process of reconstituting the
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figure 98. Thomas Eakins, Naked Series: “Brooklyn No. 1,” Female with Dark Mask, Pose 1, ca. 1883. Six albumen prints, 213⁄16 × 11⁄16". Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection. Purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, 1985.68.2.364.
body, making a whole of what had been in pieces. In so doing he was able to assuage his own repressed fears. Like the bodies he so single-mindedly dismantled and then reassembled in perfect working order, Eakins was haunted by deep-seated anxieties about disintegration, both physical and mental. His fetishism, indeed, may have had something to do with the need for reassurance and defense against unease about sexual potency and function. We can find faint traces of these anxieties in looking once more at The Gross Clinic with reference to the artist’s own life up to that point. The art historian Michael Fried and the literary scholar Jennifer Doyle have both pointed to strong psychosexual elements in the painting. Fried reads an oedipal structure in the triad of the masterful surgeon-father, the hysterical mother figure, and the two “sons”—the passive patient on the table and the figure of Eakins himself looking on. “With Gross’s bloody scalpel before our eyes,” writes Fried, inevitably the painting must be construed in Freudian terms, among them the “issue of [metaphorical] castration,” which dramatizes Eakins’s anxiety of influence, that is, his inability to move beyond the paternal shadow. In Fried’s intricate analysis, the “virtual dismemberment of the patient’s body by the agency of foreshortening functions simultaneously as a figure for castration and as a distancing device par excellence.” It is Eakins’s desire ultimately to merge and thereby identify with the “threatening (and healing) paternal power.” Doyle focuses on the
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patient’s gender, contending that its ambiguity leaves Eakins’s version of castration unresolved. She concludes that the work of the Gross Clinic involves a “reining-in of affect . . . in the name of realism.” This project “requires the presence of a woman: the heroic performance of masculine power is acted out around and against the backdrop of her abjection.”51 Eakins’s realism thus becomes a specifically and exclusively masculine expressive language owing its very existence to the presence of hysterical femininity. What more might The Gross Clinic have to tell us of Eakins’s intense and convoluted family relations? And who or what is that incoherent and illegible form on the operating table? The painting’s signature may offer a key. In plain block capitals, it is inscribed (with the date, 1875) on the end of the operating table. Why there? Does it mean something, or was Eakins simply making sure that his name could not fail to be seen? Eakins unambiguously linked self and signature in The Champion Single Sculls (1871; Metropolitan Museum of Art), a portrait of his admired friend Max Schmitt on the Schuylkill River. In the background he portrayed himself rowing energetically away, his name and date prominently visible on the stern end of his scull’s washbox. This parallel may not allow us to say that the patient on the table is meant somehow to represent or symbolize Eakins. But what if it were? It is well known that Eakins was dependent all his life on his father, Benjamin. He was, as the Eakins scholar Kathleen Foster has pointed out, “never alone in his house and never in charge.” His wife, Susan, was still calling their home “Mr. [Benjamin] Eakins’s house” in 1897, when Thomas was in his fifties. His mother is almost entirely absent from view in the biography. All we know is that she suffered from a mental disease so severe that after two years during which she required constant attendance, she died of “exhaustion from mania” at the age of fifty-two. She was stricken a few months after Eakins returned from abroad; according to Goodrich, the illness was probably some form of manic-depressive psychosis. In April 1871 a family friend reported, “Tom Eaken has been at home since July 4. Since early autumn he has never spent an evening from home as it worried his Mother and since her return home [most likely from a mental institution] they never leave her for a minute.” This situation was to last more than another year before Caroline Cowperthwaite Eakins finally succumbed. Eakins’s paintings from that time show his sisters in dark, moody interiors suffused with a feeling of domestic claustrophobia. Although he returned to the subject of rowing in the spring of 1872, most of the rowing series postdates his mother’s death. Thus for the better part of a two-year period the young painter was confined to a house of feminine madness and collapse. At the end of it, according to Lloyd Goodrich, he too was ill from exhaustion, and two years later a bout with malaria incapacitated him for months, leaving him weak in body and “mental faculties” alike.52 Did Eakins, like William Rimmer, live under a cloud of fear that he might inherit his parent’s
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mental disease? We know that after the disastrous climax to his career at the Pennsylvania Academy, he sought to repair his shattered nerves by undergoing a “camp-cure” in the Dakotas. There is no record of nervous instability or breakdown prior to that time, but from a young age, he was subject to extreme and debilitating mood swings. Soon after arriving in Paris, Eakins wrote to his father about his state of mind as he attempted to plot a course of study: “You have often accused me of being either in the garret or the cellar. Your remark had a fine application in Paris, and never were garrets so lofty or cellars so deep. But no sooner was I up in the garret that I was down again. My cellar life has done me no harm though. It has set me thinking and planning for myself & has taught me patience. . . . N.B. The above is all metaphysical for they never dig any cellars in Paris.” The letter clearly indicates that Eakins’s mood swings—the constant shuttling between elation and despair—were a pronounced behavioral pattern and the source of some concern.53 We know very little about Eakins’s relationship with his mother. It is likely that she was a quiet and gentle person who complemented Benjamin’s dominating personality. Eakins on the eve of his departure for Paris called her his “sweet mother” and while on the voyage wrote to her of a seasick dream in which he lay with his head on her lap. Most of his surviving letters from Europe are addressed to his father and express no anxiety about his mother’s health; those written to Caroline Eakins are chatty and filled with details about accounts and money management. Caroline Eakins’s precipitous mental decline beginning so soon after her only son returned home to Philadelphia must have been a brutal shock. If the mental defectives of the Swiss Alps so disgusted Eakins that he thought only extermination good enough for them, what must he have felt to see his own mother lose her mind and fall gradually but inexorably to pieces? Surely the protracted manic ordeal and death of the woman he called “Mommy” struck dread as well as grief into his heart. The trauma served, moreover, to reinforce what Eakins perceived as the danger of feminine nature, its potential to spin out of control, beyond the influence of masculine reason or discipline. Several years before, he had broken off a romance with the artist Emily Sartain, who proved too willful and domineering for the domineering Eakins. He wrote to his sister Frances, “There are women who wish to govern everything and in the first place men and all the more because they are weak and incapable of directing themselves.” As for him, he declared, if he ever married it would be to no “New England she doctor” but a robust “Jersey farmer’s daughter.”54 Eakins, like Elihu Vedder, was threatened by the dangerous fusion of feminine power and female weakness. Early in the 1870s there was some other mysterious family trouble as well. William Crowell, who married Eakins’s sister Frances in 1874, reported in April 1886 that “nearly fourteen years ago” something Eakins said or did led to a severe breach in their friendship. This trouble bred in Crowell “such an intense hostility toward him, that I confess having said to him, in the presence of his father, that if it were possible to confine the consequences of the act to our two selves, I
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would take his life.” What occasioned that lethal friction so soon after the death of Eakins’s mother? Crowell refused to say and would add only that the two other persons who knew what had happened “have been in their graves for years.”55 Was one of these other persons Crowell’s sister Kathrin, who became Eakins’s fiancée in 1874 but died of meningitis five years later? Was the other Eakins’s sister Maggie, who died of typhoid fever in 1882? Or were they parties unknown? Whatever the answer to this puzzle, the story suggests that in the early 1870s storm clouds of anger and sadness hovered over the artist and those around him. The pattern, once set (and repressed?), returned to haunt the Eakins clan. After the Pennsylvania Academy scandal in 1886, George Frank Stephens—husband of Eakins’s youngest sister, Caddie—spread rumors of incest and bestiality between Eakins and his favorite sister, Maggie. This episode caused a permanent rift in the family. And in 1897 the painter’s niece Ella Crowell killed herself with a gun. Diagnosed insane, she had spent two months in a mental hospital late the preceding year and had since been confined to her room in the Crowell family farmhouse. The Crowells placed the blame squarely on Eakins, who they claimed had molested Ella when she studied art with him on Mount Vernon Street. This episode fractured what remained of the family: Eakins never saw or spoke to the Crowells again.56 Ironically, Eakins, from his student days onward, owned and carried a handgun. Indeed, one of Caddie’s grievances against her brother was that he had shot her “diseased pet cat” without consulting her first.57 The many and well-known reports of Eakins’s boorish behavior also reinforce the profile of an unstable, rebellious, mood-driven personality incapable of meshing smoothly, if at all, with the demands of convention. Lloyd Goodrich’s description of the artist elucidates these contours. Eakins was “somewhat silent” and “frank and tense” in speech. An “agnostic and free-thinker,” he went around in “old, rough clothes.” He used earthy language, loved “Rabelaisian jokes,” and with his remarkable gift for mimicry could “play the clown” with enormous success. He was so uninhibited (or oblivious) that he was in the habit while dressing of walking back and forth in his “shirt tail” from his room to the bedroom that his sisters Maggie and Caddie occupied with his aunt Eliza. Intellectually mature and unquestionably brilliant in many ways, he was an adolescent socially and struck many, as he did Sadakichi Hartmann, as “naïve and awkward as a big child that has grown up too fast.”58 The big child warred constantly with the adult: throughout much of his career, Eakins perversely worked to sabotage his professional and social standing alike with his provocative acts and alienating gestures. If The Gross Clinic refers covertly in some way to the Eakins family romance, perhaps it encodes the double nature of Thomas Eakins in the patient under the knife and the intense figure sketching in the shadows. That is, the incoherent body on the table so prominently marked with the artist’s name could stand metaphorically for Eakins-in-pieces; the recognizable self-portrait,
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for Eakins whole and self-commanding. Each of these in turn has a double or echo. Wounded, helpless, jumbled, and mindless, the patient is the double of the hysterical “mother,” swept away by unreasoning emotion. Conscious, observant, and active, the artist recording the scene is the double of the “father” figure, the magisterial Samuel Gross. This Eakins’s identity, integrity, and perhaps even sanity depended on suppressing, expelling, or vigilantly policing that dark, damaged, disintegrating feminine self. Eakins’s obsession with manliness and physical culture were facets of this police action, as were his reliance on medical, mechanical, and mathematical systems to impose control on unruly, dangerous female nature. The many ambiguities of the painting, however, suggest that such control systems could fail at any time—as they did, time and again, in Eakins’s own social and professional life.59 Much like the blood welling up out of the gashed thigh of the patient in The Gross Clinic, Eakins in art and life overflowed and aggressively pushed against established limits. That blood, finally, is crucial to understanding the confusions of the picture and its maker. With the exception of this one clinical portrait by Eakins, almost no images of American surgeons in the late nineteenth century showed spilled blood. As Daniel Fox and Christopher Lawrence have pointed out, conventional hospital pictures “signaled moral and material order rather than the presence or threat of disorder.”60 Literally and figuratively, the most volatile threat to surgical, scientific order and control was blood, by its very nature formless, wayward, and difficult to check. Flowing without stoppage, blood transgressed the boundaries segregating the inside of the body (with its dark, visceral, messy, somatic processes) from the realm of social and cultural containment outside. Checked, it permitted the reinstatement of bodily and social order. Unchecked, it led relentlessly to disintegration, beyond the power of even the greatest surgical skill to reverse its flow. It is hardly surprising that Dr. David Hayes Agnew refused to permit Eakins to depict blood on his hands in the 1889 portrait. Seeing what Eakins was up to, Agnew “at once objected most strenuously, and despite the artist’s protests for fidelity to nature, ordered all the blood to be removed.”61 Nonetheless, it remains a bloody spectacle for all that Agnew’s scalpel shines clean. The painting’s reception in Philadelphia, little better than its predecessor’s, sharpens the pattern of ambiguity and conflicting identity that persistently clung to artist and subject alike. According to Lloyd Goodrich, The Agnew Clinic created a scandal in polite Philadelphia art circles: “The saying that went around was: ‘Eakins is a butcher.’ Weda Cook Addicks told me that he repeated this to her, with tears in his eyes, saying: ‘They call me a butcher, and all I was trying to do was to picture the soul of a great surgeon.’” Gross, too, was inordinately sensitive to this pejorative, declaring, “I never hear the word ‘butcher’ applied to an operator without resenting it.” The taint of butchery extended even to Eakins’s work space. When the art critic Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer visited Eakins in Philadelphia in 1881, she reported: “His want of a sense of beauty apparent in his
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pictures is still more so in his surroundings. His studio is a garret room without one single object on which the eye might rest with pleasure—the sole ornaments some skeletons & some models of the frame & muscles which looked, of course, like the contents of a butchers shop!” Not surprisingly, perhaps, the New York Daily Graphic, in describing the morgue at Bellevue Hospital, noted that to the uninitiated this room “would readily be taken for a butcher’s shop from its familiar surroundings.”62 In their identity as “butchers,” artist and surgeon fused into one, becoming figures of fear and harbingers of death. Gross personified the dreaded “sawbones” and the detested vivisector, while the painter, who had forsaken studio for dissecting room, had compounded butchery with art. For its distressed and sickened viewers, The Gross Clinic evoked a world in which the authoritarian structure of masculine rationality (and realism) had established itself on a deep foundation of pain. But in Eakins’s picture the stern tools of science only tenuously held the violence and chaos of nature in check, just as his own systems only precariously held his demons of disorder at bay. In a way that beholders could perhaps sense though never recognize, the painting broadcast subtle signals from the uneasy mind of an artist for whom realism, with all its complex organizing systems, was the defense of method against madness. By recognizing this, we can recover some of the intense ambiguity that attended this painting’s earliest days in public, when the medical world and the chamber of horrors were not so far apart, and a maverick painter, wielding the dissecting knife and the brush with equal relish, inflicted horrible butchery on the act of painting.
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8
DIRTY PICTURES
n The Temple of the Mind Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1916) recast Edgar Allan Poe’s poem
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“The Haunted Palace” in symbolic visual form (see Plate 14). Set within “The Fall of the House
of Usher,” the poem foreshadows the doom of Roderick, the demented heir. The palace had once been a stately abode of light, wit, and wisdom, under the benevolent reign of the monarch Thought. But evil invaders have toppled reason from the throne. The windows now glow red, and behind them monstrous forms dance to discordant music. Like the palace, Roderick’s mind becomes the abode of demons—his inner demons—who have driven out whatever bright spirits once resided there.1 Ryder’s painting is a free pictorial translation, faithful to the essence if not the letter of Poe’s stanzas. On his symbolism, the artist was uncharacteristically specific: The theme is Poe’s Haunted Palace. . . . The finer attributes of the mind are pictured by three graces who stand in the centre of the picture: where their shadows from the moonlight fall toward the spectator. They are waiting for a weeping love to join them. On the left is a Temple where a cloven footed faun dances up the steps snapping his fingers in fiendish glee at having dethroned the erstwhile ruling graces: on the right a splashing fountain.2
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Much darkened by age and unstable pigment, Ryder’s small panel is still compelling. Just above the hilly horizon is the full moon, which irradiates the sky and spreads a silvery sheen on calm waters below. The moonlight also illuminates the tiered basins of the fountain on the right and picks out the steps, columns, and curved pediment of the temple front opposite. Everything else is in silhouette, and muffled in deep brown shadows. Above the fountain hang the graceful fronds of a weeping willow, counterweight to the temple’s mass. Just as Ryder described them, the three graces huddle together beneath the moon’s orb, their heads outlined against the shimmering waters. Another female figure, unidentified and now difficult to see, leans against the other side of the fountain. In the very center of the composition is the figure of Ryder’s infantile Eros, waving his tiny fists in despair. The goat-legged faun is just about to prance up the shallow steps and vanish through the dark, yawning archway into the interior he has conquered. “The Haunted Palace,” as Poe explained, was meant to “imply a mind haunted by phantoms— a disordered brain,” connoting Roderick Usher’s disintegration and final possession by madness.3 Shadowy though it may be, The Temple of the Mind tells a corresponding story. Whatever stands for beauty, harmony, benevolence, and love has been cast out. Undefended, the temple stands open to the invasion of the goat-man, denizen of the wilderness, emblem of lust, bestiality, and confusion. Part human, part animal, this carnal creature will degrade and pollute the sacred precincts of the mind’s temple, fatally disordering its classical symmetries. Deceptively calm, Ryder’s imagery—easily legible with or without the link to Poe—discloses a nightmare unfolding in the light of the moon. Yet his critics saw in it only a dreamlike magic. The “beyond” in the painting, wrote one, was “a beyond such as dreams are made of,” and indeed the entire composition was “alluring, bewitching.” For Charles de Kay, Ryder’s staunchest defender in print, Temple of the Mind was a fairyland of enchanting effects. More generally, Ryder’s darkness was the source of delicious enthrallment. Although he worked in a variety of genres, contemporaries saw him primarily as the painter of night par excellence. “It is in night that he finds his best expression. There is necessarily an indefiniteness, a vagueness of form, that makes nature under these conditions most responsive to the poetic touch. . . . [H]is moonlights seem pre-eminent. They are imbued with the witchery and mystery of night as perhaps no one else has presented it.” Again and again, writers likened the enchantment of his paintings to the world of dreams. They were “more like dream-pictures than . . . works to be judged by the ordinary canons of criticism,” noted one. Ryder saw himself as a dream painter, too. When after much labor he finally determined the best placement for the figure of the siren in The Lorelei, he crowed, “Of such little things painted dreams are made of” (see Fig. 103).4 Even though one magazine writer dubbed Ryder a “Poe of the Brush,” the implications of such a correspondence have been obscured by the long-standing image of the artist as an endearing,
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harmless, and hopelessly romantic eccentric, living in his own land of dreams. Why did his critics (then and now) elide the ambiguities of his nocturnal dreamscapes and sanitize the pathologies of his lifestyle? The signs were there to be read, but writers persisted in misreading them. Decoding them in all their complexity would reveal something less wholesome skulking in the shadows. No benign dreamland, Ryder’s night was a kingdom where the waking self surrendered all control to the dark energies of the slumbering mind. His “dreams” plumbed the perilous depths of the psyche, where madness lurked, waiting for a chance to surface. His pictures were windows into the anarchic realm of the subconscious, still beyond the powers of empirical reason to understand or explain. Their turbulent compositions and unstable surfaces reverberated (if faintly) with the disorderly social energies of late-nineteenth-century metropolitan life. Ryder himself personified a spirit of domestic misrule undercutting the regimes of discipline and hygiene that the middle class erected as barrier against pollution by the foreign and the strange. Dark double of the daytime bourgeois self, he offered safe excursions to the inner depths his admirers feared within (and without) themselves. Ryder, youngest of four brothers, was born to a working-class family in the old whaling town of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Little information survives on his childhood and youth, although he was said to be interested in art from an early age. He had only a grammar school education but avidly consumed the classics of English literature, from Chaucer to Shakespeare and the romantic poets. About 1870 he moved to New York City, where his brother William owned a restaurant and later managed hotels. Ryder lived with his family until 1879, when he moved into a rented room at Broadway and Canal Street. Two years later, he took a studio in the new Benedick Building on Washington Square, where he lived for twelve years in a community of congenial young artists. Ryder studied informally with the portrait painter William E. Marshall and then sporadically at the National Academy of Design. In 1877 he became one of the founders of the Society of American Artists, organized as an alternative to the National Academy by the painter Helena de Kay Gilder and several of her artist friends. He exhibited in the group’s annual shows from 1878 to 1884. About the same time, he became friendly with the dealer Daniel Cottier, a proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, who commissioned Ryder to undertake some decorative painting projects. With Cottier or other cronies, he made four voyages to England and Europe between 1877 and 1893. During the opening stages of his career Ryder painted earthy little stable scenes and broadbrushed landscapes in the romantic French Barbizon style. In the 1880s he turned to moonlight marines and ambitious subjects from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the romantic poets. Gradually he attracted a small coterie of patrons, most of them nouveau riche businessmen outside the social and cultural mainstream. Always peculiar, Ryder as he aged became strikingly weird, notori-
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ous for his slovenly, irregular habits and his inability to finish paintings. Cared for and monitored by a circle of devoted friends, he gradually failed in inspiration, and his production tapered off. He spent his last years as an old, sick man in the Long Island home of Charles and Louise Fitzpatrick, who had befriended him when they were neighbors in the building at 308 West Fifteenth Street, where Ryder lived from the mid-1890s. By the time he died, he was legendary as an artistseer whose strange visions cast a haunting spell.5 Ryder’s dream paintings departed radically from long-established pictorial conventions for representing the strange visions of sleep. Nineteenth-century painters and graphic artists displayed dream imagery in clouds or registers above the sleeper’s head. In Emanuel Leutze’s Poet’s Dream, for example, the slumbering poet lies in a moonlit graveyard, the figure of a ghostly muse hovering over him (Fig. 99). A cartoon, “The Emigrant’s Dream” (Fig. 100), shows the figure of a man slumped over a newspaper with a headline pertaining to news from Ireland. Over his head float vignettes telling the story of his life in the old country, from the bliss of courtship to the misery of famine. Such images portray dreams legibly, using symbols that are easy to recognize and interpret. Most of Ryder’s painted “dreams,” by contrast, are barely legible and, if gauged by existing conventions, unrecognizable as dreams. Moonlight exemplifies this wayward vision (see Plate 15). Slightly to the right of center, a pallid full moon floats high in the opalescent heavens between two dark lozenges of cloud. Below are the blackish waters of the ocean and the silhouette of a small sailing boat, one tattered sail flapping on a flimsy mast. A glow on the horizon dramatizes the silhouette of this vessel, which seems to skim swiftly across the dark billows. There is no hint of its purpose, destination, or fate; we do not know if the boat is lost, drifting, or wrecked. Is it merely making a night voyage on a limitless sea, by the light of the moon? Or is it sailing in a seascape of the mind? What kind of dream is this, and whose? Ryder painted Moonlight on the back of the same mahogany panel that he used for The Temple of the Mind. The New York collector Thomas B. Clarke had commissioned the latter in 1885, and Ryder finished it during a crossing to England in 1887 on the SS Canada, captained by his seagoing friend John Robinson. He made Moonlight on the return but failed to track down a cabinetmaker who could split the conjoined paintings into two. He gave the panel to Clarke, who found a meerschaum pipe maker capable of performing the delicate operation. It is significant that these contrasting moonlight scenes were once united, back-to-back. Each panel is the double of the other. The Temple of the Mind shows us, in symbolic terms, what happens at the portals of consciousness at the moment when reason is about to crumble and give way to madness. Moonlight ushers us through those portals and into the universe of the unconscious: we are inside the dream, where the mind can lose its way.6
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figure 99. Emanuel Leutze, The Poet’s Dream, by 1840. Oil on canvas, 305⁄16 × 25". Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Bequest of Henry C. Carey (The Carey Collection). figure 100. “The Emigrant’s Dream,” published in Yankee Doodle, March 20, 1847.
Nineteenth-century dream theory and research on the mind offer some suggestions for understanding Ryder’s imagery and its connotations. Since ancient times, dreams had figured large in religion, prophecy, and superstition. With the Enlightenment, philosophers and scientists began to seek rational, materialist explanations for the workings of the mind and the nature of consciousness. Thinkers probed the character and construction of the self, asking if it was a singular and coherent entity or multiple and fragmented. Central to the enterprise was the quest to know and control a nebulous hidden self, and the new formulation of the dream as a coded and cryptic revelation of innermost psychic depths. Double consciousness, or the notion “that the dreaming and waking state might correspond to two parallel mental worlds, each separate from the other,” was also explored and debated.7 Basic to all avenues of inquiry was the emergent concept of the mind as embodied rather than autonomous and transcendent. Because its instinctive or unconscious processes and drives bypassed or eluded the authority of the will, understanding them became a matter of pressing importance. Long before Freud, the nature of the unconscious was the subject of intense interest and debate. In fact, Freud’s theories grew out of a large body of nineteenth-century psychological and philosophical thought. The notion or image of psychic depth was in some sense an invention of the dominant order, a rationalist metaphor to account for and categorize facets of mental or emotional life hitherto explained (if at all) by recourse to religion, magic, or the supernatural. Once the unconscious was “discovered,” as Lancelot Whyte wrote, rationalists tended to regard it as the realm of irrational forces threatening the social and intellectual order which rational consciousness, they imagined, had built up over generations. Day was challenged by Night, the enlightenment of reason by the tempests and conflicts of intuition and instinct, the soul of man by a dark and frightening, but desperately attractive, inner spirit of temptation and surrender, ready to take over and bring the peace of self-forgetfulness. Night, dream, self-annihilation in the abysses of sensuality, escape from the pretenses of social and intellectual life to a sincere and spontaneous acceptance of the depths. But this attraction of the dark was merely the reverse of the pretense that man had already discovered the light: the ideas and ideals . . . appropriate to his nature.8
In other words, the unconscious mind was made to serve as both repository and metaphor for the energies—internal and external alike—that endangered the regulation of self and society in a modernizing world driven by the ideologies of progress, productivity, and the scientific mastery of nature. What was the nature of this repressed and hidden realm? Spatial and landscape metaphors— borrowed from literature—served to describe what could never be seen but only imagined. Strug-
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gling to find words, writers used oceanic and geological images: tides, streams, floods, islands, layers, cavernous depths. The Scottish critic Eneas Sweetland Dallas, one of many who speculated on these issues, imaged the unconscious as the “Hidden Soul” and conceived of thought as a system of concentric rings. The inner represented conscious thought, “which may be described as illuminated,” and the outer one, the unconscious, “which may be described as dark.” Although a current of thought flowed continuously from dark to light and light to dark, in the darkness it passed “beyond our ken, it is gone, we forget it, and we know not what has become of it.” Yet the same thought returned, “changed and grown, as if it were a new thought, and we know not whence it comes.” Consciousness was a tiny island surrounded by the vast, rolling “tide of life,” unknown and unknowable.9 Such metaphors circulated widely. The journalist Frances Power Cobbe meditated on the mysterious processes of memory and its fallacies. Where did memories go, and why did so many vanish without a trace? “Trying to recall the past . . . we shall succeed in finding certain points here and there, a few stepping-stones in the flood of time. Some of them stand out high and clearly. . . . Others are nearly submerged under the ever-rising current of oblivion; and others, again, lie far down where we only see them in strange glimpses by day, or weird dreams at night.”10 Dreams, in like fashion, came from and returned to the innermost depths, shrouded in obscurity. Victor Hugo described the subterranean dreamworld and its oceanic character in the novel Toilers of the Sea (published and translated into English in 1866). Set in Brittany, the story centers on a dreamy, unworldly fisherman. Shunned by neighbors who believe his mother was a sorceress, he travels easily between real life and the land of dreams and sets himself to explore that strange realm. “Night,” wrote Hugo, “is a universe in itself,” and there the Unknown; the darker side of human life is more fully revealed. Is it that there is a real communication, or that the visionary has power given to pierce those unknown abysses till now hidden in gloom? . . . A creation of spectres rises around us; another life than ours, composed of ourselves and something else, come and goes, and the sleeper, not seeing clearly, yet not unconscious, gazes on those strange phantasms, spectres, faces, and those confused visions, the moonlight, with no moon, fragments, without form or name—all these, floating in the troubled atmosphere of the night, are the mystery we term a dream, and are but the approach of an invisible reality. The dream is the aquarium of night.11
The “aquarium of night” was a haunted place, its atmosphere troubled, its waters perturbed by specters, phantasms, and confusion. The unknown harbored bogeys, creatures forming themselves out of darkness.
