The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture 2019049325, 2019049326, 9780367175566, 9780367175573

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Plates
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Historicizing the Imagination
Whose Imagination?
Between Body and Mind
Summary and Methods
A Brief History of the Embodied Imagination
Wonders, Monsters, and Virtuality
Notes
Chapter 2 A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim
Virtuality and Immersion
Tracing the Capuchin Church
Vexed Pleasures
Moving Pictures
Excavating the Past
The Cultural Work of the Imagination
Notes
Chapter 3 Staying on the Surface
“A New Class of Pictures”
Weighing the Fancy Piece
Depth and Surface
“Getting Stuck in Matter”
The Shroud and the Veil
Incarnate Redemption
Notes
Chapter 4 Race-ing the Embodied Imagination
Wine-Bibbing and Authority
Luxury’s Other
The Darkness Within
Hunger and Desire in Palette’s Cabinet
Finding Othello
Notes
Chapter 5 Culturing the Embodied Imagination
Cultivating Taste
“Rather Ultra”
Playing in the Margins
Morbid Extravagance
Effacing Class
Nightmares
The Sublimated Body
Notes
Index

Citation preview

The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture

This book reveals a new history of the imagination told through its engagement with the body. Even as they denounced the imagination’s potential for inviting luxury, vice, and corruption, American audiences avidly consumed a transatlantic visual culture of touring paintings, dioramas, gift books, and theatrical performances that pictured a preindustrial—and largely imaginary—European past. By examining the visual, material, and rhetorical strategies artists like Washington Allston, Asher B. Durand, Thomas Cole, and others used to navigate this treacherous ground, Catherine Holochwost uncovers a hidden tension in antebellum aesthetics. The book will be of interest to scholars of art history, literary and cultural history, critical race studies, performance studies, and media studies. Catherine Holochwost is Assistant Professor of Art History at La Salle University, Philadelphia, USA. Cover credit: Washington Allston, Spanish Girl in Reverie, 1831, oil on canvas, 30 ´ 25 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Lyman G. Bloomingdale, 1901.

Routledge Research in Art History

Routledge Research in Art History is our home for the latest scholarship in the feld of art history. The series publishes research monographs and edited collections, covering areas including art history, theory, and visual culture. These high-level books focus on art and artists from around the world and from a multitude of time periods. By making these studies available to the worldwide academic community, the series aims to promote quality art history research. Ceramics and Modernity in Japan Edited by Meghen Jones and Louise Allison Cort Chinese-Islamic Works of Art, 1644–1912 A Study of Some Qing Dynasty Examples Emily Byrne Curtis Portuguese Artists in London Shaping Identities in Post-War Europe Leonor de Oliveira Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage Magda Dragu Mongol Court Dress, Identity Formation, and Global Exchange Eiren L. Shea The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture Catherine Holochwost Mural Painting in Britain 1630–1730 Experiencing Histories Lydia Hamlett Academies and Schools of Art in Latin America Edited by Oscar E. Vázquez For a full list of titles in this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeResearch-in-Art-History/book-series/RRAH

The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture

Catherine Holochwost

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Catherine Holochwost to be identifed as author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Holochwost, Catherine, author. Title: The Embodied Imagination in Antebellum American Art and Culture / Catherine Holochwost. Description: New York: Routledge, 2020. | Series: Routledge research in art history | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifers: LCCN 2019049325 (print) | LCCN 2019049326 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367175566 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367175573 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art and society—United States—History. | Material culture—United States—History. | Aesthetics, American—History. | Creation (Literary, artistic, etc.) Classifcation: LCC N72.S6 H653 2020 (print) | LCC N72.S6 (ebook) | DDC 709.73/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049325 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019049326 ISBN: 978-0-367-17556-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-17557-3 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of Figures List of Plates Acknowledgments

vii x xii

1

Historicizing the Imagination Whose Imagination? 3 Between Body and Mind 6 Summary and Methods 11 A Brief History of the Embodied Imagination 17 Wonders, Monsters, and Virtuality 21 Notes 29

1

2

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim Virtuality and Immersion 40 Tracing the Capuchin Church 45 Vexed Pleasures 49 Moving Pictures 54 Excavating the Past 60 The Cultural Work of the Imagination 63 Notes 67

39

3

Staying on the Surface “A New Class of Pictures” 75 Weighing the Fancy Piece 85 Depth and Surface 88 “Getting Stuck in Matter” 92 The Shroud and the Veil 95 Incarnate Redemption 100 Notes 102

74

vi

Contents

4

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination Wine-Bibbing and Authority 113 Luxury’s Other 115 The Darkness Within 121 Hunger and Desire in Palette’s Cabinet 125 Finding Othello 129 Notes 133

112

5

Culturing the Embodied Imagination Cultivating Taste 139 “Rather Ultra” 145 Playing in the Margins 149 Morbid Extravagance 161 Effacing Class 167 Nightmares 170 The Sublimated Body 173 Notes 177

138

Index

185

Figures

1.1 1.2 2.1

2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 2.8 2.9 3.1

3.2 3.3

Abraham Bosse, Title-page to Hobbes’s Leviathan (London: Andrew Cooke, 1651), etching, 9 3/5 in. × 6.25 in Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1538), woodcut, overall 12 9/16 × 8 7/16 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Felix M. Warburg, 1918 Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives, 1822, probably reworked 1823, oil on canvas, 86 7/8 × 130 5/8 in., Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund), Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington Detail, Samuel F. B. Morse, House of Representatives John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, 20 7/8 × 31 in., Trumbull Collection, 1832.3, Yale University Art Gallery David Roberts, Departure of the Israelites, 1829, oil on canvas, 51 3/16 × 72 1/8 in John Martin, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1820, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 × 47 1/2 in., Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of St. Peter’s, Rome, ca. 1756, oil on canvas, 64 11/16 × 88 in., Athenæum purchase, 1834, Boston Athenæum Benjamin W. Thayer, Cover of “Fairy Grotto and Fantoccini Waltz,” (Boston: Henry Prentiss, 1840), lithograph, Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University Painted cotton window shade, mid-19th c., 22 × 72 1/2 in., 26.63.16, Old Sturbridge Village Painted cotton window shade, mid-19th c., 22 1/8 × 78 in., 26.63.15, Old Sturbridge Village Jean-Baptiste Boudard, “Imagination,” Iconologie, tirée de divers auteurs: utile aux gens de lettres, aux poëtes, aux artistes, & généralement à tous les amateurs des beaux-arts (Parma: chez l’auteur, 1759), etching, digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program Charles Cromwell Ingham, The Flower Girl, 1846, oil on canvas, 36 × 28 3/8 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of William Church Osborn, 1902 Daniel Huntington, Mary Inman, 1844, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Dave Hennen Coddington, in memory of her husband, 1964

19 25

53 54 54 56 57 59 65 67 67

77 80 81

viii

Figures

3.4

Thomas Sully, The Student, 1839, oil on canvas, 23 1/2 × 19 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Francis T. Sully Darley, 1914 Samuel F. B. Morse, The Muse (Susan Walker Morse), ca. 1836–1837, oil on canvas, 73 3/4 × 57 5/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Herbert L. Pratt, 1945 Asher B. Durand, Il Pappagallo, ca. 1841, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 × 24 in., 1903.5, Gift of the Durand Family, New-York Historical Society Asher B. Durand, Ariadne, ca. 1831–1835, oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 19 3/8 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Samuel P. Avery, 1897 John Cheney after Daniel Huntington, Donna Isabella (or Florentine Girl), 1843, Engraving and etching on cream wove paper, 3 3/4 × 3 1/16 in., Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. John S. Phillips Collection Detail, John Cheney after Daniel Huntington, Donna Isabella [or Florentine Girl], 1843 Asher B. Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1834, engraving; ffth state of eight, 17 5/8 × 20 13/16 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1927 Detail, Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party, ca. 1821 Detail, Henry Sargent, The Tea Party, ca. 1824 Aaron Martinet, L’après-dinée des Anglais from Scenes Anglaises dessinees a Londres, par un francais prisonnier de guerre, 1814, handcolored etching, 9 3/4 × 13 in Detail, Charles Bird King, The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, 1830, oil and graphite on canvas, 35 1/8 × 29 1/2 in., Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Grenville L. Winthrop, Class of 1886 Asher B. Durand, Boy Chasing a Pig, 1836, oil on wood, 9 1/8 × 26 1/8 in., 1940.483, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, NewYork Historical Society Victor Prevost, Reed & Sturges Warehouses, 125–127 Front Street, Victor Prevost photograph collection, 1853–1857, 80195d_PrevostPrint_032, Prevost 32, Gelatin silver contact print made before 1906 and donated to the New-York Historical Society by Eugene Hoffman, the son of Samuel V. Hoffman, on February 2, 1943, New-York Historical Society Unknown, copy after Willem Kalf, Still Life with Chinese Sugarbowl, Nautilus Cup, Glasses, and Fruit, ca. 1675–1700, oil on canvas, 1858.15, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society Pot de crème with lid from Luman Reed’s dinner service, ca. 1832, glazed porcelain, overall: 4 1/4 × 3 × 2 1/2 in., 1992.5cd, Gift of John van Cortlandt Parker, Luman Reed’s great-great-great-grandson, NewYork Historical Society Detail, Asher B. Durand, The Pedler (The Pedlar Displaying His Wares), ca. 1836 George Whiting Flagg, Falstaff Playing King, ca. 1834, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 × 28 1/2 in., 1858.16, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society

3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8

3.9 3.10 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2

5.3

5.4

5.5 5.6

83 84 87 91

97 97 98 116 117 121 127 139

140

142

145 147 149

Figures 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11 5.12 5.13 5.14 5.15 5.16 5.17 5.18 5.19 5.20 5.21

Asher B. Durand, The Woodchopper, 1836, oil on wood, 29 5/8 × 11 5/16, Collection of Mrs. Wendy Wolff Asher B. Durand, Barn Builders, 1836, oil on wood, 20 3/4 × 14 3/4 × 1 1/4 in., 1991.2.1, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Sturges III, New-York Historical Society Asher B. Durand, Woman Milking a Cow, 1836, oil on wood, 7 3/4 × 11 1/2 × 1/2 in., 1959.118, Gift of Elinor M. Parker, New-York Historical Society Asher B. Durand, Woman Churning Butter, 1836, oil on wood, 18 5/6 × 12 3/16 in., Collection of Mrs. Jean Wolff Stevens Asher B. Durand, School Let Out, 1836, oil on wood, 20 15/16 × 14 13/16 × 1 1/8 in., 1940.482, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society Asher B. Durand, Man Reading at a Table, 1836, oil on wood, 29 1/4 × 11 in., 2006.13, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Wolff, New-York Historical Society Asher B. Durand, Haying Scene, 1836, oil on wood, 24 3/8 × 11 3/8 × 1/2 in., 1963.9, Bequest of Mrs. Andrew Chalmers Wilson, greatgrandaughter of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1858.2, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society, digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions Thomas Cole, The Titan’s Goblet, 1833, oil on canvas, 19 3/8 × 16 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Samuel P. Avery Jr., 1904 Asher B. Durand, Boys Playing Marbles, 1836, oil on wood, 27 × 21 1/2 × 1/2 in., 1940.484, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society Asher B. Durand, Blind Man’s Bluff, 1836, oil on wood, 1940.481, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society Samuel F. B. Morse, Scene from Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” n.d., graphite on paper, 5 1/8 × 6 in., Yale University Art Gallery Thomas Cole, Study for “Dream of Arcadia,” 1838, oil on wood, 8 3/4 × 14 1/2 in., 1903.9, Gift of the children of the artist, through John Durand, New-York Historical Society Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855, oil on canvas, 60 3/4 × 48 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges by his children, 1895 Daniel Huntington, Portrait of Asher Brown Durand, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 1/8 × 44 in., 1864.8, Courtesy Century Association, New York

ix 150 151 151 152 152 153 153 155 158 159 160 167 171 175 176

Plates

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

François-Marius Granet, The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, 1814–15, oil on canvas, 77 1/2 × 58 1/4 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of P. L. Everard, 1880 Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party, ca. 1821, oil on canvas, 61 5/8 × 49 3/4 in., Gift of Mrs. Horatio Appleton Lamb in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Sargent 19.13, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Henry Sargent, The Tea Party, ca. 1824, 64 3/8 × 52 3/8 in., oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Horatio Appleton Lamb in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Sargent 19.12, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Washington Allston, Beatrice, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 × 25 3/8 in., Anonymous gift, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Washington Allston, Spanish Girl in Reverie, 1831, oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Lyman G. Bloomingdale, 1901 Washington Allston, Rosalie, oil on canvas, 43 × 39 in., Courtesy of Historic New England. Gift of William Sumner Appleton, Mrs. R.H.F. Standen, Mrs. George F. Weld, and Gladys H. Winterbottom, 1941.1697 Thomas Sully, The Love Letter, WA 1902.3, 25 3/16 × 29 15/16 in., Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford Daniel Huntington, A Sibyl, 1839, oil on canvas, 30 1/2 × 25 in., 1863.9, Gift of the American-Art Union, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society Daniel Huntington, Italy, 1843, oil on canvas, 38 5/8 × 29 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum Purchase Charles Bird King, The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, 1830, oil and graphite on canvas, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Grenville L. Winthrop, Class of 1886, Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College Asher B. Durand, Peter Stuyvesant and the Trumpeter (Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant on learning the capture, by treachery, of Fort Casimir), 1835, oil on canvas, 24 1/4 × 30 1/4 in., 1858.28, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society

Plates 12

13 14

Asher B. Durand, The Pedler (The Pedlar Displaying His Wares), ca. 1836, oil on canvas, 24 × 34 1/2 in., 1858.26, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society Detail, Asher B. Durand, Boys Playing Marbles, 1836 Asher B. Durand, The Beeches, 1845, oil on canvas, 60 3/8 × 48 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Maria DeWitt Jesup, from the collection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup, 1914

xi

Acknowledgments

This book began as a dissertation at the University of Delaware when Alan Wallach projected Thomas Cole’s Study for the Dream of Arcadia (see Figure 5.21) in front of our graduate seminar in landscape painting and challenged us to make sense of it. In that room in Old College Hall and in our weekly trips back and forth to the Wilmington train station, Alan proved a dedicated teacher, challenging me to think more rigorously about theory, history, and the role of social class in the reception and production of American art. My greatest scholarly debt, of course, is to my graduate advisor, Wendy Bellion. I still recall the moment when she took in my disparate and wide-ranging ideas for a dissertation and told me, “What you’re really writing about is the imagination,” and went on to emphasize why the topic was timely and interesting. The idea that I was writing about the imagination was news to me at the time, but such incisive and humane comments are typical of Wendy’s ability to guide and shape projects with uncommon wit and wisdom. Sincere thanks are also owed to Bernie L. Herman, whose exhortations to think broadly across time and space were legendary in the University of Delaware’s Art History Department, and whose scholarly celebrations of all things material modeled complexity and clarity. Finally, thanks are due to my editor, Isabella Vitti, and to Katie Armstrong, both of whom shepherded this manuscript with care. This current book would not have been possible without funding to devote ample time to think, write, and learn from a community of scholars. My work has beneftted immeasurably from the year I spent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a Douglass Foundation Fellow. The freedom to pop into the Luce open storage to stare at a painting was a profound gift, as was the ability to exchange ideas and research leads with other fellows, particularly Melody Barnett-Deusner, who also toiled away in subterranean cubicles of the Watson Library. Met curators Kevin Avery, Thayer Tolles, and Carrie Rebora Barratt were also gracious in lending their expertise and wisdom as I shaped my project. I would also like to thank the Henry Luce Foundation and the American Council of Learned Studies for their support, as well the Art History Department at the University of Delaware for supporting my last year of dissertation writing with the Sewell C. Biggs Dissertation Writing Award. At the Winterthur Library and Museum, curator Anne Verplanck and librarian Helena Richardson guided me toward valuable resources during the month I spent as a Research Fellow. Susan Newberry at the Durand-Hedden House supplied historical photographs, information, and, ideas about Asher B. Durand’s home turf of Maplewood, New Jersey. Others, including librarians and other staff at the New-York Historical Society, the Library Company, the Fogg Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Getty