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Much dream theory involved speculation about the deeper layers of the mind and their influence on mental life. Earlier experiments with mesmerism, hypnosis, and other forms of trance pointed in the same direction, indicating that suspension of volition opened the eyes of the spirit to strange realms of vision.12 New models of memory were important in evolving theories of the dreaming mind. The notorious opium eater Thomas De Quincey contributed a highly influential construction of the human brain as a “natural and mighty palimpsest” in which “everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings” had accumulated since the very beginning of life. Long lost to the conscious mind, the “mysterious handwritings of grief or joy” slumbered in the depths, to be revived only by the hour of death, by the delirium of fever, or by the searchings of opium. At the very bottom, indelible and “lurking to the last,” were “the deep deep tragedies of infancy, as when the child’s hands were unlinked forever from his mother’s neck, or his lips forever from his sister’s kisses.”13 The psychologist James Sully built on this model in formulating a theory of dreams based on regression down to the most primitive layers of the self. Dreams were revelations of a primordial state, unveilings of the “more instinctive layers of our mental life,” the “leaping forth into full activity of some nascent and instantly inhibited thought or feeling of the waking hours.” The “supreme controlling organs” stupefied, sensation and impulse swelled up in “vigorous pristine abundance.” Far from dead, the past in dreams returned like the tide, as the sleeping self reverted to an infantile absorption in bodily life. Inhibitions dissolved, and the “undeveloped, rudimentary selves” from the “hidden substrata of our mental being” enjoyed free play, seeing once again with the eyes of a child. These “nocturnal phantasmagoria” were a source of “preternatural delight, as an outlet from the narrow and somewhat gloomy enclosure of the matter-of-fact world, giving swift transition into the large and luminous spaces of the imagination.”14 Emanating from the unconscious, dreams revealed how little known and ill controlled the human mind really was. The peril of sleep was the will’s desertion of its command post, opening the way to anarchy. Dreams were “ungoverned thoughts that have escaped from the guidance of the slumbering will.” Although the course of these “wild fancies” often brought revelation of “our inmost selves,” such visions could be fearful. Robert Macnish, author of the standard nineteenthcentury treatise on sleep, noted that in dreaming, voluntary powers were suspended, allowing “one faculty, or more than one,” to “burst asunder the bonds which enthralled it.” While judgment slept, the imagination went to work, free to indulge in “the maddest and most extravagant thoughts, free from the salutary check of the . . . more sedate and judicious faculty.”15 Lying beneath the conscious, controlling mind, the realm of dreams was the breeding ground of insanity. Many pointed to a connection between dreams and madness; it was all a matter of degree. Philosophy had already posited that link; mental science sought to rationalize it.16 There was near consensus that the two occupied neighboring points on one continuum. In his influential trea-
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tise on mental physiology, Henry Holland stated that “if it were an object to obtain a description of insanity . . . this would be found in the conditions which most associate it with dreaming; viz., the loss, partial or complete, of power to distinguish between unreal images created within the sensorium and the actual perceptions drawn from the external senses . . . and secondly, the alteration or suspension of that faculty of mind by which we arrange and associate the perceptions and thoughts successively coming before us.” Sully elaborated on the “many curious resemblances” between dreaming and the mental states of the insane. The essential difference was that the mentally sound could distinguish the real from the imaginary, whereas the insane could not. Nonetheless, those resemblances were compelling.17 Consciousness, it seemed, was the thinnest of veneers over a treacherous pit. What in the end could prevent that veneer from cracking and collapsing into the darkness of the unconscious below? Tapping into this uneasy constellation of images and ideas, Ryder’s dream paintings—his nebulous, moonlit marines—drifted down into that pit. In their oceanic character, Ryder’s pictures converge with Victor Hugo’s dream metaphors in Toilers of the Sea. That may be no coincidence: Ryder exhibited his own Toilers of the Sea in 1884, the title a tribute to Hugo’s novel (Fig. 101).18 The composition is simple. In the center is the silhouetted shape of a small sailboat riding the crest of a foamy wave. Two barely visible figures crouch in the hull. The bow slants up to the left, leading the eye to a fat, full moon, floating like a beacon above the water and edged with a luminous halo. The sky is a shadowy, dark gray, with pale swaths and tatters of cloud. The water is nearly black. The horizon extends from edge to edge, and there is no sign of land. Toilers of the Sea is an amorphous allegory of the will’s surrender to the power of sleep. Ryder’s boat might be traveling from the tiny island of consciousness into the limitless, dark ocean fabricated by Eneas Sweetland Dallas as symbol of the unconscious mind. With the exception of moon and boat, everything in the picture is fluid and formless. Even the vessel, with its rough, clumsy contours, seems unfinished. Shadowy and amorphous, this is a dreamworld of hidden depths and shifting shapes that seem to coalesce out of the darkness, emanations of the unknown. The dreamer heads out into uncharted territory, the watery wastes of a shoreless sea. There is no hint that night will end and dawn break, nor the smallest sign that the boat is under the control of anything but the wind and the waves. In other Ryder marines, utter chaos prevails. The turbulence of Lord Ullin’s Daughter spins Ryder’s dream boat into a vortex of nightmare, beyond all hope of salvation (Fig. 102). Ryder based this painting on Thomas Campbell’s poem of the same name, which told the story of a Scottish chieftain who fled by boat with his lover, only to drown in the stormy sea. The painting shows a lurid sky, dark silver-edged clouds concealing the moon and a rocky shore in the distance. In the foreground is nothing but wind-whipped, muddy-green water, churning with waves and lashing
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figure 101. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Toilers of the Sea, ca. 1883–84. Oil on panel, 11 × 12". All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
spume. A small vessel bobs on the heaving surface. As a wave hits it broadside, the passenger in the stern topples backward, momentarily to plunge into the furious billows. The paint itself is layered in violent streaks and swirls. Elizabeth Broun has written that the composition, with its jagged rhythms and asymmetrical design, amplifies the sense of “balance lost.”19 It embodies the disorder that was thought to link dreams with the delusions of the insane. As Sully argued, “In the illusory intensity of its internal images, in the rapidity of its flux of ideas, and in the wildness and incoherence of its combinations, the dream stands very close to the whole class of hallucinations and
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illusions of the waking state.”20 Wild and almost completely incoherent, Lord Ullin’s Daughter sweeps us over the edge. Admirers believed that Ryder’s dream pictures flowed from hidden substrata, remote from reason and governed only by primordial impulse. The critic Henry C. White, who called on Ryder several times in the 1890s, reported that mood drove the artist, to the exclusion of even the most basic practical concerns. His procedures were erratic, and “when the mood impelled he scraped, glazed, scumbled and made the wildest experiments, simply to produce a fine bit of tone or beautiful color. It was an emotional process that often disregarded sound technique, working over a surface not thoroughly dry, piling layer upon layer of paint and using too much medium or varnish.” Thickly layered, Ryder’s paintings functioned as ever ready surfaces on which he inscribed pure, unmediated feeling, analogous to De Quincey’s “mysterious handwriting of grief or joy.” White noted that “Ryder evidently used his pictures as a school boy does his slate. They were an emotional proving ground, easily erased or sacrificed in the effort to obtain the rarest qualities. He forgot them in the intervals and did not worry about them. . . . When in the mood he pulled them out, played with them and enjoyed them as a child might play with a handful of jewels or semiprecious stones.” Ryder seemed to paint as sleepers dream, shedding inhibition and letting a buried, rudimentary self take command.21 Appropriately, he often worked at night, preferring the silence and the light of a favorite old lamp to the sunlit bustle of the day. His friend and neighbor Charles Fitzpatrick recalled Ryder’s endless nocturnal laborings over his Lorelei. He would bring it almost to a state of completion but then, never satisfied, would rub it down and try again. “If we heard a rasping sound on the floor (and it was always at night), we knew he was rubbing down the Lorelei. As he worked, he would roam about the room, singing the siren’s songs.” Although he “finished” it at least three times, he could not surrender it. “It was a strange weird moonlight, and when it was at its best . . . it looked as though it was painted by a man with strange subconscious power.” Ryder’s unconventional methods stirred up the somnolent, unreasoning bottom layers of his mind, which found their expression and equivalent in his paintings, layered concretions of mood and dream.22 Like many of Ryder’s works, The Lorelei has darkened and changed dramatically (Fig. 103). The siren herself can no longer be seen. Why did it strike Fitzpatrick as the work of “strange subconscious power”? It is a night scene, bathed in the cold rays of a high, distant moon sailing beneath wavy bands of cloud. Chalky light glimmers on the water that flows between steep cliffs. On the left is the dim shadow of a little boat, passing by the jagged rocks on which the goldenhaired Lorelei once sang, enchanting her victims with her seductive voice. The painting avoids linear narrative for the vagueness and obscurity that psychologists and other dream theorizers associated with the unconscious or subconscious mind, the “dim depths” of the primal self. As one
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figure 102. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Lord Ullin’s Daughter, 1890s. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 20 × 183⁄8". Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of John Gellatly. figure 103. Albert Pinkham Ryder, The Lorelei, early to mid-1890s and later. Oil on canvas, 22 × 19". The Guennol Collection.
essayist wrote, the “land of dreams,” which lay across a “ borderland of impenetrable mystery,” was “dim and unexplored.” Its darkness stirred up “indefinable fear.” The Lorelei plays on the same scale of emotion, its shadowy vagueness a veil, perhaps, for hidden psychological dangers. The Lorelei herself, with her siren song, might even be taken as a metaphor for the irrational, mysterious unconscious, implicitly gendered feminine by virtue of ruling cultural assumptions. Finally, the painting speaks in the preverbal pictorial symbolism that in Sully’s view was projected by the “exalted organic sensibility of sleep. . . . Thus the frequent dreams of water, of burning or freezing, of vast cavernous spaces, of preternatural forms of motion.” Like the indefinable floating forms in Victor Hugo’s “aquarium of night,” Ryder’s shapes are organic, irregular, and almost undifferentiated. Water, moon, sky, and rocks are of the same painty substance, as if barely emergent from primal chaos. In their indefinition, these shadows embody the flux of unconscious thought given free play in dreams.23 What did these dream worlds have to do with their place and time? Ryder lived in a dynamic, rapidly modernizing urban society. His paintings, conceived for the most part in congested, populous, practical New York, seemed to represent the polar opposite of the environment in which he worked. His style, the critic Jed Perl argues, seems on the surface “less a response to what is close at hand than a form of escape, an oppositional device or an idealistic gesture.” In the generation after Ryder, the critic Louis Mumford marveled that “an art such as Ryder’s should have grown up and survived in the midst of the massive materialism which characterized the Brown Decades.” Yet he “belonged to the period” absolutely, while transcending its limitations. This paradox, in Perl’s view, makes Ryder all the more a symbol of the city, America’s greatest commercial center. His dark atmospheres and boats on stormy seas “seem to exude the city’s spirit,” though in ways hard to explain. Perl looks to another, earlier, account to make sense of this. The modernist writer Paul Rosenfeld’s Port of New York (1924) begins with Ryder, presenting his work as “a sort of nocturnal doppelgänger haunting the merchant city of the day.” However remote his moonlights from asphalted Fifth Avenue in daytime’s garish glare, they were, as Rosenfeld claimed, “the first deep expression of American life in the medium of paint.”24 What nocturnal doppelgänger animated Ryder’s art, and what were the urban and social meanings of darkness during his heyday late in the nineteenth century? By that time (and from the vantage point of the middle and wealthy classes), the modern metropolis incorporated sprawling tracts of ever more concentrated and deadly darkness—political and social. Its growing slums housed unassimilated immigrant masses seething in misery. Its factories and saloons were the breeding grounds of riot and anarchy that could explode at any time. Chicago’s Haymarket Riot on the night of May 4, 1886, became a symbol of anarchism’s incendiary potential when a bomb lobbed into the crowd sparked a murderous conflict between striking workers and the police. Seen as a
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European import, anarchism was associated specifically with the laboring immigrant classes, which seemed to swell with alarming speed.25 Much earlier in the century, the expanding metropolis, with its impenetrable slums, had become the locus of nocturnal terror. But now the threat had grown to incalculable dimensions, difficult to define. As the historian Mary Ryan writes, the “chiaroscuro of class” sharpened dramatically in the late nineteenth century, and the relatively upbeat “city mystery” of midcentury gave way to a literature of increasingly sensationalist tours, painting the city’s sunshine and “especially the shadows in flamboyant detail. . . . The decaying social matter of the city was represented by a whole litany of terms for contamination: poisoning, curdling, ulcerating, and stinking.”26 The city of night was alien territory, its inhabitants merged into one vast, potently toxic organism ready to infect and destroy the body politic. Such was the imagery used by the police photographer and reformist Jacob Riis, who, beginning in the late 1880s, photographed and published accounts of slum life. Adopting the tour guide’s persona, Riis ventured with his camera into the tenements and reported his findings in language that wove a repeating pattern of filth, foulness, and infection. In the slums, dirty children and unwholesome crowds swarmed; houses rotted; garbage reeked. There were smells everywhere: of boiling cabbage, of rags and uncleanliness. The slums, where light seldom shone, were human pigsties. On one occasion police raided several dives in a cellar, where “the filth and stench were utterly unbearable; even the sergeant turned his back and fled. . . . the air seemed thick enough to cut with a knife.” Even food was disgusting and alien: slimy, strange-looking fish; big, awkward sausages, “anything but appetizing”; loads of decaying vegetables. Wallowing in the filth of moral and physical darkness, the “restless, pent-up multitudes” held New York’s wealth and business at their mercy. “The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and quality of the mercy expected. . . . When another generation shall have doubled the census of our city, and to that vast army of workers, held captive by poverty, the very name of home shall be as a bitter mockery, what will the harvest be?”27 Like Riis, the agrarian populist Ignatius Donnelly feared the city as a monstrous, malignant growth. He set his anti-utopian novel, Caesar’s Column, in 1988 New York, where dazzling wealth and progress have risen atop the labors and suffering of oppressed masses. In the end this mob rises up, irrepressibly: “And like a huge flood, long dammed up, turbulent, turbid, muddy, loaded with wrecks and debris, the gigantic mass broke loose, full of foam and terror, and flowed in every direction. A foul and brutal and ravenous multitude it was, dark with dust and sweat, armed with the weapons of civilization, but possessing only the instincts of wild beasts. . . . Civilization is gone, and all the devils are loose!”28 Only a program of stringent social sanitation seemed to hold out any hope of fending off the coming apocalypse.
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The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago proposed just such a solution. An emblem of Western civilization’s progress and power, it was as clean and controlled as the slums were supposed to be filthy and chaotic. Laid out on a rigorously axial plan and dominated by classical exhibition halls painted pure white and scaled to one master module of proportion, the fair reified the values of rationality, hierarchy, efficiency, and hygiene adopted by modern corporate culture. The fair’s planners kept non-Western cultural displays at a carefully calculated distance and confined the most exotic and potentially disorderly spectacles to the outlying Midway, where they could be kept in check.29 Civilization, the fair proclaimed, was above all bright and clean. Yet in tandem with this vision of purity, the slum in the late nineteenth century emerged as a new and alluring site of spectacle. The Marxist historian Bryan Palmer writes that the “dangerous classes” were a “social construction of fear and loathing, made in the realm of ideas, perceptions, and intuitions.” The social problems of immigration, poverty, and oppression were real and urgent enough. However, the geography of the slums—dark, fetid, alien—was also the terrain of the imaginary, where fantasy might enjoy free play. This strain is not unlike what the literary scholar Patrick Brantlinger defines in late Victorian fiction as the “imperial Gothic,” a blend of the adventure story with gothic tropes. Its three principal themes are individual regression, the decline and barbarian invasion of civilization, and the loss of opportunities for adventure and heroism in the modern world. In these tales, to explore the Dark Continent or to “go native” was also to journey inward, “into the unconscious or the heart of darkness of the explorer.” Africa, India, and other dark places were sites on which the “political unconscious” of imperialism could map “its own desires, its own fantastic longings and latitudes.”30 In America, fascination with the slum was part of a quest for intense experience in reaction to the very civilization the White City so triumphantly proclaimed. Middle-class culture, so orderly, clean, and pure, was also a culture of stifling routines and emasculating comforts. The spectacle of the slum—at least in imagination—offered a new territory for adventure, exciting, dangerous, and strange. Like the battlefield or the west, the slum offered opportunities for heroism, with its revitalizing energies, unrestrained and raw. Early in the twentieth century the Reverend Walter Rauschenbusch suggested that just as “darkest Africa and the polar regions are becoming familiar . . . we now have intrepid men and women who plunge for a time into the life of the lower classes and return to write books about this unknown race.” This journey into the “Dark Continent” of the slum was, to use Brantlinger’s term, a “regression fantasy,” portending the dissolution of self and civilization. Yet regression, for all its terrors, also connoted freedom (however illusory) from the regimentation imposed by capitalism and its bureaucratic systems, from the discipline of school and workplace, from the artifice of etiquette and fashion—in short, from the constraints of middle-class identity.31
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Is there a thread that connects these discourses with Ryder’s art? On the surface his moonlit marines have nothing whatsoever to do with murky cellars, anonymous swarms, or anarchist unrest. Yet his paintings evoked what they did not say. Vague excursions into thick obscurity, they alluded obliquely to the urban darkness and confusion that shadowed the geography of the metropolis. Tapping into an ancient constellation of myth and folklore, Ryder’s imagery brought its meanings into the present day. Night, as the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch reminds us, is the mythic realm of chaos, teeming with ghosts and demons. No matter that by the time Ryder embarked on his moonlit marines in the 1880s, New York at night was beginning to blaze with electricity.32 However brilliant, no light could dispel the shadows and the magnetism of the dread unknown. Like his art, the artist—obedient only to the rule of instinct—embodied the regressive and incipiently chaotic spirit of those dark regions. In an oft-repeated story, Ryder mythologized an allimportant early breakthrough, when after futile attempts to imitate the old masters, he embraced nature as his teacher. He was painting outdoors that day but to his mounting frustration could not capture the scene on his canvas. Suddenly, at last, he realized the power of pure color. He threw his brushes aside, he claimed, and squeezed out “big chunks of pure, moist color,” laying them on with the palette knife. The result was “better than nature, for it was vibrating with the thrill of a new creation.” He painted until the sun sank, and then “raced around the fields like a colt let loose, literally bellowing for joy.”33 However much embellished in the telling, Ryder’s anecdote exalts animal instinct, toppling inhibition to unleash the primal, infantile self in all its anarchic energy: smearing gobs of paint, bawling at the top of his lungs, and careening in circles, utterly without self-consciousness. Ryder the man was the city’s night self, representing everything that modernism, materialism, and empiricism repressed as detrimental to progress. He was heir to the legacy of his romantic forebear, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge suffered terrible dreams that made his nights a torment and divided him internally into “ego diurnus” and “ego nocturnus”: the day self and the night self. The night self spoke a different language, a primordial “language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other than the various (Day) Languages of Nations.” Yet these two selves, the night self out of control and the day self in command, cohabited the same mind and body, each a mystery to the other.34 Robert Louis Stevenson modernized and psychologized the model of day and night selves in the novella Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, published in 1886—just when Ryder was working on Temple of the Mind. Stevenson’s story, which sold forty thousand copies in England and then achieved enormous popularity in the United States, concerned the daylight Dr. Jekyll, whose haunting consciousness of his own double nature prompts him to concoct a potion that will release his second, lower, self: the troglodytic Mr. Hyde. Hyde, primitive, sensuous, and murderous creature of the
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night, gradually becomes more powerful until Jekyll can no longer repress him. In the end, Jekyll, to destroy his dark double, must kill himself. Short and simple as it is, Stevenson’s tale provides an index to contemporary middle-class fear of and fascination with doubleness, regression, and the disintegration of the self. Under the skin of every civilized person lurked a savage; in every White City seethed an “insurrectionary underclass.” Hyde stood for both.35 Ryder’s Tempest (begun 1892; Detroit Institute of Arts), for all its Shakespearean loftiness, insinuates that Jekyll-Hyde doubleness in the figures of Prospero, protecting his daughter Miranda, and Caliban, clinging to a rocky ledge at their feet. It is a moonlit scene with seething, inky clouds, a boiling sea, and jutting rocks. Prospero the magician is what we might expect: he has streaming, silvery locks and a long beard and wears a voluminous brown robe. Caliban, however, could be a match for Mr. Hyde. Emerging from the murky waters, his unformed body is grossly crude—little more than a clot of brown paint—the head a lumpy boulder on shapeless shoulders. Low and hideous, this monster seems to regress and disintegrate before our eyes. Ryder was no Hyde, of course, let alone a Caliban. His letters show that he had a practical, prosaic side. He was gentle and softhearted and could be excellent company. He and Fitzpatrick occasionally went on “mild beer drinking sprees together, going from pub to pub singing sea ditties.”36 Yet his eccentricities loomed large both in real life and in the construction of the mythic Ryder by his friends and artistic disciples. In their accounts unconventional and occasionally repellent lifestyle and personal habits acquired almost sacred meaning because Ryder performed the night self’s function in the culture of his time. In some sense this was the logical outcome of the nocturnal habits that governed his art production and much of his domestic life as well. Everyone who knew Ryder remarked on his addiction to long, moonlit walks. Charles Fitzpatrick wrote, “On a summer evening, he would start out for the Palisades of Jersey, especially on moonlit nights. . . . he would not get home until around two in the morning.” Ryder told Fitzpatrick that such excursions were good for his gout, but there was more to it. Captain Robinson recalled, “I have known him to walk down to the Battery at midnight, and just sit there studying the effect of clouds passing over the moon. . . . He needed but little sleep. He bore a charmed life; he would walk along West Street at all hours of the night—a rough neighborhood, where many undesirables would congregate.” Once he was mugged, but he fled to the nearest streetlight and shouted for help; the thugs ran away.37 In defiance of conventional daytime rules for good grooming, Ryder dressed like a man who lived in the dark and never saw his reflection in the mirror. So slovenly was he that people occasionally took him for a tramp or a beggar. In winter, according to Fitzpatrick, he would wear a “brownish-red fisherman’s cap in the house and outdoors.” Henry C. White reported that when he called on Ryder at eleven o’clock one morning, the painter answered the door in “a long, dark
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brown bath robe which covered him from his head to his bare feet. With his unkempt hair and beard, I felt for the moment as if I faced a monk of the Middle Ages.” Even outdoors, he sported sleeping attire. Sometimes he wore a nightshirt with his baggy, low-slung trousers or blue overalls. One dark night the young painter Arthur B. Davies encountered Ryder “way up Broadway in bedroom slippers,” studying the November sky.38 Ryder’s hygiene left much to be desired. The illustrator William Henry Hyde remembered that as a young student, Ryder would come to class at the National Academy “smelling strongly of stables where he had been to make sketches of horses.” In later life his “flossy beard became thick and matted,” as Kelly recalled. When he lived on West Fifteenth Street, “he slept on a cot, but not being able to keep it clean, he abandoned it and slept on the floor,” atop a moth-infested fur rug that he tried unsuccessfully to fumigate with naptha. Obsessed with his health, he experimented with various regimens and cures. His devoted friend the painter J. Alden Weir observed in 1904 that Ryder “is feeling in good health again. He attributes it all to wearing no stockings and sleeping on the floor rolled up in rags. He could not work last week as he had so much mending to do. They ought to be grabbed and burnt, but he has tender affection for holey and torn garments which he thinks ventilate his body better.”39 Not surprisingly, the unkempt bachelor had little or no luck with women, although he occasionally developed a romantic crush. His ever-solicitous friends monitored these infatuations and took whatever steps necessary to nip them in the bud. On one occasion Ryder’s friend and dealer Daniel Cottier reportedly whisked the painter off to Europe to prevent him from trying to marry an opera singer. The most bizarre entanglement occurred in the 1890s, when Ryder found an adolescent country girl in the street and took her home with him, to take care of her. A friend happened by, took stock of the situation, and had her removed to the police station, where, presumably, she was to be kept until officials located her family. Invariably, Ryder figures in these stories as an unworldly dreamer, innocent of the social skills needed for a conventional heterosexual relationship.40 Whatever the case, it is beyond dispute that Ryder was utterly innocent of domestic skills. The small Greenwich Village apartment in which he lived and worked invariably astonished and repelled friends and casual callers. The squalor of the place—material analogue, perhaps, to Poe’s “disordered brain”—was unforgettable. Many years later, informants could still describe its dereliction in great detail. The critic Sadakichi Hartmann compared it to a “neglected storage room, filled with discarded, broken furniture, trunks, suitcases, boxes of every kind and size, gunny sacks and rags, a scuttle and cider keg amidst bundles of clothing, stacks of old canvases, crowded to such an extent that the merest trail led from the entrance door to his easel near a window and from there into the adjoining hall room.” The debris was buried “under the dust-patina of years,” com-
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pounded by scattered paint and varnish drippings that made everything sticky. It was the same when Henry White visited. The floor was invisible under layers of kitchen utensils, canvases, and bits of clothing. Discolored strips of wallpaper dangled from the leaky ceiling. On the mantel was “a plate with a couple of chop bones and a potato which looked as though they had been there for a considerable time. The inner half of the room was piled high with boxes, packing cases, and a confused mass of junk, partially obscured in the dim light.”41 Over time these mountains of trash decomposed, merging into one undifferentiated welter of rottenness, an “indescribable mass.” Fitzpatrick told of an interval when Ryder was so ill that he required round-the-clock attention from his extraordinarily devoted neighbors. Louise Fitzpatrick decided it was time to purge the place of its rubble. What a job she had. She was not over strong herself and the condition and bad odor of the room was counting on her. Finally, she got the housekeeper’s son and started to clean up. They cleaned out bags and barrels filled with paper, empty food boxes, ashes, old clothes, especially under-garments, and about fifteen white shirts for evening wear, all soiled and in a fearful condition, mice that had decayed in traps, food in pots that had been laid [to] one side and covered with paper and forgotten. As he laid there helpless, he would accuse them of upsetting his room. When they got one side clean, they would drag him over on the rug to the other. The long seige, however, was too much for her, and on the verge of breaking down herself, from the breathing of dust and the foul odor.
These descriptions leave little doubt that Ryder lived and worked in a miasma of decay. Had he not been an artist, he would have been written off as an addle-brained bum. Visiting Ryder was like following Jacob Riis into the dark depths of the tenement houses. As Henry C. White wrote, “His setting in the slum was his defense. Few but kindred spirits would ever have penetrated it.”42 Even his paintings were makeshift and grubby. Rather than use canvas as support, he sometimes painted on wooden cigar box lids, refuse from his brother’s hotel. Out of ignorance or carelessness, Ryder played fast and loose with his medium, sometimes using alcohol or wax, and sometimes dusting the surface of a painting with ashes from the stove. Like slum tenements, Ryder’s paintings attracted vermin. Entrusted with the delivery of a painting to its new owner, Hartmann opened the neatly wrapped package only to discover it encrusted and crawling with “hundreds of pale yellow and reddish brown bugs,” which he hastened to flush out under running water in the patron’s lavatory.43 When the dealer William Macbeth planned to restore one of Ryder’s paintings in 1911, the artist protested that he had a “right” to protect his picture from “the vandalism of cleaning.” In its present condition the painting was in a perfect state of color; it needed only to be washed and thinly coated
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with new varnish. “It is appalling,” Ryder went on, “this craze for clean looking pictures. Nature isn’t clean, but it is the right matter in the right place.” Ryder often washed his paintings, but this was hardly a rite of purification. When he showed some work to Henry White, he brought out one small panel, coated with a thick layer of dust. “He set it on the floor and got a wash basin of dirty water and a dirty towel and washed it.” After it dried, White could see that Ryder had done this so many times before that most of the oil had leached out of the paint, leaving it dry and chalky.44 Ryder’s paintings were (and are) notoriously ramshackle as well. Many of them followed the same course as his apartment, reverting gradually to a state of chaos. Building up his surfaces with layers of paint and glaze, Ryder often applied new layers before the old had dried. This practice, plus the sheer weight and density of material, produced radical instability that progressively defaced the paintings with wrinkles, sagging, and cracks. In the most extreme cases they degenerated beyond recognition. When Lloyd Goodrich examined Curfew Hour in 1938, he noted, “The cracks are very bad, especially in the hill at the upper right and center, where the top layer of paint has contracted into islands, wrinkled in texture, separated by great wide areas of transparent glossy substance which looks like varnish. Through this transparent substance can be seen other paint below the surface. The effect is that of a scum of paint floating on a liquid” (Fig. 104). Ryder’s young admirer the painter Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) also found Ryder’s paintings scummy. He reported that the artist had “run a hot poker” through the sky in The Tempest, and that its surface was “all scum,” the product of “dust and abuse” over long years in the polluted precincts of the painter’s studio.45 The philosopher William Miller suggests in his study of disgust that “crusts, skins, and films covering fluid interiors have a special ability to elicit disgust.” Such conditions remind us that generation and decay have common roots in raw nature: “the eternal recurrence of viscous, teeming, swarming generation and the putrefaction and decay that attend it. It is as if . . . milk, when heated, spontaneously generate[d] a loathsome image of gestation itself: a membrane appearing to cover warmish fluids.” This sight, in turn, conjures up the most elemental state of nonbeing, achieved only in the fluid darkness of the womb or in death. The feminist psychologist Julia Kristeva defines abjection as the act and result of displacing such unsettling reminders. They must be fended off and kept at a distance, lest identity collapse and dissolve back into nothingness.46 Whether painted on cigar box lids or canvas, Ryder’s little moonlights portend (and in some cases enact) that abjection and dissolution. Like aging fruit, they ooze and rot. Curfew Hour exhibits what may be the most advanced state of decay among Ryder’s works. The original landscape scene has vanished, and only scabs and scales remain, crusted over deeper layers. Many other paintings also bear signs of progressive disintegration. As the conservator Sheldon Keck notes, in some “the sluggish underlayer of not yet dried paint extrudes up out of the cracks as glassy glob-
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figure 104. Albert Pinkham Ryder, Curfew Hour, 1880s. Oil on cradled panel, 75⁄8 × 10". All rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
ules.” In an area of sky, Moonlit Cove (Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.), for example, shows such extrusions oozing to the surface like blobs of undifferentiated, primal matter.47 Attribute of the night self, Ryder’s dirt subverted the emergent middle-class culture of cleanliness and purity. Dark, muddy, and polluted, his paintings implicitly sullied the hygienic vision promulgated by the white, measured, ordered structures at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. In life and art alike the artist incorporated everything that his progress-oriented culture sought to subdue and transcend. He played the role of an oversize baby, permitted to indulge in practices generally unacceptable outside the nursery or the asylum. Even his eating habits were infantile: according to the reporter for the New York Press, Ryder lived chiefly on “bread, fruit, and breakfast food,” as witnessed by a pile of empty cereal packages in one corner, mounting all the way to the ceiling.48 If civilization and adulthood depended—like the Columbian Exposition—on order, cleanliness, refinement, and bodily discipline, Ryder and his art stood for their dissolution.
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More innocuous than Mr. Hyde, Ryder trod the same path of regression down and back even further to a primitive, unsocialized self, floating in oceanic, amniotic oneness. Like the infant who has yet to recognize bodily boundaries, Ryder perceived his domestic surroundings as part and extension of himself. In this, he was not unlike the pathological collectors studied by the psychiatrist David Greenberg. The home of one subject was “filled with piles of broken objects and rags . . . and the stink of rotting garbage.” Another packed his room with “old suitcases of clothes, broken umbrellas, radios, a pile of toilet seats, books and glasses.” He became violent if anyone tried to throw something away: “It’s like taking part of my body,” he said. Louise Fitzpatrick’s campaign to purge Ryder’s living quarters occasioned similar distress. In Hartmann’s version of the story, when “a woman friend tried to clear away some rubbish, among other things a paper bag with old cheese rinds, he glanced up with an expression of worry and grief, a dumb pleading in his eyes: ‘Please, do not disturb anything!’”49 That incident also suggests why Ryder so passionately sought to retain his paintings: they, too, he felt, were parts of his body. Few, if any, of Ryder’s critics and friends ventured to speculate about his aberrations, writing them off as eccentricities of genius. But those resistant to his spell commented freely in blunt language. The artist James Edward Kelly, who met Ryder in the 1870s, recalled a visit to Ryder’s studio with two fellow students, including a “breezy Texan.” In the fading light Ryder showed his paintings, which Kelly (and presumably the Texan) found incomprehensible. One was a large picture of a stretch of moorland with what seemed a ghostly figure in the distance. On closer inspection, it proved to be a drop of candle grease, but Kelly persuaded Ryder to paint the lone figure in because it would “add to the weirdness of the scene.” Ryder agreed to carry out the suggestion. After the three departed, the Texan laughed heartily, and said, “‘He’s crazy—he should have a keeper.’” Kelly demurred, responding that he was “a nice fellow but a little queer,” while the third student “was deeply impressed and glorified him.” The glorifiers carried the day, leading the gradually swelling chorus of praise for Ryder’s art.50 Did Ryder’s earlier admirers sense what lay within his mysterious little moonlights, or did they see them as nothing more than harmless painted poems, enchanting reveries? There is no definitive answer. It is too easy to say only that he offered viewers escape from the pressures of modernity that weighed so heavily on the cultural elite that first adopted him. The art historian Eric Rosenberg has argued that for the Gilders and others among Ryder’s first circle of supporters, the painter’s colorism conjured up visions of upheaval associated with radical politics, specifically the insurgence of the Commune in Paris in 1871. Something of a wild man himself, Ryder, with his anarchic colorism, required containment and neutralization, which critics such as Charles de Kay carried out by insistently depoliticizing and aestheticizing the meaning of his work.51
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Supporters styled him a visionary out of touch with practical affairs; they viewed his work as a poetic dreamland, sublimating what had the potential to be more unsettling. Aestheticized, his paintings became spaces for managing fear and familiarizing the unfamiliar—a process that recalls Kristeva’s characterization of art as “that catharsis par excellence.” The artistic experience, she writes, “is rooted in the abject it utters and by the same token purifies.” In other words art, like religion, seeks transcendence. Ryder’s supporters insisted on his transcendence and valued the quasireligious uplift they found in his pictures. In mood and tone Curfew Hour had an “effect on the nerves like slow organ music,” Charles de Kay wrote. Even more transcendent was The Temple of the Mind, which de Kay considered “a piece of pure symbolism as beautiful in thought as the finest work of the kind during the Middle Ages.” The painting is about the pollution and defilement of the mind, defenseless against the forces of bestiality and unreason. De Kay’s act of viewing was a rite of purification, in which he suppressed darker meanings while extolling the beauty of Ryder’s thought.52 Yet the dark meanings remained, just as the dirt, disorder, and decay of the modern metropolis hovered beneath and just outside the gates of the White City. Abjection, in Kristeva’s words, is “something rejected from which one does not part.” That is, whatever the measure of expulsion, the abject remains, intrinsic to the self. The abjection of Ryder’s life and the darkness of his art alike opened up glimpses of unsettling depths and suggested how little separated tidy order from messy breakdown. His dirty pictures, slummy surroundings, and disheveled person represented everything that had to be repressed or thrust away so that civilization could function and progress pursue its course. At the same time, these things were intrinsic to Ryder’s fascination and the magic many sought and found in his art. “Disgust,” Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note, “always bears the imprint of desire.” Through Ryder, vicariously, beholders could trace the steps back to infancy, revisit the dangerous but thrilling regions of the psyche that in daylight hours must be locked down. Like those intrepid explorers who plunged into the “darkest Africa” of the slum, they returned, revitalized, from their adventure, nerves tingling after immersion in the slow organ music of his art. As the historian Joel Pfister aptly notes, for middle-class cultural elites, “to visit the primitive can be restorative and romantic . . . but one doesn’t want to get stuck there.”53 The next generation detected what earlier admirers strove to purge and hide from view. Psychologically attuned and in self-conscious revolt against Victorian gentility, they celebrated Ryder’s deviance even while continuing to romanticize him. Four years after the artist’s death, Walter Beck described the “spirit world” of his pictures as “the place of the human soul seen by introspection, where health and lassitude creep apace . . . where the ego is seeking prenatal life or, like Sir Galahad, longing for the perfection whose reward is the Holy Grail.” Beck invoked old roman-
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ticism and new Freudianism in one breath. Yet his allusion to the womb—the return to oceanic oneness, or nothingness—shows insight into the deep, suppressed psychological dimension that Ryder’s devotees sensed, whether consciously or not.54 Marsden Hartley ventured further in his psychological assessment of Ryder. Ryder lived in “the abjectest disorder,” Hartley noted, although dreamers were “apt to do this.” But the artist was a dreamer always teetering on the edge of madness, as Hartley hinted in every one of his reminiscences of Ryder by alluding to the moon, Ryder’s true home: Ryder was “first citizen of the land of Luthany,” Hartley wrote in 1917, and in 1936 he stated that Ryder was “one of the greatest of the moon’s precious citizens” and “among the first citizens of the moon.” Ryder’s little pictures “epitomized the drama of the sick soul—the tragic union of love and death. There is an unceasing passion in them to enter that ‘other’ world—to escape, if possible, from this unceasingly wearisome one. Ryder was moon-ridden—he was obsessed of all the shades of lunar despair and hypocrisies.” The image of the moon is the key to Hartley’s evasive and poetic diagnosis of Ryder as a man who had gone well beyond the borders of sanity.55 As a closeted homosexual, Hartley perhaps found comfort in Ryder’s anomalies and touched up the image of a moonstruck, soul-sick painter to make him seem all the more authentically deranged and marginalized. Hartley’s portrayal of Ryder also meshed with older romantic models linking genius and insanity. In the nineteenth century the work of physicians, psychologists, and even criminologists lent scientific reinforcement to such mythic constructions. Although the relationship of genius to madness incited intense controversy, many believed (well into the twentieth century) that genius was an exalted but biologically grounded disorder.56 These discourses most probably shored up Hartley’s glorification of Ryder as first citizen of the moon. Yet in Ryder’s case it was not merely a matter of one discourse or another. Innocuous and gentle though the artist was, he was also indisputably strange. Undomesticated, unregulated, and largely out of touch with everyday life, he deviated from turn-of-the-century patterns of normalcy almost as much as any certified lunatic. Without his devoted circle of protective friends, he probably could not have functioned in the world at all. Ryder never experienced the catastrophic breakdown that eventually made it necessary to institutionalize his contemporary the moonlight painter Ralph Blakelock.57 Therefore he was privileged to act as resident artist-mystic to those who sought transcendence through art, even (or especially) if doing so entailed a walk on the wild side. Was Ryder’s psyche the haunted palace that he imaged in Temple of the Mind? He left no record of what, if anything, preyed on him. His obsessive inability to finish his paintings may give us one clue to his disorder; the chaos and squalor of his life may give us another. These might be less important, however, than recognizing that Ryder’s imbalance was the key to his appeal: he was everything his genteel admirers could never allow themselves to be. He was the surrogate night self for
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those who feared yet desired the dark. As A. Alvarez puts it, “Just as the dim, unsteady clearings of light cast by the gaslamps somehow emphasized the darkness beyond, the Victorians were uneasily aware that behind their prosperous, well-regulated lives, their confidence and their propriety, lay a whole world of darkness which they preferred not to notice. . . . like the darkness of night or the dark continent, the inner darkness was terra incognita, unmapped, uncomprehended, threatening and ripe for exploration.”58 Science and medicine had probed, analyzed, and anatomized the workings of the body. But no surgery, however delicate, could discover the workings of the mind or plumb its buried secrets, nor could social engineering and hygiene expunge or repress the anarchic energies of the slums that threatened domestic order and haunted the bourgeois imagination. In life and art alike, Ryder personified that darkness, a realm of mystery and terror, yet to be illuminated by the glaring searchlights of reason.
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EPILOGUE
hat of the twentieth century? Ryder lived into its second decade, but we tend to think that
W
the brash urban realism of Robert Henri and the so-called Ash Can school swept away all
the nineteenth-century cobwebs and shadows to set a bright new stage for modern art in America, while the Armory Show a few years later secured a dominant place for cosmopolitan, modernist expression. But the gothic lingered on, taking new forms and continuing to serve as a space where fear, guilt, pessimism, and perversity could find expression. Indeed, it entered the mainstream, where realism, or hyperrealism, became a prime vehicle for gothic expression, and Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930; Art Institute of Chicago) became the definitive gothic icon for a mass audience. There is no space here to do justice to the myriad ways we might reimagine a gothic twentieth century, and I do not suggest that one comprehensive model would serve the purpose. Yet there seems to be an almost unending supply of candidates for a gothic reformation, and many fragments suggest the potential for a more coherent history. The Ash Can painters’ city was often dark, threatening, and violent, its inhabitants (like George Luks’s urchins) grotesque and malformed. There were the haunted city streets and mysterious shadows of Edward Hopper, the phantasmagoric urban swarms of Reginald Marsh, or, in photography, the nightmarish world of urban crime and despair so sedulously pursued by Weegee.
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The dark side was mapped on the modern body as well. In Chicago, Ivan Albright obsessively reiterated the theme of bodily decay, death, and dissolution; in New York, Diane Arbus sought out the abnormal in the everyday, photographing freaks, nudists, transvestites, and circus people. More recently Joel-Peter Witkin and other photographers have taken such subjects to a further extreme. Strangeness, violence, and death pervaded interwar realist and surrealist imagery of strikes, riots, lynchings, and executions; in the 1960s Andy Warhol reprised those themes in a series of prints depicting car crashes and death chambers. Everywhere there were hauntings in twentieth-century American art: the dreamlike plantation ruins of Clarence John Laughlin; the haunted houses of Charles Burchfield, Morris Kantor, and Philip Evergood; the creepy subways of George Tooker; the uncanny interiors and spooky countryside of Andrew Wyeth. We might also venture into the domain of film and television where, from Frankenstein to Twilight Zone and The X-Files, a mass audience has voraciously devoured lethal and supernatural terrors. And, of course, the perennial popularity of Stephen King is yet another index of our irresistible attraction to the dark side. The rise of Goth subcultures in the late twentieth century and the concomitant surge of artistic fascination with violence, death, abjection, and perversity represented yet another return of (and to) the repressed during a time of millennial unease. What might have been specifically “American” about these manifestations is an open question in this age of globalism and intertextuality. They cannot, however, be disentangled from the deep, thick roots winding down and back to the very birth of the Republic. Often submerged, frequently thrust aside, always dangerous, the gothic has from our beginnings been the shadow side of the Enlightenment, a countercurrent of darkness flowing underground and never running dry. Even now, its manifestations in visual form continue to measure the depths of our malaise.
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epilogue
NOTES
introduction 1.
See Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969); and John Wilmerding, American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875, exhibition catalogue (New York: Harper and Row for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980), as representative (and influential) models of this canon-building enterprise.
2.
Abraham A. Davidson, The Eccentrics and Other American Visionary Painters (New York: Dutton, 1978).
3.
Sadakichi Hartmann, A History of American Art [1901], rev. ed., 2 vols. (Boston: L. C. Page and Company, 1932), 1:204; Frank Jewett Mather, Estimates in Art, series 2 (1931; reprint, Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), 216.
4.
David Lubin, “Projecting an Image: The Contested Cultural Identity of Thomas Eakins,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 3 (September 2002): 519, comments suggestively on the importance of considering the dark side of Eakins’s work and the “dark shades” of the artist himself.
5.
See Katherine S. Howe and David B. Warren, The Gothic Revival Style in America, 1830–1870, exhibition catalogue (Houston, Tex.: Museum of Fine Arts, 1976); and Alice P. Kenney and Leslie J. Workman, “Ruins, Romance, and Reality: Medievalism in Anglo-American Imagination and Taste,” Winterthur Portfolio 10 (1975): 131–63.
6.
The literature on the gothic is vast. For a useful general overview and history of the gothic in
249
various media, including literature, see, for example, Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin (New York: North Point Press, 1999). For painting, see Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Harper and Row, 1979); and Morton D. Paley, The Apocalyptic Sublime (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). 7.
Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; reprint, Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997), 76, 29; Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 7, 95.
8.
Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). Also see Robert K. Martin and Eric Savoy, eds., American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1998).
9.
Toni Morrison, “Romancing the Shadow,” in Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993), 38, 42, 46, 50.
10.
Goddu, Gothic America, 3, 2, 10, 8.
11.
Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michael Fried, Realism, Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000). Similarly specialized is Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), which explores the uncanny in Peale’s art.
12.
I do not, for example, discuss Rembrandt Peale, whose The Court of Death (1819–20; Detroit Institute of Arts) was a profit-generating public showpiece meant to promote moral reform.
13.
Goddu, Gothic America, 77.
chapter 1: gloom and doom 1.
Thomas Cole “Thoughts and Occurrences,” August 18, 1836, and February 1, 1847, and untitled poems, 1825 and 1841, Thomas Cole Papers, microfilm ALC-3, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., hereafter cited, with reel number, as Cole Papers, AAA. The original documents on reels ALC-1 through ALC-4 are in the New York State Library, Albany, New York. Because the New York State Library’s Cole papers on microfilm lack frame numbers, I give only the reel number in all citations. “Thoughts and Occurrences” is the title of the journal Cole kept from November 1834 to February 7, 1843.
2.
Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” July 5, 1835, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA. Earl A. Powell III, “Thomas Cole and the American Landscape Tradition: Associationism,” Arts Magazine 52 (April
250
notes to pages xvii–2
1978): 116, notes that Lake with Dead Trees was one of Cole’s first paintings “to consider the landscape as a form of ruin.” Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820–1895, exhibition catalogue (Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum of Westchester, 1987; distributed by University Press of New England), 41–42, suggests that Lake with Dead Trees may refer indirectly to the disfiguring impact of the lumber industry and tourism in the region. 3.
Walter L. Nathan, “Thomas Cole and the Romantic Landscape,” in Romanticism in America, ed. George Boas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1940), 24–62, mapped some of the issues I explore in greater depth. Nathan portrayed Cole as a quintessentially romantic artist unable to shake the memory of his unhappy youth, assailed by premonitions of death, and strongly attracted to the dark side of nature. More recently, Cole scholars have concentrated on the importance of external factors—historical, social, political—in interpreting Cole’s art.
4.
On Cole, see Louis L. Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliot S. Vesell ([1853]; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1964); Ellwood C. Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988); William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, exhibition catalogue (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press for the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., 1994); and Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). The Reverend Noble, Cole’s friend and first biographer, heavily edited the journals and letters to represent Cole as a paragon of virtue and piety.
5.
William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York: George P. Scott and Company, 1834), 2:351. See Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” in Truettner and Wallach, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, 33–47, for an incisive discussion of the conflicting interests at play in the art world from the 1820s through the 1840s; Wallach, ibid., 24, writes of Cole’s strong attachment to the “trappings of gentility” and genteel culture more generally, rigorously analyzing class dynamics in Cole’s life and artistic career.
6.
Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” 24–25, discusses the business failures of James Cole and their impact on Thomas; also see Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole, 44.
7.
James Cole to Thomas Cole, August 12, 1828, Cole Papers, ALC-2, AAA.
8.
Cole to Gilmor, December 7, 1827, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA; Cole to Wadsworth, November 10, 1828, in J. Bard McNulty, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Cole and Daniel Wadsworth (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1983), 47; Cole to William Adams, April 7, 1834, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA. In the material quoted here, as throughout the text (except where square brackets mark editorial emendations), I preserve the spelling and punctuation of the original.
9.
Cole, “The Bewilderment,” ca. 1826, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
notes to pages 3–7
251
10.
Cole, “The Storm,” ca. 1826, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
11.
Cole, “The Storm,” ca. 1826, “The Bewilderment,” Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA. “The Wanderer,” also in Cole Papers, ALC-3, is another variation on the same themes.
12.
Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 177–236, argues (in essence) that Cole, in his early paintings especially, projected and displaced his inner struggles onto the natural world. Wolf recognizes the gothic elements in Cole’s imagery but is concerned primarily with their psychoanalytical connotations.
13.
Franklin Kelly offers a detailed examination of the Expulsion’s creation in Kelly, Thomas Cole’s Paintings of Eden, exhibition catalogue (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum, 1994), 29– 35. Also see Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision, 91–106. Wolf offers a reading of the painting as a “selfportrait of the Romantic mind, created by Cole as a mirror image of his interior world” (91) as well as a critique of the Enlightenment’s world of classical order and affirmation (104). Tim Barringer, in Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880, exhibition catalogue (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 93, suggests that Cole’s Expulsion can be understood as an allegory of America’s fall from grace as the wilderness is increasingly destroyed by western expansion and industrialization.
14.
Miller, The Empire of the Eye, 45–46, notes the ambiguity of temporal sequence in Cole’s Oxbow of 1836 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), in which the movement of the storm—from left to right or vice versa—is difficult to determine.
15.
Leslie A. Fiedler, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic,” in Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960; reprint, Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archives Press, 1997), 126–61, discusses the naturalization process whereby English gothic mutated into American gothic forms.
16.
Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design, 2:350–67. On Brown, see Donald A. Ringe, Charles Brockden Brown (Boston: Twayne, 1991), and Bill Christopher, The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993). Also see Fiedler, “Charles Brockden Brown and the Invention of the American Gothic,” 126–61.
17.
Although Brown wrote six novels altogether, only the first four are gothic: Wieland (1798), Ormond (1799), Edgar Huntly (1799), and Arthur Mervyn (1800).
18. 19.
Louis Gross, Redefining the American Gothic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), 14–15. Brown, “To the Public,” preface to Edgar Huntly, vol. 4 of The Novels and Related Works of Charles Brockden Brown, bicentennial edition, ed. Sydney J. Krause (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977), 3. Citations from the text of Edgar Huntly are from this edition.
20. 21.
Brown, Edgar Huntly, 94–97, 100–101, 122, 158–67, 173, 194, 199. Krause, “Historical Essay,” in Brown, Edgar Huntly, 295, 317; Dieter Schultz, “Edgar Huntly as a Quest Romance,” American Literature 43, no. 3 (November 1971): 326; Brown, Edgar Huntly, 211. See also George Toles, “Charting the Hidden Landscape: Edgar Huntly,” Early American Literature 16, no. 2 (fall 1981): 133–53; and Jared Gardner, “Alien Nation: Edgar
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notes to pages 7–13
Huntly’s Savage Awakening,” American Literature 66, no. 3 (September 1994): 429–61. Gardner sees the extirpation of the alien other as fundamental to the formation of national identity. 22.
Cole to Wadsworth, June 5, 1828; Wadsworth to Cole, December 4, 1827, in McNulty, ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Cole and Daniel Wadsworth, 41, 23.
23.
Gilmor to Cole, August 1, 1826, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA. On the Albany commission, see Kenneth John Myers, “Art and Commerce in Jacksonian America: The Steamboat Albany Collection,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 3 (September 2000): 503–28.
24.
On Cooper’s symbolic use of natural setting, see Richard Slotkin, introduction, to Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 [1826] (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), xviii. On Cooper’s appropriation of Brown’s landscape settings, see Lulu Rumsey Wiley, The Sources and Influence of the Novels of Charles Brockden Brown (New York: Vantage Press, 1950), 209, 215–17. See also Donald A. Ringe, “The Last of the Mohicans as a Gothic Novel,” in James Fenimore Cooper: His Country and His Art, ed. George A. Test (Oneonta, N.Y.: SUNY College at Oneonta, 1986), 41–53.
25.
Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans, 336–38.
26.
Cole, “Lines on Lake George,” Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
27.
Cole, journal entry, October 2, 1828, “Sketch of My Tour to the White Mountains with Mr Pratt,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 66, no. 1 (1990): 27.
28.
On the rhetoric and history of the Indian wars and the Indian removal during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, see Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1979; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 80–107; and Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Knopf, 1975). See also Renee Bergland, The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2001).
29.
Gilmor to Cole, December 13, 1826, and December 13, 1827, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA.
30.
Cole, diary entry, May 5, 1829 [Detroit Institute of Arts], quoted in Howard S. Merritt, “‘A Wild Scene’: Genesis of a Painting,” Studies on Thomas Cole, an American Romanticist, Baltimore Museum of Art Annual 2 (1967): 26. In “Essay on American Scenery,” American Monthly Magazine, n.s., 1 (January 1836): 4–5, Cole drew sharp distinctions between the Old World and the New, using landscape to make his point. There were no ruined towers on this side of the water, nor any of the other detritus of past civilizations that furnished such a vast storehouse of subjects to the artists of Europe. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that in Cole’s view, the United States was headed for decadence and destruction.
31.
Cole, journal entry, August 24, 1831, Cole Papers, ALC-2, AAA; Cole, “Sicilian Scenery: II,” Knickerbocker 23 (March 1844): 244.
32.
Poe, “The City in the Sea,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1969), 1:201–2.
33.
Volney’s Ruins; or, Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires (1793), was published in English in numerous editions. On the cult and meaning of ruins, see Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1953); Anne F. Janowitz, England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose
notes to pages 13–21
253
and the National Landscape (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990); Elizabeth Wheeler Manwaring, Italian Landscape in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1925); and Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). 34.
See Nancy Lusignan Schultz, Fire and Roses: The Story of the Charlestown, Massachusetts Convent Burning (New York: Free Press, 2000). The bibliography on Jacksonian era rioting is large. See, for example, Carl E. Prince, “The Great ‘Riot Year’: Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of Violence in 1834,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 1 (1985): 1–19, which surveys nativist riots in New York and other major cities during that year.
35.
Herbert Asbury, Ye Olde Fire Laddies (New York: Knopf, 1930), 126–30. Barringer, in Wilton and Barringer, American Sublime, 105, 107, has also suggested a connection between the Wall Street fire and Cole’s imagery in Destruction.
36.
Philip Hone, diary entry, December 7, 1838, in The Diary of Philip Hone, 1828–1851, ed. Allan Nevins (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1927), 367. Several scholars have discussed Cole’s interest in the cyclical theory of history. See Merritt, “‘A Wild Scene,’” 30–31; Alan Wallach, “Byron, Cole, and the Course of Empire,” Art Bulletin 50, no. 4 (December 1968): 36–37. Angela Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America: The Course of Empire as Political Allegory,” Prospects 14 (1989): 67, also points to the importance of the concept to Cole’s design for this series.
37.
Cole to William Adams, May 26, 1838, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA; Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” August 21, 1835, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA; Cole, “Verdura,” ca. 1845, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA. Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire, 208–31, discusses the idea, shared by Cole, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper, of America as an Eden fated for destruction.
38.
Poe, “Mellonta Tauta,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3:1299–1300. On Poe’s relations with the popular culture of his day, see David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 226–30. Kenneth Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 395–96, discusses the status of “Mellonta Tauta” as Poe’s “most absolute repudiation of democracy.” Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1958), 103, notes Poe’s indelible pride as a “displaced Southerner.”
39.
Betsy Erkkila, “The Poetics of Whiteness: Poe and the Racial Imaginary,” in Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race, ed. J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 35.
40.
Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” Arts Magazine 56 (November 1981): 84–106; and Angela Miller, “Thomas Cole and Jacksonian America,” 65–92, argue that Cole’s visions of cataclysm and decay metaphorically expressed the uneasiness and fear inspired by conditions in an expanding, young democracy.
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notes to pages 21–24
41.
Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, 226. Merritt, “‘A Wild Scene,’” 30, notes that Childe Harold was at least as likely as Volney’s Ruins to have inspired Cole in his conception of the series. Wallach, “Byron, Cole, and the Course of Empire,” 35–36, discusses Cole’s debt to Byron.
42.
After Cole, the apocalyptic vision in visual culture continued as a salient theme in midcentury America. See Gail E. Husch’s important study, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000).
43.
Cole, “Subjects for Pictures,” nos. 89 and 23, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA. Cole’s motifs were standard properties much used in the eighteenth century and passed on to the romantics of the nineteenth. “Il Penseroso” itself (1645) was the fountainhead of the landscape of melancholy, with its imagery of moonlight, a lonely tower, twilight groves, and stained-glass windows casting a “dim religious light” in some medieval cloister. Eighteenth-century poets decorated this terrain with images more specific to decay and death. Thomas Warton’s Pleasures of Melancholy (1745), for example, featured fallen columns, ivy, fungi, ravens, bats, and owls. Cole’s well-stocked library included an edition of Edward Young’s “Night Thoughts” (1742–45) and the works of Thomas Gray, whose “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) was the best-known product of the so-called Graveyard school of English poetry. The opening stanzas set the scene with darkness and silence, broken only by the cry of a solitary owl roosting in an “ivy-mantled tower” under the moon. The sinister castle and medieval ruin were also stock items in the gothic novel, essential for producing the desired atmosphere of terror and mystery.
44.
Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery was commissioned by Rufus L. Lord, a retired drygoods merchant whom Cole met in Florence in 1831. Lord specified the size of the painting but left the subject to Cole. See Howard S. Merritt, Thomas Cole, exhibition catalogue (Rochester, N.Y.: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, 1969), 27.
45.
Cole “Thoughts and Occurrences,” May 22, 1838, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
46.
On Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower, see Franklin Kelly, American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, pt. 1, Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1996), 81–87. Bruce W. Chambers, “Thomas Cole and the Ruined Tower,” Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin (1983): 2–32, offers a thoughtful discussion of this subject in Cole’s oeuvre.
47.
Chambers, “Thomas Cole and the Ruined Tower,” 14–15, and Kelly, American Paintings, 82, note the strong parallels between Constable’s painting and Cole’s. Louis Hawes, “Constable’s Hadleigh Castle and British Romantic Ruin Painting,” Art Bulletin 65, no. 3 (September 1983): 456, discusses Maria Constable’s untimely death as catalyst for the darker moods that shadowed Constable’s painting from the late 1820s.
48.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), vol. 4, canto IV, stanza 25.
notes to pages 24–29
255
49.
Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3:397–421.
50.
Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe, offers abundant information throughout on Poe’s undomestic life and gives an account of his strange death (429–37).
51.
Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe, 150, 210; Sarah Helen Whitman, Edgar Poe and His Critics (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1860), 46, 71. “The Haunted Palace” Whitman refers to is the poem of that title in “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
52.
Joy Kasson, “The Voyage of Life: Thomas Cole and Romantic Disillusionment,” American Quarterly 27 (March 1975): 53–55, discusses Cole’s divided self and notes that in his darkness, Cole is close to Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision, 264n.44, has suggested that Cole’s storm narratives resonate in an uncanny manner with the short stories of Poe.
53.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. and ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 46–52; Cole to Luman Reed, March 6, 1836, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA; Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” January 1, 1846, and May 22, 1838, ALC-3, AAA; Cole to Maria Cole, January 29, 1843, ALC-2, AAA; Cole to William Adams, May 26, 1838, ALC-1, AAA; Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” 46–47. An illuminating study of antebellum literary culture in the new economy is Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
54.
Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” July 1, 1838, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA; Cole, letter to Durand, August 7, 1838, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA. Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination, 209, identifies Cole’s references to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
55.
Cole, entries for Past and Present, Exhibition of the Paintings of the Late Thomas Cole at the Gallery of the American Art Union (New York: Snowden and Prall, 1848), 16–17. Ellwood C. Parry III, “Gothic Elegies for an American Audience: Thomas Cole’s Repackaging of Imported Ideas,” American Art Journal 8, no. 2 (November 1976): 37–46, is the most thorough study of Cole’s medieval themes, offering information on their sources and their buyers as well as discussing their place in America’s Gothic Revival movement.
56.
Cole “Thoughts and Occurrences,” January 24, 1835, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
57.
William H. Truettner, “Nature and the Native Tradition: The Problem of Two Thomas Coles,” in Truettner and Wallach, Thomas Cole, 137–58, discusses the twentieth-century scholarly tendency to take Cole’s American landscapes more seriously than his fanciful, historical, and allegorical works.
58.
Cole to Luman Reed, September 18, 1833; to Asher B. Durand, September 12, 1836, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA.
59.
Cole to Francis Alexander, September 1, 1834; to Asher B. Durand, January 14, 1838, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA.; “To Melancholy,” in “Thoughts and Occurrences,” ca. May 19, 1839, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA; Cole to C. L. ver Bryck, January 17, 1843, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA.
60.
Cole to Asher B. Durand, December 18, 1839, Cole Papers, ALC-1, AAA. Parry, The Art of Thomas Cole, 187, provides information on Cole’s domestic arrangements and position in the
256
notes to pages 32–38
Cedar Grove household. See also Raymond Beecher, “Cedar Grove—The Thomas Cole Residence,” Crayon 12, no. 1 (spring 1980): 1, 5–7, for a detailed description of life at Cedar Grove. 61.
Cole to Maria Bartow Cole, August 8, 1837; Sarah Cole to Thomas Cole, November 6, 1838, Cole Papers, ALC-2, AAA.
62.
On Prometheus Bound as an antislavery allegory, see Patricia Junker, “Thomas Cole’s Prometheus Bound: An Allegory of the 1840s,” American Art Journal 31, nos. 1/2 (2000): 32–55.
63.
Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” May 22, 1836, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
64.
Cole, entry for Manhood, in Exhibition of the Paintings of the Late Thomas Cole, 7–8.
65.
Cole, “Subjects for Pictures,” no. 91; Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” May 31, 1835, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
66.
Cole, entry for Old Age, in Exhibition of the Paintings of the Late Thomas Cole, 8. Cole’s descriptive narrative of The Voyage of Life originally appeared in a pamphlet to accompany the exhibition of the series in New York in 1840.
67.