Acknowledgments

xiii

Research Institute, the Huntington Library and Museum, the Boston Athenaeum, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Brooklyn Museum have also been instrumental in providing access to and knowledge about fles, objects, and archives. Another year spent as the Patricia and Philip Frost Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum helped me to craft a book from a dissertation, and I am grateful to Amelia Goerlitz, Eleanor Harvey, and William Truettner for their generosity in discussing ideas, publishing, and life beyond graduate school. Discussions with my fellow fellows Susanneh Bieber, Emily Burns, Agathe Cabau, Katelyn Crawford, Miri Kim, Laura Igoe, Shana Klein, Abra Levenson, Nick Miller, Berit Potter, Elke Siebert, and Adam Thomas, were equally important in helping me to connect my research to broader trends in the feld; conversations with Greg Zinman in particular helped me see unexpected connections between my research and media studies. Jennifer Roberts provided invaluable feedback and enthusiasm as I revised my article on Asher B. Durand’s Ariadne during that year, as did Emily D. Shapiro. Later, Laura, Shana, and Sarah Beetham proved patient and perceptive readers of an early draft of my second chapter. Fellow University of Delaware alums and students Amy Torbert, Ashley Rye-Kopec, and Katie Wood Kirchoff also provided writing feedback—and occasionally writing therapy—at key moments of revising the dissertation into a book. Friends and colleagues in the feld, including LaTanya Autry, Emily Casey, Adrian Duran, Nika Elder, Kathy Foster, Ellery Foutch, Nikki Greene, Lynley Herbert, Laura Keim, Anna Marley, Leo Mazow, Erin Pauwels, and Katie Poole-Jones have also lent their intelligence, wit, and moral support at key times during the long process of crafting both dissertation and book. Most of this book in its current form was written while I was an assistant professor at La Salle University, and I have collected many debts there. I am grateful to the Provost’s Offce for providing two Faculty Research Grants and a one-semester Faculty Research Leave. Although our conversations necessarily dealt more often with pedagogy than with scholarship, I could not have asked for better or more supportive departmental colleagues than Siobhan Conaty, Susan M. Dixon, Chair of the Art Department, and Mey-Yen Moriuchi. Many other colleagues at La Salle have been generous in supplying their advice on writing, teaching, parenthood, and all the other things that vex and delight us daily. Particular thanks are due to Elizabeth Langemak, Maureen O’Connell, Bryan Narendorf, Claire Busse, Miranda Clark-Binder, and Vincent Kling for helping me make my way through matters both mundane and sublime, and to Jamie Jesson and Lyman Stebbins for their feedback on an early chapter draft. I am also indebted to all in the art history, museum, and university community who lent their support during our campaign to preserve the La Salle University Art Museum in 2018. Our efforts may not have prevented the decision to deaccession 46 works in the permanent collection, but the commitment and passion of those who joined us in our opposition reaffrmed the wisdom of “ars longa, vita brevis.” Finally, I have been extraordinarily blessed by the support of my family. Steve, my brilliant and steadfast husband to whom this book is dedicated, has supported me through 18 years and 13 moves, through having a baby during graduate school, and having twins on the tenure track. While I wrote this book, he made dinners, soothed clients, published papers, and diapered babies. None of my professional or academic success would have been possible without his wise counsel, good humor, or dedicated co-parenting. In addition, my mother, Loree Reed, taught me about taste and modeled

xiv

Acknowledgments

how to be passionate about a career while loving one’s children dearly. My father, Walter Reed, who is a Romanticist and a Bakhtin scholar himself, warned me not to go into academia, but has read my drafts, listened to my ideas, and cheered my successes nevertheless. My sister, Melissa Reed, has bolstered my sanity at every turn. My mother- and father-in-law, Anita and John Holochwost, have unstintingly provided help of all kinds, and more importantly, have accepted me as if I were their own daughter. Last, but certainly not least, I thank my three imaginative, smart, and kind sons, Jonas, Miles, and Ian for giving me so many happy reasons to put the laptop away.

1

Historicizing the Imagination

In 1832, the Boston artist Alvan Fisher wrote to his friend, the painter and engraver Asher B. Durand. There was some news to report—Fisher had recently painted a portrait of the phrenologist Gaspar Spurzheim that he wanted Durand to see, and he relayed some praise of Durand’s portrait of George Washington. The artist was given more to refection than gossip, however; as he wrote, “Many faults, or foibles I know I have, more probably that I do not know and probably I am the happier for that ignorance.” One fault rose above all the others, and that was his “rambling, speculating, theorizing, rattling” imagination. How much better it would be to switch places with the less imaginative Durand! “I feel, I know, that I should be the gainer by the advantage of your chaste taste and improved judgement [sic],” Fisher asserted. Instead, the artist wrote, he was stuck with an imagination that was “like an unbroken colt” or an “unruly vagrant that so much posseses [sic] my mind.” This sounds very bad indeed, but Fisher inexplicably followed it with an appreciation of sorts. “[Y]et why do I rail at this power of imagination? I live by it and [am] made happy by it—tho’ it do lead me to the brink of folly.” Perhaps sensing that he had said too much, Fisher then withdrew entirely from the subject, writing a terse “but enough of ego” before moving on to supplying more desultory news from Boston.1 There is a good deal in this brief exchange that is puzzling. The idea that the imagination had to be carefully monitored is revealed in both the metaphors Fisher chose (an “unbroken colt” and a “vagrant”) as well as the rhetorical shape of the sentences themselves, which are littered with changes in direction (“yet,” “tho’,” and “but”), as if navigating some hidden threat. What lies beneath? And why would an artist, of all people, worry about having too much imagination? For many today, imagination is a pleasant faculty that can facilitate delightful shifts from humdrum, everyday life to the South Seas or the moon, something that helps tell stories from the perspective of an insect or an anthropomorphized dog. Contemporary critics often praise novels or flms as tours de force of the imagination, and, although too much whimsy can become tiresome or confusing, it is seldom thought of as dangerous. In the late eighteenth into the nineteenth century, however, the imagination was regarded as a tool of despots and tyrants, capable of encouraging “the vitious gratifcation of grosser appetites,” as the refned statesman Gulian Verplanck warned in an address to the American Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824. One would rarely read a description of the imagination in the nineteenth century without encountering some kind of caveat about its inherent dangers and its need to be regulated. At the same time, however, it was also an astonishingly fundamental term for Anglo-American aesthetic theory. The Connecticut painter Samuel F. B. Morse declared that pleasing

2

Historicizing the Imagination

the imagination was the “central aim” of the fne arts, a claim he placed in the opening section of the frst of four lectures on art theory that he delivered for the New York Athenaeum in 1826. Not only were these lectures one of the most serious attempts at a comprehensive theory of the fne arts in antebellum America, Morse continued to use these lectures as a teaching tool for his students.2 Making a statement like this would have been thoroughly uncontroversial, however, and echoed the great British theorist and painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who had stated in similarly unambiguous terms, “The great end of all those arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling.”3 Imagination and sensibility formed the “fundamental ground, common to all the arts” that Reynolds thought worthy of the name. Rather than being “false and delusive,” he instead called the imagination “the residence of truth,” and warned that merely imitative and mechanical mimesis was nothing without it.4 We might wish to dismiss these concerns as elitist and esoteric, but in the early national period, aesthetics was central to public discourse. People in this era “[spoke] the philosophical language of the imagination fuently and vociferously,” as the literary scholar Edward Cahill has argued in his study Liberty of the Imagination. The imagination and its adjuncts—beauty, sublimity, genius, pleasure, taste, and more— were celebrated, dissected, and analyzed in newspapers, periodicals, commonplace books, sermons, and, of course, face-to-face conversation. These terms spring from aesthetics, a mode of knowledge that Cahill succinctly defnes as a “diverse constellation of concepts similarly concerned with discovering truth in pleasure, emotion, and non-rational modes of knowledge.” As Catherine Kelly has shown, exercises in aesthetic discernment like penmanship and dancing not only structured much of the curriculum of early national academies, they also rendered these individuals socially visible by endowing them with a form of “politicized virtue.” These educational institutions were private and their reach was somewhat limited, but even so, Kelly has shown that ordinary men and women, too, were drawn into their culture of learning.5 Furthermore, the philosophy underpinning this culture of learning was remarkably cohesive. Beginning at the College of Philadelphia in 1755 and spreading to conservative schools like Yale as well as the more liberal and Unitarian Harvard soon after, the Scottish commonsense school supplied the philosophical curriculum for generations well into the nineteenth century. This infuence extended to “small liberal arts colleges and the state colleges, too,” as well as to smaller, privately-run academies.6 Fisher’s vivid metaphors describing his imagination in his letter to Durand compels us to acknowledge, however, that the imagination, the pivot around which this aesthetic discourse turned, was built upon shaky ground. This book is about how artists and audiences navigated these treacherous conditions and asks what these negotiations might have looked like in visual, material, and rhetorical terms. Although the word “imagination” might bring to mind weird and wonderful Gothic outsiders like John Quidor and David Gilmour Blythe, this study is instead concerned with standard-bearers who sought to uphold the traditions of what was variously called the beau ideal in France and the Grand Manner in Britain. It therefore examines works by artists who were academically trained or who aspired to an academic style, including Henry Sargent, Thomas Sully, Washington Allston, Samuel F. B. Morse, Charles Bird King, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Daniel Huntington, as well as the Europeans like François-Marius Granet and Thomas Gainsborough whom they emulated. Just as the French and British had done before them, these American artists sought to create

Historicizing the Imagination

3

works of art in an imaginative and ideal cast, thereby building credibility and acclaim for a national school. Rather than taking the sunny declarations of boosters of the arts in America at face value, analyzing the rhetoric of the imagination asks us to see how conficted and vexed their project was from the start.

Whose Imagination? For many, the combination of “imagination” and “antebellum American art” will seem like a contradiction in terms. “Little has been written about the rise of the imagination in American art,” the esteemed Americanist Wayne Craven wrote in a footnote to an essay published in 2001. Craven noted that “[o]ne of the few scholars to consider this important matter” was Elizabeth Johns on Washington Allston’s theory of the imagination, but found little else besides two other Allston scholars.7 Lest one think that this is only an American art history problem, a similar pattern has held in American literary studies. In 2008, K. P. van Anglen admitted in another footnote, “Relatively little has been written on the history of the imagination in New England per se.”8 As recently as 2016, Christopher Castiglia agreed. After calling for increased attention to imagination’s revolutionary potentials, he allowed that, “As things stand … literature as an enactment of imaginative world making has little traction in early American literary studies, easily dismissed in favor of weightier critiques.”9 This scholarly lacuna is due in no small part to the fact that many infuential scholars either explicitly stated that Americans were not concerned with the imagination, or implicitly accomplished the same goal by ignoring it. Terence Martin, in his 1961 book The Instructed Vision, defnitively stated that Americans had a widespread “fear of imaginative experience.”10 And the literary scholar James Engell whose synthesis of imagination’s post-Enlightenment history has served as an indispensable resource, nevertheless claimed that, “The great split between man and nature, the dualism that scarred so much European thought, simply was not a factor in America before 1820 or 1830, and so the imagination was not required to stitch it up.”11 Likewise, the art historian Barbara Novak argued that “pure imaginary romanticism was rare in America,” arguing that “romanticism was more likely to appear … in the super-real techniques” that were “appropriated” by twentieth-century surrealists.12 In Novak’s later book on nineteenth-century American landscape art, the term “imagination” surfaces from time to time, but it is often synonymous with the idea of falsity. We are told that “the stress on poetic vision found in the Germans and in Ruskin leads to Turner’s imagination rather than to Constable’s eye.” Elsewhere, the idea of the artist’s imagination “tamper[ing] with God’s nature” is likened to the blasphemy of “[c] ivilization’s axe.”13 Even books that seemed to promise dedicated analysis of the topic like Ellwood Parry’s 1988 monograph Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination did not critically examine the specifc meanings that attached themselves to the imagination, perhaps because the benefts of doing so were unclear.14 Indeed, the Romantic imagination can seem like shapeless pabulum, everywhere and nowhere at once, and corresponding to a set of dated concerns that historians of the modern and contemporary periods have shuffed off. As W. J. T. Mitchell has noted of this inclination, “cultural critics and historians [tend] to refer unrefectively to tendencies such as emotionalism, sentimentality, and idealism as ‘merely’ romantic phenomena that have been superseded by tough-minded modernism or even more

4

Historicizing the Imagination

wised-up postmodernism.”15 In contrast, the supercharged theories of the imagination put forth in the twentieth century could hardly be more signifcant, and, although I lack the space here to unpack them in any detail, I can at least gesture at their importance. Jacques Lacan, for instance, dubbed the imaginary one of the three symbolic orders that helped structure the psyche, identifying it with his famous “mirror stage” by which infants established a concept of idealized selfhood. The intricacies of the Lacanian imaginary continue to guide analyses in a range of felds. The infuential concept of the “social imaginary” was developed by the philosophers Cornelius Castoriadis and Paul Ricoeur in the mid-1970s, and, by the 1980s, the imagination was made central to the study of nationalisms by the political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson’s now-canonical Imagined Communities. Anderson’s text later served as one of the theoretical foundations for the “modern social imaginaries,” of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, one of the most infuential philosophers of modernity living today. Largely as a result of Ricoeur, Anderson, and, most of all, Taylor, there are more imaginaries and imaginations today than one could possibly count. There is a cultural imagination, a technical imagination, a religious imagination, a literary imagination, and a bioregional imagination. Subgroups within these imaginations also have their own imaginations, parceled out by historical period, religious or ethnic identity, or political affliation. As the literary historian Sean Silver has helpfully pointed out, however, “imaginary” and “imagination” have become “short-hand” for “coordinating large groups and large historical movements … installing a (perhaps appropriately) weak theoretical center at the very heart of the method that seeks to read those conditions.”16 The many recent books that use the term “historical imagination,” Silver has emphasized, “generally mean the term in no particularly historical sense at all, but rather as a heuristically useful way of addressing large, sometimes somewhat woozily apprehended … shared ideas and cultural conditions.”17 More to the point, most of these imaginations would scarcely be recognizable to Fisher, Durand, or their mid-nineteenth century counterparts, and much of this book is an implicit argument that how we historicize the imagination as a specifc, aesthetic term matters. I contend that imagination, like vision, is neither transcendent nor ahistorical, but is rather conditioned by overlapping and sometimes contradictory ideas and epistemologies, political economies, religious traditions, media, works of art and literature, and social and economic forces.18 Analyzing the imagination means going beyond the familiar Foucauldian pairing of power/knowledge with its attendant analysis of how individuals become trapped within a disciplinary social matrix, and rather requires an awareness of its liberatory potential. Thus, I explore how imagination could convey socio-political status or racial purity, but I am also interested in how it licensed positive affective states like wonder, pleasure, desire, and astonishment. Admittedly, he imagination in antebellum American contexts might not receive the fullest scholarly attentions because the philosophers who devoted themselves to its discussion and whom American readers knew best, the Common Sense school, have been seen as narrow, conservative, and excessively pious, at odds with a Coleridgean or more generally European imagination that was freer, more expressive, and transcendent. Thus, David Miller, in a deeply insightful article on Washington Allston nevertheless claimed singularity for the painter that separated him from Americans’ “profound suspicion of any visual experience which was unmediated by explicit moral, religious,

Historicizing the Imagination

5

social, and literary frames of reference.” Interarts analogies in the United States, as opposed to Europe, were supposedly more “traditional,” “supporting not an expressive but a mimetic form of representation, not a transcendental but an empirical epistemology.”19 In a similar vein, Angela Miller has argued that “the emergence of native romanticism was from the beginning inseparable from the search for national meaning,” connecting the imagination’s subjectivity-conferring power to a more dutiful sense of nationalism.20 This is not to say that imagination has been a moribund topic in American art, and there are a number of brilliant studies that have furthered my own, particularly Sarah Burns’ Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America, Alexander Nemerov’s The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 and Bryan Jay Wolf’s Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth Century American Art and Literature.21 My approach differs from these books, however, in that my primary concern is not to better understand the Gothic mode as a counter-narrative in American art. Rather, I am interested in how the standard-bearers and institution-builders of American art dealt with imagination’s confounding paradoxes, and how American viewers more broadly were both attracted to and repulsed by its antinomies. Dismissing Anglophone, Common Sense philosophy as hidebound rests upon the received wisdom that the imagination achieved transcendent complexity only within a Kantian aesthetic. This has hampered investigation into those contexts where German Idealism was not widely read, such as the United States where the infuence of the Common Sense school lasted at least through the Civil War, but it also affects other arenas like French eighteenth-century art “Only Kant’s brilliant formulation of the transcendental imagination towards the end of the century put an end to this tension by giving primacy to the imagination,” art historian Melissa Percival has written of this stereotype in her study of Fragonard’s fgures de fantaisie, summing up the received wisdom that has cast imagination as a purely Kantian invention.”22 The neo-Kantian aesthetic has continued to reign supreme, however, not for Fragonard or for artists like Morse or Durand, but rather for infuential twentieth-century scholars of British Romanticism. As Cairns Craig has argued,“Aligning Wordsworth and Coleridge with Kant, Schelling, and Hegel has allowed Anglo-American critics—-often themselves working in a Kantian-derived aesthetic—to see in the English Romantics a leap into a new world beyond the presuppositions of eighteenth-century British empiricism.” Bucking decades of scholarship on the Romantic imagination, he has criticized the reductivism that has positioned the Common Sense school as the “dead weight” from which poets like Coleridge and William Wordsworth had to free themselves “before they could take fight on the wings of the Kantian transcendental.”23 Although unfairly maligned as discussed above, scholars like Craig, Stephen Boulter, and others have recently contested the long-held opinion that Common Sense philosophy was retardataire.24 Reading those philosophers, one fnds language that is startlingly free of obscurantism, as well as an empirical commitment to logic and atomistic, phenomenological experience. And whereas earlier associationist philosophers did try to establish some objective standard of taste, later writers like Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart emphasized that beauty and aesthetic value resided in the viewer (or imaginer) rather than the object itself. Feelings, of both of the affective and corporeal varieties, are revealed to matter more than dogma. The open-ended, sometimes even arbitrary nature of this search for truth was due to the principle of