Cole, entry for The Cross and the World, in Exhibition of the Paintings of the Late Thomas Cole, 10–13.
68.
Cole, “Thoughts and Occurrences,” December 29, 1839, Cole Papers, ALC-3, AAA.
chapter 2: the underground man 1.
Christian H. Wolff, “Ledger of Art Possessions, 1857–85,” ms. in Blythe Artist’s File, Carnegie Public Library, Pittsburgh. There are few full-scale treatments of Blythe. An essential monograph is Dorothy Miller, The Life and Works of David G. Blythe (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1950). I am indebted to the meticulous research and analysis of Bruce W. Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe (1815–1865): An Artist at Urbanization’s Edge” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1974), and Chambers, The World of David Gilmour Blythe, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: published for the National Collection of Fine Arts by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1980). In The World of David Gilmour Blythe, 75, Chambers sees Art versus Law as the artist’s “public confession of guilt” about his intemperate habits.
2.
Chambers, The World of David Gilmour Blythe, 42–55, uses the Pittsburgh context to interpret Blythe’s representations of urban life, as does Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Politics of Everyday Life (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 190–96. Both see Blythe’s images as social commentary of one kind or another.
3.
See James Hadden, A History of Uniontown, the County Seat of Fayette County, Pennsylvania (Akron, Ohio: New Werner Company, 1913), 602–4, for a description of the panorama and its fate.
4.
Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” 226–27; Miller, The Life and Works of David G. Blythe, 104.
5.
Quoted in James Hadden, “Sketch of David G. Blythe: Reminiscences of a Queer Genius,” Uniontown (Pa.) News Standard, April 16–May 28, 1896, from clippings preserved in a scrapbook, Carnegie Public Library, Uniontown, Pennsylvania.
notes to pages 38–46
257
6.
“Blythe’s Work: A Sketch of a Strangely Gifted Character,” East Liverpool Tribune, January 24, 1879, clipping preserved in Harold Bradshaw Barth, comp., “Blythe Archives,” East Liverpool Historical Society, Carnegie Public Library, quoted in Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” 147; Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 8, 1865; and Pittsburgh Gazette, April 4, 1895, both quoted in Miller, Blythe, 107–8; Miller, Blythe, 109. Blythe did have a handful of local patrons such as Andrew Carnegie’s friend James Park Jr. and several other businessmen; see Chambers, The World of David Gilmour Blythe, 54–55.
7.
Undated clipping from Agnes Way scrapbook, Carnegie Public Library, Pittsburgh, quoted in Miller, Blythe, 108; “Pittsburgh Legend,” Time, April 20, 1936, 58–59; Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” 8–9, 62–68.
8.
For a discussion and survey of parodies of “The Raven,” see John H. Ingram, “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe (1885; reprint, New York: Haskell House, 1972).
9.
“Ludwig” [R. W. Griswold], “The Death of Edgar A. Poe,” New York Tribune, October 9, 1849; Griswold, “Memoir of the Author,” in Griswold, The Literati (New York: Redfield, 1850), xxxviii; George R. Graham, “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s Magazine 36 (March 1850): 226.
10.
Blythe, untitled poem, quoted in Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” Appendix A, 361.
11.
Blythe, “A Fragment-A-la-Alex. Smith,” quoted in Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” Appendix A, 338–39. There is another version of the poem, quoted in Hadden, “Sketch of David G. Blythe,” that ends on a more portentous note. Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” 65, argues that the more burlesque version, in emphasizing the ridiculousness of the drunkard, casts doubt on the poem as an expression of Blythe’s own struggles against alcohol.
12.
Blythe, “A Fragment-A-la-Alex. Smith,” “The Drunkard’s Doom by ‘Boots,’”“Speech,” “Boots vs. Waynesburg,” “Aphorism 6a,” quoted in Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” Appendix A, 338–39, 365–66, 364, 345, 333. Chambers, 347n.22, provides extensive background on the squabble between Blythe and the town of Waynesburg, which had to do with an unsatisfactory commission to carve a statue for the Greene Country Courthouse.
13. 14.
Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” 221. William H. Smith, The Drunkard: or,The Fallen Saved! (Boston: Jones’s Publishing House, 1847), 39. The Power of the Pledge (1848), another temperance tale, ended happily with the family reunited beneath the pledge, framed and hung over the mantel. On the literature of temperance, see James David Hart, The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950); and David S. Reynolds and Debra J. Rosenthal, eds., The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997).
15.
Blythe painted about ten known pictures on drinking and temperance subjects, including some not mentioned in this chapter: The Wine Taster (ca. 1850–54; Westmoreland County Museum of Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania); and Conviviality, Beer Drinker, and Wine Merchant, all unlocated.
16.
258
Diana Strazdes, American Paintings and Sculpture to 1945 in the Carnegie Museum of Art (New
notes to pages 47–50
York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992), 85, discusses The Temperance Pledge, describing it as a “psychological study of an alcoholic contemplating reform.” 17.
Ibid., 83.
18.
David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 65–73. On temperance reform, see Ian R. Tyrrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979); and Thomas R. Pegram, Battling the Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998).
19.
Frank J. Kernan, Reminiscences of the Old Fire Laddies (New York: M. Crane, 1885), 34–35.
20.
Cleanliness was a constant concern of the etiquette books that proliferated in antebellum America. For example, D. Mackellar, A Treatise on the Art of Politeness, Good Breeding, and Manners (Detroit: George E. Pomeroy, 1855), 119–20, advised that a clean shirt and a clean person were necessary “as not to offend people.” Dirty mouths, hands, and nails were especially vulgar and offensive.
21.
Blythe’s Town Crier (1858–59; Duquesne Club, Pittsburgh) also displays the emblem of the bottle in the pocket.
22.
Joseph C. Neal, “Ripton Rumsey; A Tale of the Waters,” in Neal, Charcoal Sketches; or, Scenes from a Metropolis (Philadelphia: Cary and Hart, 1838), 155–62.
23.
Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, Cyclopaedia of American Literature (New York: Scribner, 1855): 2:456. Neal’s other work in the genre included Peter Ploddy and Other Oddities (1844) and a second series of sketches published in his weekly newspaper, Neal’s Saturday Gazette.
24.
Neal, “‘Boots’: or, The Misfortunes of Peter Faber” [1848], in Neal’s Charcoal Sketches (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson and Brothers, 1865), 7–20.
25.
Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 207, notes that Quaker City sold sixty thousand copies the first year and an average of thirty thousand a year for the next five.
26.
Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 70, 312n.11. Boyer, 68–84, provides a rich and useful survey of the urban social landscape of this period, and of literary responses to it. Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 135–80, details urban unrest and rioting in the 1850s. Also see Adrienne Siegel, The Image of the American City in Popular Literature, 1820–1870 (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981); and Janis P. Stout, Sodoms in Eden: The City in American Fiction before 1860 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976).
27.
George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (New York: Dewitt and Davenport, 1850), 25, 32, 52.
28.
George Thornton Fleming, History of Pittsburgh and Environs (New York: American Historical Society, 1922), 2:89; Leland D. Baldwin, Pittsburgh: The Story of a City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1937), 275–76; Samuel Young, The Smoky City: A Tale of Crime (Pittsburgh: A. A. Anderson, 1845). On April 10, 1845, a fire in Pittsburgh destroyed nearly one thousand buildings.
notes to pages 52–63
259
29.
James Parton, “Pittsburgh in 1866,” Atlantic Monthly 21 (January 1868): 17–18, 21–22; Anthony Trollope, North America (London: Chapman and Hall, 1862), 2:100.
30.
Chambers, The World of David Gilmour Blythe, 106, suggests that the newsboy here functions as Blythe’s surrogate.
31.
On Yankee Notions, see Cameron C. Nickels’s entry on that journal in David E. E. Sloane, ed., American Humor Magazines and Comic Periodicals (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987), 322–25.
32. 33.
Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, 479. Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1978), 2:507, 511, 514, 515.
34.
Dana Brand, “Rear-View Mirror: Hitchcock, Poe, and the Flaneur in America,” in Hitchcock’s America, ed. Jonathan Freedman and Richard Millington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 123–34; Jules Zanger, “The City from the Inside: Poe’s Urban Fiction,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 3, no. 2 (1991): 36; D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (1923; reprint, New York: Viking, 1968), 81. See also Amy Gilman, “Edgar Allan Poe Detecting the City,” in James Gilbert, Amy Gilman, Donald M. Scott, and Joan W. Scott, The Mythmaking Frame of Mind: Social Imagination and American Culture (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1993), 71–87; and Robert H. Byer, “Mysteries of the City: A Reading of Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 221–46.
35.
Johns, American Genre Painting, 193, views Blythe’s urchin paintings as “the didactic vehicles of a preaching about the character of the population as a whole.”
36.
There has been little discussion of The Hideout. See Miller, The Life and Works of David G. Blythe, 75. Donald D. Keyes and Lisa Taft, “David G. Blythe’s Civil War Paintings,” Antiques 108, no. 5 (November 1975): 992, connect Blythe’s cluttered style and oddly proportioned figures with the conventions of caricature, as seen in the cartoons of David Claypoole Johnston and George Cruikshank. The subject of the topsy-turvy domestic interior might also have been familiar to Blythe through prints of seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings.
37.
Rev. Edwin Chapin, Moral Aspects of City Life, a Series of Lectures, 2d ed. (New York: H. Lyon, 1854), 18, 147.
38.
Blythe, untitled poem, quoted in Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” Appendix A, 371.
39.
Blythe, untitled poem,“—To—,” “To ‘M,’” “To Mary Lyon,” quoted in Chambers, “David Gilmour Blythe,” Appendix A, 374, 375, 379, 381. Chambers, The World of David Gilmour Blythe, 76, proposes a similar reading of Prospecting as an anti-Edenic image.
chapter 3: the shrouded past 1.
Entry for July 12, 1843, in The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., ed. Robert F. Lucid (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1968), 2:177.
2.
260
Charles Sumner, letter to Lord Morpeth, 1843, quoted in William H. Gerdts, “Belshazzar’s Feast
notes to pages 64–76
II: ‘That Is His Shroud,’” Art in America 61 (May–June 1973): 58; “The Athenaeum Gallery and the Allston Collection,” Bulletin of the American Art-Union, October 1850, 111. 3.
William H. Gerdts, “Allston’s ‘Belshazzar’s Feast,’” Art in America 61 (March–April 1973): 61, pointed out the connections between Napoleon and Belshazzar in Allston’s initial formulation of the painting. David Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 101–4, offers a many-faceted interpretation of Belshazzar’s Feast in its English and Bostonian contexts. For a concise overview of the painting’s history, see The Correspondence of Washington Allston, ed. Nathalia Wright (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 102–7, hereafter referred to as Correspondence unless the reference is to Wright’s editorial essays and notes; I refer in such instances to Wright, Correspondence of Washington Allston. The most direct model for Allston was the work of his mentor, the American-born Benjamin West, who painted Daniel Interpreting to Belshazzar the Handwriting on the Wall (Berkshire Museum, Pittsfield, Mass.) in 1775.
4.
Allston to Washington Irving, May 9, 1817, Correspondence, 100–101.
5.
Allston to Charles Robert Leslie, May 20, 1821, Correspondence, 184.
6.
The quotation is from Harding’s autobiography, A Sketch of Chester Harding, Artist, new ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 143. See also Jared B. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (New York: Scribner, 1892), 72.
7.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Dana, “Allston in Cambridgeport, 1830 to 1843,” Cambridge Historical Society Publications, no. 29, Proceedings for the Year 1943 (1948): 37; entry for July 12, 1843, The Journal of Richard Henry Dana, Jr., 178.
8.
William Wetmore Story to James Russell Lowell, quoted in Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 1:297–98.
9. 10.
Bjelajac, Millennial Desire, 127–30, 141. William H. Gerdts, “The Paintings of Washington Allston,” in William H. Gerdts and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., “A Man of Genius”: The Art of Washington Allston (1779–1843), exhibition catalogue (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), 161–62, sees a shift in both the painter’s sensibility and American taste as factors in Allston’s loss of interest and motivation for finishing Belshazzar’s Feast. Many scholars have speculated on this question. See also, for example, Elizabeth Johns, “Washington Allston’s Later Career: Art about the Making of Art,” Arts Magazine 54, no. 4 (December 1979): 122–29, which argues that Allston’s relationship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and other English romantic poets was a primary factor in the shift after his return to America from making art about the external world to making inward-looking art.
11.
Bjelajac, Millennial Desire, 98–99, also suggests that in beginning Belshazzar’s Feast Allston “sublimated his private, subjective experience of evil onto the relatively impersonal and emotionally distant plane of a public history painting.”
12.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 3. Essential early biographical sources include Flagg, Life and Letters; and Moses Foster Sweetser, Allston, vol. 7 of Artist Biographies (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1878).
notes to pages 76–79
261
13.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 4; Susan Lowndes Allston, Brookgreen,Waccamaw, in the Carolina Low Country (Charleston, S.C.: Walker, Evans, and Cogswell, 1935), 11.
14.
Gerdts, “The Paintings of Washington Allston,” 11. Bjelajac, Millennial Desire, 51–52, comments briefly on the importance of the plantation in developing Allston’s imagination and his habituation to the idea of a natural social hierarchy.
15.
Charles Winston Joyner, “Slave Folklife on the Waccamaw Neck: Antebellum Black Culture in the South Carolina Lowcountry” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977), 2 –10. Joyner provides invaluable information about Low Country plantation life and the cultural dynamic between masters and slaves.
16.
Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, Voyage dans les Etats-Unis (Paris: Du Pont, 1799), 4:10–11.
17.
On the will, see Allston, Brookgreen, Waccamaw, 13. The literature on plantation life and relations between white owners and their slaves is extensive. See in particular Kenneth M. Stampp. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Vintage, 1956); Eugene D. Genovese, The World the Slaveholders Made (New York: Pantheon, 1969), and Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974).
18.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 39, reports the story of Allston’s conversation with Fuseli. For details on Allston’s inheritance, see Correspondence, 36n.1; Joseph A. Groves, The Alstons and Allstons of North and South Carolina (Atlanta: Franklin Printing and Publishing, 1901), 34–37; and also Barbara K. Nord, The Flagg Family in South Carolina: The Nineteenth Century (Austin, Tex.: Peripatetic Press, 1984), 4–7.
19.
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of EighteenthCentury America, ed. Albert E. Stone (New York: Penguin, 1981), 67, 166–79. See Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 13–30, for a thoughtful reading of Crèvecoeur’s vision of America as a nation fatally flawed by slavery. Crèvecoeur may not have witnessed the slave torture scene described in the Letters. Rather, this narrative was meant to symbolize the underside of the Enlightenment and the corrosive effects of slavery on republican society. See Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 165–66.
20.
Joyner, “Slave Folklife on the Waccamaw Neck,” 82.
21.
William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York: George P. Scott and Company, 1834), 2:153.
22.
John Bennett, “Gullah: A Negro Patois,” South Atlantic Quarterly 7 (1908): 339. For a useful and thorough discussion of Gullah and its speakers in the South Carolina Low Country, see Joyner, “Slave Folklife on the Waccamaw Neck,” 110–47.
23.
South Carolina Folk Tales: Stories of Animals and Supernatural Beings, compiled by Workers of the Writers’ Program of the WPA in the State of South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1941), 46–49, 90–91. Although collected in the twentieth century, these stories represent the tradition on which Allston’s slave storytellers also drew. See this publica-
262
notes to pages 79–83
tion for an extensive bibliography of earlier sources. Also see Elliott J. Gorn, “Black Spirits: The Ghostlore of Afro-American Slaves,” American Quarterly 36, no. 4 (fall 1984): 549–65. 24.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 5–6.
25.
Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, 2:153–54.
26.
Thomas Jefferson framed the case for black inferiority in these terms in Notes on the State of Virginia, written in 1781, and southern slave owners elaborated on this rationale especially in the antebellum nineteenth century, when the savage/Sambo stereotype had wide currency. See Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1979; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 108–28.
27.
Mary Pinckney, letter, 1798, quoted in Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti’s Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 120, 108. Hunt powerfully states the case for the Haitian revolution as a watershed for American fears about slave revolt and emancipation. Also see Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995). Michele Oriol, Images de la Révolution à St-Domingue, exhibition catalogue (Port-au-Prince, Haiti: Fondation pour la Recherche Iconographique et Documentaire, 1992), is a useful compendium of visual images that came out of the Haitian revolution, ranging from heroic portraits to gory spectacles.
28.
Bryan Edwards, An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo (London: John Stockdale, Piccadilly, 1797), preface; Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser, December 11, 1802, quoted in Hunt, Haiti’s Influence, 38; “Copy of Some Loose Papers Found among the Manigault Papers in the Handwriting of Dr. Gabriel Manigault, October 25, 1888,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 40 (1939): 20. See Hunt, Haiti’s Influence, 4–43, for a full account of the protracted rebellion. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 152–55, discusses the reverse terrors of 1802, when France under Napoleon attempted to recolonize St. Domingue and subjected blacks to unimaginably grisly tortures.
29.
Hunt, Haiti’s Influence, 39.
30.
Ibid., 118–20, 39–40; Negro Plot: An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection (Boston: Joseph W. Ingraham, 1822), 30; J. H. Easteroy, ed., The South Carolina Rice Plantation As Revealed in the Papers of Robert F. W. Allston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 35.
31.
Allston, Brookgreen, Waccamaw, 14, 17; George C. Rogers Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), 236. Mabel L. Webber, “Moore of St. Thomas’ Parish,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 27 (1926): 165, states that Rachel Moore Allston Flagg died in Charleston on December 27, 1839.
32. 33.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 34. Allston to John Knapp, October 23, 1800, Correspondence, 18; Allston, “Introductory Discourse,” in Lectures on Art and Poems and Monaldi (1850 and 1841; reprint, 2 vols. in 1, Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967), 39; “Sonnet on the French Revolution,” in Lectures on Art and Poems, 324.
notes to pages 84–87
263
34.
Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 101–6.
35.
Hunt, Haiti’s Influence, 121–27, discusses how the St. Domingue revolution was seen to prefigure a cataclysmic race war in the South; De Bow’s Commercial Review 16 (January 1854): 35; Edwin C. Holland, A Refutation of the Calumnies against the . . . Southern States (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1822), 86. On race relations and fear of revolution in South Carolina, see also George M. Fredrickson, “Masters and Mudsills: The Role of Race in the Planter Ideology of South Carolina,” in Fredrickson, The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 15–27. Flagg, Life and Letters, 8, writes that Allston made the volcano painting while still at school in Charleston.
36.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 27, 33. The story of the banditti originally appeared in Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design, 2:156. Kerry Dean Corso discusses Allston’s banditti paintings in “Reading the Gothic: American Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature, 1800–1850” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2001), 19–55.
37.
See Gerdts, “The Paintings of Washington Allston,” 21–22, for a discussion of Allston’s sources for Tragic Figure in Chains. These included Robert Edge Pine’s Mad Woman in Chains (ca. 1760), which Allston could have seen exhibited at the Columbianum Museum in Boston.
38.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 34, mentions a lost painting completed by Allston before he left Cambridge for the return to South Carolina in 1800. A scene from the “tragedy of Borabona,” it represented a group of splendidly dressed tyrants and the slave Selim, surrounded by “black mutes.” This work, too, might have exemplified Allston’s disguised or veiled “speech” about slavery.
39.
Wright, introduction to Correspondence of Washington Allston, 2.
40.
Sweetser, Allston, 175.
41.
Allston to Charles Robert Leslie, November 15, 1819, in Correspondence, 169; Allston, “Introductory Discourse,” Lectures on Art and Poems, 54–55, 60; Sweetser, Allston, 173–74.
42.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. Frank Shuffelton (New York: Penguin, 1999), 144–51. See Takaki, Iron Cages, 42–55, on Jefferson and the question of race. For all his rhetoric, Jefferson almost certainly fathered children by his slave Sally Hemings, and Allston, for all his rhetoric on purity and the ideal, had epicurean tastes. Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves,” American Literature 66, no. 2 (June 1994): 239–73, has made an argument similar in some points to mine on the sources of Poe’s gothic. She contends (265) that Poe’s unique tools of terror have less to do with “Germany” or the “soul” than “with African American stories of the angry dead, sightings of teeth, the bones and matter of charms, the power of conjuring.”
43.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 35. Johns, “Washington Allston’s Later Career,” 123, argues that Allston absorbed his ideas about memory from William Wordsworth and other romantic writers, who felt that the artist stored the sensory experiences of childhood and drew on them for art the rest of his life. Johns, however, does not show how Allston’s actual childhood impressions might have informed his later images of dreamy figures.
264
notes to pages 87–91
44.
Gerdts, “The Paintings of Washington Allston,” 118.
45.
Allston to Dunlap, August 16, 1834; Allston to Jonathan Mason, October 20, 1831, Correspondence, 363, 303.
46. 47.
Bjelajac, Millennial Desire, 168–72, argues for anti-Catholic meaning in Spalatro’s Vision. On the drawing, see Stebbins, “The Drawings of Washington Allston,” in Gerdts and Stebbins, “A Man of Genius,” 238; Charles Fraser, “Exhibition of Pictures,” Magnolia 1, no. 3 (September 1842): 171.
48.
Hunt, Haiti’s Influence, 148, 98; Easteroy, The South Carolina Rice Plantation, 16. John R. Welsh, “Washington Allston: Expatriate South Carolinian,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 67, no. 2 (April 1966): 84, mentions the inscribed copy of Monaldi that Allston gave to his nephew. See William W. Freehling, Prelude to the Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina (New York: Harper and Row, 1966). On Walker and his Appeal, see Herbert Aptheker, “One Continual Cry”: David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (New York: Humanities Press, 1965); and Peter B. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997).
49.
Wright, ed., Appendix 7, “Politics,” Correspondence of Washington Allston, 629–30, discusses Allston’s lack of interest in politics; Welsh, “Washington Allston,” 97; William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Public,” Liberator, January 1, 1831; William Lloyd Garrison, “Universal Emancipation,” and “An Address Delivered in Marlboro Chapel, Boston, July 4, 1838,” in An Address Delivered in Marlboro Chapel, Boston, July 4, 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838), 47–48, 21. On Garrison, see Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
50.
Wright, Correspondence of Washington Allston, 350n.2. See Donald M. Jacobs, ed., Courage and Consciousness: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); and George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750–1860 (New York: Garland, 1994).
51. 52.
Edward Ball, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine, 1998), 313–14. Allston to Cogdell, March 8, 1841; June 7, 1840; March 24, 1841, Correspondence, 455–56, 440–42, 457–58. After his death the New York Tribune claimed Allston had emancipated a young female slave inherited from his stepfather, but the story had no basis in fact; see Wright, Correspondence of Washington Allston, 440n.3. On shipping slaves to other states in order to emancipate them, see George C. Rogers Jr., The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1970), 349.
53.
Allston to Cogdell, March 24, 1841, and June 7, 1840, Correspondence, 458, 441.
54.
Welsh, “Washington Allston: Expatriate South Carolinian,” 97; Sweetser, Allston, 145.
55.
Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Painting (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2000), 93–94, notes that biblical painting and radical abolitionism were in certain instances “not unrelated,” though the connections were oblique.
notes to pages 91–97
265
56.
Allston to Cogdell, December 21, 1825, and July 1, 1826, Correspondence, 223, 228; Harding, A Sketch of Chester Harding, Artist, 143; Allston to Ruth Gibbs Channing, July 4, 1843, in Flagg, Life and Letters, 327.
57.
Allston to McMurtrie, May 27, 1831, and to “a friend,” n.d., quoted in Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design, 2:185, 186; Allston to Cogdell, February 27, 1832, Correspondence, 314. In becoming Belshazzar’s slave, Allston acted out the classic power reversal posited by Hegel, who saw the master-slave relation as one of fateful interdependence that ultimately made a slave of the master and a master of the slave. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 236–37.
58.
Flagg, Life and Letters, 289; Elizabeth P. Peabody, “Last Evening with Allston,” in Peabody, Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1886), 7. Phoebe Lloyd, “Washington Allston: American Martyr?” Art in America 72 (March 1984): 145–55, 177–79, also argues that Allston lived in a state of psychic imprisonment, but for reasons pertaining to his sexuality rather than his slaveholding past.
59.
James Russell Lowell, Fireside Travels (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864), 47–48; Anna Jameson, “Washington Allston,” in Jameson, Memoirs and Essays (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1846), 112; Flagg, Life and Letters, 71.
60.
Dana to Samuel F. B. Morse, quoted in Sweetser, Allston, 149; Allston, Lectures on Art and Poems, 211; Sweetser, Allston, 155; Dana, “Allston in Cambridgeport,” 67.
61. 62.
James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1:308. This figure is already present in the studies Allston made in 1817, suggesting that thoughts of slave rebellion and liberation were never far from his mind.
chapter 4: the deepest dark 1.
There is a rich body of scholarship focusing on the power and horror of blackness in the white world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am indebted to the work of Teresa Goddu, Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), has been invaluable, as have H. L. Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); and Leonard Cassuto, The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). An older study that is still very useful is Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1959). Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25, discusses the collective white fears of a degraded, threatening, male Other that played a part in the culture of minstrelsy.
2.
T. B. Thorpe, “New-York Artists Fifty Years Ago,” Appleton’s Journal 7 (May 25, 1872): 574, recounts the lawsuit story.
3.
266
The literature on Quidor is slim, consisting of a handful of exhibition catalogues, articles, and
notes to pages 98–102
dissertations. See especially John I. H. Baur, John Quidor 1801–1881, exhibition catalogue (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, 1942); David M. Sokol, “John Quidor: His Life and Work” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1971); and Christopher Wilson, “The Life and Work of John Quidor” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1982). John Quidor to Stewart L. Woodford, July 13 1868, quoted in Baur, John Quidor, 14. Sokol, 41–42, doubts the authenticity of the letter but concedes that whatever the case, Quidor “undoubtedly lost the farm.” The letter once belonged to Quidor’s grandson; a copy is owned by the Archives of American Art. 4.
Herbert Asbury, Ye Olde Fire Laddies (New York: Knopf, 1930), 168–71, describes the ritual of engine washing and is a good older source for fire-fighting lore, narratives of street brawls, and information about fire fighting and antitemperance attitudes. Also see Ernest Earnest, The Volunteer Fire Company: Past and Present (New York: Stein and Day, 1979); and Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), which deals at a higher theoretical level with the dynamics of class and gender ideologies in the culture of the volunteer companies.
5.
Asbury, Ye Olde Fire Laddies, 166. See Greenberg, Cause for Alarm, 80–108, on fire company violence, and 59 for remarks on lack of restraint as the firefighters’ norm. In Greenberg’s opinion (68–69), the volunteer fire companies offered men an attractive blend of middle-class refinements and working-class physicality and excitement. On urban riots during the Jacksonian era, see David Grimsted, “Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting,” American Historical Review 77, no. 2 (April 1972): 361–97; and Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
6.
William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (New York: George P. Scott and Company, 1834), 2:308, rated Quidor a minor artist whose main occupation was painting devices for fire engines.
7.
T. B. Thorpe, “Personal Reminiscences of C. L. Elliott,” Watson’s Art Journal 10, no. 5 (November 21, 1868): 55. Baur, John Quidor, 23, lists Quidor’s New York addresses. See Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001). Wilson, “The Life and Work of John Quidor,” 55, first pointed out that Quidor did not conform to the National Academy’s standards of gentlemanly conduct.
8.
Thorpe, “Personal Reminiscences,” 55. On the physical type of the legendary brawler, see Asbury, Ye Olde Fire Laddies, 178–80. Elliott J. Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), is an invaluable study of this subject.
9.
Robert Lebel, “Quidor and Poe, or the American Loneliness,” VVV 2–3 (1943): 56, suggested that “there could be no room for such an eccentric in the ranks of our recognized painters at a time when solemnity and restraint were considered the essential marks of artistic eminence.” Here again the contrast with Cole is interesting, Cole with all his gentlemanly aspirations having been associated with the National Academy from its inception. On the American Academy, see Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, American Academy of the Fine Arts and the American Art-Union,
notes to pages 103–104
267
1816–1852 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1953); and Carrie Rebora Barratt, “The American Academy of the Fine Arts, New York, 1802–1842” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1990). 10.
Irving to Allston, May 21, 1817, in Nathalia Wright, ed., The Correspondence of Washington Allston (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993), 108. On Irving and sentimental moralism, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 372–73. Studies on Irving include William L. Hedges, Washington Irving: An American Study, 1802–1832 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965); and Martin Roth, Comedy and America: The Lost World of Washington Irving (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1976). On Irving stories as sources for American artists, see Bertha Monica Stearns, “Nineteenth-Century Writers in the World of Art,” Art in America 40, no. 1 (winter 1952): 33–38. See also Visions of Washington Irving: Selected Works from the Collections of Historic Hudson Valley, exhibition catalogue (Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown, N.Y., 1991).
11.
New-York Mirror, June 15, 1833, 398, and June 9, 1838, 398.
12.
Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 119; and Rebecca Bedell, “John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c. 1828),” Yale Journal of Criticism 11, no. 1 (1998): 115. Both authors maintain that Quidor had a conservative view of the imagination and its dangers if allowed to fly free, without restraint. The pictorial evidence, however, would suggest otherwise.
13.
Irving, “Wolfert Webber, or Golden Dreams,” in Tales of a Traveler, vol. 10 of Complete Works of Washington Irving, ed. Judith Giblin Haig (Boston: Twayne, 1987), 251; Washington Irving to John Pendleton Kennedy, April 27, 1851, in Irving, Letters, ed. Ralph M. Alderman, Herbert L. Kleinfeld, and Jenifer S. Banks (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 4:248.
14.
Irving, “Wolfert Webber,” 259.
15.
Ibid., 257, 259.
16.
David Bjelajac, American Art: A Cultural History (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 2000), 176.
17.
Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision, 122–30.
18.
Wilson, “The Life and Work of John Quidor,” 114–24; and Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision, 131–40, offer detailed descriptions and discussions of the painting. Wilson, 116, points to a cartoon by George Cruikshank as the source for Quidor’s dancing figures but notes that Quidor’s black man responds to the music in an “almost possessed” and demonic fashion. Quidor also drew on the work of William Hogarth and other English satirists.
19.
Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 196–97.
20.
Lott, Love and Theft, 111, notes that a little more than a year after William Lloyd Garrison founded the abolitionist Liberator in Boston, T. D. Rice toured the northeastern seaboard with his celebrated “Jim Crow” act, setting the stage for the eventual development of the full-fledged minstrel show. Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 126–67, discusses the Sambo/Savage dialectic in
268
notes to pages 105–111
plantation and abolitionist literature. See Leonard L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). 21.
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 90–108, offers a provocative interpretation of the Crockett almanacs as outlets for young working-class masculine hostility amid the violence of jingoism and racism.
22.
The Yaller Flower almanac was published at 134 Division Street, within a block of Quidor’s studio (1834–36) at 46 Canal Street, between Ludlow and Orchard Streets.
23.
For a survey of grotesque black figures in pulp fiction, see Adrienne Siegel, The Image of the American City in Popular Literature (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1981), 132–34; Samuel Young, The Smoky City: A Tale of Crime (Pittsburgh: A. A. Anderson, 1845), 89.
24.
Poe to John Allan, March 17, 1827, in The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. John Ward Ostrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:8.
25.
Poe, “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” in Tales, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison, 2d ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1979), 84; Poe, “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1969), 2:348–49, 564, 567. Richard Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe and the “Philadelphia Saturday News” (Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Edgar Allan Poe Society, and the Library of the University of Baltimore, 1991), 7–18, discusses the newspaper sources for “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and other tales. Cassuto, The Inhuman Race, 161–62, argues that “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” gives free rein to the fear of the black man, especially his violence and supposedly unrestrained sexuality. For much further discussion of Poe’s attitudes and their inscription in his tales, see J. Gerald Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg, eds., Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
26.
Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838), in Selected Tales (New York: Vintage, 1991), 320–23, 386, 455.
27.
Editorial, Albany Evening Journal, May 23, 1854; John Campbell, Negro-Mania: Being an Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of the Various Races of Men (Philadelphia: Campbell and Power, 1851), 459. George Lippard, The Quaker City, or, The Monks of Monk-Hall (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1845), 91.
28.
See Malchow, Gothic Images of Race in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 9–40 for a detailed discussion of Frankenstein’s monster in nineteenth-century English popular culture.
29.
Gary Laderman, The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes toward Death, 1799–1883 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 101–2; “The Battle of Antietam,” Harper’s Weekly 6, no. 302 (October 11, 1862): 655.
30.
On Ole Cezer, see Bruce Chambers, The World of David Gilmour Blythe, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, 1980), 66; and Diana Strazdes, American Paintings and Sculpture to 1945 in the Carnegie Museum of Art (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1992), 87.
notes to pages 111–117
269
31.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly (1852; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1986), 648.
32.
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 195–98, discusses the meaning of “washing the Moor” and gives examples of soap advertisements featuring a black child washed white.
33.
Ibid., 24.
34.
Wood, Blind Memory, 158. I am indebted to Wood for his discussion of devil–black man symbolism.
35.
Jonathan Edwards, Images, or Shadows of Divine Things, ed. Perry Miller (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1948), 66; Robert Bailey, The Life and Adventures of Robert Bailey (Richmond, Va.: J. and G. Cochran, 1822), 12–13; Poe, Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 279; Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter, vol. 1 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Fredson Bowers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962), 184–85. See James J. Lynch, “The Devil in the Writings of Irving, Hawthorne, and Poe,” New York Folklore Quarterly 8 (summer 1952): 111–13. Not surprisingly, slaveholders merged the devil and the black man with practiced ease. See Richard B. Erno, “Dominant Images of the Negro in the Ante-Bellum South” (Ph.D. diss., University of Minnesota, 1961), for extensive analysis and many examples of the black man’s double nature in the eyes of slave owners. On the devil in general, see Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995).
36.
Irving, “The Devil and Tom Walker,” in Tales of a Traveller, 217–27.
37.
Guy McElroy, Facing History: The Black Image in American Art, 1710–1940, exhibition catalogue (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, in association with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1990), 26.
38.
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music at the Johns Hopkins University has editions of “My Long Tail Blue” issued by three publishers in New York and one in Baltimore; conceivably others were published elsewhere.
39 40.
New York Picayune 4, no. 34 (August 18, 1855): 1. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 447.
41.
In addition to those mentioned in the text, Quidor’s other subjects from Irving in the 1850s included Ichabod Crane at a Ball at Van Tassel’s Mansion (1855; Sleepy Hollow Restorations, Tarrytown, N.Y.); Rip Van Winkle: Scene at a Village Tavern (ca. 1856; private collection); Wolfert’s Will (1856; Brooklyn Museum of Art); Wolfert Webber at the Inn (1857; private collection); and Edict of William the Testy (ca. 1857; Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vt.). He also painted an earlier version of The Headless Horseman (1828; Yale University Art Gallery).
42.
See George W. Van Vleck, The Panic of 1857: An Analytical Study (New York: AMS Press, 1967). On Quidor and land speculation, see Wilson, “The Life and Work of John Quidor,” 103–6, 124–31.
43.
270
Wilson, “The Life and Work of John Quidor,” 166–67.
notes to pages 118–125
chapter 5: the shadow’s curse 1.
Marcia Goldberg, “William Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit: An Allegory of Assassination,” Art Bulletin 58, no. 2 (June 1976): 234–40; Ellwood C. Parry III, “Looking for a French and Egyptian Connection behind William Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit,” American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (summer 1987): 52–60; Jeffrey Weidman, “William Rimmer: Critical Catalogue Raisonné” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1982), 610; Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 84–107.
2.
Essential sources on Rimmer include Truman H. Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer: Sculptor, Painter, and Physician (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881); Lincoln Kirstein, William Rimmer, 1816–1879, exhibition catalogue (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1946); Weidman, “William Rimmer: Critical Catalogue Raisonné,” and Weidman et al., William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo, exhibition catalogue (Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, Mass., 1985; distributed for the Brockton Art Museum/Fuller Memorial by University Press of New England). I am particularly indebted to the information contained in Weidman’s meticulously detailed and comprehensive studies.
3.
Lincoln Kirstein, “Who Was Dr. Rimmer?” Town and Country, July 1946, 72–73, 118, 132–33, is the first account of the Rimmer Dauphin legacy.
4.
Daniel Chester French, letter to Mrs. Thomas Ball, September 10, 1879, quoted in Lincoln
5.
Carol Troyen, The Boston Tradition: American Paintings from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Kirstein, “William Rimmer, His Life and Art,” Massachusetts Review, summer 1961, 16. exhibition catalogue (New York: The Federation, 1980), 147, argues that Flight and Pursuit is “both an image of paranoia, and a subtle interpretation of the nature of paranoia.” 6.
Rimmer, “The Midnight Ride,” Rimmer album of poetry and drawings, Boston Medical Library, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston, Mass.
7.
Scott’s translation of the “Erlkönig” first appeared in 1798 and was reprinted in 1799, 1802, and 1806. In 1832 it was published as a song (music adapted from Schubert’s setting of Goethe’s poem) in The Cadeau . . . for 1832. See William B. Todd and Ann Bowden, Sir Walter Scott: A Bibliographical History, 1796–1832 (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press, 1978), 10–12; and William Ruff, “Walter Scott and The Erl-King,” Englische Studien 69 (1934): 106–8. Given the Rimmer family’s interest in music, they probably knew some version of the Schubert song.
8.
Weidman, “William Rimmer: Critical Catalogue Raisonné,” 10. Weidman (592–626) offers a thorough discussion of the painting and its sources and critiques opposing interpretations while offering his own, which suggests that in this painting Rimmer alluded directly (if covertly) to the “Dauphin burden.” The principal clues to this allusion, according to Weidman, are the cape, in the form of a reversed map of France, and a concealed fleur-de-lis in the wall decorations directly above it. See also Charles A. Sarnoff, “The Meaning of William Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit,” American Art Journal 5, no. 1 (May 1973): 18–19, which also argues that the painting alludes to the history of Rimmer’s father and his flight from the assassins hired by Louis XVIII.
9. 10.
Weidman, William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo, 6 and 6n.2. Ibid., 92–93.
notes to pages 129–135
271
11.
Goldberg, “William Rimmer’s Flight and Pursuit,” 234.
12.
Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 78–142, thoroughly canvasses and analyzes the visual culture of the runaway. In his view, slave narratives and abolition novels romanticized the slave hunt, highlighting incidents of “melodrama, excitement, savagery, and horror,” while depicting the slaves themselves as victims, unable to act. Repeatedly in books, in pictures, and on the stage, such representations obscured the lived reality of slave experience, offering instead an easily accepted cluster of stereotypes that passed for truth in northern eyes.
13.
Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, pt. 1, From the American Revolution to World War I (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1989), 4:209–10.
14.
Wood, Blind Memory (127–30) discusses this recycling process in the case of Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (New York, 1849), in which the illustrations were crude adaptations of those in the Suppressed Book about Slavery (New York, 1857). Wood explains that despite the seemingly impossible difference in the dates of the illustration source and the Bibb narrative, the Suppressed Book claimed to have been ready for press years prior to its actual publication.
15.
Thurman Wilkins, Thomas Moran, Artist of the Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 42. There were two or three versions of the painting. A label on the back of the version owned by the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, states that the picture was engraved but offers no further particulars.
16.
Francis Parkman, “The Pioneers of the New World,” Atlantic Monthly 12 (August 1863): 230. See David C. Miller’s magisterial study Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Miller notes (49–51) that in Puritan theology, the swamp connoted the moral quagmire of sin and evil.
17.
Longfellow, “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp,” in The Poetical Works of Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 21–22; Stowe, Dred, A Tale of the Dismal Swamp (Boston: Phillips, Sampson, 1856), 2:274.
18.
Weidman, “William Rimmer: Critical Catalogue Raisonné,” 600; Rimmer, Providence (R.I.) lecture no. 11, ca. 1871–72; quoted in Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer, 75–77.
19.
Weidman, “William Rimmer: Critical Catalogue Raisonné,” 607; The Iconographic Encyclopedia, vol. 4, Architecture, ed. W. N. Lockington (1851; reprint, Philadelphia: Iconographic Publishing Company, 1888), 136–37.
20.
Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer, 120.
21.
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno [1855], ed. John P. Runden (Boston: Heath, 1965). The name of Cereno’s ship obviously is a play on St. Domingue, site of the horrific slave rebellion in 1791.
22.
See, for example, the opposing viewpoints expressed by Sidney Kaplan, “‘Benito Cereno’: An Apology for Slavery?” and Alan Guttmann, “The Enduring Innocence of Captain Delano,” both in Melville, Benito Cereno, 167–78, 179–88.
23.
272
Melville, Benito Cereno, 1–2, 17, 74.
notes to pages 135–141
24.
William Douglas O’Connor, Harrington: A Story of True Love (1860; reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970), 8–9.
25.
See George Fort Milton, The Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), 392–410; Damon Wells, Stephen Douglas: The Last Years (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971), 60–79.
26.
The term “slavocracy,” an obvious corruption of “aristocracy,” was widely used in the North as a disparaging label for the South.
27. 28.
New York Tribune, December 16, 1861. See Ralph Ray Fahrney, Horace Greeley and the “Tribune” in the Civil War (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Torch Press, 1936), 109–31; and Erik S. Lunde, Horace Greeley (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 39–45. “Intelligent Contraband” was a commonplace in newspaper correspondence, but the Vanity Fair cartoon uses heavy-handed irony to mock the idea of black intelligence. See Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 154–55, 219.
29.
Poe, “The Raven,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1:369, lines 103–8.
30.
Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” [1919], in Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1934), 4:368–407. In his novel Siebenkäs (1796) Jean Paul Richter coined the term “doppelgänger” to describe two friends who together form a whole, each dependent on the other half, or alter ego. See Andrew Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); and John Herdman, The Double in NineteenthCentury Fiction: The Shadow Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).
31.
Edgar Allan Poe, “William Wilson,” in Collected Works, 2:436, 444–48.
32.
Kenneth Silverman, Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 149–51, discusses doubles and doubling in Poe’s work.
33.
James Thomas Flexner, That Wilder Image: The Native School from Thomas Cole to Winslow Homer, vol. 3 of History of American Painting (1962; reprint, New York: Dover, 1970), 173.
34.
Victor I. Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow (1997; reprint, London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 142–44; Charles A. Sarnoff, “Symbols in Shadows: A Study of Shadows in Dreams,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association 20, no. 1 (January 1972): 80–81.
35.
Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1823). For discussion of the shadow motif in Peter Schlemihl, see Sarnoff, “Symbols in Shadows,” 68–74; and Stoichita, A Short History of the Shadow, 167–85.
36.
Von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, 92–96.
37.
William Raeper, George MacDonald (Tring, England: Lion Publishing, 1987), 285, 257–58.
38.
George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance, in MacDonald, Works of Fancy and Imagination, 10 vols. (London: Strahan and Company, 1871), 5:61–62, 130–33, 150; 6:26–41, 52– 54, 159, 168–69.
39.
Rimmer, “Stephen and Phillip,” Rimmer manuscripts and scrapbooks, Boston Medical Library,
notes to pages 142–154
273
Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Harvard University, Boston, Mass., B MS b44.2, p. 17. 40.
Kirstein, “William Rimmer: His Life and Art,” 713, 715. On the photo-sculpture studio and Rimmer’s would-be profitable inventions, see also Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer, 87–90.
41.
Bartlett, The Art Life of William Rimmer, 27, 96, 128, 137. Opinion on Rimmer was divided. Other acquaintances praised his honesty, high ideals, and commitment to teaching.
42. 43.
Weidman, “William Rimmer: Critical Catalogue Raisonné,” 62. On “Stephen and Phillip,” see Weidman, “William Rimmer: Critical Catalogue Raisonné,” 20–21, 83–84; and Weidman, William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo, 5.
44.
Rimmer, “Stephen and Phillip,” 379, 381.
45.
The suppression or lack of genitalia hints at Rimmer’s own sense of impotence and failure, though of course the artist may have been modeling his figure on those of William Blake, who so often depicted his ideal male nudes as sexless androgynes.
46.
Raeper, George MacDonald, 150.
chapter 6: mental monsters 1.
Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V. Written for His Own Fun and That of His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910). Digressions remains an essential source on the artist. Also invaluable is Regina Soria, Elihu Vedder: American Visionary Artist in Rome (1836–1923) (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1970). Soria gained access to a great trove of Vedder’s papers in Rome, and her biography contains much hitherto unknown information about the artist. For a comprehensive survey of Vedder’s varied output, see Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: published for the National Collection of Fine Arts by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979). The Elihu Vedder Papers are in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., microfilm reels 515–29, 671, and 2323 (hereafter cited, with reel number, as Vedder Papers, AAA). For other interpretations of Lair of the Sea Serpent, see David Tatham, “Elihu Vedder’s Lair of the Sea Serpent,” American Art Journal 17, no. 2 (spring 1985): 33–47; and Charles C. Eldredge, “Wet Paint: Herman Melville, Elihu Vedder, and Artists Undersea,” American Art 11, no. 2 (summer 1997): 107–34.
2.
Vedder, Digressions, 8, 18–19.
3.
Ibid., 42, 55, 77.
4.
Ibid., 22, 27–28.
5.
Ibid., 103–4, 112.
6.
Ibid., 111–12.
7.
Ibid., 82, 20.
8.
Ibid., 41.
9. 10.
274
Ibid., 113–14. Ibid., 141.
notes to pages 154–162
11.
Ibid., 408.
12.
Ibid., 186, 193–94.
13.
Ibid., 190–94.
14.
The most popular edition of the Arabian Nights at the time was Edward Lane, trans., The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called . . . The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, 3 vols. (London: C. Knight, 1839–40). “The Fisherman and the Genie” is in vol. 1 (1839), 78–84, 97–105; the episode illustrated by Vedder is on 78–80.
15.
Soria, Elihu Vedder, 35, identifies “the Boys.”
16.
On Pfaff’s, see Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America [1933], rev. ed. (New York: Dover, 1960), 14–61; and Donald P. Dulchinos, Pioneer of Inner Space: The Life of Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Hasheesh Eater (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 1998), 81–98. Aldrich, in a letter to Carrie Rosekrans Vedder, May 33, 1878, Vedder Papers, reel 517, frame 949, AAA, dated his friendship with Vedder from the very early 1860s. Vedder, Digressions, 440, mentions knowing Bayard Taylor as well.
17.
Soria, Elihu Vedder, 36; and Joshua C. Taylor, “Perceptions and Digressions,” in Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder, 62, note the popularity of hashish in Vedder’s milieu but do not suggest that Vedder may have tried it himself, nor do they look for links between Vedder’s subjects and those about which the hashish eaters wrote.
18.
Fitzhugh Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater (1857; reprint, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1979), 18–19, 227–29. The inspiration for Ludlow’s experiment was Taylor’s account of his initial trial of the drug in The Land of the Saracens (1855; reprint, New York: Putnam, 1882), 133–48.
19.
[Bayard Taylor], “The Hasheesh Eater,” Putnam’s Magazine 8 (September 1856): 233–39.
20.
Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater, 106–7, 42–43.
21.
Ludlow, “The Apocalypse of Hasheesh,” Putnam’s Magazine 8 (December 1856): 626, 629.
22.
Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater, 68–70. 164–65, 211.
23.
Harry Escot [Fitz-James O’Brien], “What Was It?” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 18, no. 106 (March 1859): 506.
24.
Aldrich, “Hascheesh,” in Cloth of Gold and Other Poems, 7th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1883), 28–29. The poem was first published in 1861 in Pampinea and Other Poems (New York: Rudd and Carleton). “Hascheesh” continued to appear in Aldrich’s works until the late 1880s, but when Houghton Mifflin published his collected works in 1907, Aldrich excised that poem and others. A statement prefacing the 1907 edition but written in 1897 stated that “these two volumes include all the lyrics and poems that the author desires associated with his name.” See Charles E. Samuels, Thomas Bailey Aldrich (New York: Twayne, 1965).
25.
Edward M. Brecher, Licit and Illicit Drugs (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), 404–6.
26.
Ether-sniffing parties were not uncommon in student culture; see Albert M. Betcher, “The Historic Misuse of Anaesthetic and Related Agents,” in The History of Anaesthesia, ed. Richard S. Atkinson and Thomas B. Boulton (Park Ridge, N.J.: Parthenon Publishing Group, 1989), 223–24.
27.
Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater, 17–19.
notes to pages 162–169
275
28.
Lester Grinspoon and James B. Bakalar, Marijuana, the Forbidden Medicine (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 5–6; Vedder, Digressions, 98–99.
29.
Taylor, “The Hasheesh Eater,” 234; Ludlow, “The Apocalypse of Hasheesh,” 628; Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater, 123, 165, 203; O’Brien, “What Was It?” 506.
30.
Vedder Digressions, 197, 43. Among the works with Christian themes Vedder attempted was the visionary Star of Bethlehem, ca. 1863 (J. B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Ky.).
31.
Leigh E. Schmidt, “Visualizing God’s Silence: Oracles, the Enlightenment, and Elihu Vedder’s Questioner of the Sphinx,” in The Visual Culture of American Religions, ed. David Morgan and Sally M. Promey (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 223.
32.
Schmidt, “Visualizing God’s Silence,” 222–28. Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 4, pt. 1, From the American Revolution to World War I (Houston: Menil Foundation, 1989), 229, interprets Questioner of the Sphinx in light of “Negrophobia” in Civil War New York. Viewers in 1863, he writes, “may well have presumed that the question put to the sphinx was about the destiny of Afro-Americans.” The war climate undoubtedly had an impact on Vedder’s art. Henry Louis Stephens’s “Rising of the Afrite” in Vanity Fair (January 19, 1861), shows a swarthy, snake-wielding genie erupting from a bottle labeled “Secession.” Vedder’s genie, his features distinctly African, might also allegorize the cause and consequences of secession, condensed into one foreboding vision.
33.
Ludlow, The Hasheesh Eater, 192; Aldrich, “Egypt,” in Cloth of Gold, 180. This poem was first published in the same 1861 edition as “Hascheesh”; see note 24.
34.
Samuels, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 36–37, discusses the “declassed” status of the Pfaff’s group.
35.
Vedder, Digressions, 264. Vedder’s serpent may have been linked to The Arabian Nights as well. In “The Third Voyage of Sinbad” an immense snake attacks Sinbad and his fellow sailors on the beach of an island where they have landed. The snake crushes one sailor in its coils, but the rest escape by climbing a tree. See Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, 3:30–31.
36.
Ludlow, “The Apocalypse of Hasheesh,” 629.
37.
Vedder, “Neptune’s Siesta,” n.d., American Academy of Arts and Letters, Miscellaneous Papers, reel NAA4, frame 644, AAA. Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 328–31, discusses Vedder’s Sphinx of the Seashore in relation to the late-nineteenth-century obsession with the femme fatale. Carter Ratcliff, “The Gender of Mystery: Elihu Vedder,” Art in America 67 (November 1979): 91, has suggested that in Vedder’s work, “enigma” is gendered as female; see also Robert Storey, “The Mystico-Symbolist Argument of Elihu Vedder’s Art,” Studia Mystica, n.s., 17, no. 2 (1996): 99, arguing that in Vedder’s Medusas and Sphinxes, “Woman . . . carries the burden of consciousness as victim” (italics in original).
38.
Janet Adelman, The Common Liar: An Essay on “Antony and Cleopatra” (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 64, 204nn.29, 31, 32. See Stephen R. Wilk, Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), for a particularly thorough discussion of the myth and its variants. Adelman’s reference is to Python, the monster that guarded the Delphic oracle, and his equally monstrous serpentine mate.
276
notes to pages 169–173
39.
Regina Soria, “Mark Twain and Vedder’s Medusa,” American Quarterly 16, no. 4 (winter 1964): 604.
40.
Hawthorne, “The Gorgon’s Head,” in A Wonder Book and Tanglewood Tales, vol. 7 of The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ed. Fredson Bowers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974), 10–34. Vedder began producing the sketches of heads in 1866; the bulk of them date to 1868.
41.
Vedder, The Story of Medusa (London: privately printed, 1872), 17.
42.
William Morris, “April—The Doom of King Acrisius,” in The Earthly Paradise, vol. 3 of The Collected Works (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 171–241.
43. 44.
Vedder, “The Story of Medusa,” 21. See Jerome J. McGann, “The Beauty of the Medusa: A Study in Romantic Literary Iconology,” Studies in Romanticism 11 (1972): 3–25; Kent Patterson, “A Terrible Beauty: Medusa in Three Victorian Poets,” Tennessee Studies in Literature 17 (1972): 111–20. The second-generation Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones began an ambitious cycle of paintings depicting the Perseus legend for Arthur Balfour in 1875, but that series (now in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart) was not exhibited until 1888.
45.
Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson, 2d ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 26–27; McGann, “The Beauty of the Medusa,” 23; Sigmund Freud, “Medusa’s Head,” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology, and Other Works, vol. 18 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1955), 273–74.
46.
Adrienne Munich, Andromeda’s Chains: Gender and Interpretation in Victorian Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 84, 31–32. See also Neil Hertz, “Medusa’s Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure,” Representations 4 (1983): 27–54, for a political interpretation in the context of the French Revolution. Charles C. Eldredge, American Imagination and Symbolist Painting, exhibition catalogue (New York: Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, 1979), 57, relates Vedder’s Medusa to European symbolist conventions in which the severed head connoted the rejection of empirical thought in favor of subjectivity and introspection.
47.
Vedder, Digressions, 99, 193; Soria, Elihu Vedder, 32.
48.
Kate Field to Whitelaw Reid, October 11, 1869; Richard Watson Gilder to Kate Field, ca. 1868, in Kate Field: Selected Letters, ed. Carolyn J. Moss (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1996), 52, 236. I have relied on Moss, xvi–xxx, for biographical information. Ironically, one of Hosmer’s early sculptures was a marble bust of Medusa (1854; Detroit Institute of Arts), representing her with a sad but lovely face, undulating locks, and two snakes interlaced like ribbons just beneath her bare bosom. Dolly Sherwood suggests that Hosmer’s fascination with Medusa may have been related to a fear of sexuality and its consequences: Sherwood, Harriet Hosmer, American Sculptor, 1830–1908 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 87.
notes to pages 174–179
277
49.
Kate Field to Cordelia Riddle Sanford, March 1869, in Kate Field: Selected Letters, 18; Vedder, Digressions, 149.
50.
Vedder, Digressions, 245; Soria, Elihu Vedder, 38–39.
51.
Soria, Elihu Vedder, 53–54; Vedder to Kate Field, June 4, 1867, in Lilian Whitney, Kate Field: A Record (Boston: Little, Brown, 1899), 172.
52.
Carrie Rosekrans Vedder to her mother, June 4, 1874, Vedder Papers, reel 516, frame 1666, AAA. On Carrie’s management style, see Soria, Elihu Vedder, 76–78, 88–89.
53.
Vedder to Carrie Rosekrans Vedder, April 6, 1890, quoted in Hugh T. Broadley, “Voyage of the Sesostris: Elihu Vedder in Egypt,” Phoebus 3 (1981): 48–49.
54.
Vedder to Dr. Alexander Vedder, ca. February 1867, quoted in Soria, Elihu Vedder, 51.
55.
Vedder, Digressions, 246–47.
56.
The same complex of anxieties developed in Continental cultures during the period, but my focus here is on the Anglo-American world.
57.
On post–Civil War feminism in the United States, see William Leach, True Love and Perfect Union: The Feminist Reform of Sex and Society (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
58.
Eliza Lynn Linton, “The Girl of the Period,” Saturday Review 25, no. 646 (March 14 1868): 340; “Dress, Ancient and Modern,” Harper’s Bazar 4 (February 25 1871): 14; Dio Lewis, Our Girls (New York: Harper, 1871), 79; “Are Women to Blame?” Appleton’s Magazine of Literature, Science, and Art 15 (April 1, 1876): 436. See J. B. Bullen, The Pre-Raphaelite Body: Fear and Desire in Painting, Poetry, and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 170–78, for a discussion of the “bad sublime” and Girl of the Period in England. G. J. Barker-Benfield, Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes toward Women and Sexuality in NineteenthCentury America (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 189–96, discusses contemporary criticism of women as all-devouring consumers.
59.
Vedder, Digressions, 375.
60.
George Vandenhoff, Leaves from an Actor’s Notebook (New York: Appleton, 1860), 217; Gertrude Reece Hudson, Browning to His American Friends (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1965), 271. Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), is an excellent study of Cushman’s career and relationships. See Joy S. Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), 203–40, on William Wetmore Story’s sculpture featuring demonic, powerful women such as Medea and Cleopatra.
61.
Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman, xvii.
62.
Munich, Andromeda’s Chains, 30–31.
63.
Vedder, “Notes for Preface to Omar Khayyam Drawings,” n.d., n.p., American Academy of Arts and Letters, Miscellaneous Papers, AAA, roll NAA-5, frame 84. On the idea of myth as a language and form of speech, see Roland Barthes, “Myth Today,” in Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (1957; reprint, New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 109–59.
278
notes to pages 180–185
64.
The idea of The Sphinx of the Seashore was also connected to the fatalism of Omar Khayyám, whose Rubaiyat Vedder illustrated in a volume published in 1884. In 1879–80 Vedder produced the small oil sketch Head of Young Medusa (art market, 2000), showing her weeping, still crowned with rosy little wings, but with tiny black snakes wriggling in her golden hair.
65.
Vedder to Mrs. Theodore Shillaber, July 25, 1877, Vedder Papers, AAA, reel 517, frames 692–93.
66.
Vedder produced another version of Lair of the Sea Serpent in 1899 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). The art of the English visionary William Blake also reinforced Vedder’s interest in serpentine rhythms.
chapter 7: corrosive sight 1.
Sadakichi Hartmann, A History of American Art [1901], rev. ed., 2 vols. (Boston: L. C. Page and Company, 1932), 1:204.
2.
There is some disagreement as to the identity of this figure. Its strong resemblance to the artist, however, supports the contention that it is indeed a self-portrait.
3.
Eakins’s Gross Clinic has been the subject of numerous studies, including Gordon Hendricks, “Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic,” Art Bulletin 51, no. 1 (March 1969): 57–64; Elwood C. Parry III, “Thomas Eakins and the Gross Clinic,” Jefferson Medical College Alumni Bulletin 16 (June 1967): 2–12, and Parry, “The Gross Clinic as Anatomy Lesson and Memorial Portrait,” Art Quarterly 32 (winter 1969): 373–91; and Elizabeth Johns, Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 46–81. See Johns in particular for a meticulous account of the painting, including identification of all known figures, and a complete surgical and art-historical genealogy. Also consult William H. Gerdts, The Art of Healing: Medicine and Science in American Art, exhibition catalogue (Birmingham, Ala.: Birmingham Museum of Art, 1981), 59–79, for a discussion of the Gross Clinic in relation to Eakins’s many portraits of doctors.
4.