6

Historicizing the Imagination

association, a process by which sights, ideas, affective states, and other infuences could become bound together, requiring, Alison wrote, “no labour of thought, or habits of attention.” These trains arose “spontaneously,” and they “lead [the mind] almost insensibly along, in a kind of bewitching reverie, through all its store of pleasing or interesting conceptions.”25 This surprisingly relativist, psychological approach was in large part a response to the titanic infuence of the Common Sense school’s predecessor, David Hume, who saw selfhood as fractured, situational, and decentered, “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual fux and movement.”26 Hume’s ideas about selfhood, or rather its lack thereof, allowed for a cheerful skepticism that saw reality itself as contingent rather than fxed. Crucially for my purposes, as well as for Hume’s, imagination was at the center of it all. We were all, he argued, under “the empire of imagination,” a statement that, as the philosopher Stephen Buckle has explained, “effectively reduce[d] our rational powers to just one more consequence of bodily processes.”27 Psychologist and Hume scholar Alison Gopnik has explained the rather stunning ramifcations of this conclusion: Ultimately, the metaphysical foundations don’t matter. Experience is enough all by itself. What do you lose when you give up God or ‘reality’ or even ‘I’? The moon is still just as bright; you can still predict that a falling glass will break … Go back to your backgammon game after your skeptical crisis, Hume wrote, and it will be exactly the same game.28 Although the idea of multiple selves and realities might more readily be identifed with modernist aesthetics, Hume’s shot across the bow fully registered in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Hume scholars William Edward Morris and Charlotte R. Brown observe, “Kant reported that Hume’s work woke him from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’ and Jeremy Bentham remarked that reading Hume ‘caused the scales to fall’ from his eyes. Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central infuence on the theory of evolution.”29 Even well into the twentieth century, the aftershocks of Hume’s provocations were still being felt. There is evidence that Hume was a signifcant source for William James and Henri Bergson, and in the twentieth century, Hume’s ideas were the subject of Gilles Deleuze’s frst book, Empiricism and Subjectivity.30

Between Body and Mind If philosophy set the stage for the realization that consciousness was not as supremely rational as had once been thought, thereby making more room for an imagination that functioned of its own accord, new discoveries in the expanding feld of physiology and psychology helped to prove the idea that it was empirically possible for a physical body that included the mind to function independently of the will. Long before Sigmund Freud, there was a rich vein of early nineteenth-century research that demonstrated a neurobiological unconscious which is to say, one that was rooted in the body.31 And in fact, a number of intellectuals (including Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Leibniz, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling) were interested in the ways in which processes like memory, cognition, and physical movement occurred seemingly without mental awareness. The feld was further expanded in the 1830s when a group of British physicians

Historicizing the Imagination

7

“concluded that there must be ‘mental latency’ ([William] Hamilton’s term, drawing on Leibniz), ‘unconscious cerebration’ ([William] Carpenter’s term), or a ‘refex action of the brain’ ([Thomas] Laycock’s term).”32 These “biological, organicist” ideas about the physiological unconscious were also put forth by researchers like Erasmus Darwin, Charles Bell, F. J. Gall, Pierre-Jean-George Cabanis, and Luigi Galvani, and they pervaded literary, scientifc, and artistic discourses in the early nineteenth century, not only in Europe, but in the United States, as well.33 As a result, early nineteenth-century Americans began to speak of the mind not as a unitary, physical reality, an endless and inert storehouse or bank, but rather as a virtualized network of impressions and reactions. Nor did they see this unconscious as one exclusively colonized by horror as in the Freudian sense, but rather treated it as an object of curiosity and pleasant amazement. In “An Essay on the Immateriality of Mind” published in 1823, for instance, one Henry T. Farmer asked plainly, “If mind is material, why should it be confned to the human body … why should it not be evident in a stone, active in a whirlwind, and apparent in the vegetable kingdom?” The possibility that the mind existed outside the confnes of the body was not cause for terror, but was rather an opportunity for religious consolation. For Farmer, it was not heretical to think that the mind might be material—in other words, that the mind might be fully housed within the body and subject to the laws of the physical world. Indeed, he postulated that this might lead to a new beginning, “a total escape from … dross” in which the “most beautiful power, imagination” would be fully realized in “dreams of delight and extacy.”34 Of course, the imagination could result in grave and immoral error, and this duality is key to my analysis, for Common Sense school philosophers attempted to hold the propulsive power of the imagination in check. This makes it more, rather than less interesting as a topic since failed attempts at control often yield fascinating contradictions, denials, and elisions. After all, many Victorian hygiene manuals strictly prohibited bawdiness and sexual excess, but that has not stopped scholars from pointing out that this repression led to the invention of legal and scientifc discourses that made sex visible, and that these silences structured Victorian culture in complex and surprising ways.35 Similarly, efforts at restraining the imagination were never entirely successful, and philosophers after Alexander Gerard’s Essay on Taste (1774) inadvertently gave the imagination more power by insisting that it had to be constantly attended by judgment.36 Called to be exceedingly vigilant against the imagination’s wiles, AngloAmerican artists and theorists in the late eighteenth- into the mid-nineteenth century actually elevated it as a dynamic, vital, and organic force. There are abundant examples of this antithetical rhetoric around imagination in American aesthetic treatises that refect Common Sense inconsistencies on the subject. The poet William Cullen Bryant, for example, who would later become a leading fgure in American literature and culture, made imagination second only to emotion in his Lectures on Poetry delivered in 1826. The idea that this pivotal faculty possessed an unsettling agency shaped his remarks, as when he asserted that imagination was a “restless faculty” that was “the most active and the least susceptible of fatigue of all the faculties of the human mind.” The consequences of this masterless activity could be ruinous. “There are exercises of the imagination, it must be confessed, of too gross and sordid a nature to be comprised within the confnes of any divine art,” Bryant had reluctantly admitted, “revellings of the fancy amid the images of base appetites and petty and ridiculous passions.” Therefore, he concluded, “We cannot eradicate the

8

Historicizing the Imagination

imagination, but we may cultivate and regulate it; we cannot keep it from continual action, but we can give it a salutary direction.”37 Morse drew similar conclusions. In the second of a four-lecture theory on art that he also delivered in 1826 for the New York Atheneum, the painter warned that imagination was “restless,” capable of both delight and terror. “[I]t is perpetually on the wing collecting from the four corners of the earth its materials to combine in picturing scenes of bliss or misery, it suffers itself not long to be confned by attention without fatigue.”38 Imagination’s mobility was not entirely negative, however, in that its fights allowed the artist to make richly combinatory loops and turns through various different ideas and images, choosing only the best ones in the process. Besides, there was no dispensing with the imagination if one wanted to be an artist, for, wrote Morse, “it is he alone who aims in the practice of [the Fine Arts] to please the imagination, who is truly entitled to the name of an Artist.” The imagination’s harum-scarum capabilities were related more broadly to a principle Morse called “connexion” which helped to relate different disciplines in the arts and sciences, and which “pervade[d] the Universe.” As if looking for some small degree of purchase in this roiling admixture, however, he asked, not entirely rhetorically, “Where is the line that severs the connection between beasts and birds, while the bat still holds his midway parley between them?”39 It was the body, or more precisely, the mingling of the body with the immaterial mind or spirit that Bryant, Morse, and their British peers found so potentially dangerous, but this mingling was paradoxically what made the imagination so indispensable. The process by which this worked was referred to as association, as discussed above. Trains of association collected inner states (experiences, sensations, emotions, and memories) and mixed them with exterior images and ideas, blurring the lines of the dualistic moral order that Common Sense philosophers believed patterned the universe itself. Indeed, to truly gain the full power of the imagination, one had to surrender control over the rational mind to the body and the outside, material world—at least to some degree—a process compared to fevers, dreams, and other involuntary bodily phenomena. Imagination therefore had a sense of dialectical “in-between-ness” that swung from the abstract to the embodied, but it was the feshly body and its “lower” senses of taste, smell, and touch that most enlivened this process, and which most needled nineteenth-century Americans whose sense of moral and political virtue made this potential for individual, solitary pleasure suspect. At this point, it might be helpful to address how the imagination differs from vision. Imagination was understood as visual—after all, the word root for imagine comes from the Latin imago or image. By the early nineteenth century, however, sight alone was thought an insuffcient stimulus to the imagination. Addison had set the stage for this conclusion by claiming that the non-visual senses enhanced imagination’s force in the mind itself, even if their effects were not experienced in literal fact. [I]f there arises a fragrancy of smells or perfumes, they heighten the pleasures of the imagination, and make even the colours and verdure of the landscape appear more agreeable, for the ideas of both senses recommend each other, and are pleasanter together than when they enter the mind separately.40 Addison still located the imagination primarily in the eye, but by the time that Dugald Stewart was writing at the century’s end, the latter claimed that “this limitation of the province of Imagination to one particular class of our perceptions is altogether

Historicizing the Imagination

9

arbitrary,” and argued that it should be “as unlimited as the sphere of human enjoyment and of human thought.”41 Attempting to cross-fertilize vision with other sensory experiences makes sense. To imagine something means to bring it into mind, incorporating an object like a rhinoceros or a landscape, for example, into one’s invisible, mental interior. This “something” is just as likely to be a presence defned by absence, “something not real or not present to the senses,” as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it since that rhinoceros or landscape may well be far away when we dream of them.42 This paradox was also discussed in terms of presence and absence in the nineteenth century. An often-used encyclopedia entry drew on the words of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Joseph Glanvill: “Our simple apprehension of corporeal objects, if present, is sense; if absent, imagination.”43 Absence did not result in sensory dulling, but rather sent the imagination into overdrive, making the absent seem even more present. One could imagine touching a rhinoceros’ leathery hide, for instance, or smelling a landscape’s fresh-mown grass. These tactile, olfactory, or even, on occasion, gustatory experiences made the imagination more effective than just vision alone. The emphasis on both visible surface and invisible depth in these defnitions refects imagination’s exasperating tendency to combine the two, a problem that is not just conceptual but also semantic. From the publication of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan in 1651, imagination has been split into two different, unequal, yet complementary faculties. One was fancy (or “fant’sy”), a word derived from the Greek phantasia which was supposed to be inferior to imagination (imaginatio). In contrast to the imagination’s muscular solidity, fancy suggested a freer, though more superfcial play of creativity. This supposedly orderly division rapidly became confused and confusing, however, and even Hobbes mixed the two. After taking great care to differentiate fancy from the imagination, the terms appear completely interchangeable: “This decaying sense … I mean fancy itself, we call imagination.”44 Over a century later, the situation was no better. Thomas Reid wrote that imagination was once called the fancy, but, he lamented, “If the old name were to be laid aside, it were to be wished that it had got a name less ambiguous than that of imagination, a name which had two or three meanings besides.”45 The notion of fancy, as both an adjective and a noun, was also plagued by an excess of meanings. Calling something “fancy” (often with a capital “F”) in early national America could simply imply that it was novel, colorful, or, as Sumpter T. Priddy III put it, “exuberant.” When George Washington urged saving the seed of a “Fancy grass,” for instance, he meant one that was striped.46 Fanciness could also imply a kind of seduction that went well beyond everyday consumerism. Around 1830, a fancywoman was a mistress, a fancy-house was a brothel, and a fancy-man was a pimp. Even today, to “fancy” someone is to desire them sexually. The superfciality and tawdriness of Fancy was supposed to be distinct from “the fancy,” which—often spelled with a small f—was thought to represent the associative power of collecting experiences, but not arranging them.47 As Francis Bowen, professor of moral and intellectual philosophy at Harvard University, wrote in 1855, It is the power of fancy which supplies the poet with metaphorical language, and with all the analogies which are the foundation of his illusions; but it is the power of imagination that creates the complex scenes he describes, and the fctitious characters he delineates.48

10 Historicizing the Imagination In practice, however, even the small “f” fancy and the capital “F” fancy were substituted for one another frequently, blurring any distinctions that were supposed to keep their various meanings from bleeding into one another.49 It is easy to sympathize with Joseph Addison, who complained in the early eighteenth century, “There are few words in the English language which are employed in a more loose and uncircumscribed sense than those of the fancy and the imagination.”50 Such a bewildering mixture of interiority with externality, even at the level of language, refects the complex epistemological work that the imagination performed. It placed one’s self at the center of a vast, inner universe not just because it permitted experiences of beauty and all its aesthetic kin, but also because it conferred herculean powers of mobility. The inner workings of the imagination often necessitated a diachronic and bilocational split; one’s sight might linger on a surface, sparking a memory or some other disparate association that would suddenly propel the viewer into an entirely different historical era, location, or even, in some cases, planet. Writing of this power in 1820, Thomas Brown, a student of the infuential philosopher Dugald Stewart, thus explained, “I wish to rise to the planet Saturn, at the distance of three hundred millions of leagues from the earth. I am there.” Moreover, Brown emphasized, there were there no limits on imagination’s speed, and its ability to “mingle at pleasure” with external things, and to commune with “the affections of the soul” were also beyond reckoning.51 This independence was paradoxically linked to a vivid experience of somatic presence and even entrapment which viewers claimed they were powerless to resist.52 Exploring these paradoxical states of power and captivity, sin and virtue helped establish these viewers as subjects, in the fesh and answerable only to themselves. Imagination was not solely an individual faculty, however, but rather had the potential to contribute to the collective good. If cultured with reason and restrained by moral virtue, it could help develop a republican sense of ethics precisely because, from a very early point in the eighteenth century, imagination was understood as indispensable to sympathy, the mechanism by which the pain and suffering of one human being was made legible to another.53 James Arbuckle, the little-known Irish poet and critic, seems to have made this connection frst in 1722 in his Hibernicus’s Letters, but was followed by other esteemed thinkers, notably Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756) and Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).54 Perhaps these extensive associations with sympathy and moral conduct were why, despite common characterizations of Americans as too republican or pragmatic for the imagination, its benefts for the nation formed a topic of frequent discussion in periodicals during the frst half of the nineteenth century. Since these sentiments have not been widely quoted before, it is worth reviewing a representative sample of them at some length, although this is only scratching the surface of a rhetoric that was pervasive in the antebellum era. One 1841 essayist, for example, contended that imagination would make the poor cleaner, “more cheerful,” and better able to resist “selfsh ambition.” It would make the speeches of lawyers and ministers “simpler, and more impressive.” The world itself “would be purer and holier,” and “the natural warfare of trade, the competition of business, would be merged in an universal harmony and brotherly love,” with the fnal result that “body social would then be in its most perfect state.”55 Seen in a certain light, exerting manful and moral control over the imagination to produce taste and refnement could actually be a selfess act of patriotism.

Historicizing the Imagination

11

Even when critics allowed that indulging the imagination could lead to political decline, however, its civilizationist import meant that they could not discount it entirely. An 1829 critic for The Southern Review, for example, scoffed that if excellence in the fne arts really foreshadowed political decline—“a ‘gilded halo hovering round decay’”—then perhaps Americans, he suggested sarcastically, should also “submit to retrenchments and tariffs, and all the ultra maxims of thrift and parsimony.” The writer continued, Let us convert our rising academies and exhibition halls into factories and lumber rooms, let us renounce and abjure forever all fealty to genius and taste—let us envelope ourselves in the smoke of steam-engines, and be content that our only progress should be upon our own canals and railroads. Besides, he conjectured that Americans might be “exempted” from the usual political declension that imagination spurred since the United States had not, he concluded, engaged in “foreign conquest” or compromised its morals by taking “the spoils of vanquished nations.” Perhaps his confdence was also borne of a scornful disregard for a threat that never seemed to materialize. Surveying the effects of the fne arts on Great Britain, even amid “her wasteful expenditure and riotous excesses, her wars of ambition and her schemes of monopoly, her almost undisputed dominion of the seas,” the critic found all of the dreaded effects of luxury on “virtues, public and private” wholly lacking. He concluded, “The truth is, that the schoolboy theme about luxury, and its effects in enervating and corrupting nations is as inapplicable to the condition of modern society as it is trite and hackneyed.”56 Indeed, the British served as the primary model for the ways in which taste and imagination could both build and destroy an empire. When managed effectively, the imagination was a spur to imperial glory. “‘Arms and Arts!’ could be an effective rallying cry for artists and statesmen alike,” Holger Hoock has written in his study of culture in Britain’s imperial zenith.57 And, as John Brewer’s exhaustive Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century showed, the imagination was thought to invigorate cultural productions in the public sphere from the coffee house to the printing house, the theater to the picture gallery, those crowning glories of civilization itself. But, Brewer observed, “every apology for the arts contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction.”58 Too much pleasure was a sign of an unregulated imagination which encouraged wantonness and debauchery and could rot a nation’s moral fber. Such ideas had their roots in classical republicanism, a doctrine which was tantamount to orthodoxy in early national America.59 Lacking imagination made one barbarous, however, so it was clearly a diffcult balance to strike.