See Johns, Thomas Eakins, 46–81. John Wilmerding, “The Tensions of Biography and Art in Thomas Eakins,” in Thomas Eakins, exhibition catalogue, ed. Wilmerding (London: National Portrait Gallery, in association with Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C., 1993), 22, argues along similar lines that the painter’s intention was “primarily to elevate the modern professionalism and wisdom of a senior surgeon to a heroic stature.” Hendricks, “Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic,” 63, dismisses the strongly negative criticism of 1879 as “irrelevant.”
5.
Michael Fried, Realism,Writing, Disfiguration: On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 59–69, takes up the painting’s disturbing qualities and the paradoxical pleasures of beholding its “violence and voluptuousness, repulsion and fascination” (62); Eric Rosenberg, “‘. . . one of the most powerful, horrible, and yet fascinating pictures . . .’: Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic as History Painting,” in Redefining American History Painting, ed. Patricia M. Burnham and Lucretia Hoover Giese (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 174–92. See also Jennifer Doyle, “Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic,” Representations, no. 68 (fall 1999): 1–33.
notes to pages 185–189
279
6.
New York Tribune, March 22, 1879; Susan N. Carter, “Exhibition of the Society of American Artists,” Art Journal, n.s., 5 (1879): 156; “Culture and Progress,” Scribner’s Monthly 18 (1879): 311. Hendricks, “Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic,” provides a useful overview of the criticism in New York and Philadelphia. There was one supportive critic in 1876: William Clark Jr., who commented enthusiastically on the painting in the Evening Telegraph, March 8 and April 28, 1876. The critic for the New York Daily Graphic (March 8, 1879) was one of the few to find merit in The Gross Clinic during its exhibition at the Society of American Artists.
7.
On Eakins’s study of anatomy and his practice of dissection, see Phyllis Rosenzweig, The Thomas Eakins Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 28–30, 76–79; and Darrel Sewell, Thomas Eakins: Artist of Philadelphia, exhibition catalogue (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1982), 77–79. For a detailed examination of Eakins’s education, see Elizabeth Milroy, “Thomas Eakins’s Artistic Training: 1860–70” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1987). Important sources on Eakins include Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Works (New York: Whitney Museum, 1933), and Goodrich, Thomas Eakins, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1982); Gordon Hendricks, The Life and Work of Thomas Eakins (New York: Grossman, 1974); William Innes Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville, 1992); Kathleen A. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1997); and Darrel Sewell, Thomas Eakins, exhibition catalogue (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001).
8.
Linden F. Edwards, “Resurrection Riots during the Heroic Age of Anatomy in America,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 25 (March–April 1951): 178–84, provides details about the incidents and the times and places of their occurrence.
9.
George Lippard, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall [1848], ed. David S. Reynolds (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 368–69. On the gothic anatomy of Quaker City, see Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 220–27.
10.
“Resurrectionists’ Methods,” New York Times, August 16, 1878.
11.
“Grave Robbing in Indiana,” New York Herald, November 1, 1874; “The Graveyard Robbers,” New York Times, May 31, 1878; George W. Corner, “The Role of Anatomy in Medical Education,” Journal of Medical Education 33, no. 1 (January 1958): 4. Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, extensively discusses the practice and meaning of body snatching in the nineteenth century.
12.
“The Body Snatchers—A Recent Actual Occurrence in the Vicinity of New York City,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, April 18, 1868, 71.
13.
J. William White, “Memoir of D. Hayes Agnew, M.D., LL.D,” pamphlet reprinted from University Medical Magazine, February 1893 (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1893), 22. Dr. White read this text before the College of Physicians in Philadelphia on January 4, 1893. Horace Mont-
280
notes to pages 190–194
gomery, “A Body Snatcher Sponsors Pennsylvania’s Anatomy Act,” Journal of the History of Medicine 21 (October 1966): 374–93, tells of the Jefferson grave-robbery affair and its outcome, an improved anatomy act in 1883. On related questions of race, see David C. Humphrey, “Dissection and Discrimination: The Social Origins of Cadavers in America, 1760–1915,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 49, no. 9 (September 1973): 819–25; and Robert L. Blakely and Judith M. Harrington, eds., Bones in the Basement: Postmortem Racism in NineteenthCentury Medical Training (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997). James S. Terry, “Artistic Anatomy and Taboo: The Case of Thomas Anshutz,” Art Journal 44, no. 2 (summer 1994): 149–52, discusses dissection at the Pennsylvania Academy under the tutelage of Eakins and his student Anshutz; Terry mentions (150) Jefferson Medical College’s dependence on the bodies supplied from Lebanon Cemetery. 14.
Mary C. Gillett, The Army Medical Department, 1818–1865 (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1987), 275, 286; Eastman Johnson, letter to Jervis McEntee, June 28, 1862, Charles Feinberg Collection of Artists’ Letters, microfilm reel D30, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Studies of Civil War medicine include Richard Shryock, “A Medical Perspective on the Civil War,” in Medicine in America: Historical Essays, ed. Shryock (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 90–108; and Richard A. Gabriel and Karen S. Metz, A History of Military Medicine, vol. 2, From the Renaissance to Modern Times (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992).
15.
Gabriel and Metz, History of Military Medicine, 185, note that the term “sawbones” dates from the Civil War period; Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869), 29.
16.
Mary Clemmer Ames, Ten Years in Washington: Life and Scenes in the National Capital as a Woman Sees Them (Hartford, Conn.: Worthington, 1875), 477.
17.
Elizabeth Young, “A Wound of One’s Own: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Fiction,” American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (September 1996): 455–61, analyzes the literary metaphor of the fractured Union as an injured body. William H. Helfand, Medicine and Pharmacy in American Political Prints (1765–1870) (Madison, Wis.: American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, 1978), is an excellent source of medical and surgical imagery in caricature.
18.
“Hospital Circumlocution—Even Charity Must Be Barred Out,” Daily Graphic (January 15, 1885). Information on Miranda (Fernando Miranda Casellas) is slim. His New York Times obituary (May 10, 1925) gives a brief biographical account. Miranda seems to have been conversant with the whole range of medical-pathological themes. A week after the amputation cartoon, the Daily Graphic (January 21, 1885) printed Miranda’s “Resurrecting the Corpse,” showing a moonlit graveyard where several politicians in evening dress are digging up the body of former Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Miranda may have had Eakins’s painting in mind. The Spanish artist, who was a sculptor as well as an illustrator, came to the United States in 1876 to attend the Philadelphia Centennial. He remained, settling in New York, where critical furor over The Gross Clinic in 1879 may have made the painting particularly memorable— and usable, later on, for satire.
notes to pages 194–196
281
19.
Hendricks, “Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic,” 64, alluded in passing to a possible link between negative reactions to the painting and the emerging antivivisection furor. Kathleen Pyne made the same observation in The Quest for Unity: American Art between World’s Fairs, exhibition catalogue (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1983), 227. Neither explored the implications of this connection, however.
20.
Several studies of surgery, vivisection, and related topics have been invaluable to my account of antivivisection; these include Martin Pernick, A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anaesthesia in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Coral Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog: Women, Workers, and Vivisection in Edwardian England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Richard D. French, Antivivisection and Medical Science in Victorian Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), is an important source for the nineteenth-century English antivivisection movement. See also Lawrence Finsen and Susan Finsen, The Animal Rights Movement in America: From Compassion to Respect (New York: Twayne, 1994); and Gerald Carson, Men, Beasts, and Gods: A History of Cruelty and Kindness to Animals (New York: Scribner, 1972).
21.
John Ireland and John Nichols, Hogarth’s Works, 3 vols. (1875; reprint, Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier, 1883), 2:62; “The Society of American Artists,” Art Interchange 2, no. 6 (March 19, 1879): 42. Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog, 53–56, discusses the Hogarth revival in connection with the antivivisection movement of the later nineteenth century. It is ironic that Eakins and his wife, Susan, seem to have been dues-paying members of the ASPCA, at least in the 1880s. I thank W. Douglass Paschall for that information.
22.
Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 134, mentions Bergh’s attempt to have the Eden Musée’s “Chamber of Horrors” suppressed. On Bergh, see Carson, Men, Beasts, and Gods, 95–106; and Zulma Steele, Angel in Top Hat (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1942). On the Eden Musée, see the informative and provocative work of Kathleen Kendrick, “‘The Things Down Stairs’: Containing Horror in the Nineteenth-Century Wax Museum,” Nineteenth-Century Studies 12 (1998): 1–35. Although Bergh vigorously opposed vivisection, he thought it permissible if the animal was anesthetized.
23.
C. C. Buel, “Henry Bergh and His Work,” Scribner’s Monthly 17 (April 1879): 878, 881.
24.
Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, trans. Henry Copley Green (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 15, 103. I want to acknowledge a substantial intellectual debt to Mary Panzer, “Photography, Science, and the Traditional Art of Thomas Eakins,” in Eakins and the Photograph: Works by Thomas Eakins and His Circle in the Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, by Susan Danly and Cheryl Leibold, exhibition catalogue (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1994), 23–64, for a great deal of valuable information and food for thought. On Bernard, see Francisco Grande and Maurice B. Visscher, Claude Bernard and Experimental Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1967).
282
notes to pages 196–201
25.
Our Dumb Animals 9 (1876–77): 25, quoted in Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 87–88; Frances Power Cobbe, Bernard’s Martyrs: A Comment on Bernard’s “Leçons de Physiologie Opérative” (London: Office of the Society for Protection of Animals from Vivisection, 1879), xi–xviii.
26.
Cobbe, Bernard’s Martyrs, xi; Dr. George Hoggan, in Morning Post, February 1, 1875, quoted in Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog, 171; Frances Power Cobbe, “Schadenfreude,” Contemporary Review 81 (1902): 662.
27.
Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 97. Lansbury, The Old Brown Dog, 130–43, discusses several late-nineteenth-century novels in which sinister surgeons play evil roles.
28.
Samuel Gross and A. Haller Gross, Autobiography of Samuel Gross, M.D. (Philadelphia: George Barrie, 1887), 1:96–97.
29.
Turner, Reckoning with the Beast, 86; Gross, A System of Surgery, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1866), 1:535; Gross, in American Journal of the Medical Sciences 22 (1851): 426, quoted in Pernick, Calculus of Suffering, 173.
30. 31.
“Anaesthesia,” New York Times, May 22, 1873; Pernick, Calculus of Suffering, 228. John Janvier Black, Forty Years in the Medical Profession, 1858–1898 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1900), 94; Gross, Autobiography, 1:172–76, 33.
32.
On the issue of pain as a spectacle in nineteenth-century America, see Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (April 1995): 303–26.
33.
The woman is commonly assumed to be the patient’s mother or some other relative. According to Hendricks, “Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic,” 59n.24, the law required a relative to be present during operations on charity patients. To date I have not found substantiation for that claim. See Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 35–58; and Rosenberg, “‘. . . one of the most powerful, horrible, and yet fascinating pictures . . . ,’” for rereadings of the woman and her place in the meaning of the painting. Rosenberg’s careful and intricate account is especially rewarding. He suggests (189), as I do, that the woman outwardly assumes the anguish of the chloroformed patient, though his interpretation takes a more political turn.
34.
Carter, “Exhibition of the Society of American Artists,” 156; Strong, diary entry for December 24, 1872, in The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Alan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas, vol. 4, Post-War Years, 1865–1875 (New York: Macmillan, 1952), 177.
35.
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, January 6, 1877, 293.
36.
See Elizabeth Milroy, “‘Consummatum est . . .’: A Reassessment of Thomas Eakins’s Crucifixion of 1880,” Art Bulletin 81, no. 2 (June 1989): 269–84, for a consideration of Eakins’s emulation of his French teachers and colleagues. Milroy suggests (277) that Becker’s Rizpah was probably one of the models Eakins had in mind when planning his Crucifixion. Rosenberg, in “‘. . . one of the most powerful, horrible, and yet fascinating pictures . . . ,’” argues that the blood and implicit violence of The Gross Clinic stirred up anxieties about another French connection: memories of the bloody rise and suppression of the radical Paris Commune and fears that such a class war could erupt in the United States. Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered,
notes to pages 201–206
283
47, notes that Eakins paid studious attention to Regnault’s sensational Salomé at the Paris Salon of 1870. 37.
Johns, Thomas Eakins, 51; Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 40.
38.
Richard D. Walter, S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.—Neurologist: A Medical Biography (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1970), 47–48; J. Howe Adams, History of the Life of D. Hayes Agnew, M.D., LL.D. (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1892), 133–35; Gross, Autobiography, 1:133; William W. Keen, “Military Surgery in 1861 and in 1918,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 80 (1918): 14.
39.
S. Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow,” Atlantic Monthly 18 (July 1866): 1–11.
40.
David Yuan, “Curious Bodies: The Body as Spectacle and the American Body Politic” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1997), 1, 6, 166.
41.
Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, March 6, 1868, Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, microfiche edition, series 1, Papers of Thomas Eakins, fiche 2; hereafter referred to as Bregler Collection, PAFA, with series number and fiche number; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins and Caroline Cowperthwaite Eakins, May 9, 1868, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Daniel W. Dietrich II, cited in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:28; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, December 2, 1869, Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 3; Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, n.d. [ca. August 15, 1867], Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 2.
42.
On Eakins’s association with Keen, see Sewell, Thomas Eakins, 77–78. Panzer, “Photography, Science, and the Traditional Art of Thomas Eakins,” 103, states that Eakins also followed Bernard’s lead in the belief that “the fictional barriers separating the observer from the observed stood in the way of progress for science as well as art.”
43.
Eakins, as quoted in William Crary Brownell, “The Art Schools of Philadelphia,” Scribner’s Monthly 18 (September 1879): 737–50.
44.
Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, 99. Panzer, “Photography, Science, and the Traditional Art of Thomas Eakins,” 97, explains the purpose of Eakins’s differentialaction study.
45.
See Panzer, “Photography, Science, and the Traditional Art of Thomas Eakins,” 96–97, on early medical photography in Philadelphia; Robert Bogdan, Freak Show (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 30–31. An informative study of the practice of photographing freaks in the nineteenth century is Michael Mitchell, Monsters of the Gilded Age: The Photographs of Charles Eisenmann (Toronto: Gage Publishing, 1979).
46.
Richard D. Walter, S.Weir Mitchell, M.D.—Neurologist, 188–90, discusses the case of the hysteric Robert Connolly. On Muybridge, see Robert B. Haas, Muybridge, Man in Motion (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). Linda Williams, “Film Body: An Implantation of Perversions,” in Explorations in Film Theory: Selected Essays from “CineTracts,” ed. Ron Burnett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 46–71, argues that Muybridge’s motion studies of women in particular were more voyeuristic than scientific in their appeal.
284
notes to pages 207–212
47.
See Ellwood C. Parry III, “Thomas Eakins’s ‘Naked Series’ Reconsidered: Another Look at the Standing Nude Photographs Made for the Use of Eakins’s Students,” American Art Journal 20, no. 2 (1988): 53–77, for an interpretation of Eakins’s intentions in producing these studies, which Parry (65) suggests were for the recording of bodily differences.
48.
William J. Crowell to Thomas Eakins, April 10, 1890, Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 7. Panzer, “Photography, Science, and the Traditional Art of Thomas Eakins,” 111, believes that Crowell was right about Eakins’s “uncontrollable passion for observation.”
49.
Cecil Helman, The Body of Frankenstein’s Monster: Essays in Myth and Medicine (New York: Norton, 1992), 121.
50.
Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:84; Margaret McHenry, Thomas Eakins Who Painted (Philadelphia: privately printed, 1946), 61; Valerie Steele, Fetish: Fashion, Sex, and Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12. For numerous anecdotes about Eakins’s desire to touch and behold his sitters’ nude bodies, see Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:90–98; see also Homer, Thomas Eakins, 177–78.
51.
Fried, Realism,Writing, Disfiguration, 41, 67, 88; and Doyle, “Sex, Scandal, and Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic,” 22, 29.
52.
Foster, Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 12; Rebecca Fussell to her daughter, April 1871, quoted in Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:76; see 77 for citation on the cause of death, from the Philadelphia city register; Eakins to Jean-Léon Gérôme, n.d. [1874], draft of letter, Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 3.
53.
Thomas Eakins to Benjamin Eakins, October 26, 1866, Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 1.
54.
Thomas Eakins to Frances Eakins, March 11, 1868, Wyeth Foundation for American Art; Eakins to Frances Eakins, October 29, 1868, reel 640, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; both cited by Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 1:42–43.
55.
William J. Crowell to John V. Sears, June 5, 1886, Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 6.
56.
For a usefully clear account of these tangled family affairs, see Kathleen A. Foster, “The Manuscripts of Thomas Eakins,” in Foster and Cheryl Leibold, Writing about Eakins: The Manuscripts in Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1989), 82–122.
57.
William Crowell to John V. Sears, June 5, 1886, Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 6.
58.
Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1933), 7, 99; William J. Crowell to Thomas Eakins, April 26, 1886, Bregler Collection, PAFA, series 1, fiche 6; Hartmann, History of American Art, 1:204–5. Scholars have noted Eakins’s dual nature. See Henry Adams, “Thomas Eakins: The Troubled Life of an Artist Who Became an Outcast,” Smithsonian Magazine 22 (November 1991): 52–66; Homer, Thomas Eakins, 178–82; and David M. Lubin, “Modern Psychological Selfhood in the Art of Thomas Eakins,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 133–66. Were Eakins alive today, he might be diagnosed with some sort of cognitive disorder, most likely Asperger’s syndrome, which is a high-functioning variant of autism. Asperger’s syn-
notes to pages 213–218
285
drome affects males almost exclusively. Asperger’s men exhibit pronounced deficiency in everyday understanding about how people work (“folk psychology”) while often brilliantly understanding how things work (“folk physics”). Men with Asperger’s typically are fascinated by systems and are immersed in a world of things, not people. They have great difficulty deciphering social cues and lack empathy. If we consider Eakins’s obsessions with perspective, anatomy, and contraptions, such as four-in-hand coaches and sculls, and his many reported social blunders in addition to outright disasters, his behavior might fit this pattern, as would his reported comment (see p. 214) that he cared more for the character of the muscles than the character of the people he portrayed. See Simon Baron-Cohen, Sally Wheelwright, Valerie Stone, and Melissa Rutherford, “A Mathematician, a Physicist, and a Computer Scientist with Asperger Syndrome: Performance on Folk Psychology and Folk Physics Tests,” Neurocase 5 (1999): 475–83; BaronCohen, “Is Asperger Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism Necessarily a Disability?” Development and Psychopathology 12 (2000): 489–500. 59.
The association of unruly nature with the female and disciplined science with the male was conventional in the nineteenth century. See Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). On Eakins and manliness, see Martin A. Berger, Man Made: Thomas Eakins and the Construction of Gilded Age Manhood (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000). Berger (80) proposes a somewhat different model of doubling in Eakins’s Chess Players (1876; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which represents Benjamin Eakins and two elderly friends. Berger argues for an understanding of Thomas’s identity as twinned and interpenetrated with Benjamin’s.
60.
Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America since 1840 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 45.
61.
Adams, History of the Life of D. Hayes Agnew, 333.
62.
Goodrich, Thomas Eakins (1982), 2:46; Gross, Autobiography, 1:171; Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer to S. R. Koehler, June 12, 1881, S. R. Koehler Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; “The City’s Sick and Dead,” Daily Graphic, June 11, 1877, 710.
chapter 8: dirty pictures 1.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1978), 3:406–7.
2.
Albert Pinkham Ryder to Dr. John Pickard, November 3, 1907, Dr. John Pickard Papers, reel 498, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
3.
Edgar Allan Poe to Rufus Griswold, March 29, 1841, in Poe and His Friends: Letters Relating to Poe, vol. 17 of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. James A. Harrison (1902; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1979), 83–84.
4.
286
William Howe Downs and Frank Torrey Robinson, “Later American Masters,” New England
notes to pages 219–222
Magazine, n.s., 14, no. 2 (April 1896): 150; Henry Eckford [Charles de Kay], “A Modern Colorist: Albert Pinkham Ryder,” Century Magazine 40 (June 1890): 259; “Albert P. Ryder,” The Art Collector 9, no. 3 (1898): 37; “Art Notes,” New York Times, March 8, 1883; Ryder to Col. C. E. S. Wood, February 5, 1906, Philip Evergood–Harold O. Love Collection, Ryder Archive, University of Delaware Library, quoted in William Innes Homer and Lloyd Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder: Painter of Dreams (New York: Abrams, 1989), 54. Homer and Goodrich (152–53) discuss Temple of the Mind; also see Elizabeth Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder, exhibition catalogue (National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1989), 299–301. 5.
Recent and very thorough studies on Ryder include Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder: Painter of Dreams, and Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder. Broun discusses Ryder’s collectors in great detail; on this subject, see also Albert Boime, “Ryder on a Gilded Horse,” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 56, no. 4 (1993): 564–75. Boime contends that Ryder’s visionary style provided self-made gentlemen with an escape from the world they had degraded for gain. See especially Broun for discussion of Ryder’s sources in literature and art.
6.
John Robinson, “Personal Reminiscences of Albert Pinkham Ryder,” Art in America 13 (June 1925): 180, 183, recollected Ryder’s working on Temple of the Mind and Moonlight during the 1887 voyage; the story of the meerschaum pipe maker is told in “Albert P. Ryder: A Poe of the Brush,” New York Press, December 16, 1906, 5.
7.
Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds., Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts, 1830–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 67–72. I am indebted to this source for both its valuable synthesis and its extremely useful collection of primary sources.
8.
Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 71–72.
9.
Eneas Sweetland Dallas, The Gay Science (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), 1:207–8.
10.
Frances Power Cobbe, “The Fallacies of Memory,” in Cobbe, Hours of Work and Play (London: N. Trubner and Company, 1867), 99.
11.
Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea (Guernsey: Guernsey Press, 1990), 21–22. Tony James, Dreams, Creativity, and Madness in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 196–211, provides a detailed analysis of the connections in Hugo’s mind between the dream and creation, both artistic and divine.
12.
See, for example, Catherine Crowe, The Night-Side of Nature; or, Ghosts and Ghost-Seers (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850), which attempted to reconcile traditional supernaturalism with modern psychology in explaining visions, dreams, and trances and argued that the loosening of links between body and spirit was the necessary precondition of all visionary experience.
13.
Thomas De Quincey, “Suspiria de Profundis,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 57 (June 1845): 742–43.
14.
James Sully, “The Dream as a Revelation,” Fortnightly Review 59 (March 1893): 354–65.
15.
“Dreams,” Nation 43 (1866): 266; Robert Macnish, The Philosophy of Sleep (Glasgow: W. R. M’Phun, 1830), quoted in Taylor and Shuttleworth, Embodied Selves, 103.
16.
Kant, for example, described the madman as waking dreamer. See A. Alvarez, Night: An Explo-
notes to pages 224–228
287
ration of Night Life, Night Language, Sleep and Dreams (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 111, for discussion of philosophical views on dreams and madness. 17.
Henry Holland, Chapters on Mental Physiology (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852), 113; James Sully, “Dreams,” in Sully and George C. Robertson, Aesthetics, Dreams and Association of Ideas (New York: Humboldt Publishing Company, 1888), 40. The British and Continental literature on dreams was well known in the United States. Even Robert Owen, proselytizer of spiritualism, quoted Holland and other theorists when he wrote about the links that bound dreaming and insanity; see Owen, Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1860), 134.
18.
When the artist exhibited the painting in 1884, he appended a verse caption describing a fisherman’s flight through billowy waters under a changing sky. Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 3:15–16, discusses the parallels between Hugo’s imagery and Ryder’s painting and suggests several specific passages in the novel that Ryder’s Toilers of the Sea might represent. Burke (15) notes that the painting was titled Toilers of the Sea during Ryder’s lifetime and that “it is likely that the artist either selected or approved the title,” since one of Ryder’s friends owned the work.
19.
Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 248. Broun notes (247) that the painting was exhibited as The Sea during Ryder’s lifetime, and its owner, John Gellatly, was the first to cite the literary reference. Ryder, however, also knew the poem and used an illustration of it by J. M. W. Turner as the basis for The Lorelei.
20. 21.
Sully, “Dreams,” 40. Henry C. White, “A Call upon Albert P. Ryder,” Ryder Archive, University of Delaware Library, quoted in Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 226.
22.
Charles Fitzpatrick, “Albert Pinkham Ryder” [1917], Harold O. Love Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., quoted in Kendall Taylor, “Ryder Remembered,” Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 3 (1984): 9.
23.
“Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made Of,” Atlantic Monthly 46 (September 1880): 405; Sully, “The Dream as a Revelation,” 359.
24.
Jed Perl, “The Adolescent City,” New Republic, January 22, 2001, 23; Louis Mumford, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865–1895 (1931; reprint, New York: Dover, 1971), 104; Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York (1924; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 5.
25.
On the Haymarket Riot and fears of working-class violence near the end of the nineteenth century, see Bryan D. Palmer, Cultures of Darkness: Night Travels in the Histories of Transgression (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 232–56.
26.
Mary Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 193, 213–15.
27.
Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives [1890], introd. Luc Sante (New York: Penguin, 1997), 26–27, 39, 46, 61, 49, 20.
288
notes to pages 229–234
28.
Edmund Boisgilbert, M.D. [Ignatius Donnelly], Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: F. J. Schulte and Company, 1890), 299–301.
29.
Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1982), 208–34, offers a cogent analysis of the Columbian Exposition as the epitome of corporate ideology. On the cult of purity at the turn of the century, see Bailey Van Hook, Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 187–208.
30.
Palmer, Cultures of Darkness, 233; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), 227–30, 246. See also Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986), 125–26.
31.
The Reverend Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970), 8; Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 246. For the idea of the slum as spectacle and site of revitalizing adventure, I am indebted to Keith Gandal, The Virtues of the Vicious: Jacob Riis, Stephen Crane, and the Spectacle of the Slum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 8–21. See also Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 140–49; and T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), on the perceived enervation and feminization of middle-class culture during the period.
32.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Cen-
33.
Albert Pinkham Ryder, “Paragraphs from the Studio of a Recluse,” Broadway Magazine 14 (Sep-
tury, trans. Angela Davies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 81. tember 1905): 10–11. 34.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, notebook entry, May 1818, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 3, sect. 4409, 27.7. See Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams, and the Medical Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” furnished the title of Ryder’s moonlight marine With Sloping Mast and Dipping Prow (Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.).
35.
Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 232–33, discusses Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a fantasy of going native in “imperial Gothic”; for Hyde as a figure representing the revolutionary proletariat, see Richard Davenport-Hines, Gothic: Four Hundred Years of Excess, Horror, Evil, and Ruin (New York: North Point Press, 1998), 312–13. The story has also been interpreted as a narrative of homosexual guilt and desire; for a useful digest of these interpretations, see Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Penguin, 1990), 105–18.
36.
Philip Evergood, “The Master’s Faithful Disciple,” Philip Evergood Papers, box 5, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., quoted in Kendall Taylor, “Ryder Remembered,” Archives of American Art Journal 24, no. 3 (1984): 5.
37.
Fitzpatrick, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 11; Robinson, “Personal Reminiscences of Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 180.
notes to pages 234–237
289
38.
Fitzpatrick, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 8; White, “A Call upon Albert P. Ryder,” 225; Kelly, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 223; “Albert P. Ryder as Remembered by Arthur B. Davies,” Ryder Archive, University of Delaware Library, quoted in Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 221.
39.
William Henry Hyde, “Albert Ryder As I Knew Him,” Arts Magazine 16 (May 1930): 597; Kelly, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 223; Fitzpatrick, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 8–9; Julian Alden Weir to Colonel Charles Erskine Scott Wood, February 1904, quoted in Dorothy Weir Young, The Life and Letters of J. Alden Weir (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), 221.
40.
“Conversation with Kenneth Hayes Miller by Lloyd Goodrich,” June 15, 1938, Ryder Archive, University of Delaware Library, quoted in Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 230. Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 87, recounts the story of Ryder’s country girl. The incident was hushed up and remains a puzzle.
41.
Sadakichi Hartmann, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” Magazine of Art 31 (September 1938): 502–3; White, “A Call upon Albert P. Ryder,” 226.
42.
“Albert P. Ryder: A Poe of the Brush,” 5; Fitzpatrick, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 12; White, “A Call upon Albert P. Ryder,” 226.
43.
Hartmann, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 551; Hyde, “Albert Ryder As I Knew Him,” 598; Robinson, “Personal Reminiscences of Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 183; Marsden Hartley, “A. P. Ryder: ‘The Light That Never Was’” [1929], Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., quoted in Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 228.
44.
Ryder to Macbeth, November 9, 1911, Ryder Archive, University of Delaware Library, quoted in Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 193; White, “A Call upon Albert P. Ryder,” 225.
45.
Goodrich, “Albert Pinkham Ryder—Supplement” [1920–40], quoted in Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3:12; Marsden Hartley, “Albert Pinkham Ryder” [1936], in On Art by Marsden Hartley, ed. Gail R. Scott (New York: Horizon Press, 1982), 264. On Ryder’s technique and conservation problems, see Sheldon Keck, “Albert Pinkham Ryder: His Technical Procedures,” in Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 175–84.
46.
William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 64; Julia Kristeva, “Powers of Horror,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 230. In her work on abjection Kristeva builds on the model proposed by Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). For an illuminating application of Kristeva’s theory of abjection, see Linda S. Kauffman, “David Cronenberg’s Surreal Abjection,” in her Bad Girls and Sick Boys: Fantasies in Contemporary Art and Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 115–45.
47.
Keck, “Albert P. Ryder: His Technical Procedures,” 177.
48.
“Albert P. Ryder: A Poe of the Brush,” 5.
49.
David Greenberg, Eliezer Witztum, and Amihay Levy, “Hoarding as a Psychiatric Symptom,”
290
notes to pages 238–242
Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 51, no. 10 (October 1990): 418, 419; Hartmann, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” 550. 50.