Summary and Methods The chapters of this book address objects and events in the abbreviated but consequential period of ca. 1820–1850, and are arranged in roughly chronological, albeit overlapping, order. Here, I summarize their major points and the methods used to arrive at them. Chapter 2, “‘A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim’” examines the surprisingly broad reach of a genre called the “perspective painting” during the 1820s and 1830s. The taste for these pictures was inaugurated by the arrival of François-Marius

12

Historicizing the Imagination

Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome in Boston in the winter of 1819, and it was followed by illusionistic paintings and dioramas of exotic architectural settings that fourished for over two decades. I argue that this profusion of copies and copies made after copies was part of a transatlantic and intermedial mass culture usually associated with the fâneur’s virtual, mobile gaze, as he or she traveled “through an imaginary elsewhere and an imaginary elsewhen,” in the words of media studies scholar Anne Friedberg. While Friedberg and other scholars of modernity have this gaze lingering on “protocinematic” delights like the department store and the museum in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, I argue that this layered media history should also include the touring picture circuit in early national America.60 The feeling of virtual immersion that critics could not stop from commenting on when they confronted these works was also accompanied by uncommonly vivid sense impressions. Astonished viewers claimed to hear painted fgures speak, to smell incense burn, or to hear the swelling notes of an organ sound. At times, these effects were literal. Cathedral of Reims, a traveling diorama painted by Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri relied on the Viennese inventor Johann Nepomuk Maelzel’s Melodium, a mechanical invention that “seemed to place the hearer under the vault” of the grand cathedral, as the Baltimore Patriot observed.61 In many other cases, however, this feeling of virtual and sensory immersion was achieved by pictorial and sometimes exhibitionary strategies that split the viewer between absence and presence, seeming to offer a seductive material reality while simultaneously keeping the spectator’s physical body at a distance from it. Clever displays and mechanical novelties only go so far in explaning this magical aura, however. How could Americans, renowned for their tendentious insistence on self-evident truths, moral uprightness, and hard-headed pragmatism, embrace images that promoted pleasure and spectacle?62 In large part, they didn’t, or at least this is what they claimed. Rather, the fact that the imagination was understood as potent, agentic, and mobile provided a measure of plausible deniability against accusations of moral laxity. Viewers were stunned and outfoxed, they emphasized, when their imaginations were kindled into action with unexpected force. Much as Alvan Fisher did in the letter quoted at the beginning of this chapter, critics often employed a proleptic rhetoric of doubt or astonishment, as if anticipating a reader’s objections in advance and thereby distancing themselves from accusations of impropriety. Such narratological splitting created multiple subject positions, creating an unstable but ultimately open-ended vehicle for exploring a wide range of subjectivities.63 Despite these distancing tactics, however, it still seemed odd to me that no one called fraud on these immersive and erratic paintings. Try as I might, I could fnd no sturdy patriot denouncing as delusive or anti-republican works that seemed to come to life before viewer’s very eyes, a failure that was puzzling. After all, falsehood is well-trodden territory among scholars of American culture and politics, and terms like humbug, chicanery, and paranoia have been defning terms in a number of infuential analyses.64 Were viewers really mistaking two-dimensional paintings of European architecture for the real thing? Such an explanation strains credulity since the critical rhetoric around these works was incredibly consistent, and was voiced in the many cities and towns—ranging from Charleston and Savannah to Portland, Maine and Saratoga Springs, New York—to which these touring paintings and dioramas of cathedrals and other exotic settings traveled.

Historicizing the Imagination

13

I contend that the taste for these virtual and immersive paintings can help scholars to productively rethink the privileged place of fraudulence in American cultural history. Instead of a binary choice between truth and fction, I discuss these paintings as virtual, a representational category that is neither real nor false, but might instead be called “real prime.” The imagination is intimately connected to the idea of virtuality because it, too, bestowed a reality, albeit of a second order. My defnition of virtuality relies on Friedberg’s: an entity that is “functionally or effectively but not formally” made from the same material that it was meant to represent. According to this interpretation, the virtual is therefore “a substitute—‘acting without agency of matter’— an immaterial proxy for the material.” Simply put, as Friedberg has written, “Virtual images have a materiality and a reality but of a different kind.”65 Thus, the virtual allows for a vivid—and paradoxical—sensory immediacy, licensing sensual corporeality while simultaneously allowing for distance from it.66 It was this incongruous sense of distance and presence that allowed imaginative, alternate realities to fourish and, indeed, to cause reactions of pleasure and delight despite the fact that these experiences could potentially compromise one’s moral fber or patriotic fervor. The contradictory notion of the intensely corporeal, yet strangely virtual imagination also structures the following chapter, “Staying on the Surface.” In a fairly literal way, these paintings illustrated the invisible operations of the imagination, depicting girls who exercised theirs by sketching, sleeping, singing, reading, or simply looking into the far distance with a dreamy eye. They were central to the oeuvre of artists like Washington Allston, Thomas Sully, and Daniel Huntington, and served as important demonstrations of imaginative capacity and freedom from market forces for artists like Asher B. Durand and William Sidney Mount, even though they would eventually gain recognition in other, more populist genres. I locate these works within the genre of the fancy piece, which arose in eighteenth-century Britain and blended the elegant sauciness of Watteau’s fêtes galantes with the rich feshiness of Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s genre paintings. Much as they had for British viewers, these works allowed Americans to imaginatively explore distant historical eras while remaining in a modern present that vastly extended their reach through new technologies of print production and dissemination. For artists, paintings of young women in reverie performed an even stranger alchemy, appearing to demonstrate their high-minded removal from mercenary entrepreneurialism while drawing more income from commissions and print reproductions. Like the copies of the Capuchin Church, the young girl in reverie genre circulated many similar images in a variety of novel formats. They also appeared to double the body of the artist with that of a young woman, often a daughter like Rosalie Kemble Sully, Mary Inman, or Susan Walker Morse. Despite this literal familiarization, there is something excessive and hyperembodied about the eroticized and rhapsodic living presence response that they drew forth from critics. In their reviews and recollections, the breasts of these painted fgures inevitably heaved and trembled, while eyes appeared as liquid pools. With passions stirred, these were not merely visual phenomena, but auditory, tactile, even gustatory. Such an overfow of creativity refected the genius of the artists themselves, but it was also typical of a rhetoric of fancy and imagination that saw these mental faculties as physical and kinetic forces that continually assembled and reassembled new ideas, sifting, sorting, and gathering sensations, impressions, images, and ideas into new and continually renewed forms.

14

Historicizing the Imagination

Contemporary scholars have often dismissed the idea that these paintings might be anything other than insipid exercises in sentimentality, however, or perhaps exercises in cultural nationalism designed to show that American art was fully equal to the magdalens, saints, and duchesses depicted by the likes of Correggio, Titian, or Sir Joshua Reynolds. Indeed, it would not be diffcult to explain the popularity of these paintings and prints as compensatory for some falseness cloaked within: a psychic desire for sexual domination, perhaps, or a nationalist obsession with metaphorically colonizing virgin territories. Rather than stripping these artists and their works to their innermost depths of motivation, however, I call on readers to “stay on the surface,” as it were, attending to the literal and discursive webs, weaves, chains, and veils that proliferate in plain view. As in the complex perspective pieces explored in the previous chapter, these woven objects were virtualizing fgures that played with presence and absence. Erotic immediacy and spiritual longing combined in these peculiar works, particularly because American artists used experimental binders and varnishes like molasses, honey, and cream in their never-ending quest to approximate the glow of human fesh. These materials interpolated a tasting, sensate body into mid-nineteenth-century art’s spiritual idealism, but it also affrmed the centrality of moral struggle to an enfeshed imagination, affrming the importance of incarnate knowledge and redemption in an increasingly liberal Protestant mainstream. My methods in these two chapters are interdisciplinary and I have attempted to preserve what is useful from many quarters. Art historical methods, with their attention to close looking, reception, and social history, form the backbone of my approach. Film and media theory have supplied valuable critical terms for analyzing paintings or dioramas that not only seemed to have no (or at least no meaningful) original referent, but which were also, in some cases, no longer extant. Particularly in Chapter 3, I also attend to the physical and material properties of paintings produced by pigments, additives, and specifc painterly techniques. Where it is possible to understand these processes from texts, I rely on primary sources, but I am also grateful for technical analyses that have been conducted and published by conservators, which allows me to comment upon things like the composition of drying oil binders which are not visible to the naked eye.67 This attention to a sensuous and material aesthetics places these two chapters within an “aesthetic turn” which contests a poststructuralist tendency to read aesthetics as an empty and performative set of “signifying practices.”68 In addition to very real ways that art was used to establish social dominance or distinction, there is also an affective residue of joy, astonishment, or bliss that is paralleled by somatic phenomena like glow, fush, or softness that these social art historical methods do not quite capture. “When I was a child I wanted the moon,” wrote a Boston critic of Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, “but now I sigh for Mr. Wiggins’ picture.”69 Theorists of the aesthetic turn, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, can help rehabilitate a social art history that often anatomizes and dissects rather than conserving or repairing. I have found useful in this respect Sedgwick’s opposition of “paranoid reading” which ferrets out bias, snobbery, racism, and commodity fetishism, and “reparative reading” which preserves intimate and fragile emotions and surface textures that are sometimes lost in more vigorous critical excavations. This is not to say that the tools of social art history are to be replaced with the new aesthetics, however. Paying close attention to economic and social determinants of a work of art like patronage and the politics of race can be especially powerful when

Historicizing the Imagination

15

combined with historical analyses of aesthetic concepts like taste and imagination. The latter two chapters of this book are predicated on this assumption, and pay particular attention to taste as an incarnated metaphor for aesthetic judgment. Learning to taste and even relish were essential to culturing the sensory faculty of taste into a shared set of aesthetic principles. As Denise Gigante has pointed out, Immanuel Kant’s original metaphor for the sensus communis in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) envisioned it as a dinner party, and the early decades of the nineteenth century saw a shift from the long view—said to be the mark of a connoisseur in the early eighteenth century—to the subjective immersion of gastronomic pleasure as an aesthetic ideal.70 Taste was also one of the body’s “lower” orders, and, coupled with imagination’s readiness to revolt, these bodily faculties threatened to topple the entire aesthetic project that held thinking, rational Man above all other earthly forms of life. Pleasure in eating led to other, potentially non-normative modes of pleasure, both sexual and more broadly sensual, a damning accusation that indicted the imagination, as well. Anxieties about embodiment focused attention on the essential sameness of bodies that hungered, ate, digested, and, ultimately, decayed. Breaking the body down to its systems and therefore denying the superior powers of the mind had been troubling for centuries, going back to ancient Greece. But in an era that saw “the recoordination of nerves and muscles, eyes and hands” of millions of enslaved laborers whose embodied knowledge about picking cotton was considered superior to that of any machine, being reduced to a mere body was especially fraught.71 Bodies were vulnerable in a biopolitical system that converted their labor, fertility, and caretaking capacities into capital, making the embodied imagination a particularly diffcult feature of the culture that white, male leaders sought to elevate as evidence of the nation’s (and often their own) worth. I suggest that the solution for this discomfort with embodiment was to displace it onto nonwhite and/or female bodies that were seen as less rational, more emotional, and more given to selfshness, gluttony, and avaricious consumption. Women, African Americans, and, to some degree, I would add, Catholics, possessed “bodies that carry the burdens of difference and materiality, that are understood as less social, less intellectual, and, at times, less sentient,” as Kyla Wazana Tompkins has argued in her groundbreaking study on race and the body in antebellum American culture.72. To some degree, white superiority was already an implicit feature of the critical fuss over Francois-Marius Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, or Washington Allston’s Spanish Girl in Reverie, which recruited the bodies of Catholic and female avatars, respectively, who could be made to carry the burden of the imagination’s sensuous and ensnaring embodiment.73 Chapter 4, “The Raced Imagination” is given over to more fully exploring how race and the imagination were intertwined, however. Its primary subjects are Henry Sargent’s pendant pieces, The Dinner Party and The Tea Party and Charles Bird King’s Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, paintings which might appear not to be about race at all, at least at frst glance. In Sargent’s The Dinner Party, for example, the only visible marker of racial difference is the black servant standing at the left corner of the room, ready to serve the assembled gentlemen as they consume their post-prandial wines, an activity that was a marker of wealth and aesthetic refnement in the early nineteenth century. In Charles Bird King’s Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, there are no black bodies at all, only “scrawled,” trompe l’oeil references to Othello and Bluebeard, two characters understood in the nineteenth century as Moorish and Near Eastern, respectively.

16

Historicizing the Imagination

And yet, I argue that blackness, understood as a kind of symbolic and moral darkness, helps render the whiteness, which is to say a symbolic purity and superiority, of the subjects in these paintings visible. This is in large part because both paintings visually depict the “pleasures of the imagination” like wine and food which so powerfully threatened to undo the rational control that was presumed essential to resisting their pull. Inserting a black, subordinate body into the space of these pleasures, as Sargent did in both of his paintings, was also a familiar rhetorical move in popular discussions of aesthetics. It drew an analogy between social and economic control of white men over black people and an ostensibly correlative power of judgment that was able to discipline the refractory imagination. This hierarchy was naturalized in the mesmerizing spell of virtuality in which the quicksilver imagination thrived, and the tools of social art history are particularly helpful in deconstructing a glossy whole which might otherwise conceal the facts of its own making. In Sargent’s case, this world of elegance and imagination was directly fueled by profts realized from the slave trade. The artist’s Gloucester, Massachusetts family leveraged their position on the eastern edge of the triangle trade to reap profts which paid for Sargent to study painting in London, using the vast engine of global capitalism to turn preserved fsh sold to feed the enslaved on sugar plantations in the West Indies into an aesthetic system of knowledge that supposedly elevated them above people of color. In contrast, King had no such direct connection to the slave economy, but the artist’s The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream is no less implicated in an aesthetic system that relied upon an Africanist presence as proof of its capacity for manful judgment and control. The painting adopts a structure that is similar to the architectural framewithin-a-frame that was so crucial to constructing an illusion of an independent, immersive world, but King has destroyed that world, not only through the apparent violence that has wrested the cabinet’s door off its hinges, but also through trompe l’oeil texts that invite blistering shifts in representation. Through close visual analysis, I show how this disorder was displaced onto burlesqued black fgures like Othello who license a sense of freedom and rebellion, disgust and desire. No less than the interior of the artist’s cabinet that King depicts, these contradictions belonged to the white, elite, male artists and patrons who were ambivalent about the pleasure and freedom that the imagination offered, and I emphasize that the moral and symbolic blackness that they attempted to foist onto others was really a problem whose origin was concealed within. The fnal chapter, Chapter 5, “Culturing the Imagination” looks at a similar complex of issues (imagination, race, and the grotesque) through the lens of culture, which I understand not simply as a inert product, but rather as an active and dialectical process that continually swung between chaos and order. A number of simple oil sketches by the artist Asher B. Durand serve as emblems of the “culturing” the imagination required in order to prevent destructive passions from wasting both bodies and the body politic. Fears about consumption, bodies, boundaries, and their potential for violation were almost omnipresent in this period, and in this chapter, I trace them through archival sources like the minutes of the Sketch Club, of which Durand, Thomas Cole, and their patron Luman Reed were all members, as well as through paintings and textual sources that placed black or “half-breed” bodies at their margins. Taken together, these sources reveal how the embodied imagination’s play between control and chaos invisibly structured Reed’s gallery, one of the most important and infuential

Historicizing the Imagination

17

collections of American art, especially insofar as it allowed self-made entrepreneurs like Durand and Reed to satirize and therefore distract from an arrival among New York’s cultural elite that some members of the old guard clearly saw as a monstrous birth. Ultimately, I contend that American artists, and particularly Durand, did not exorcise this troublesome body completely, but rather sublimated it in a landscape art that appeared empty of bodies and, conveniently, innocent of the class and racial hierarchies that were inscribed upon them. My methods in these fnal two chapters are also drawn from an art historical quiver, analyzing visual and representational strategies while considering their points of correspondence with interdisciplinary cultural contexts including histories of medicine and labor. The felds of critical race studies, critical whiteness studies, and postcolonial theory have been essential in considering the location of culture, who it acts on and who it purports to act on. I do this in order to resist the easy narratives that foist pain, loss, or dehumanization onto their objects (women and black and indigenous people) rather than their subjects (white, elite, men). My approach to margins also takes cues from art historians Michael Camille, Richard Meyer, and Victor Stoichita who were interested in the visual and philosophical spaces of the margins and the marginalized, as well as the broad movement toward the investigation of “borderlands” in American Studies which has shown that borders often attempt to maintain distinctions even as they facilitate mixing and creolization.74 Given my focus on the relationship between Reed and Durand, I am also interested in how patron and artist collaborated to produce objects that drew on aesthetic, social, and political discourses. There is a performative and symbolic aspect to exorcizing the dangers of the imagination, and so I turn to anthropological methods that are keenly attuned to the symbolic margins of belief as a way of ordering society.75 Seen in this light, imagination was just such a belief, and it built a symbolic economy of purity and corruption between an inside and outside that were continually shifting according to the vagaries of physical environment, social class, and urban space. Food and drink were particularly implicated in this symbolic economy, and I suggest that eating and imagination were both viewed as hygienic practices that had to be vigilantly maintained lest those appetites overwhelm socially sanctioned ideas of order, being, and form.

A Brief History of the Embodied Imagination “There is no body as such: there are only bodies,” the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has written, as she explains that the body is not “a precultural, presocial, or prelinguistic pure body but a body as social and discursive object, a body bound up in the order of desire, signifcation and power.”76 Although I will often refer to “the body” for the sake of brevity in the following chapters, I want to be clear that there is not one body but many. There were numerous medical, philosophical, literary, and media discourses that have worked to produce this embodiment as a distinct, cultural artifact rather than a transcendent or “natural” fact. Although these contexts are plainly too vast to treat in anything approaching an exhaustive fashion, I gesture here at some key historical and cultural moments around which I have structured my understanding of “the body.” The discussion proceeds in roughly chronological order from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.

18 Historicizing the Imagination The idea that the imagination was physically lodged within the brain had been seen as one of the most consequential “discoveries” of the latter part of the seventeenth century.77 This was in large part because of Thomas Willis, a neuroanatomist, professor of natural philosophy at Oxford University, and, later, the philosopher John Locke’s teacher. Assisted by a group of young assistants who included Christopher Wren, the Baroque architect, Willis dissected the brains and nerves of both animals and humans and observed that both had channels through which fuids might travel. Willis was interested not only in the body, but in the soul, or rather souls, for he argued that there were three: rational, animal, and vegetative. Although he maintained that there was an immortal, rational soul, it was the “animal soul” that attracted much of his critical inquiry. Willis claimed that imagination, as well as memory, appetite, sense, and motion were controlled by the animal soul, which placed them frmly into the brain as a physiological substrate. It was through these hydraulic channels that the soul, which Willis understood as an exceedingly fne fuid, helped to control what neurobiologists might today refer to as movement, cognition, and affect.78 John Locke, Willis’ pupil, was also a medically trained doctor and anatomist, and he used this background to argue that reason and knowledge were not innate in his extraordinarily infuential Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1691). Locke may have disputed the intuitive and unconscious nature of reason, famously positing the mind as a blank slate or tabula rasa, but curiously, imagination was another matter. The English philosopher was not at all concerned with notions of creativity or invention, but he did rest his argument on the idea that the imagination was innate and powerful. Taken together, the work of Willis and Locke thus moved the seat of the soul to the brain, cementing the imagination as a major faculty in this empirical mix of mental, material, and spiritual. This physiological rationale profoundly affected the eighteenth-century development of taste, which was thought to depend upon a literal fneness of the neural structures, as discussed below. The brave new theories of the imagination formed by the inquisitive Willis and Locke could not salve the division between body and soul by relocating the latter to one organ or another, however, for the body was no blank slate. For over a millennium or so, Christian theologians had argued that the body was something to be denied. The physical bodies of Jesus and the saints had been tortured and disfgured as a means of proving the resilience, purity, and, ultimately, the transcendent immortality of their souls. In the early modern period and after, however, there was no meaningful philosophy without the material body because there could be no thought or cognition without sensory perception. The major thinker who established this route through the body, Thomas Hobbes, predated both Locke and Willis, and used a sharp sense of argument rather than a physical, surgical instrument. Hobbes had been marked by the anarchy that he fed during the English Civil War (1642–1651), and was partly interested in its effects, but more so in the essential force within the individual that might control or unleash this kind of societal dissolution. In his The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1650) and again in Leviathan (1651), Hobbes had posited imagination as that pivotal element. In the second chapter of Leviathan, he explained that imagination could be simple, a kind of memory, but that it could also be “Compounded; as when from the sight of a man at one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind a Centaure.” In contrast to Romantic theories of the imagination informed by medical research which saw imagination as a kind of madness or fever, the foundations of

Historicizing the Imagination

19

imagination in Hobbesian thought were rational although simultaneously based on a corporeal “Fiction.”79 The imagination was also more than just an individual faculty, however, but was rather a crucial tool for structuring civil society itself. Anticipating Castoriadis and his social imaginary by three centuries or so, Hobbes was not interested in the imagination merely as a route to solipsistic reverie over Greek vases, nightingales, or abbeys. As political economist Robin Douglass has argued, “Hobbes’ political philosophy depended upon men coming to understand their relationship with the commonwealth in a certain way, and … Leviathan was itself designed to bring about the very transformation in their imaginations required to make this understanding possible.”80 Using imagery in a frontispiece that Hobbes developed with the accomplished engraver Abraham Bosse as well as metaphor and argument, Hobbes sought to enlist the imaginations of his readers in replacing older religious and medieval conceptions about how an ideal society was to work. Properly trained and coordinated on a societal scale, he believed that the imagination could erase the narrow fanaticism of religion as well as superstitious ignorance. The body politic was troubled by the question of what would happen if the imaginations of its constituents were not trained effectively, however, an argument made in visual terms in. Leviathan’s frontispiece (see Figure 1.1). Although many descriptions

Figure 1.1 Abraham Bosse, Title-page to Hobbes’s Leviathan (London: Andrew Cooke, 1651), etching, 9 3/5 in. × 6.25 in., © The Trustees of the British Museum.

20 Historicizing the Imagination of the image fxate on the fact that the Sovereign in the engraving emerges from the land itself, holding a bishop’s crosier symbolizing the church in one hand and a sword which represents the state in the other, this neat iconographical resolution obscures the question of whether this fctitious body is savior or monster. The double columns of symbols pertaining to church (cathedral, bishop’s miter, and so on) and state (walled fortress, crown, and the like) encourage a methodical habit of viewing that, like a double-entry ledger, seem to negate the possibility of disorder. And yet, the king’s body is constituted by a legion of individual bodies that ripple across his torso like carbuncles, suggesting that the imagination that formed this body politic had destructive, carnal, and even grotesque powers that could rip this equilibrium in two. Just as Willis and Locke’s imaginative faculty had to broker with the brain, which the English philosopher Thomas More thought no more impressive “than a cake of suet or a bowl of curds,” the imagination had the potential to be the foundation of civil society or a canker that destroyed it from within.81 Echoing the idea that the body politic was threatened by the imagination’s constructed hybridity, Bruno Latour, the French anthropologist, has argued that Bosse’s frontispiece to the Leviathan is one of a “naked and calculating citizen who constitutes the Leviathan, a mortal god, an artifcial creature.”82 And yet, that artifciality and the knowledge and power it constructs is rooted in the body’s corporeality, its nerves, organs, and sinews. This double-edged dilemma is an essential feature of the imagination’s plastic powers of construction which, as I have argued in the overview of seventeenth-century philosophy above, was always distributed in a peculiar and uneven mix between soul and brain, faith and empiricism, and individual and collective. However distant this early modern context may seem to American art, it is important to recognize that the dialectics of the imagination are not presentist concerns that I am somehow foisting onto unsuspecting nineteenth-century artists. This book takes pains to emphasize that imagination’s amalgammatory contradictions, particularly around the body politic, did not disappear, but rather intensifed in the frst half of the nineteenth century. As an inherently and unevenly divided force, the imagination was an ideal medium for refecting who was thought to have the rational selfcontrol to guide the social and political ferment that typifed the Jacksonian era. This process was intensifed by the fact that antebellum American society itself was tremendously heterogenous and dynamic. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the United States was composed of Christians, Jews, and Muslims, pacifsts and war-mongers, utopian idealists like the Shakers and a southern plantocracy that had dreams of extending racialized chattel slavery over a Caribbean empire.83 The need to harness citizens’ imagination in the production of a peaceful civil society was more pronounced than ever before, and the American body politic was extremely vexed by the question of just whose body mattered most.84 By the eighteenth century, however, the civic import of the imagination was sometimes eclipsed by its individualist appeal. This was a particular legacy of Joseph Addison’s publication of 11 papers on the “pleasures of the imagination” that were published in the Spectator in 1712. The English poet Mark Akenside also took up this theme in his epic poem Pleasures of the Imagination (1744) which was considered an essential part of any learned person’s store of literary references.85 The polished refnement that Akenside’s Pleasures represented was subtended, however, by an eroticized poetics that as Robert W. Jones and Ronald Paulson have argued was present in British aesthetic productions from the 1740s and 1750s onwards. In epic poems like Pleasures of the Imagination and James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730), the pastoral landscape became

Historicizing the Imagination

21

a vehicle for investigations into physical experiences that were intensely sensual. This subtext was sometimes veiled through poetic references to throbbing limbs and fervent desire, but sometimes not. Literary historian Kathleen Lubey has argued that eroticism was a fairly public discourse that we can trace through the Georgian hoop-petticoat to more frank statements. As she writes, quoting Addison’s paper no. 412, Aesthetic allure in persons can produce not simply sexual desire but sex acts: ‘every different Species of sensible Creatures has its different Notions of Beauty [… therefore] all Creatures might be tempted to multiply their Kind, and fll the World, with Inhabitants.’86 Although the empirical subtext of the imagination discussed above may have been less visible at times during its eighteenth-century progress, it is important to emphasize that these associations did not go away entirely. Rather, the medical and physiological dimensions of the imagination fused with poetry in ways that made the sexually reproductive human body a legitimate topic of scientifc inquiry. Just like the Romantic poet John Keats who was born a quarter-century after his death, Akenside was a poet as well as a physician, and studied embryology at a time when there was a vigorous debate over whether procreation resulted from the fertilization of an egg by sperm or whether fetuses were contained in miniature within the egg already. The poet wrote his thesis supporting the former theory, even though the foundational work advancing that idea, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s Venus Physique (Earthly Venus) (1745) would not be published until the following year. These activities manifested themselves in his literary work in the form of poetic metaphors invoking wombs, birth, and orgasm, as literary historian Robin Dix has argued. “By degrees the mind/ Feels her young nerves dilate: the plastic pow’rs/ Labour for action” reads one line from The Pleasures of the Imagination. As Dix has pointed out, “Even the physiological effects on the body of the creating artist—the dilating nerves, the heaving bosom, the loveliest frenzy, the rolling eye—are reminiscent of sexual ecstasy.”87 However unlikely this erotics of the imagination may seem, it was commonplace for poets and philosophers of the era who were interested in the bodily origins of both life and art. At the end of the eighteenth century, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, would publish his poem Zoonomia, Or the Laws of Organic Life which the historian Thomas Hallock has called “a botanic paean to sexual freedom.” The elder Darwin’s interest was, as he wrote in a later work called The Botanic Garden, “to inlist Imagination under the banner of Science; and to lead her votaries from the looser analogies, … to the stricter, ones which form the ratiocination of philosophy.”88 It would be easy to treat Darwin’s language as fussy, poetical window-dressing rather than what it claims to be, a call to follow the imagination’s lead from the lyrical into “stricter” considerations of epistemology, were it not for so many cultural products of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that saw the imagination’s embodiment as a matter of real scientifc and philosophical import

Wonders, Monsters, and Virtuality Throughout this brief history, it is clear that imagination occupied a space that was materialist in its embodiment or sensuousness, and yet at the same time, strangely immaterial. These are properties of an embodied imagination which I argue was seen as virtual due to centuries of discursive and screenic practice that described it as such.

22 Historicizing the Imagination I have addressed what I mean by the term virtual in an earlier section, but why is it such a key term when it comes to imagination’s facility in shuttling between absence and presence? For one thing, postulating a virtual reality that was present and somehow absent helped philosophers and, by the early nineteenth century, scientists to shape new ideas about the world, and even the extent and limitations of knowledge itself. One could proceed by analogy from metaphysical beliefs in things like ether or a dynamic “vital fuid” pervading the universe to physically observable phenomena like the voltaic battery. Even before this experimentation with unseen forces and physical materials, however, the idea that imagination constructed a virtual reality was present from the very beginning of empirical philosophy. Textual metaphors of the imagination as a virtual and immanent succession of moving images can be found in Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), in which he compared the imagination to “rowling” waves.89 Because of the nature of waves, this created an infnite succession of images that continued long after the initial stimulus. “And as wee see in the water, though the wind cease, the waves give not over rowling for a long time after.” Even after the stimulus was removed or the viewer closed her eyes, “wee still retain an image of the thing seen,” he wrote. The connection between this virtual, infnite image-production and the imagination was bluntly direct. “And this is it,” Hobbes continued in the very next sentence, “that Latines call Imagination.” A never-ending, unreliable, but usually pleasant experience of images passing before one’s eyes was a commonplace of descriptions of the imagination throughout the eighteenth century. Consider William Gilpin’s reaction to viewing a landscape through a Claude glass, in which images glided by, “like the visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream.” Indeed, Gilpin held that through viewing the picturesque “the imagination becomes a camera obscura.” Gilpin could have been drawing on his knowledge of Mark Akenside’s The Pleasures of the Imagination, which, as mentioned previously, was one of the most widely read works of eighteenth-century literature. In the second book of his epic poem, Akenside developed an extended allegory of the imagination, initially voicing a fgure whose visions were “baleful” and “horrid” visions until the “Genius of human kind” descended from the heavens to demonstrate what (virtual) reality really looked like: I look’d, and lo! the former scene was chang’d; For verdant alleys and surrounding trees, A solitary prospect, wide and wild, Rush’d on my senses.90 Although Akenside did not specifcally refer to these images as emerging from a camera obscura, it seems clear that his narrator was a passive spectator who sat before a succession of sensorially vivid, changing, and imagination-stimulating images, a description that might also be applied to any number of media I discuss at further length below. Gilpin also could have had in mind Addison, whose Spectator papers were published over a decade before Akenside published his poem. (Addison’s papers were also the source of Akenside’s title.) These pleasures, Addison wrote, were the “agreeable Visions of Things that are either Absent or Fictitious,” a statement that made it clear that pleasurable phenomena, rather than their grotesque sports, formed the true

Historicizing the Imagination

23

foundation of the imagination. It was the mediation of a lens or screen that made these images pleasant, however, not any inherent or inborn quality of the thing-in-itself. Indeed, the “prettiest landskip I ever saw,” claimed Addison, was a camera obscura made out of a darkened room adjacent to a river, a sight valuable not just for its “novelty,” but for its resemblance to nature and crucially for this analysis, “the motion of the things it represents.”91 These literary descriptions of the imagination intersect with an intermedial screenic practice, a history of virtual images produced on lenses that were imagined and sometimes built by fgures like the French philosopher René Descartes and the astronomer Joahnnes Kepler. Detailing this history in full goes beyond the scope of this book, but nevertheless, I emphasize that tracing the history of devices like the camera obscura, the magic lantern, and the kaleidoscope which, like the imagination, produced virtual images, can give the imagination a historical counterweight measured in brass and lenses rather than the more easily-dismissed fgments of an overheated mind.92 This establishes the imagination not as some wild and therefore risible trife, but rather as a fundamental tool for seeing and knowing the world as it is. Devices that displayed virtual images proliferated at the dawn of the Enlightenment as philosophers and scientists tried to defne how observable phenomena connected (or didn’t) to stable epistemic truths. Descartes famously wrote about the “eye of a newly dead man” that displayed virtual images in Dioptrics (1637), a treatise on lenses and refraction, which he compared to the camera obscura, a virtual image Kepler had also described in 1604.93 At roughly the same time, miniscule structures like silkworm thread or eel scales came to life under dioptric lenses operated by pioneers of microscopy like the English curator of experiments for the Royal Society in London Robert Hooke and the Dutch amateur Antoni van Leeuwenhoek.94 Both men consistently expressed wonder at the phenomena they discovered under the microscope’s lens. Van Leeuwenhoek “could not but silently wonder” at microscopic views of oil from Belgian hops, while Hooke looked “with wonder and pleasure” at a patch of mold that contained “multitudes and diversities of little reptiles.”95 The long tradition of fnding wonder and pleasure rather than anxious skepticism in response to virtual images formed on lenses is an important element of my argument, particularly in Chapters 2 and 3. Viewers were not meant to be duped or frightened by Hooke’s magnifcations of bark and bee stingers, but were instead supposed to be able to draw nearer to the phantasmic reality of these microscopic worlds. These images could be regarded as true in an epistemological and ontological sense, even if their ways of knowing and being did not exactly correspond to a reality that could be seen with the unassisted eye. Rather than a perspectival view that focused a razor-sharp skepticism on the observable world, these virtual screens rebuffed the viewer’s eye so that it remained on the surface. The effect was pleasing, however, and it bears a resemblance to the sense of wonder that Giambattista della Porta, the sixteenth-century natural philosopher, evoked in his description of the camera obscura in his Magiae naturalis (1558). Although much of this treatise was dedicated to rational entertainments that could educate and instruct, thereby dispelling suspicion and ignorance, he also wrote of the “pleasure to see such a deceit,” in “counterfeit Stages” of “Huntings, Banquets, Armies of Enemies, Plays, and all things else that one desireth.”96 These were unfolding visual narratives that seemed to charm viewers not by delivering knowledge in one, instantaneous coup de foudre, but rather by dramatizing the pleasurable suspense of what one didn’t know.