James E. Kelly, “Albert Pinkham Ryder,” Ryder Archive, University of Delaware Library, quoted in Homer and Goodrich, Albert Pinkham Ryder, 222.
51.
Eric Mark Rosenberg, “Intricate Channels of Resemblance: Albert Pinkham Ryder and the Politics of Colorism” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1992).
52.
Kristeva, “Powers of Horror,” 243; de Kay, “A Modern Colorist,” 258–59.
53.
Kristeva, “Powers of Horror,” 232; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 191; Joel Pfister, “Glamorizing the Psychological: The Politics of the Performances of Modern Psychological Identities,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 189.
54.
Walter de S. Beck, “Albert Pinkham Ryder: An Appreciation,” International Studio 70, no. 277 (April 1920): xlvi. On Freud in the United States, see Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917, vol. 1 of Freud in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). By the teens, Freud was well known; by the 1920s his name was a household word, according to Raymond E. Fancher, “Snapshots of Freud in America, 1899–1999,” American Psychologist 55 (September 2000): 1026.
55.
Hartley, “Albert P. Ryder: The Light That Never Was,” 228; Hartley, “Albert P. Ryder,” The Seven Arts, May 1917, 96; Hartley, “Albert Pinkham Ryder” [1936], in On Art by Marsden Hartley, 258, 261. The connection between the moon and madness is an ancient superstition. See, for example, T. F. Thiselton Dyer, “The Moon and Its Folk-lore,” Gentleman’s Magazine, n.s., 25, no. 249 (1880): 177–87. The word “lunatic” in itself demonstrates the staying power of this idea.
56.
See George Becker, The Mad Genius Controversy: A Study in the Sociology of Deviance (London: Sage, 1978).
57.
Blakelock (1847–1919), son of a physician, was a native New Yorker who taught himself to paint and exhibited at the National Academy of Design. He spent two years out west, which inspired haunting paintings of native life in the wilderness. He moved back to New York, where he married in 1877, and continued to exhibit his work, both at the National Academy and, four times, at the Society of American Artists. In the later 1880s Blakelock began to paint his hallmark nocturnal scenes, which almost always featured a greenish sky, glowing moon, silvery reflections, and darkly silhouetted masses. Unlike Ryder, Blakelock failed to find a market niche and suffered severe financial problems exacerbated by an ever-growing family. In 1891 he had his first mental breakdown and spent a short time in the hospital. Throughout the nineties he became increasingly unstable, as his family, evicted time after time, moved from one low-rent apartment to another. In 1899 he suffered a recurrence of his dementia so calamitous that he was removed from home to spend the next seventeen years in mental hospitals. Late in life he fell prey to Mrs. Van Rensselaer Adams, an unscrupulous schemer, who secured custody of the artist,
notes to pages 242–244
291
sequestered him from his family, and tried to capitalize on the reputation that had begun to rise once he had become a certified madman. See Abraham A. Davidson, Ralph Albert Blakelock (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). On Blakelock and Mrs. Adams, see Dorinda Evans, “Art and Deception: Ralph Blakelock and His Guardian,” American Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1987): 39–50. 58.
292
Alvarez, Night, 194–95.
notes to page 245
INDEX
Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abjection, 240, 243, 290n46 Abolitionism, 21, 94, 95, 97, 103, 109, 125, 268–69n20; and fugitive slave narrative, 136–38, 140–41, 146, 272n12; and Greeley’s activity, 114, 144, 146 Adelman, Jane, 173 Agnew, David Hayes, 194, 207, 219 Alcohol abuse: and Blythe’s art, 45, 47, 50, 52, 54–56, 257n1, 258n15, 259n16; and Blythe’s life, 46, 47; and Blythe’s writings, 48–50, 258n11; and city sketch genre, 58, 60; and Poe’s life, 32, 47–48; and Quidor’s life, 103; and temperance campaign, 50, 54, 55, 103, 258n14; and working class, 103 Alcott, Louisa May, 194 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 164, 166, 168, 172, 275 Alienation, 172 Allegory: and Cole’s art, 8, 24, 33, 39– 42, 252n13, 257n62; and Cole’s
writings, 7–8; and Poe’s writings, 24; and Rimmer’s art, 129, 135, 157; and Rimmer’s writings, 155; and Vedder’s art, 276n32 Allston, Washington: childhood of, 79, 80, 81, 82–84, 264n43; death of, 75, 99; education of, 79, 86; and family relations, 75, 79–80, 81, 82, 86, 89, 94; Flagg’s biography of, 79, 83–84, 264n38; folklore as formative influence on, 82–84, 89; guilt experienced by, xx, 97, 99; as history painter, 76, 78, 80, 91, 261n11; and marriage to Ann Channing, 80; and marriage to Martha Remington Dana, 80; as member of slaveholding class, xx, 79, 80, 81, 82, 96–97, 262n14, 265n52; physical delicacy of, 91, 98; racist beliefs of, 91; and relations with Ball, 92, 95–96; and relations with Coleridge, 79–80, 261n10; and relations with Fuseli,
293
81; and relations with Greenough, 75, 78; and relations with Harding, 77, 95, 98; and relations with Irving, 76, 99, 104; and relations with Stuart, 77; and relations with Sumner, 97; religious faith of, 80; southern background of, xxi, 79, 80–81, 82–84, 88–90, 95– 96; studios of, 75, 77, 95, 98, 99; travels of, 79, 89, 91; writings of, 86–87, 91, 94 Allston, Washington, art of: based on Radcliffe’s writings, 92, 95; biblical narrative represented in, 75–79, 80, 91–92, 95, 96–98, 100; and classicism, 99; coded language in, 88; and commercial relations, 98; and commissions, 91, 92; and concealment, 75, 77–78, 96, 97; critical reception of, 77, 90, 92, 100; and distancing, 89, 90, 96; and escapism, 90; and exhibitions, 92; and French revolution, 86–88;
Allston, Washington (continued) and gothic, xix, 80, 89, 92, 99; guilt as theme in, xx, 79, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97; and humor, 88, 89; and ideality, 90–91; influence of Benjamin West on, 261n3; and patronage, 77, 80, 92, 95, 96, 97; and political relations, 76, 78, 87–88, 97, 261n3; and racial fear, xx, xxii, 79, 88, 89, 91, 99; and romanticism, 261n10, 264n43; and slavery, xx, 79, 82, 86, 87– 88, 89, 96, 97, 98, 99, 264n38, 266n62; and supernatural, 84, 91, 99; and violence, 89, 96; by title: The Angel Pouring Out the Vial of Wrath over Jerusalem, 95; Angel Releasing St. Peter from Prison, 98; Belshazzar’s Feast, xx, 75–79, 80, 95, 96–98, 100, 261, plate 5; Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 99; Evening Hymn, 90; Rocky Coast with Banditti, 89, 90; St. Domingo Black Boy, 86, 87–88; Saul and the Witch of Endor, 91–92, 93; Spalatro’s Vision of the Bloody Hand, 92–96, 93, 94, 265n46; Tragic Figure in Chains, 89, 98, 264n37, plate 6 Almanacs, comic, 111, 269nn21–22 Alvarez, A. A., 245 American Academy of the Fine Arts, 102, 104, 105 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), 197, 199, 282n21 Ames, Mary Clemmer, 195 Amputation, surgical, 194–96, 207–8 Anarchism, 233–34, 236 Anatomy: Eakins’s study of, 191, 207, 209, 211; Rimmer’s study of, 130 Angell, George T., 197 Anshutz, Thomas, 209, 210 Antiabolitionism, 113, 114 Anti-Catholicism, 21, 265n46 Antivivisection campaign, 196–97, 199–202, 205 Anxiety: and Allston’s art, 88, 98; and Blythe’s art, 66, 72; and Cole’s art,
294
index
3, 21, 42; and Eakins’s art, 204, 209, 215, 283n36; and gothic, xx, xxi; male, xxi, 179, 182; and Quidor’s art, 102, 109, 111, 116; and Rimmer’s art, 140; and urban life, 62, 66 The Arabian Nights, 163–64, 169, 275n14, 276n35 Army Medical Museum, 195 Arnold, George, 164 Asperger’s syndrome, 285–86n58 Ball, Hugh Swinton, 92, 95–96 Barbizon school, 223 Barringer, Tim, 252n13, 254n35 Bartlett, Truman, 141, 154 Bartow, Maria, 1, 38 Beck, Walter, 243 Becker, George, 205–6, 283n36 Bedell, Rebecca, 268n12 Bellew, Frank, 114, 115, 146, 147, 148 Bergh, Henry, 199–200, 282n22 Bernard, Claude, 200–202, 204, 209, 211, 284n42 Bible: represented in Allston’s art, 75– 79, 80, 91–92, 95, 96–98, 100; represented in Rimmer’s art, 130; represented in Ryder’s art, 223 Bjelajac, David, 261, 262, 265 Blackness, fear of. See Racial fear Blake, William, 274n45, 279n66 Blakelock, Ralph, 244, 291–92n57 Blythe, David Gilmour: and alcohol abuse, 46, 47; childhood of, 45; compared to Poe, xxii, 45, 47, 50, 72; compared to Quidor, 103; death of, 46, 50; eccentricities of, 46–47, 72, 103; and marriage to Julia Keffer, 45; writings of, 46, 48–50, 72, 258n11 Blythe, David Gilmour, art of: and alcohol abuse, 45, 47, 50, 52, 54– 56, 257n1, 258n15, 259n16; and anxiety, 66, 72; and caricature, 46, 260n36; and cartoons, 46, 56, 260n36; and commercial relations, 45, 72; compared to Poe’s writings, 68; compared to Quidor’s art, 117, 120; critical reception of, 47; and exhibitions, 46, 47; and gothic,
45, 74; and patronage, 257n6; and political relations, 46; and racial fear, 117–18; and satire, 44, 55, 67; and self-portraits, 44–45; and social relations, 64, 66, 257n2, 260n35; and urban life, 45, 46, 60, 62–64, 66–68, 70–72, 74, 257n2; by title: Art versus Law, 44–45, 47, 71, 257n1, plate 3; Beer Drinker, 258n15; Boy at the Pump, 55, 56, 57; The Bum, 60; Conscience Stricken, 55, 57; Conviviality, 258n15; Good Times, 52, 53, 55; Great Moving Panorama of the Allegheny Mountains, 46; Hard Times, 52, 53, 55; The Hideout (The Hangout), 70–72, plate 4; In the Pittsburgh Post Office, 66; A Loafer, 60; Man Peering from Jail, 55; Man Putting on Boots, 60, 61; A Match Seller, 70, 71; Ole Cezer, 117–18, 120, plate 8; Post Office, 64, 65, 66, 68; Prospecting, 72, 73, 260n39; Street Urchins, 68, 69, 70; The Temperance Pledge, 50, 51, 259n16; The Urchin (Boy Sipping Wine), 55, 56; Wine Merchant, 258n15; The Wine Taster, 258n15 Body represented in Eakins’s art: and fetishism, 213–15; fragmentation of, 214–15; health of, 188, 207, 208; and nudity, 212–14 Body snatching. See Grave robbing Bogdan, Robert, 211 Bohemian lifestyle, 164, 166, 168, 169, 172, 187, 275nn16–17 Boime, Albert, 287n5 Boyer, Paul, 62, 259n26 Brand, Dana, 68 Brantlinger, Paul, 235 Brinton, John H., 207 Broun, Elizabeth, 230 Browere, John, 104 Brown, Charles Brockden, xxi, 9–10, 12–13 Brown, John, 126, 144 Brownell, William Crary, 209–10 Bryant, William Cullen, 254n37 Bufford, John, 21, 24
Bunyan, John, 7 Burne-Jones, Edward, 277n44 Byron, George Gordon, 3, 21, 24, 26, 29, 255n41 Campbell, Thomas, 229 Cannabis extract, 169 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi), 173 Caricature, xviii, xix, 105, 114, 182, 194, 260n36, 281n17; and Blythe’s art, 46, 260n36; and Nast’s art, 182–83, 184; and Quidor’s art, 105 Carter, Susan N., 190, 205 Cartoons: and Bellew’s art, 146, 147; and Blythe’s art, 46, 56, 260n36; and Cruikshank’s art, 111, 268n18; and Miranda’s art, 196, 198, 281n18; and Quidor’s art, 111, 268n18; and Stephens’s art, 114, 116, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 195–96, 197; and women’s liberation, 182–83, 183 Cassuto, Leonard, 109, 269n25 Castration, 215–16 Catholicism, 21, 92, 170 Caylo, Nicolino, 109, 110 Chambers, Bruce, 45, 46, 47, 117, 257nn1–2, 258nn11–12, 260n39 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 150 Chapin, Edwin, 71 Chicago: Haymarket Riot in, 233; World’s Columbian Exposition in, 235, 241 Church, Frederic E., xv City life. See Urban relations City mystery exposés, 60, 62–63, 70, 111, 234 City sketch genre, 58, 60 Civil War, 116, 126, 133, 135, 146, 164, 182, 276n32; surgical procedures in, 194–96, 207–8 Claflin, Tennessee, 182 Clapp, Henry, 164 Clare, Ada, 164 Classicism: and Allston’s art, 99; and Rimmer’s art, 133, 135 Clemm, Virginia, 32 Coachman, Charles, 94
Cobbe, Francis Power, 196, 201–2, 204, 227 Cogdell, John Stevens, 96, 98 Colbert, Charles, 129 Cole, Thomas: childhood of, 3–4; as commercial artist, 4, 33, 43; compared to Poe, xxii, 21–23, 33, 36; compared to Quidor, 103, 267n9; death of, 42; democracy feared by, 21–23; Dunlap’s biography of, 9; education of, 4; as engraver’s apprentice, 3, 4; family of, 3–5, 33, 36, 38, 39; financial difficulties of, 4–5, 38, 39; as immigrant, xxi, 3, 4; library of, 255n43; and marriage to Maria Bartow, 1, 36, 38; and National Academy of Design, 4, 267n9; as naturalized citizen, 22; Noble’s biography of, 251n4; and relations with Constable, 26; religious beliefs of, 1; and social class, 4, 22, 251n5; as teacher of art, 3; travels of, 3, 4, 5, 9, 18, 19, 25; writings of, 1, 5, 7–8, 16, 18–19, 21, 23, 25–26, 34, 36, 39, 40, 42, 253n30, 257n66 Cole, Thomas, art of: and allegory, 8, 24, 33, 39–42, 252n13, 257n62; and anxiety, 3, 21, 42; based on Cooper’s writings, 13–18; based on Milton’s writings, 25; and castles, 3, 8, 18–19, 20, 26–27, 27, 28, 31, 33, 34, 35, 36; and commercial relations, 3, 5, 33, 43; and commissions, 23, 34, 39, 255n44; compared to Brown’s writings, xxi, 3, 9, 10, 12, 13; compared to Poe’s writings, 3, 19, 21–25, 29, 256n52; critical reception of, 33, 256n57; and death, 34, 40, 42; and democracy, 3, 24, 254n40; dialectic of light and darkness in, 34, 36, 40, 43; and exhibitions, 4; and “fallen” world, 8, 9, 15; and fear, 7, 18, 25; and gothic, xix–xx, 3, 7, 8, 9, 18, 25, 43, 252n12; Indians depicted in, 13–18; influenced by Byron’s writings, 24, 26, 255n41; influenced by Constable’s art, 26–27, 255n47; Italy depicted in, 25–27,
27, 28, 29; and “lower” world, 13, 17, 18, 40, 43; and morality, 3, 24, 40; and naturalism, 9; and nature, 10, 18, 29, 34, 39, 40, 45; and pastoral, 24, 33, 43; and patronage, 4, 5, 22, 29; and political relations, 3, 24, 25; psychoanalytic interpretation of, 252n12; and religion, 3, 38, 40; and romanticism, 5, 45, 251n3, 252n13, 255n43; and ruins, 3, 18–19, 20, 21, 24–25, 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37, 43, 45, 251n2, 253n30; and self, 25, 29, 38; and significance of American setting, 4, 8, 9, 14, 18, 253n30; and social relations, 3, 24–25, 33; and solitude, 36, 39; and subjectivity, 5; and sublime, 13, 18, 33; and violence, 3, 14– 18; and wilderness, 3, 8, 13–18, 43, 252n13; by title: Chocorua’s Curse, 16; The Course of Empire: Desolation, 19, 20, 24, 36; The Cross and the World, 40–42, 42; The Death of Cora, 13, 15, 15– 16; Expulsion from the Garden of Eden, 8–9, 13, 252n13, plate 1; Hope Deferred Maketh the Heart Sick, 5, 6; Italian Coast Scene with Ruined Tower, 26, 27, 33; Lake with Dead Trees (Catskill), 1–2, 2, 5, 22, 251n2; Landscape Composition, Italian Scenery, 19, 20, 25, 255n44; Landscape with Tree Trunks, 9, 11; Mount Etna from Taormina, 36, 37; Oxbow, 252n14; Past, 34, 35; The Pilgrim of the World at the End of His Journey, 21, 41–42, 42; Present, 34, 35; Prometheus Bound, 38, 257n62; Rock in Connecticut, 29, 30; Romantic Landscape, 9, 11; Ruined Tower (Mediterranean Coast Scene with Tower), 26, 27, 29, plate 2; Scene from “The Last of the Mohicans,” 13–14, 14, 18; Shipwreck Scene, 5, 6; Simeon Stylites, 36, 37; The Storm, 6, 7; Untitled (Landscape with Building Fragment), 29, 31; Untitled (Landscape with
index
295
Cole, Thomas (continued) Mountains), 29, 31; Untitled [Volterra], 27, 28; The Voyage of Life: Manhood, 39, 39–40; The Voyage of Life: Old Age, 40, 41 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 79–80, 236, 261n10 Commercial relations: and Allston’s art, 98; and Blythe’s art, 45, 72; and Cole’s art, 3, 5, 33; and Irving’s writings, 105; and Poe’s writings, 3, 47; and Quidor’s art, 102, 125; and Vedder’s art, 180– 81, 186–87 Constable, John, 26–27, 255n47 Contrabands, 146, 273n28 Cooper, James Fenimore, 13, 16, 18, 104, 254n37 Cooper Union, 130, 140, 154 Cottier, Daniel, 223, 238 Creek War, 17 Creolization, 83 Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de, 81– 82, 262n19 Crime, xviii, 62, 63, 103 Critical reception: of Allston’s art, 77, 90, 92, 100; of Blythe’s art, 47; of Cole’s art, 33, 256n57; of Eakins’s art, xvi, 188, 189, 190, 199, 202, 204–5, 219–20, 280n6; of Quidor’s art, 105, 267n6; of Rimmer’s art, 154; of Ryder’s art, 222, 242–43 Crockett almanacs, 111, 269n21 Crowe, Catherine, 287n12 Cruikshank, George, 111, 151, 157, 260n36 Currier, Nathaniel, 21 Cushman, Charlotte, 183, 185 Dallas, Eneas Sweetland, 227, 229 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 97 Dauphin, 129–30, 133, 157 Davidson, Abraham, xv–xvi Davies, Arthur B., 238 Davis, Jefferson, 114, 281n18 Dayan, Joan, 264n42 Deas, Charles, 123 Death: and Cole’s art, 34, 40, 42; and Vedder’s art, 172, 187 De Kay, Charles, 242, 243 Democracy: and Cole’s art, 3, 24,
296
index
254n40; and Cole’s writings, 21– 23; fear of, 22–25, 86–87, 254n40; and Poe’s writings, 3, 21, 23–24, 254n38; and social decline, 21–22; and urban relations, 67 De Quincy, Thomas, 228, 231 Dercum, Francis X., 211 Devil, 101–2, 120–23, 270n35 Dijkstra, Bram, 276n37 Disgust: and Eakins’s art, 189, 190, 204, 205, 220, 279n5; and Ryder’s art, 240; theories of, 240, 243 Dissection: and art curriculum, 191, 209–10; corpses stolen for, 191– 94; and Eakins’s art, 188, 189, 190, 191, 194, 196, 220; Eakins’s practice of, 191, 209, 210–11, 220; and Hogarth’s art, 197, 199; and pornography, 213 Donnelly, Ignatius, 234 Doppelgänger. See Double Doré, Gustave, 205 Double, 148–50, 154, 155, 236–37, 273n30, 286n59 Douglas, Mary, 290n46 Douglas, Stephen A., 125, 142, 145 Doyle, Jennifer, 215 Dreams, 222–23, 224, 226–31, 233, 288n17 Drug use, 164, 166–70, 171, 172, 228, 275 Duhring, Louis A., 211 Dunlap, William, 9, 82–83, 84, 251n5, 267n6 Durand, Asher B., 34, 36 Eakins, Thomas: as athlete, 188; childhood of, 190; compared to Rimmer, 216; compared to Vedder, 217; dissection practiced by, 191, 209, 210–11, 220; education of, 190, 191, 207, 209; and family relations, 190, 213, 216–19, 286n59; and marriage to Susan MacDowell, 190, 216; mental condition of, 191, 217, 218, 285–86n58; photography practiced by, 211–13; and scandal over nude model, 190–91, 213, 218; and stay in Europe, 190, 208–9, 217; as teacher of art, 190– 91, 209, 210, 213
Eakins, Thomas, art of: and anxiety, 204, 205, 209, 215, 283n36; and bodily fragmentation, 214–15; and bodily health, 188, 207, 208; and castration, 215–16; and Civil War, 207–8; compared to French art, 205–6; compared to Hogarth’s art, 199; compared to Poe’s writings, 214; critical reception of, xvi, 188, 189, 190, 199, 202, 204–5, 219– 20, 280n6; and disgust, 189, 190, 204, 205, 220, 279n5; dissection connoted by, 188, 189, 190, 194, 196, 199, 220; and double, 286n59; exhibitions of, xvi, 189–90, 206, 280n6; and family relations, 216– 18, 286n59; and fear, 205, 209, 220; and fetishism, 213–15; and gender relations, 216, 219, 220; and horror, 189, 190, 199, 220, 279n5; and nude figures, 212–14; and photography, 211–13; and political relations, 283n36; and psychological relations, 215–16; and realism, 189, 207, 216, 220; and science, xvi, 188, 189, 191, 209, 213, 219, 220, 284n42; and self, 218–19; and sexuality, 215; and study of anatomy, 191, 207, 209, 211; and study of dissection, 191, 209; surgical procedures represented in, 188–91, 196, 199, 202–7, 212, 215–16, 218–20, 279n4, 283n33; and violence, 190, 199, 279n5; vivisection connoted by, 199, 202, 205, 220, 282n19; by title: The Agnew Clinic, 191, 194, 219; The Champion Single Sculls, 216; Chess Players, 286n59; The Concert Singer, 214; Crucifixion, 207, 283n36; The Gross Clinic, xvi, xxi, 188–91, 196, 199, 202–7, 212, 215–16, 218–20, 279–80nn3–6, 283n33, plate 13 Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 191 Economic relations: and emancipation of slaves, 113; and industrialization, 21, 63–64, 252n13; and speculation, 108, 125; and urbanization, 62, 63 Eden. See Garden of Eden
Eden Musée, New York, 199 Edmundson, Mark, xvii Edwards, Jonathan, 120 Eldredge, Charles C., 277n46 Electrification of urban centers, 236 Emancipation Proclamation, 146 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xviii, 130, 151 Enlightenment, xviii, 10, 81, 108, 171, 226, 252n13 Erkkila, Betsy, 24 Escapism, 90, 172, 233 Exhibitions: of Allston’s art, 92; of Blakelock’s art, 291n57; of Blythe’s art, 46, 47; of Cole’s art, 4; of Constable’s art, 26; of Eakins’s art, xvi, 189–90, 206, 280n6; of Moran’s art, 137; of Quidor’s art, 102, 104, 105; of Rimmer’s art, 130; of Ryder’s art, 223 “Fallen” world in Cole’s art, 8, 9, 15 Faulkner, William, xvi Fear: and Allston’s art, 92, 97, 100; and Brown’s writings, 10, 12; and Cole’s art, 7, 18, 25; of democracy, 22–25, 86–87, 254n40; and Eakins’s art, 205, 209, 220; and gothic, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 247; and MacDonald’s writings, 152–53; and Poe’s writings, 32; and Quidor’s art, 101, 106, 125, 127; and Rimmer’s art, 128, 131, 148, 150; and Ryder’s art, 233, 243; and Scott’s writings, 132–33; and urban life, 62, 63; of women, xx, 173, 179, 182, 185, 187, 217. See also Racial fear Femininity, 182–83, 185, 187, 216, 217, 219 Feminism, xx, 178, 182 Fetishism, 213–15 Fiedler, Leslie, xvii, xx, 252n15 Field, Kate, 179–81, 183 Flagg, Jared B., 79, 83–84, 264n38 Flaneurs, 45, 68, 260n34 Flexner, James Thomas, 150 Flynn, Tom, 54 Folklore, 82–84, 89, 264n42 Foster, George, 62–63, 70 Foster, Kathleen, 216 Fox, Daniel, 219
France: Barbizon school in, 223; Paris Commune in, 242, 283n36; representations of violence in, 205–6; revolution in, 86–88, 129; vivisection in, 200–202 Frankenstein’s monster, 114, 115, 120 Fraser, Charles, 92, 96 French, Daniel Chester, 130 French and Indian War, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 108, 148, 149, 150, 173, 178, 215, 226 Fried, Michael, xx, 189, 215, 279n5 Fugitive Slave Act, 113, 125, 136 Fugitive slave narrative, 136–38, 140–41, 146, 148, 157, 272n12 Fuseli, Henry, xvii, 81 Garden of Eden, 8, 9, 15, 163, 254n37, 260n39 Gardner, Jared, 253n21 Garrison, William Lloyd, 95, 268n20 Gender relations: and androgyny, 183, 185; and Eakins’s art, 216, 219, 220; and gothic, xvii, xx–xxi; and myth of Medusa, 178–79; and sexual liberation, 182–83; and Vedder’s art, 173, 185, 187, 276n37 Genius, romantic, 244 Gerdts, William H., 91, 261 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 190 Gifford, Sanford, 194 Gilder, Helena de Kay, 223 Gilder, Richard Watson, 179 Gilmor, Robert, 4, 5, 13, 17–18 Goddu, Teresa, xvii, xviii, xxi, xxii, 262n19 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 132– 33, 271n7 Golem, 108 Goodrich, Lloyd, 207, 216, 218, 240 Gorgon. See Medusa Gothic: and Allston’s art, xix, 80, 89, 92, 99; and Blythe’s art, 45, 74; and Brown’s writings, xvi, xxi, 9, 10, 13; and Cole’s art, xix–xx, 3, 7, 8, 9, 18, 25, 43, 252n12; and Eakins’s art, xix, 129; and fear, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, 247; Fiedler’s theory of, xvii, xx, 252n15; and folklore, 264n42; and fugitive
slave narrative, 137; and Fuseli’s art, xvii; and gender relations, xvii, xx–xxi; and Gray’s writings, 255n43; and Hawthorne’s writings, xvi, xxi; and imperialist adventure genre, 235; and Melville’s writings, xvi, xxi, 141; and Poe’s writings, xvi, xxi–xxii, 3, 29–30, 32–33, 264n42; and Quidor’s art, xx, 106, 108; and Radcliffe’s writings, xvii, 89, 92; and repression, xviii, xxi, xxii, 187, 248; and Rimmer’s art, xix, 129; and Rimmer’s writings, 133; and self, 13; and significance of American setting, xvii, 8, 9, 10, 14, 18, 252n15; and slavery, xviii– xix; and urban setting, 45, 74; and Vedder’s art, xix, 187; and Walpole’s writings, xvii, 89 Gough, John Bartholomew, 54 Graham, George R., 48 Grave robbing, 191–94 Gray, Thomas, 255n43 Greeley, Horace, 114, 144, 146 Greenough, John, 75, 78 Griswold, Rufus, 47–48 Gross, Samuel, 188–89, 191, 196, 202–4, 207, 219, 220 Guilt: and Allston’s art, xx, 79, 89, 91, 92, 96, 97; and Blythe’s art, 257n1; and gothic, 247; and Poe’s writings, xxii, 113; and Quidor’s art, 102; and Stevenson’s writings, 289n35 Gullah (slave language), 83 Hadden, James, 46 Haiti. See St. Domingue Halttunen, Karen, xviii Hamilton, Alexander, 154 Harding, Chester, 77, 95, 98 Harper’s (periodical), 116, 146, 182, 196 Harpers Ferry, 126, 144 Hartley, Marsden, 240, 244 Hartmann, Sadakichi, xvi, 188, 189, 190, 218, 238, 239, 242 Hashish, 166–70, 171, 172, 275 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, xvi, xxi, 120, 173–74, 182, 256n52 Haymarket Riot in Chicago, 233
index
297