24 Historicizing the Imagination Wonder driven by fear rather than delight has shaped a number of scholarly accounts of the many virtual image machines that proliferated in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, however. Arnaud Maillet, for example, has discussed the Claude glass as a tool of necromancy, and, in the same vein, many scholars have detailed how Etienne Gaspard Robinson’s phantasmagoria exposed transatlantic audiences to terrifying images of skeletons and other spectral terrors that recalled the butchery of the Terror.97 For shock value, however, few can match the immersive, Orientalist sets that Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg designed for the English aristocrat William Beckford at his Fonthill estate in 1781. Beckford commissioned the spectacle as a backdrop for his three-day tryst with William Courtenay, then a boy of 13, and his cousin’s wife, Louisa Beckford, who may have been suffering delusions due to advanced tuberculosis. There is no shortage of evidence for the “virtual infernal” that historian Iain McCalman has argued Beckford’s escapade typifes, and I am in no way trying to supplant this body of interpretation with a more innocent version.98 Indeed, as Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park have observed, wonder has a history that is tightly bound to monsters and horror, which was categorized in the early modern era as a type of passion.99 I do, however, want to make an important distinction between a regulated imagination and a dysregulated one. The idea that an infamed or dysregulated imagination was inherently dangerous was held as an article of faith among eighteenth-century British and French philosophers like Locke, Anthony Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, and Etienne de Condillac.100 As Jan Goldstein has noted, the topos of the “dangerous imagination” was so omnipresent in eighteenth-century France that it structured topics with which it would seem to have little connection. When a royal edict abolished artisans’ trade guilds in 1776, the Parlement of Paris objected on the grounds that severing the artisans from a disciplining corporate structure would encourage their sense of independence and unleash “fights of an often disordered imagination.”101 Americans inherited these fears of the dysregulated imagination, and warnings about the imagination’s potential for deviancy was widespread in the popular press. By the early nineteenth century, these ideas had acquired a physiological gloss. One of the most important fgures in this respect was William Cullen, a professor of chemistry and physiology at the University of Edinburgh, who educated a veritable phalanx of respected and infuential doctors including John Morgan, the “Father of American Medicine” who founded the frst medical school in North America, Benjamin Rush, and William Shippen, Jr.102 Cullen’s disciples encouraged the idea that an infamed and ill-regulated imagination could sicken the able-bodied. It is little surprise then, that simply ruminating on the effects of epidemic diseases like yellow fever or cholera was thought to lead to contagion. Thanks to the vitalist treatises like François-JosephVictor Broussais’ Treatise on Physiology Applied to Pathology translated into English by the Philadelphia doctor John Bell (1796–1872) in 1826 and 1828, an overactive imagination was also thought to stimulate deleterious appetites for food, drink, or sex.103 The dose made the poison, however, as the British physician John Haygarth showed in 1799 in a pamphlet aptly titled Of the imagination, as a cause and as a cure of disorders of the body which is today remembered as the frst scientifc demonstration of the placebo effect.104 Despite this potentially positive use for imagination as a cure for disease, Haygarth’s use of what he called “fctitious tractors,” wooden versions of a brass-and-iron instrument that the American Elisha Perkins had invented, patented, and sold (at quite a

Historicizing the Imagination

25

proft) for around 25 dollars, raises imagination’s role in perpetuating shams, trickery, or deception. This is well-trodden ground in the feld of American cultural studies, especially after the publication of Neil Harris’ essay “The Operational Aesthetic” in 1973. In this well-known and widely reprinted and assigned text, the author suggested that nineteenth-century Americans were drawn to experiences of “humbugging.” As Harris wrote, “Concentration on whether a particular show, exhibit, or event was real or false, genuine or contrived, narrowed the task of judgment for the multitude of spectators. It structured problems of experiencing the exotic and unfamiliar by reducing that experience to a simple evaluation.” Harris’ infuence was far-reaching, and his analysis opened the foodgates for a number of analyses about the important role that doubt, skepticism, even paranoia played in American eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury life.105 While I do not wish to deny the importance of deception or—thinking of the “virtual infernal,” fear or horror— in histories of transatlantic culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I suggest that they have sometimes overshadowed wonder and delight, particularly as constructed by a virtual media in the Atlantic World during the Enlightenment and beyond.106 Thus, transhistorical methods of media archaeology are particularly important for seeing these connections across time periods and cultures, and they are also important for moving away from an enduring and spurious notion of America as provincial and culturally isolated. A full genealogy of these media is something that I can only gesture at here, but it would spring from della Porta’s “counterfeit Stages” and van Leewenhoek’s “little reptiles” to include the dioramas and touring paintings explored in Chapter 2, as well as devices like the magic lantern, the dissolving view, and the kaleidoscope, among many others.107 It would also nest within Anne Friedberg’s suggestive genealogy of virtual screens that leads from Albrecht Dürer’s veil-covered perspective screen in his famous woodcut Treatise on Measurement frst published in 1525 (see Figure 1.2); within dematerialized midnineteenth century media like William Henry Fox Talbot’s paper negatives and other technologies of dematerialization as described by Geoffrey Batchen, as well as within a “ludic and aesthetic” Victorian cinema that included the thaumatrope or “wonderturner,” as outlined by Tom Gunning.108

Figure 1.2 Albrecht Dürer, Underweysung der Messung (Nuremberg, 1538), woodcut, overall 12 9/16 × 8 7/16 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Felix M. Warburg, 1918.

26

Historicizing the Imagination

Rather than a fattened and disembodied linear perspective that focuses a razorsharp skepticism in order to dissect its subjects, this mode of representation rebuffs the viewer’s eye so that remains on the surface. Whether in the diorama, the thaumotrope, or the kaleidoscope, what these eye-catching surfaces have in common is that they construct reality as contingent, unreliable, and often beautiful. They also form affective ecologies—“non-deterministic and non-dualistic approaches that decenter the human and engage the livingness of the world,” as the geographer Neera Singh has put it—centered around a hopeful futurity rather than a more familiar sense of dread and doubt.109 At their core, these modes of viewership illustrate the importance of a regulated imagination that has not been corrupted by dread or debility. The growth of these virtual media did not spring forth in a vacuum, however, and their popularity in the early nineteenth century can be attributed to the increasing number of scientifc disciplines that attended to virtuality as a serious dimension of human perception, rather than simply frivolous entertainment. To take one particularly important example, a consensus regarding the wave theory of light coalesced in the frst two decades of the nineteenth century; as a result, the empiricism of a virtual reality that did not correspond to what was visible or tangible acquired more meaning.110 As a result, the scientist and inventor Sir David Brewster, in his 1831 Treatise on Optics, for instance, understood that something that was visible to the eye could be “intangible, uncapturable, ineffable” on a lens or mirror.111 This uncapturability could literally be seen when light rays were interrupted with a concave mirror, a phenomenon that is still referred to as “Brewster’s angle.” The mirror would invert the image and throw it at an angle equal to that of the original light ray, making possible new philosophical amusements that appeared to make a candle “burn” within a decanter, for example.112 These tricks and entertainments tested the sensory apparatus and mind of viewers, asking them to hold in mind both a phenomenological experience of bodily positionality (“I sense something before me”) and a contradictory epistemological fact (“I know that it isn’t really there.”), a trick of vivid absence that had long been familiar to theorists of the imagination.113 Wonder, beauty, and the imagination were not absent from these serious discussions of optics, however, but were rather imbricated in them. Brewster’s kaleidoscope, patented in 1817, seems to serve as the archetype of this screen practice as it represented a kind of beauty that seemed to have no referent, and which, like the visions of the imagination itself, multiplied almost infnitely.114 Kaleidoscopomania was an ephemeral fashion, but the aesthetic potential of the kaleidoscope lived on for much longer. Jonathan Crary, for instance, briefy noted the French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 observation that the kaleidoscope’s disintegrative beauty seemed to coincide with modernity itself; a dandy, in Baudelaire’s memorable words, was nothing more than “a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.”115 Even earlier, however, John Gibson Macvicar, a Scottish lecturer in natural history at St. Andrews wrote an aesthetic treatise in 1830 that theorized the existence of what he called “kaleidoscopic beauty,” and the examples he used (lattice-work on architecture, cirrus clouds, birds in fight, and snowfakes, for example) all served to picture how mass might be virtualized.116 This aesthetic was also, for Macvicar, tied to the liberty of choosing (“pleasure in the way we like it”) and to, as he put it, “a friendly play between the imagination and the understanding.”117 The disjunction between these two areas of mental inquiry generated tensions, but these tensions produced more than just delusions. For instance, Melanie Keene, a historian of science and philosophy, has examined a history

Historicizing the Imagination

27

of Victorian popular science that placed wonder, fancy, and amusement, particularly for children, at its very center. “Rabbit-holes and looking-glasses may have their place,” she writes, “but the surest way to wonder-land was to be found in practising the sciences.”118 As for Macvicar and Brewster, an aesthetic system with wonder and imagination at its center did not preclude the production of substantive knowledge, but rather fostered it. The possibilities that these new sciences offered sparked the imaginations of writers in fction and nonfction alike, and the pages of American literary culture brimmed with philosophical discussions of materiality and presence that seemed uniquely, even exquisitely aesthetic. “Shall we not consider the moonlight and the abbey an epitome of mind and matter?” Henry Farmer asked in his boldly materialist 1823 discussion of theories of mind.119 Susan Fenimore Cooper, a writer and the daughter of James Fenimore Cooper, invoked a similar view of consciousness in her short story “A Dissolving View” published in George Putnam’s successful giftbook on American scenery, Home Book of the Picturesque (1851). Cooper’s story began on an autumn afternoon perfect for “day-dreams” and the “strange beauty” of fancy. Her description of the workings of the imagination is transplanted onto a humble American village, but its “images, quaint and strange, [which] rise unbidden and fll the mind.” recall Gilpin’s or Addison’s words about the virtual and unceasing nature of the imagination.120 In contrast to this individual virtuality which is rife with unexpected lumps of desire or revulsion, there was also an early national, top-down virtuality that presented a fantasy of order, cleanliness, and control that could not exist in actual fact. As Erin C. Blake and Wendy Bellion have argued, a polite and orderly virtuality was mobilized in prints and optical entertainments like the vue d’optiques and peepshows in the long eighteenth century.121 Architectural historian Dell Upton, too, has proposed the virtual grid as a schema of what he has called “the republican spatial imagination” which prized transparency, classifcation, and articulation and emerged in cultural products as diverse as the statistical manuals and gazeteers that proliferated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and systematizing cultural institutions like the American Philosophical Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences.122 Trish Loughran has echoed this analysis in her writing about the print culture Revolutionary period, calling “self-identicality” one of the abiding concerns of Revolutionary and early national American life. The special power of American political economy of the early national era rested in its actuality, she has explained, in its claims to represent exactly and without disruption the will of the people, which resulted in a tendentious American insistence on incorruptible thing-ness.123 The differences between the mode of virtuality that I have sketched here and that described by Loughran, Upton, Blake, and Bellion are partially predicated on different time scales; the 1830s and 1840s saw the expansion of franchise in the United States, as well as global revolutions. But we might also locate these differences in an individualism encouraged by aesthetic philosophy and revealed that phrase of Macvicar’s: “pleasure in the way we like it.” When applied to the body politic, the American “period eye” did tend to emphasize a mensurational order that was supposed to map neatly onto national identity. Thus, in 1815, an art critic argued that while the Chinese excelled in “minute manual dexterity” and the French were known for their agility, Americans were good at looking, enabling them to become superior marksmen and merchants. “Take any promiscuous company of native Americans,” the author wrote,

28

Historicizing the Imagination

meaning any group of white citizens, “and it is surprising with what precision most of them are able to judge of heights and distances, of the extent of a feld, the size of a room, or the shape of distant objects.”124 Such viewing habits abstracted space, turning a landscape, for example, into commodities, futures, and risks. The journalist and writer Nathaniel P. Willis would echo this claim in 1840 when he insisted that, “the American eye is perpetually reaching forward.” He continued, Instead of inquiring into [a view’s] antiquity, [the American] sits over the fre with his paper and pencil and calculates what the population will be in ten years, how far they will spread, what the value of the neighboring land will become, and whether the stock of some canal or railroad … will … be a good investment.125 Laid overan individual body rather than the body politic, however, the virtual could be a supple, even voluptuous space of excess and surplus that would have frustrated such attempts at accurate measurement. James Fenimore Cooper claimed, for instance, in 1833 that Italy—which was often positioned as the specifc geographic location where the imagination and the nonlinear, aesthetic ideal resided—“haunts my dreams and clings to my ribs like another wife.”126 This imagined, yet virtual body was subject to drastic shifts in scale, as the Appenines, the mountain range, became in Cooper’s words “naked, downlike, shadowy.” These contradictory entanglements with matter and the body seem to erupt with a density and vitality that is at odds with the totalizing and abstracted control required for an accurate territorial map or an economic forecast, but which will become familiar in the passionate and puzzling critical and popular responses to the works that pictured an imagined—and imaginary—European past surveyed in the following chapters. The body was no innocent object, however, but a social surface onto which the imagination’s tensions were inscribed. Particularly among bourgeois, white Protestants in the United States, its unstable hierarchies were mapped onto inequitable distributions of social, cultural, and political power that privileged some bodies as more human than others. The following chapters wade into this uneven terrain further, in the hopes of charting the shifts produced by an imagination that swerved between binaries of the material and the abstract, between that which was present and, confoundingly, absent, all at the same time. I do so in order to support two ideas. First, I hope to challenge a reductive tendency that too often positions American art and visual culture before the Civil War as a tool of cultural nationalistm. What happens when the strict periodization and national boundaries long favored by art history are scrambled as, for instance, a French neoclassical painting is greeted with rapturous acclaim in Russia, Natchez, Mississippi, and Philadelphia? More than this, I hope my attention to imagination’s ambiguities exposes the kinds of dislocations and ruptures of self and meaning that are so familiar from discussions of modern and contemporary art, and yet are so often smoothed and softened in the scholarship on the period. Second, and more broadly, my hopes for this account are shaped by a present in which the notion that the humanities occupy a distinct and foreign culture from the sciences is deep and pernicious. The revolutionary futures afforded by the imagination are either dismissed as unproductive, humanistic nonsense, or worse, posited as the exclusive domain of computational or algorithmic tools. “We are coming to defne who we are through digital practice because virtual spaces are becoming more real to us than visceral ones,” writes Ed Finn of the new “algorithmic imagination.”127

Historicizing the Imagination

29

Instead, I suggest that an iterative and experimental imagination has long been an essential part of how we gain a sense of selfhood, and that extending this mental faculty with whatever technologies lay to hand, whether they be touring paintings illuminated by gaslight, reproductive engravings, or the latest app, is, in fact, nothing new. Narrating the histories of imagination after the Enlightenment requires an expanded defnition of modernity, not to mention an awareness that imagination is not necessarily unfettered or transcendent, but can rather reproduce existing biases and social hierarchies. Nevertheless, doing so offers new expanses, both familiar and delightfully strange.

Notes 1 Alvan Fisher to Asher B. Durand. Reel N49, frame 741. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 2 Samuel F. B. Morse, “Lecture One,” Lectures on the Affnity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, ed. and introd. Nikolai Cikovsky Jr. (Columbia, MO: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1983), 44–45. 3 Reynolds, “The Thirteenth Discourse,” The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmond Malone, ed. (Edinburgh: William Forrester, 1867), 132; Morse, “Lecture One,” Lectures, 44–45. 4 Reynolds, “The Thirteenth Discourse,” The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, 306. 5 Catherine Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 6 “Colleges and Universities,” The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, vol. 2, 259; see also Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 11. 7 Wayne Craven, “Washington Allston and Ut Pictura Poesis: The Romantic Artist as Poet and Cultivated Intellectual,” in Finding Colonial Americas: Essays Honoring J. A. Leo Lemay, eds. Carla Mulford and David S. Shields (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001), 273, n19. The work Craven referenced by Elizabeth Johns is “Washington Allston: Method, Imagination, and Reality,” Winterthur Portfolio 12, no. (1977): 1–18; as well as Johns, Washington Allston’s Theory of the Imagination (Ph.D. diss.: Emory University, 1974). 8 Relatively little has been written on the imagination in all of nineteenth-century America either, although Anglen’s point is well-taken. Anglen cites Michael Davitt Bell, The Development of American Romance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980); and Terence Martin, The Instructed Vision: Scottish Common Sense Philosophy and the Origins of American Fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1961). One area that is relatively well-studied are the ways in which the dangers and pleasures of the imagination were invoked around novels, particularly if the readers were young women. See, for instance, See Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2012). She takes aim at the more abstract defnitions of nationhood, and instead emphasizes the signifcance of physicality and desire for “communion,” which she identifes as emerging from “an adaptive psychosociological sense of oneness” (17). Martin discusses this as well in Instructed Vision, 57–103. See also Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. As the title implies, virtuality is a key term for Saler, although his analysis is concerned with literary authors from the late nineteenth century (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson) to the mid- and late twentieth (J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling). 9 Christopher Castiglia, “Revolution is a Fiction: The Way We Read (Early American Literature) Now,” Early American Literature 51, no. 2 (2016): 397–418. 10 Martin, Instructed Vision, 107. 11 James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1981), 189–190. Engell’s assertion that imagination

30

12 13 14

15 16 17

18

19 20

21

22 23 24

Historicizing the Imagination was regarded with suspicion in the late eighteenth century is correct, but his assumption that Americans “had not yet obtained a weight of intellectual and literary tradition or a sense of its own civilization being over-refned” is not. Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, 3rd ed., 2007), 7. Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875, with a New Preface (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980, 2007, 3rd ed.), 53, 77. Parry does not critically examine the imagination in his text. Instead, he praises Cole for having “a unique creative imagination,” a compliment that, for Parry, is synonymous with genius. This point is made by Alan Wallach in Reviewed Work: “The Art of Thomas Cole, Ambition and Imagination by Ellwood C. Parry, III, Alan Wallach,” Archives of American Art Journal 28, no. 4. (1988): 21–25. W. J. T. Mitchell, “Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 167–184. Sean Riley Silver, The Curatorial Imagination in England, 1660–1752 (Ph.D. diss: University of California Los Angeles, 2008), 7–8. See Konstantinos Kavoulakos, “Cornelius Castoriadis on Social Imaginary and Truth,” Ariadne 12 (2006): 201–212; and Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998, orig. 1975). For more on Ricoeur, see George H. Taylor, “Ricoeur’s Philosophy of Imagination,” Journal of French Philosophy 16, no. 1–2 (Spring-Fall 2006): 93–104. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). For these thinkers in a comparative perspective, see Suzi Adams, Paul Blokker, and Natalie J. Doyle, “Social Imaginaries in Debate,” Social Imaginaries 1, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 15–52. On the contributions of Durkheim, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty on the imagination/imaginary, see Adams et al., “Social Imaginaries in Debate,” 18–19. In making this argument, I am referring specifcally to Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), particularly p. 6, and more generally to the studies of vision and visuality by the likes of Michael Baxandall, Hal Foster, Peter de Bolla, Wendy Bellion, and others that did so much to render vision’s social and cultural constructedness as well as its historicity visible. David C. Miller, “Washington Allston and the Sister Arts Tradition in America,” European Romantic Review 5, no. 1 (1994): 65, n1. Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 81. Miller, who was admittedly more interested in nationalism and cultural politics, dispatched the imagination as “a faculty of private reckoning, not an instrument of communal identity.” Similar arguments can be found in Doreen Hunter, “America’s First Romantics: Richard Henry Dana, Sr. and Washington Allston,” The New England Quarterly 45, no. 1 (March 1972): 3–30; and, David Miller, “Washington Allston and the Sister Arts Tradition in America,” European Romantic Review 5, no. 1 (1994): 49–72. Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Alexander Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001). Bryan J. Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago, IL and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1982). Melissa Percival, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 7. Cairns Craig, “Kant Has Not Answered Hume’: Empiricism and the Romantic Imagination,” in Romantic Empiricism: Poetics and the Philosophy of Common Sense, 1780–1830 ed. Gavin Budge (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007), 43. In addition to Gavin Budge’s Romantic Empiricism, see also Stephen Boulter, The Rediscovery of Common Sense Philosophy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). The literary scholar Jerome McGann has also criticized this Kantian/Coleridgean worldview in “Rethinking Romanticism,” ELH 59, no. 3 (1992): 735–754.

Historicizing the Imagination

31

25 Archibald Alison, Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste 1 (Edinburgh: George Ramsay and Company, 1815), 21–22. For a fuller discussion of Common Sense aesthetics in early national America, see Jose Torre, The Political Economy of Sentiment: Paper Credit and the Scottish Enlightenment in Early Republic Boston, 1780–1820 (London: Routledge, 2015), 131–142. 26 David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, quoted in A Companion to Hume, Elizabeth S. Radcliffe, ed. (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 143. 27 Stephen Buckle, “Hume in the Enlightenment Tradition,” in A Companion to Hume, 31. 28 Alison Gopnik, “How an 18th-Century Philosopher Helped Solve My Midlife Crisis,” The Atlantic (October 2015), n.p. See also Gopnik, “Could David Hume Have Known About Buddhism? Charles Francois Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network,” Hume Studies 35, no. 1 & 2 (2009): 5–28. 29 William Edward Morris and Charlotte R. Brown, “David Hume,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. forthcoming URL = . 30 Gilles Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, Constantin Boundas, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, rev. ed.). For more on this connection, see Jeffrey Bell, Deleuze’s Hume: Philosophy, Culture, and the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). 31 As Alan Richardson has observed, irrationality is a familiar context for Romanticism and scholars have been slow to account for the infuence of the neurobiological or “nonFreudian” unconscious as it was developed in the early part of the nineteenth century. See Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, no. 47 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). There have been a number of books in British Romantic and Victorian literature that have explored aspects of the pre-Freudian unconscious. See, for instance, Adela Pinch, Thinking about Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Alison Winter, Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 32 Wilson, Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 10. 33 Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind, 349, 351 34 Henry T. Farmer, “ORIGINAL ESSAYS.: An Essay on the Immateriality of Mind,” The Medical Repository of Original Essays and Intelligence, Relative to Physic, Surgery, Chemistry, and Natural History (1800–1824) 7, no. 3 (January 1, 1823): 256. 35 Signal works on Victorians and sex include Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, trans. By Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1998) (1976, rpt.); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); and Matthew Sweet, Inventing the Victorians (London: Faber, 2001). 36 See my discussion of Alexander Gerard in Chapter 4 on this point. 37 William Cullen Bryant, Prose Writings (New York: Russell & Russell, 1964), 6, 15. 38 Samuel F. B. Morse, “Lecture One,” Lectures on the Affnity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, ed. and introd. Nikolai Cikovsky Jr. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 53–54. 39 Morse, “Lecture Two,” Lectures on the Affnity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, 64–65. 40 Joseph Addison, Spectator Paper no. 412, quoted in Engell, The Creative Imagination, 38. 41 Dugald Stewart, The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, Esq., F.R.SS., Sir William Hamilton, ed. 2 (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable & Co. and Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1854), 431, 434. 42 “imagination, n.”. OED Online. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed.com/view/ Entry/91643?redirectedFrom=imagination. Accessed August 16, 2019. 43 imagination, q.v. Encyclopedia Perthensis, or Universal Dictionary of the Arts, Sciences, Literature, &c. (Edinburgh: John Brown, 1816), XII, 14. 44 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, quoted in Engell, The Creative Imagination, 14. My discussion of the differences between fancy and the imagination in this section is indebted to Engell’s explication of it.

32

Historicizing the Imagination

45 Thomas Reid, Works, Dugald Stewart, ed. II, 436–437 quoted in Engell, The Creative Imagination, 175. I only scratch the surface of what was a complicated debate over the imagination’s constituent parts. For more, see Engell, 172–183. 46 See Sumpter T. Priddy, III American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790–1820 exh. cat. (Milwaukee, WI: Milwaukee Art Museum in association with the Chipstone Foundation, 2004). George Washington to Anthony Whitting, February 3, 1793,” Founders Online, National Archives. https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-12-02-0063. Accessed April 11, 2019. [Original source: The Papers of George Washington, Presidential Series, vol. 12, 16 January 1793–31 May 1793, ed. Christine Sternberg Patrick and John C. Pinheiro. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 95–100]. 47 On fancy vs. Fancy, see Wendy Bellion, “American Fancy: Exuberance in the Arts, 1790– 1820: An Exhibition Review,” Winterthur Portfolio 40 (Winter 2005): 254. 48 Francis Bowen, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind by Dugald Stewart (Boston, MA and Cambridge, MA: James Munroe and Company, 1855), 159. 49 Because the philosophers referring to fancy as a mental faculty were themselves not consistent in whether or not they capitalized the word, I have also elected to use the lower-case fancy throughout this book to refer to both senses of its meaning. 50 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Paper no. 411, in The Spectator: Complete in One Volume. With Notes, and a General Index (London: W. Wilson, 1813), 593. 51 Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, With a Memoir of the Author, By the Rev. David Welsh, Minister of St. David’s, Glasgow (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1820, repr. 1830), 276. 52 Although her topic is sculpture, not painting, Caroline van Eck has written an incisive study of living presence responses to sculptures in the eighteenth century that has infuenced my thinking. Caroline van Eck, “Living Statues: Gell’s Art and Agency, Living Presence Response, and the Sublime,” Art History 33 no. 4 (September 2010): 651–656. 53 On this point, see Christine Holbo, “Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism in Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer,” Early American Literature 32, no. 1 (1997): 24. 54 Engell, Creative Imagination, 145–149. 55 J, “The Culture of the Imagination,” Arcturus, A Journal of Books and Opinion 1, no. 4 (March 1841): 236. 56 “Article 3 — Fine Arts. A Reply to Article X., No. LVIII in the North-American Review, entitled “Academies of Arts,” &C., by SAMUEL F. B. MORSE, President of the National Academy of Design. New-York. G. & C. Carvill. 1828,” The Southern Review 4, no. 7 (August–November 1829): 70–86. 57 Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profle Books, 2010), 13. 58 John Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1997), 87. 59 Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 24–32. See also Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 21–39. The classic source on anxiety about the arts as a potential vector of luxury and vice in nineteenth-century America is Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966). See also Alan Wallach, “Luxury and the Downfall of Civilization in Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire,” in Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England, eds. Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank (Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 304–318. 60 See Friedberg’s chapter “The Mobilized and Virtual Gaze in Modernity: Flâneur/Flâneuse,” Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 2. I owe this connection between the diorama and later forms of visual culture to Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge and London: The MIT Press, 2013), 12. 61 On Maelzel’s musical accomplishments and the complicated history of his long- running show of the Confagration of Moscow and the Diorama of Reims, see John F. Ohl and

Historicizing the Imagination

62 63

64 65

66 67

68

69 70 71 72 73

33

Joseph Earl Arrington, “John Maelzel, Master Showman of Automata and Panoramas,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 84 (1960): 57–92. “Mr. Maelzel’s Exhibition,” Baltimore Patriot, June 7, 1831. More detailed information on the Diorama of Reims is available in Ohl and Arrington, “John Maelzel,” 74–75. This observation draws upon Trish Loughran’s work on virtuality and political representation which is discussed at greater length below. On subject positions, see Bronwyn Davies and Rom Harré, “Positioning: The Discursive Production of Selves,” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 20, no. 1 (March 1990): 43–63. I am also indebted to the work of philosopher Elizabeth Grosz which accounts for a multiplicity of perspectives and positions. See Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). See also Grosz, “Voyeurism/ exhibitionism/ the gaze,” in Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, ed. E. Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 447–450. See my discussion of skepticism in American cultural studies following Neil Harris’ 1973 essay “The Operational Aesthetic” for more on this assertion. Anne Friedberg, Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 11. This book was largely fnished before I learned of Whitney Davis’ Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). The scope of that book is vastly more ambitious than my own, although Davis is interested in the recursion and repetition of virtual images that I explore in Chapters 2 and 3, as well as sensory perception and embodiment. Michael Darroch, Meike Wagner and Sarah Bay-Cheng, “Node: Actuality-Virtuality,” in Mapping Intermediality in Performance, eds. Sarah Bay-Cheng, Chiel Kattenbelt and Andy Lavender (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2010), 142. I have found Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011) indispensable in this effort. For an overview of technical art history in American art that begins with the invention of the x-ray in the 1890s, see Joyce Hill Stonor, “Turning Points in Technical Art History in American Art,” American Art 26, no. 1 (2012): 2–9. A brief and helpful overview is provided by Maryan W. Ainsworth, “From Connoisseurship to Technical Art History: The Evolution of the Interdisciplinary Study of Art,” Conservation Perspectives, the Getty Conservation Institute Newsletter 20 (Spring 2005): n.p. http://www.getty.edu /conservation/publications_resources/newsletters/20_1/feature.html. Accessed 10 July 2019. Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan, 1986), 39. Art history has long privileged the object, leading some to question whether art historians ever really turned away from these methods. The roundtable discussion “Whither Connoisseurship?” with contributions by Erica E. Hirshler, A. Joan Saab, Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., and Alan Wallach in Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 1, no. 2 (Fall 2015) serves as a good introduction to these issues as they have unfolded in museums and art history, particularly in the feld of American art, over the last few years. For an excellent introduction to the same debate in the feld of literary studies, see the special issue of Early American Literature 51, no. 2 (2016), particularly Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, “Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies,” 235–254 and Christopher Castiglia, “Revolution is a Fiction: The Way We Read (Early American Literature) Now,” 397–418. “For the Boston Intelligencer. Collectanea. the Capuchin Church,” Boston Intelligencer & Evening Gazette (March 25, 1820), 1. Denise Gigante, “Romanticism and Taste,” Literature Compass 4, no. 2 (March 2007): 407–419. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013), 162. Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 8. For an elegant and nuanced survey of how women negotiated this cultural landscape, often using classical art and literature to their advantage despite its troubled meanings in American cultural politics, see Caroline Winterer, The Mirror of Antiquity: American

34

74

75 76 77

78

79

80

81 82 83 84

85

Historicizing the Imagination Women and the Classical Tradition, 1750–1900 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992, repr. 2013); Richard Meyer, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (New York: Beacon Press, 2002); Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). I have found Mary Douglas’ classic text Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966) particularly helpful in this regard. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 18–19. In fact, much of the early history of physiology concerns the disputes over where precisely to locate the soul within the body. As the neuroscientist Michel Trimble has explained, “Descartes opted for the pineal gland, while Albrecht von Haller placed [the soul] in the medulla oblongata.” By the early nineteenth century, Johann Caspar Spurzheim and Franz Joseph Gall did not argue for the soul as a anatomical structure, but rather as a region of the brain that was “localized to the upper part of the ascending frontal convolution of the brain.” See Trimble, The Soul in the Brain: The Cerebral Basis of Language, Art, and Belief (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 27–28. G. S. Rousseau, “Science and the Discovery of the Imagination in Enlightened England,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 3, no. 1 (1969): 108–135. See also Alexander Wragge-Morley, “Imagining the Soul: Thomas Willis (1621–1675) on the Anatomy of the Brain and the Nerves,” in Imagining the Brain: Episodes in the History of Brain Research, eds. Chiara Ambrosio and William Maclehose, Progress in Brain Research 243 (2018): 55–73. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil [1651] in Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Political Theory: Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan, ed. Deborah Baumgold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 13. Robin Douglass, “The Body Politic “is a fctitious body,” Hobbes Studies 27, no. 2: 126– 147. I have also found helpful the discussion of Hobbes’ ideas on sense and imagination in Duncan Stewart, “Thomas Hobbes,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/ hobbes/. Accessed April 30, 2019; and Juhana Lemetti, Imagination and Diversity in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Ph.D. Diss.: University of Helsinki, 2006), 69–74. For more on this issue in a broader context, see Todd Wayne Butler, Politics and the Imagination in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2013). Thomas More, quoted in Carl Zimmer, Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How it Changed the World (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Catherine Porter, trans. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 28. See Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854–1861 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002 [1973]). See, for example, Robert H. Abzug, on antebellum “body reform” movements like vegetarianism, abolitionism, phrenology, and women’s rights in Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). On the uneven legal and political incorporations of “aliens” particularly black and Native American people, into this body politic, see Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 81–115. For a general overview of this period, see Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, The Oxford History of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). On belles lettres and the formation of American civil society, see David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 1997). See also more recent works on transatlanticism in the Revolutionary era, such as Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Edward Larkin, The American School of Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016). The transatlantic, and

Historicizing the Imagination

86

87

88

89 90 91

92

93

94 95

35

particularly Anglo-American, orientation of American culture in the nineteenth-century is given a much-needed update in Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Addison Paper no. 413, quoted in Lubey, “Erotic Interiors in Addison’s Imagination,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 432. See also Lubey, Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760. (London: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2012). Mark Akenside and Robin Dix, The Literary Career of Mark Akenside: Including an Edition of His Non-Medical Prose (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 120–121. The lines quoted from Akenside are 3.380–382 in The Pleasures of the Imagination, but the italics are Dix’s. Thomas Hallock, “Male Pleasure and the Genders of Eighteenth-Century Botanic Exchange: A Garden Tour,” William & Mary Quarterly 3rd series, 62 no. 4 (October 2005): 699; Erasmus Darwin, Botanic Garden: A Poem, in Two Parts (London: J. Johnson, 1791), v. For “rowling” see Hobbes, I.2.2., Leviathan, in Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Political Theory, 11. Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination: A Poem in Three Books (Dublin: George Faulkner, 1748, 5th ed.), lines 271–274, 50–51. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Paper no. 411, in The Spectator: Complete in One Volume. With Notes, and a General Index (London: W. Wilson, 1813), 593. On Addison’s “landskip,” see David Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 3 (2002): 413–437 for a much fuller discussion of mediation and reality in eighteenth-century British aesthetic theorists. On the longevity of virtuality across historical periods, see also Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2002) and Maria Beatrice Bittarello, “Mythologies of Virtuality: ‘Other Space’ and ‘Shared Dimension’ from Ancient Myths to Cyberspace,” in The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, Mark Grimshaw, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 86–110. For van Leeuwenhoek’s microscopic samples, see Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Samuel Hoole, The Select Works of Antony Van Leeuwenhoek: Containing His Microscopical Discoveries in Many of the Works of Nature (London: G. Sidney, 1800), 62, 65. Anne Friedberg has extended this genealogy of virtual screens back to Leon Battista Alberti’s famous metaphor for perspective, the open window. Rather than a window covered with transparent glass, she shows that windows in the ffteenth century were translucent, not transparent, and were covered with materials like gypsum or alabaster. Alberti also described a velo or veil, a machine for perspective covered by a fne netting. While Alberti’s treatise was not illustrated, this device was visualized in Albrecht Durer’s perspective screen in his famous woodcut Treatise on Measurement frst published in 1525. Both of these devices created virtual surfaces on which another plausible version of reality could be created, not a literal “window on the world.” See Friedberg, Virtual Window, 29–42. Friedberg, Virtual Window, 51–63. Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, The Select Works of Antony Van Leeuwenhoek: Containing His Microscopical Discoveries in Many of the Works of Nature, trans. Samuel Hoole (London: G. Sidney, 1800), 209; Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses. With Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (Lincolnwood, IL: Science Heritage, 1667, repr. 1987), 192. On wonder’s intersection with curiosity in the mid-seventeenth century, see Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonder and the Orders of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 311–316. D. Graham Burnett has shown that the history of the hyperbolic lens (as opposed to the less-accurate and more easily produced spherical lens) connects directly to the Renaissance Kunstkammern where their aesthetic properties were on display. These lenses also connected to discourses of occult hermeticism, although Burnett cautions not to overemphasize lenses’ “hermetic descent,” since they did also commonly serve as spectacles for the elite. Burnett, Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest: Lens Making Machines and Their Signifcance in the Seventeenth Century (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 2005), 20–21, 8–10.