Hegel, G. W. F., 266n57 Helman, Cecil, 213 History painting, 76, 78, 80, 91, 261n11 Hoffman, E. T. A., 149 Hogarth, William, 197, 199, 200, 268n18 Holland, Henry, 229, 288n17 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 181 Homer, Winslow, 196 Hone, Philip, 22 Honour, Hugh, 276n32 Hoogstraten, Samuel van, 142, 143 Hosmer, Harriet, 179, 277n48 Hudson River school, xv, 74 Hugo, Victor, 227, 233, 288n17 Humor: and Allston’s art, 88, 89; and Irving’s writings, 105; and minstrelsy, 123; and Quidor’s art, 105; and urban life, 66–67 Hunt, Alfred N., 85, 263n27, 264n35 Husch, Gail E., xx, 265n55 Hyde, William Henry, 238 Hygiene: advocated by middle class, 223, 235, 241, 243; and Ryder’s personal habits, 223, 237–39; and urban slums, 234–35 Immigrants, xxi, 3, 4, 62, 63, 129, 233 Imperialism, 235 Indians: in Brown’s writings, 12; in Cole’s art, 13–18; in Cooper’s writings, 13, 16 Industrialization, 21, 63–64, 252n13 Insanity. See Madness Ireland, John, 197, 199 Irving, Washington: Quidor’s art based on writings of, 101, 102, 104–6, 108, 111, 120–25, 270n41; and relations with Allston, 76, 99 Jackson, Andrew, 17, 21, 108 Jacobinism, 22, 24, 87 James, Henry, 100 Jameson, Anna, 99 Jarvis, John Wesley, 102 Jarvis, Leonard, 77, 89 Jefferson, Thomas, 91, 263n26 Johns, Elizabeth, 189, 207, 257n2, 260n35, 261n10, 264n43 Johnson, Eastman, 194, 196
298
index
Johnston, David Claypoole, 21, 22, 58, 59, 260n36 Joyner, Charles Winston, 262n15 Kansas-Nebraska Act, 125, 144 Kasson, Joy, 33, 256n52 Keats, John, 177 Keck, Sheldon, 240 Keen, William W., 191, 207, 209 Keffer, Julia, 45 Kelley, James Edward, 242 Kelly, Franklin, 252n13 Kennedy, John Pendleton, 106 Kernan, Frank, 54 Keyes, Donald D., 260n36 Kirstein, Lincoln, 154 Klein, Emanuel, 203 Krause, Sydney J., 13 Kristeva, Julia, 240, 243, 290n46 Laderman, Gary, 116 Lane, Edward, 275n14 The Lantern (periodical), 63, 114 Lawrence, Christopher, 219 Leonardo da Vinci, 174 Leslie, Charles Robert, 91 Leutze, Emanuel, 224, 225 Levin, Harry, 254n38 Lewis, Dio, 182 The Liberator (periodical), 95, 268n20 Lincoln, Abraham, 125, 129, 135, 146, 157 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 182 Lippard, George, 62, 192 Lloyd, Phoebe, 266n58 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 137 Lord, Rufus L., 255n44 Lorrain, Claude, 26 Lott, Eric, 268n20 Louis XVI, 129 Louis XVIII, 129, 271n8 Louisiana Purchase, 16 Lowell, James Russell, 98 “Lower” world in Cole’s art, 13, 17, 18, 40, 43 Ludlow, Fitz Hugh, 164, 166, 167–68, 169, 172, 275n18 Macbeth, William, 239 MacDonald, George, 150, 151–54, 156–57
Macnish, Robert, 228 Madness: and Allston’s life, 80; and dreams, 228–29, 287–88nn16–17; and drug use, 166–68; and Eakins’s life, 217, 218; and genius, 244; and Poe’s life, 47, 48; and Poe’s writings, 29, 222; and Rimmer’s writings, 155; and Ryder’s art, 223, 224, 230; and Vedder’s life, 160, 169 Majendie, François, 199–200 Male anxiety, xxi, 179, 182 Marijuana, 169 Market relations. See Commercial relations Marshall, William E., 223 Martin, John, 8 Masculinity, xvii, xx, 104, 181, 182, 185, 216, 217, 219, 220, 269n21 Master-slave relation, Hegel’s theory of, 266n57 Mather, Frank Jewett, xvi Matteson, Tomkins, 159 Maury, Francis F., 211 McElroy, Guy C., 123 McGann, Jerome, 178 Medical procedures. See Surgical procedures Medusa, 48, 173–75, 176–78, 177–79, 185, 186, 187, 276n37, 277nn46, 279n64 Melville, Herman, xvi, xxi, 141, 144, 256n52 Mencken, Adah, 164 Merrill, Lisa, 185 Metaphysics, 129 Middle class: and abolitionism, 109; and Blythe’s art, 55, 67; and Cole’s identity, 4; and firefighters, 103, 267n5; and gender relations, 181, 182; and Quidor’s art, 105; and social hygiene, 223, 235, 241, 243; and social mobility, 62; and temperance campaign, 50 Miller, Angela, 252n14, 254n40 Miller, David C., xx, 272n16 Miller, Dorothy, 47 Miller, William, 240 Milroy, Elizabeth, 283n36 Milton, John, 8, 25, 81, 255n43 Minstrelsy, 109, 110, 118, 123, 266n1, 268–69n20
Miranda, Fernando, 196, 198, 281n18 Mitchell, S. Weir, 207 Moorish architecture, 138, 140, 156 Morality: and Blythe’s writings, 72; and Brown’s writings, 13; and Cole’s art, 3, 24, 40; and Cooper’s writings, 13 Moran, Thomas, 137, 139, 272n15 Morris, William, 175 Morrison, Toni, xviii Mount, William Sidney, 52, 105, 107 Mumford, Lewis, 233 Munich, Adrienne, 185 Murger, Henri, 164 Muybridge, Eadweard, 211–12, 284n46 Myers, Kenneth, 251n2 Napoleon Bonaparte, 76, 78, 97, 129, 261n3, 263n28 Nast, Thomas, 182–83, 184 Nathan, Walter L., 251n3 National Academy of Design, 4, 102, 104, 105, 106, 130, 223, 238, 267n9, 291n57 Native Americans. See Indians Naturalism: and Cole’s art, 9; and Vedder’s art, 187 Nature: and Brown’s writings, 13; and Cole’s art, 10, 18, 29, 34, 39, 40, 45; and Vedder’s art, 172–73, 187 Neal, Joseph C., 58, 60, 259n23 Nemerov, Alexander, 250n11 Newton, Richard, 88 New York City: fire of 1835 in, 21, 23; and Foster’s writings, 62–63, 70; and Irving’s writings, 104–5; and Rosenfeld’s writings, 233; working-class culture in, 103 Nichols, John, 197, 199 Nickels, Cameron C., 66 Night, 222, 223, 227, 231, 236, 237, 244–45 Noble, Louis L., 251n4, 255n41 O’Brien, Fitz-James, 164, 166, 168, 170 O’Connor, William Douglas, 141–42 Omar Khayyám, 279n64
Opium, 166, 168, 170, 228 Orientalism, 133, 166–70, 171, 206 O’Sullivan, Timothy, 194 Owen, Robert, 288n17 Paris Commune, 242, 283n36 Parkman, Francis, 137 Parton, James, 63–64 Pastoral: and Cole’s art, 24, 33, 43; and Hudson River school, 74 Pater, Walter, 177 Patronage: and Allston’s art, 77, 80, 92, 95, 96, 97; and Blythe’s art, 258n6; and Cole’s art, 4, 5, 22, 29; and Vedder’s art, 186 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 4, 102, 190, 191, 209 Perkins, Thomas H., 91 Perl, Jed, 233 Pessimism, 1, 25, 33, 247 Pfaff, Charles, 164 Pfister, Joel, 243 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, 189 Photography: and Eakins’s work, 211– 13; and Muybridge’s work, 211– 12, 284n46; and O’Sullivan’s work, 194; and Riis’s work, 234 Pieterse, Jan, 120 Pine, Robert Edge, 264n37 Pittsburgh: and Blythe’s art, 64, 66, 72; and Blythe’s life, 45–47; fire of 1845 in, 259n28; industrialization in, 63–64; and Parton’s writings, 63–64; social problems in, 63; and Trollope’s writings, 64; and Young’s writings, 63, 111 Poe, Edgar Allan: and alcohol abuse, 32, 47–48; compared to Blythe, xxii, 45, 47, 50, 72; compared to Cole, xxii, 21–23, 33, 36; death of, 32, 48, 256n50; financial difficulties of, 23–24, 32; and marriage to Virginia Clemm, 32; and relations with Sarah Helen Whitman, 32–33; as ward of John Allan, 23– 24, 112 Poe, Edgar Allan, writings of: and bodily fragmentation, 214; and commercial relations, 3, 47; compared to Blythe’s art, 68; compared
to Blythe’s writings, 49, 72; compared to Cole’s art, 3, 19, 21–25, 29, 256n52; compared to Eakins’s art, 214; compared to Quidor’s art, 120; compared to Rimmer’s art, 149–50, 155; compared to Rimmer’s writings, 155; compared to Ryder’s art, 221, 222; and democracy, 3, 21, 24, 254n38; and double, 149–50, 155; and family relations, 29–30; favored by bohemians, 164, 172; and folklore, 264n42; and gothic, xvi, xxi–xxii, 3, 29–30, 32–33, 264n42; and racial fear, xxii, 24, 112–13, 116, 269n25; and ruins, 3, 19, 21, 24– 25, 32; and satire, 24; and self, 155; and slavery, 111, 146, 148, 264n42; and social class, 24, 111; and urban relations, 24, 67–68; by title: “The City in the Sea,” 19, 24; “The Fall of the House of Usher,” 29–30, 32, 221; “The Haunted Palace,” 221, 222; “How to Write a Blackwood Article,” 112; “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” 112; “Ligeia,” 32–33; “The Man of the Crowd,” 67–68; “Mellonta Tauta,” 24, 254n38; “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” 112–13, 214, 269n25; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 113, 116, 120; “The Raven,” 47, 49, 146, 148; “William Wilson,” 149–50, 155 Political relations: and Allston’s art, 76, 78, 87–88, 97, 261n3; and Allston’s writings, 86–87; and Blythe’s art, 46; and Cole’s art, 3, 24, 25; disorder in, 21–25; and Eakins’s art, 283n36; and Ryder’s art, 242; and slums, 233–35; and women’s activism, 179. See also Democracy Pompey the Great, 135 Pornography, 213 Poverty, 62, 63, 67, 70, 234–35 Powell, Earl A., 250–51n2 Praz, Mario, 177 Pre-Raphaelites, 175, 277n44 Presbyterianism, 45
index
299
Psychological relations: and abjection, 240, 243, 290n46; and Blythe’s art, 259n16; and Brown’s writing, 13; and Cole’s art, 252n12; and dreams, 226–29; and Eakins’s art, 215–16; and Freud’s writings, 108, 148, 149, 150, 173, 178, 215, 226; and Kristeva’s writings, 240, 243, 290n46; and myth of Medusa, 173, 178; and Quidor’s art, 108; and regression, 235, 236, 237, 242; and Rimmer’s art, 133, 148–49, 150; and Ryder’s art, 223, 226, 230–31, 233, 236, 243–45; and Stevenson’s writings, 236–37; and supernatural, 226, 287n12; and unconscious, 226–29, 231, 233; and Vedder’s art, 173. See also Madness; Repression Puritanism, 120, 272n16 Quidor, John: and alcohol abuse, 103; as apprentice artist, 102; and commercial relations, 102; compared to Blythe, 103; compared to Cole, 103, 267n9; education of, 102; fire engines decorated by, 102–3; and relations with Browere, 104; and social class, 103, 104, 111; studio of, 103, 269n22 Quidor, John, art of: and anxiety, 102, 109, 111, 116; based on Irving’s writings, 101, 102, 104–6, 108, 111, 120–25, 270n41; and caricature, 105; and cartoons, 111, 268n18; and commercial relations, 102, 125; and commissions, 102; compared to Blythe’s art, 117, 120; compared to Caylo’s art, 109; compared to Poe’s writings, 120; compared to Rimmer’s art, 157; critical reception of, 105, 267n6; and exhibitions, 102, 104, 105; and fear of the supernatural, 101; and gothic, xx, 106, 108; and greed, 101, 125; Hogarth’s influence on, 268n18; and humor, 105; and imagination, 268n12; and psychological relations, 108; and racial fear, xxii, 101–2, 106, 108, 109, 120, 126–27; and satire, 268n18;
300
index
and self, 108; by title: Antony Van Corlear Brought into the Presence of Peter Stuyvesant, 105, 107, 109, 268n18; Battle Scene from “Knickerbocker’s History of New York,” 105; Death on the Pale Horse, 102; The Devil and Tom Walker, 121, 122, 123; Edict of William the Testy, 270n41; Headless Horseman Pursuing Ichabod Crane, 124–26, 126, 157; Ichabod Crane at a Ball, 270n41; The Money Diggers, 101–2, 105, 106, 108–9, 125, plate 7; Rip van Winkle, 270n41; Tom Walker’s Flight, 101–2, 121–23, 125, plate 9; Wolfert’s Will, 270n41; Wolfert Webber at the Inn, 270n41 Racial fear: and Allston’s art, xx, xxii, 79, 88, 89, 91, 99; and Blythe’s art, 117–18; and color symbolism, 120; and devil figure, 101–2, 120– 23, 270n35; and emancipation of slaves, 113, 114; and folklore, 82– 83, 89; and Frankenstein’s monster, 114, 115, 120; and Jefferson’s writings, 91; and minstrelsy, 109, 123, 266n1; and periodicals, 113– 14, 116; and Poe’s writings, xxii, 24, 112–13, 116, 269n25; and Quidor’s art, xxii, 101–2, 106, 108, 109, 120, 126–27; and religion, 120; and Rimmer’s art, xxii; and slave revolts, 84, 86, 87, 144, 263n27; and Stephens’s art, 146; and Vedder’s art, 276n32 Racism: and Allston’s writings, 91; and almanacs, 111, 269n21; and caricatures, 111; and cartoons, 146; and Jefferson’s writings, 91; and minstrelsy, 109, 118; and periodicals, 118; and slavery, 84; and whitewashing, 118; and working class, 109, 111, 269n21 Radcliffe, Ann, xvii, 89, 92, 95 Ratcliff, Carter, 276n37 Rationalism, 171, 189, 220, 226, 245 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 235 Realism, 189, 190, 207, 216 Reed, Luman, 33
Regnault, Henri, 205, 206, 284n36 Regression, 235, 236, 237, 242 Religion: and Cole’s art, 3, 38, 40; and racial fear, 120; and Ryder’s art, 243; and Vedder’s art, 170– 71. See also Bible; names of specific denominations Repression, as unconscious symptom: and Allston’s art, 90; and Brown’s writings, 13; and Freud’s writings, 148, 150; and gothic, xviii, xxi, xxii, 187, 248; and Poe’s writings, xxi; and Quidor’s art, 127; and Rimmer’s art, 148, 150; and Ryder’s art, 236, 243; and Stevenson’s writings, 237; and Vedder’s art, 187 “Resurrection” of corpses for dissection, 191–94 Reynolds, David S., xviii, 54, 67, 125, 259n25 Rice, T. D., 268n20 Richter, Jean Paul, 273n30 Riis, Jacob, 234, 239 Rimmer, William: childhood of, 130; compared to Eakins, 216; and Dauphin legacy, 129–30, 133, 157; death of, 130; and family relations, 129–30, 155, 157; financial difficulties of, 154; as immigrant, 129; marriage of, 130; medicine practiced by, 130; personality of, 155; religious belief of, 154–55; as teacher of art, 130, 154; writings of, 130, 131–33, 154, 155 Rimmer, William, art of: and allegory, 129, 135, 157; and anatomical expertise, 130; and architecture, 138, 140, 156; and Civil War, 133, 135; and classical iconography, 133, 135; and commissions, 154; compared to Cruikshank’s art, 151, 157; compared to MacDonald’s writings, 151–54, 156–57; compared to Moran’s art, 137–38; compared to Poe’s writings, 149– 50, 155; compared to Quidor’s art, 157; critical reception of, 154; and double, 148–50, 154; and exhibitions, 130; and fear, 128, 131, 148, 150; and fugitive slave narrative,
136–38, 140–41, 148, 157; and gothic, xix, 129; and Lincoln’s assassination, 129, 135, 157; and metaphysics, 129; and myth, 130, 133; and orientalism, 133; and paranoia, 130, 271n5; and physiognomy, 138; and psychological relations, 133, 148–49, 150; and repression, 148, 150; and romanticism, 149; and self, 148, 149, 154, 155; and sexuality, 274n45; and shadow imagery, 128, 148, 150, 151, 154, 156–57; and slavery, 129, 136–38, 140–41, 148, 157; and subjectivity, 129, 157; and uncanny, 148–49; by title: Dedicated to the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, 133, 134, 135; Evening (The Fall of Day), 155, 156; Faces: Greek, Goth, Moor, 138, 140; Flight and Pursuit, 128–29, 130–31, 133, 135–38, 140–41, 148, 150–51, 154–57, 271, plate 10; Midnight Ride, 130–32, 131, 150; Oh for the Horns of the Altar, 135, 136; Secessia and Columbia, 133, 134 Riots, 21, 22, 24, 191, 233, 259n26 Rochefoucauld, duc de la, 80 Romanticism: and Allston’s art, 261n10, 264n43; and Cole’s art, 5, 45, 251n3, 252n13, 255n43; and Cole’s writings, 7; and Cooper’s writings, 16; and Freud’s writings, 149; and Hoffman’s writings, 149; and myth of Medusa, 177; and Rimmer’s art, 149; and Rosa’s art, 7; and Ryder’s art, 223, 243–44 Rosa, Salvator, 7 Rosenberg, Eric, 189, 242, 279n5, 283n33 Rosenfeld, Paul, 233 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 177 Rubens, Peter Paul, 208 Ruins: and Byron’s writings, 21; and Cole’s art, 3, 18–19, 20, 21, 24– 25, 27, 29, 31, 34, 35, 37, 43, 45, 251n2, 253n30; and Poe’s writings, 3, 19, 21, 24–25, 32; and Volney’s writings, 21, 253n33 Runaway slaves. See Fugitive slave narrative
Ryan, Mary, 234, 259n26 Ryder, Albert Pinkham: childhood of, 223; death of, 224; eccentricities of, xxi, 223–24, 237, 242–45; education of, 223; regressive personality of, 241–42, 243; and relations with women, 238; slovenly habits of, 224, 237–39, 241, 242, 243; and travels to Europe, 223; working methods of, 231, 236, 240 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, art of: based on Campbell’s writings, 229; based on Hugo’s writings, 229, 288n17; based on Poe’s writings, 221, 222; based on Shakespeare’s writings, 237; and commissions, 224; compared to Barbizon school, 223; compared to Stevenson’s writings, 236–37; critical reception of, 222, 242–43; and dirt, 239–41; and disgust, 240, 243; and double, 223, 233; and dreams, 222–23, 224, 226, 229–31, 233; and escapism, 233, 287n5; exhibitions of, 223; and fear, 233, 243; and madness, 221, 222, 223, 230; and marines, 223, 236; and night, 222, 223, 231, 236; and political relations, 242; and psychological relations, 223, 226, 230–31, 233, 236, 243–45; and regression, 236, 237; and romanticism, 223, 243–44; and self, 223, 231, 236; and social relations, 223, 233, 236; techniques used in, 231, 236, 240; and unconscious, 229, 231, 233; and urban relations, 223, 233, 236, 243; by title: Curfew Hour, 240, 241, 243; Lord Ullin’s Daughter, 229–31, 232; The Lorelei, 222, 231, 232, 233, 288n19; Moonlight, 224, plate 15; Moonlit Cove, 241; The Tempest, 237, 240; The Temple of the Mind, 221–22, 224, 236, 243, 244, plate 14; Toilers of the Sea, 229, 230, 288n18 Sarnoff, Charles A., 150 Satire: and Blythe’s art, 44, 48, 55; and Blythe’s writings, 48; and Newton’s
art, 88; and Poe’s writings, 24, 67–68; and Quidor’s art, 268n18; and urban relations, 66–67 Saturday Press (periodical), 164 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, 236 Schmidt, Leigh, 170, 171 Schmitt, Max, 216 School of Design for Women, Cooper Union, New York, 130 Schubert, Franz Peter, 271n7 Science celebrated in Eakins’s art, xvi, 188, 189, 191, 209, 213, 219, 220, 284n42 Scott, Walter, 132, 183, 271n7 Scribner’s (periodical), 199, 209 Self: and Brown’s writings, 13; and Coleridge’s writings, 236; and Cole’s art, 25, 29, 38; and dream theory, 226; and Eakins’s art, 218–19; and MacDonald’s writings, 154; and Poe’s writings, 155; and Quidor’s art, 108; and Rimmer’s art, 148, 149, 154, 155; and Rimmer’s writings, 155; and Ryder’s art, 223, 231, 236; and Stevenson’s writings, 236–37 Sexuality: and Eakins’s art, 215; and Eakins’s photography, 213, 215; and Hosmer’s art, 277n48; and Rimmer’s art, 274n45; and sexual liberation, 182–83; and Vedder’s art, 179, 185 Shadow symbolism, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150–54, 156–57 Shakespeare, William, 81, 123, 185, 223, 237 Shelley, Mary, 114 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 177 Sherwood, Dolly, 277n48 Silverman, Kenneth, 32, 150, 254n38, 256n51 Slavery: and Allston’s art, xx, 79, 82, 86, 87–88, 89, 96, 97, 98, 99, 264n38, 266n62; and Allston’s life, xx, 79, 80–81, 82, 86, 94, 96–97, 261n14, 265n52; and creolization, 83; and Crèvecoeur’s writings, 81–82, 262n19; and Emancipation Proclamation, 146; and folklore, 82–84; and Fugitive Slave Act, 113, 125, 136; and fugitive slave nar-
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Slavery (continued) rative, 136–38, 140–41, 157, 272n12; and gothic, xviii–xix; and Hegel’s writings, 266n57; and Irving’s writings, 106; and Jefferson’s life, 264n42; and Kansas-Nebraska Act, 125, 144; and Longfellow’s writings, 137; and Melville’s writings, 141; and Moran’s art, 137; and Morrison’s writings, xviii; and O’Connor’s writings, 140–41; and Poe’s writings, 111, 146, 148, 264n42; and racial fear, 113; and Rimmer’s art, 129, 136–38, 140–41, 148, 157; and Rochefoucauld’s writings, 80; and shadow symbolism, 142, 146, 148; and slave revolts, 84–88, 94, 144, 160–61, 263n27, 264n35; and Stowe’s writings, 62, 118, 136, 137. See also Abolitionism Slums, 233–35, 243 Smith, William H., 258n14 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 269n21 Social class: and Cole’s identity, 4, 22, 251n5; and Poe’s identity, 24, 111; and Quidor’s identity, 103, 104, 111; and racism, 109, 269n21; and urban life, 62, 63, 103, 234–35, 267nn4–5 Social relations: and Blythe’s art, 64, 66, 257n2, 260n35; and bohemians, 172; and Cole’s art, 3, 24– 25, 33; and commercialism, 33; disorder in, 21–25, 62; and Ryder’s art, 223, 233; and urbanization, 62, 66–67, 233–35, 259n26 Society of American Artists, 190, 191, 204, 223, 291n57 Soria, Regina, 173, 274n1, 275n17 Stallybrass, Peter, 243 St. Domingue (Haiti), slave revolt in, 84–88, 94, 263n27, 264n35 Steele, Valerie, 214 Stephens, Henry Louis, 114, 116, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 195–96, 197 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 236–37 Storey, Robert, 276n37 Story, William Wetmore, 78, 185 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 62, 118, 136, 137
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Strazdes, Diana, 52, 258–59n16 Stuart, Gilbert, 77 Stuyvesant, Peter, 34 Subjectivity: and Cole’s art, 5; and Rimmer’s art, 129, 157; and Vedder’s art, 277n46 Sublime: and Cole’s art, 13, 18, 33; and Cole’s writings, 7; and Fuseli’s art, 81; and Vedder’s art, 172–73 Sully, James, 228, 230 Sumner, Charles, 76, 78, 97 Supernatural: and Allston’s art, 84, 91, 99; and Cole’s art, 40; and folklore, 82–84, 89; and mass culture, 248; and psychological relations, 226, 287n12; and Quidor’s art, 101; and Vedder’s art, 171, 172 Surgical procedures: in Civil War, 194–96, 207–8; and Eakins’s art, 188–91, 196, 199, 202–7, 212, 215–16, 218–20, 279n4, 283n33; Gross’s practice of, 188–89, 196, 202–4, 207. See also Dissection; Vivisection Surratt, John, 129, 135 Swamp, xx, 72, 120, 121, 136, 137, 138, 140, 141, 272n16 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 129, 151 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 177 Taft, Lisa, 260n36 Taine, Hippolyte, 182 Taylor, Bayard, 18, 166–67, 169, 275nn16 Temperance campaign, 50, 54, 55, 103, 258n14 Theater, 50, 54, 183 Thomson, John Alexander, 38 Thorpe, T. B., 103, 104 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 33 The Token (periodical), 16 Trollope, Anthony, 64 Troyen, Carol, 271n5 Truettner, William H., 256n57 Turner, J. M. W., 288n19 Turner, Nat, 86 Uncanny, 148–49 Unconscious, 226–29, 231, 233. See also Repression
Universalism, 170 Urbanization, 62, 66–67, 233–35, 259n26 Urban relations: and Blythe’s art, 45, 46, 60, 62–64, 66–68, 70–72, 74, 257n2; and city sketch genre, 58, 60; and crime, 62, 63, 103; and electrification, 236; and fear, 62, 63; and gothic, 45, 74; and humor, 66–67; and hygiene, 234–35; and Ryder’s art, 223, 233, 243; and sensational exposé genre, 60, 62– 63, 70, 111; and slums, 233–35, 243; and social class, 62, 63, 103, 234–35, 267nn4–5 Vandenhoff, George, 183, 185 Vanity Fair (periodical), 114, 142, 144, 163, 164, 195 Vedder, Elihu: bohemian lifestyle of, 164, 168, 169, 172, 180, 187, 275nn16–17; childhood of, 159–62; compared to Eakins, 217; and drug use, 164, 166, 168–70, 171, 275n17; and encounters with mortality, 159–61, 172, 187; and family relations, 159–62, 170; and marriage to Carrie Rosekrans, 180–81; and relations with Charlotte Cushman, 183, 185; and relations with Kate Field, 179–81, 183; religious belief of, 170–71; and residence in New York, 163, 164, 170, 172, 179, 180; Soria’s biography of, 274n1, 275n17; and travels in Europe, 158, 162, 163, 174, 179, 180; visionary experiences of, 161–63, 166, 170, 172; and visits to Cuba, 159, 160–61, 169, 170, 179; writings of, 159, 170, 175, 179, 181 Vedder, Elihu, art of: and allegory, 276n32; based on The Arabian Nights, 163–64, 169, 276n35; based on Hawthorne’s writings, 173–74; based on Omar Khayyám’s writings, 173–74; and commercial relations, 180–81, 186–87; and fear of women, xx, 173, 179, 185, 187; and gothic, xix, xxii, 187; Medusa represented in, 173–75,
176–78, 177–79, 185, 186, 187, 276n37, 277n46, 279n64; and nature, 172–73, 187; and orientalism, 171; and psychological relations, 173; and racial fear, 276n32; and religion, 170–71; and subjectivity, 277n46; and sublime, 172–73; and supernatural, 171, 172; and violence, 177; and visionary experience, 158, 163, 170, 171, 172; by title: The Dead Alchemist, 160; The Dead Medusa, 177, 178; The Fisherman and the Genie, 163–64, 165, 168–70, 171; Head of Young Medusa, 279n64; The Hermit in the Desert, 172; Lair of the Sea Serpent, 158–59, 170, 172–73, 181, 279n66, plate 11; The Lost Mind, 172; Medusa (1867), 173, 174–75, 176; Medusa (1878), 185; Perseus and Medusa, 175, 177, 177; The Phorcydes, 186, 186–87; The Plague in Florence, 160; Prayer for Death in the Desert, 172; The Questioner of the Sphinx, 170–71, 171, 276n32; Rome, or the Art Idea, 187; The Sphinx of the Seashore, 173, 174, 185, 276n37, 279n64; The Young Medusa, 175, 176 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva, 208 Vesey, Denmark, 86 Violence: and Allston’s art, 89, 96; and Cole’s art, 3, 14–18; and Eakins’s art, 190, 199, 279n5; and French art, 205–6; and sensational exposé genre, 63; and slave revolts, 84–86; and Vedder’s art, 177 Vivisection, 196–97, 199–203, 205 Volney, Constantin François, 21, 253n33, 255n41 Wadsworth, Daniel, 4, 5, 13, 29 Walker, David, 94 Wallach, Alan, 33, 254n40 Walpole, Horace, xvii, 89
Ward, Samuel, 39 Warton, Thomas, 255n43 Wax museum. See Eden Musée, New York Weidman, Jeffrey, 130, 133, 138, 155, 271n8 Weir, J. Alden, 238 Welsh, John R., 97 West, Benjamin, 261n3 Whigs, 22 White, Allon, 243 White, Henry C., 231, 237, 239 Whitewashing, 118, 270n32 Whitman, Sarah Helen, 32–33 Whitman, Walt, xviii, 164 Whyte, Lancelot, 226 Wilderness: and Brown’s writings, 10, 13; and Cole’s art, 3, 8, 13–18, 43, 252n13; and Cole’s writings, 5, 7–8; and Cooper’s writings, 13 Williams, Linda, 284n46 Wilmerding, John, 279n4 Wolf, Bryan Jay, xix, 108, 252nn12–13, 268n12 Wolff, C. H., 45 Women: activism of, 179, 196, 205; fear of, xx, 173, 179, 182, 185, 187, 217; sexual liberation of, 182–83 Wood, Marcus, 120, 272 Wood, Thomas Waterman, 196 Woodhull, Victoria, 182–83 Wordsworth, William, 3, 264n43 Working class, 21, 54, 103, 104, 109, 113, 183, 223, 267nn4–5, 269n21 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 235, 241 Yankee Notions (periodical), 58, 66, 118 Young, Edward, 255n43 Young, Jeffrey Robert, 87 Young, Samuel, 63, 111 Yuan, David, 208 Zanger, Jules, 68
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