36

Historicizing the Imagination

96 “Rational entertainments” of illustrated science from the seventeenth and stretching into the nineteenth century promised to educate and instruct young as well as old, thereby eradicating suspicion and ignorance. See Barbara Maria Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998) and Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). The passage from della Porta is quoted and its relationship with virtuality is discussed in Friedberg, Virtual Window, 66–68. 97 For an infuential analysis of the phantasmagoria that uses these terms, see Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 140–167. See also Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder, 83–90 and Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 47–49 and 307–315. 98 Iain McCalman, “The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford, and the Spectacle of the Sublime,” Romanticism on the Net (Special Issue: Romantic Spectacle, John Halliwell and Ian Haywood, eds.) 46 (May 2007): n.p. https://www.erudit.org/revue/ ron/2007/v/n46/016129ar.html?vue=resume. Accessed February 1, 2015. 99 Daston and Park, Wonder and the Orders of Nature, 15. 100 Daston and Park, Wonder and the Orders of Nature, 341. 101 ”Lit de justice pour l’enregistrement de l’édit … supprimant les jurandes,” 12 March 1776, in Remonstrances du Parlement de Paris au XVIIIe Siécle, ed. Jules Flammermont (Paris: Impr. nationale, 1888–98), 3:346, quoted in Jan Goldstein, The Post-Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 39. 102 Julius Rocca, “William Cullen and Robert Whytt on the Nervous System,” Brain, Mind, and Medicine: Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience, eds. Harry Whitaker, C. U. M. Smith, and Stanley Finger (New York: Springer, 2007), 92–93. 103 On the association between imagination and epidemic disease, see Sari Altschuler, The Medical Imagination: Literature and Health in the Early United States (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 54, 100. For more on the connection between imagination and alcoholism, particularly with regard to Charles Willson Peale and his son, Raphaelle, as well as the genre painter Charles Deas, see Guy Jordan, The Aesthetics of Intoxication in Antebellum American Art and Culture (Ph.D. diss: University of Maryland, College Park, 2007), 49–59. Jordan’s argument around themes like dependency and excess in antebellum American art nicely complements my own, and has been especially useful in the last three chapters of this study. On the disregulated imagination in early national Philadelphia, see Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale. Bell’s translation was published as F. J. V. Broussais, A Treatise on Physiology Applied to Pathology … Translated From the French, by John Bell … and R. La Roche … Second American Edition (Philadelphia, PA: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1828). 104 John Haygarth, Of the imagination, as a cause and as a cure of disorders of the body; exemplifed by fctitious tractors, and epidemical convulsions (Bath: R. Crutwell, 1800). The See Stewart Justman, “Imagination’s Trickery: The Discovery of the Placebo Effect,” Journal of The Historical Society 10 (March 2010): 58. Justman’s article makes a compelling case that imagination was not simply regarded as a sham, despite a healthy dose of post-Enlightenment skepticism. For an opposing view of Haygarth’s invocation of imagination as critique of medical quackery, see James Delbourgo, “Common Sense, Useful Knowledge, and Matters of Fact in the Late Enlightenment: The Transatlantic Career of Perkins’s Tractors,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 61, no. 4 (2004): 643–684. 105 On Harris’ considerable and continuing infuence, see Andrea L. Volpe, “The Neil Harris Effect,” Reviews in American History 38, no. 4 (2010): 636–643. For the operational aesthetic, see Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Co., 1973), 33–89, 211–223. An incomplete list of scholarship that might ft within an operational aesthetic includes works that pre-date Harris like Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1965) and Gordon Wood’s article which builds upon it: Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century.” Cultural historians who bear a debt to Harris include Karen Halttunen, Confdence Men and Painted Women: A Study

Historicizing the Imagination

106

107

108

109 110 111

37

of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); James Cook, The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Michael Leja, Looking Askance: Skepticism and American Art from Eakins to Duchamp (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004). In flm studies, see Tom Gunning, “Crazy Machines in the Garden of Forking Paths,” in Classical Hollywood Comedy, eds. Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins (New York: Routledge, 1995), 87–105; and, Anna McCarthy, “Stanley Milgram, Allan Funt, and Me,” in Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, eds. Susan Murray and Laurie OuelletteNew York: New York University Press, 2009, 19–39. I of course acknowledge Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak’s magisterial Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001). And yet, despite their title and an excellent discussion of the connections between new media and the Renaissance wunderkammern, innocent wonder is actually given short shrift in Stafford’s essay. The literature on these devices is far too vast to ft within one footnote, but major touchstones in it are Birgit Verwiebe, Lichtspiele: vom Mondscheintransparent zum Diorama (Stuttgart: Füsslin, 1995). See also Renzo Dubbini, “Light and Motion,” in Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe, Lydia G. Cochrane, trans. (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 115–134. There are several well- illustrated treatments of early, “proto-cinematic” entertainments. See, for example, Jac Remise, Pascale Remise, Régis van de Walle, Magie Lumineuse: du Théâtre d’Ombres à la Lanterne Magique (Paris: Balland, 1979); Laurent Mannoni, Donata Pesenti Campagnoni and David Robinson, Light and Movement: Incunabula of the Motion Picture 1420–1896 (Gemona: La Cineteca del Friuli/Le Giornate del Cinema Muto, 1995); Bodo von Dewitz and Werner Nekes, Ich Sehe Was, Was du Nicht Siehst!: Sehmaschinen und Bilderwelten: Die Sammlung Werner Nekes (Göttingen: Steidl, 2002.) Finally, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), esp. 211–220 for more on smaller, portable optical entertainments in London. Jussi Parikka and Erkki Huhtamo have discussed the ways in which the Foucauldian concept of genealogy has infuenced media archaeology across a series of articles. See, in particular Parikka, “Introduction: Cartographies of the Old and the New,” What is Media Archaeology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 5–14; and Huhtamo and Parikka, “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, eds. Huhtamo and Parikka (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 1–21. On Friedberg, see note 95 and Virtual Window, 26–73; Geoffrey Batchen, “Electricity Made Visible,” in New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, eds. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 27–44; Tom Gunning, “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era,” Victorian Studies 54, no. 3 (2012): 495–516. See also Isobel Armstrong’s suggestive “Lens, Light, and the Virtual World,” in Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 328–350; and Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009). Neera M. Singh, “Introduction: Affective Ecologies and Conservation,” Conservation and Society 16, no. 1 (2018): 1. This series of discoveries was not without controversy, which is explored in Jed Z. Buchwald, The Rise of the Wave Theory of Light: Optical Theory and Experiment in the Early Nineteenth Century (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1989). The phrase is Friedberg’s, Virtual Window, 9. My thinking on the importance of Brewster and the virtual has also been shaped by Maggie Gover’s Seeing Double: The Victorian Virtual and Projections of Female Subjectivity (Ph.D. diss: UC Riverside, 2012).

38

Historicizing the Imagination

112 For the “burning candle” trick, see Thomas B. Greenslade, Jr., “19th Century Textbook Illustrations,” The Physics Teacher 15 (1977): 360. This discovery also made possible the theatrical illusion now described as “Pepper’s ghost” that J. H. Pepper debuted at the Royal Polytechnic Institute in London in 1862. See Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientifc Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 186. 113 On positionality and sensation, see Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 3–4. 114 Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 113–114. Erkki Huhtamo addressed this more fully in his article “‘All the World’s a Kaleidoscope’: A Media Archaeological Perspective to the Incubation Era of Media Culture,” Rivista di Estetica 55, schermi/screens (2013): 139– 153. Also useful is Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds, 255–258. 115 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Reprint. Note: the original essay appeared in the Parisian newspaper, Figaro, in 1863. Quoted in Crary, 116. 116 John Gibson Macvicar, On the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Sublime (London: Scott, Webster, & Geary, 1837), 78–114. I know of Macvicar’s book from Arnaud Maillet’s article, cited in note 56. 117 Macvicar, On the Beautiful, the Picturesque, and the Sublime, 3. 118 Melanie Keene, Science in Wonderland: The Scientifc Fairy Tales of Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 20. In a similar vein, Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman have contested the notion that the enchanted aspects of natural magic disappeared in the face of modernity. See Hankins and Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4–5. 119 Farmer, “Essay on the Immateriality of Mind,” 257. 120 Cooper, “A Dissolving View,” in Essays on Nature and Landscape, eds. Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002), 298–309. For more on Cooper’s essay and its use of the language of architecture to conceptualize the American nation, see Duncan Faherty, Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776–1858 (Hanover, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), 157–161. 121 Erin C. Blake, “Zograscopes and the Mapping of Polite Society in Eighteenth-Century England,” New Media, 1740–1915, ed. Geoffrey Pingree and Lisa Gitelman (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2003), 1–29, and Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 49–51. 122 Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New Republic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 132. 123 Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 12. 124 “Remarks on the Progress and Present State of the Fine Arts in the United States,” Analectic Magazine 6 (November 1815): 363–364. 125 Nathaniel P. Willis, American Scenery or Land, Lake, and River: Illustrations of Transatlantic Nature 1 (London: George Virtue, 1840), 2. 126 Cooper to Horatio Greenough, quoted in Brigitte Bailey, “Cole and the Italian Landscape,” American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 100. 127 Ed Finn, “Algorithms are Redrawing the Space for Cultural Imagination,” The MIT Press Reader October 7, 2019. For Finn’s full argument, see What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2017). For insight into technology as a tool of enchantment independent of modernity, see Alfred Gell, “The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology,” in Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics, ed. Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 40–67.

2

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

The city was Boston, and the year was 1820. A single picture (Plate 1) captivated the city. Admission was a fairly steep price of 25 cents, yet it was thronged by visitors who came to the rooms at Scollay’s Building, a handsome, 4-story brick building at the intersection of Court and Tremont Streets at the center of Boston.1 Its subject is oddly quotidian: a group of Capuchin monks, clad in brown robes, celebrate Mass in a narrow side chapel illuminated at its furthest edge by a high window. The image is arresting, but hardly dramatic. The shadows of the worshiping monks lengthen along the foor as a rich, crepuscular light wanes, and presumably the Mass concludes without incident. No one in the painting dies tragically or fghts in battle, as they did in so many of the most popular paintings in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. There is little in this description to suggest the improbable critical and commercial success that this French academic work would enjoy, touring American cities and towns from Savannah to Saratoga in the 1820s and 1830s. There were exact copies, bad copies, and loose homages, and despite the decimating impact the Panic of 1819 had on spending on the arts, the itineraries of these copies and the original were tortuous. The artist Thomas Sully’s copy, for instance, appeared in 11 cities at least 14 times from 1821 to 1830, in small towns like Natchez, Mississippi and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, as well as bigger cities like Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York, and Washington, D.C. Although these were places where some of the citizens were wealthy and refned and others endeavored to be, these were not urbane cultural capitals by any means. In Natchez, a Mr. Parmley advertised an exhibition of Granet’s painting in one of his rooms, and dental services in another.2 The success of Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome was odder still because critics described the painting as highly imaginative, insisting that it entranced and captivated viewers who felt powerless to resist the imagination’s vertiginous pull. These effects were so compelling that some viewers and critics exhibited an apparent confusion about whether the painting was a mental or material phenomenon, asserting that they felt transported. What accounts for the quixotic popularity of this painting, and the many others like it that were exhibited in the United States in its wake? John Davis has rightly emphasized the place of Granet’s work in a wider visual culture of Catholicism which was consumed by wary Protestants who were as drawn to the Catholic church’s “cultural legacy of all that is unfettered, pleasurable, and imaginative” as they were repelled by it. Wendy Bellion has shown that Granet’s painting sparked a vogue for illusionistic paintings such as Rembrandt Peale’s Patriae Pater and Samuel F. B. Morse’s House of Representatives, arguing that these and other works in the 1820s augured a new order of representation that prized passivity and immersion.

40

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

In each of these analyses, however, imagination appears as a familiar, if largely unacknowledged guest. Bellion writes, for example, that the tin viewing tubes that visitors used to bring details of the painting into focus at Sully and Robert Earle’s gallery in Philadelphia “telescoped imagination into the church, linking the body of the spectator with the furthest corners of the mysterious choir.” Davis also fags the imagination, citing two Unitarian preachers who noted the susceptibility of “the imagination and the feelings” among their fellow Protestants.3 As quickly as imagination surfaces in these exemplary analyses, however, its possibilities as a historical and aesthetic category of analysis are submerged again, and contemporary readers are left to guess what the term might have meant to nineteenth-century audiences. In this chapter, I argue that the success of this genre shows that imagination meant a great deal because it activated a liminal realm that was widely experienced as affective, embodied, and nonlinear. By nonlinear, I do not mean irrational, a word that might connote a negative response that is decidedly lacking in the critical reception surveyed here. Rather, this liminality suggested a second but equally valid virtual world where sensations and pleasant affective states like wonder were magnifed, but attempts at judicious evaluation (of size, of distance, or of “reality”) were frustrated. Partly, this wonder helped express a sense of proleptic disbelief that anticipated objections to the imagination’s subversive delights, thereby performing resistance to the very forces to which critics and audiences simultaneously submitted. But an immersive and labile sense of wonder or thralldom also helped to cultivate a subjectivity or, more poetically, a sense of “not yet” that was rife with dramatic, sensory intensities. In the second half of this chapter, I suggest that these experiences do not solely belong to the Jacksonian or antebellum eras, or indeed to the visual culture of the United States alone. Instead, I link touring pictures, including dioramas, to a variety of “new media” ranging from classical casts to ruins and, even later, to flm, that invited viewers to travel through space and time into a historical and imaginative realm of virtuality.

Virtuality and Immersion The notion that Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome possessed remarkable powers emerged early on in the painting’s reception. Its reputation was no doubt aided by the impeccable pedigree and vast wealth of its patron, Benjamin Wiggin. In 1818, Wiggin bought one of the numerous copies that Granet had made in Rome of his popular painting which the artist had initially exhibited in his studio in Rome in 1814, following the example of other elite patrons like Caroline Murat, the Queen of Naples and the sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, the Tsar of Russia, and the French aristocrat the Duc de Berry.4 By December of 1819, Wiggin had generously made his copy of the painting available for viewing in Boston’s Scollay Square. Wiggin was a banker and co-owner of B. & T. Wiggin, which fnanced American exports, and he was considered as much a resident of London as he was of Boston. In 1822, he lived in a house on Beacon Street with his wife, Charlotte Wiggin née Fowle, “a woman of remarkable beauty” where they reportedly entertained with “style and comfort.”5 Later, they returned to London, living in a townhouse in John Nash’s magnifcent Park Crescent. By the time he died in 1849, his estate was worth half a million dollars. The painting’s power over critics was not simply a function of its exclusive origins, however. Instead, it elicited disbelieving reactions of wonder from astonished observers. One such response published in 1819 is worth quoting in full since it demonstrates

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

41

how personally viewers engaged with this work. This was not simply a bored aesthete lauding the “correct taste,” and liberality of one of his city’s leading citizens, although there was also plenty of that elsewhere. Rather, this critic for the Boston Intelligencer alludes to a lack of control coupled with aesthetic pleasure that we often do not associate with American art in the 1820s: Sometimes, such a plenitude of genius runs through a performance, that panegyric seems to lose what it works for. I never before saw a representation so completely ad vivim. Quantenus hoc simile est oculus, quod videmus. The spectator, at the close of his visit, is almost prompted to ask the kneeling friar to rise. […] When I was a child I wanted the moon, but now I sigh for Mr. Wiggins’ picture.6 Although the reviewer positioned himself within the conventions of the eighteenthcentury gentleman of taste, with a witty pun and Latin phrases refecting a classical education, his treatment of the painted fgures as living beings is as present as those texts were distant. His was an interior desire that was diffcult to accommodate within the strictures of elite Boston society, for the painting belonged, as he acknowledged, to Mr. Wiggin. More than a painting, however, this reviewer asserted that the work was “a performance,” a living thing (ad vivim) that one could no more possess than the moon. The pleasures of its smoothly rendered, sensorially rich surfaces practically struck him dumb (“panegyric seems to lose what it works for”), as stock expressions of appreciation lost their ability to comment on an experience that overwhelmed the reason. Nowhere in this reaction does the reader edge any closer to a stable, noumenal reality, but he is rather delivered again and again into phenomenal presence. By rights, this should have been read as a deception. How could a painted fgure move? How could one possess another man’s property, or even the moon? It sounds like a humbug straight from P. T. Barnum’s (as-yet undreamed of) playbook, but the quote from Joseph Addison’s Spectator papers worked as a philosophical justifcation for these evasions. “Quantenus hoc simile est oculus, quod videmus.” The phrase is from Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, and it is the same one that opened Joseph Addison’s Spectator paper no. 416 on the “secondary pleasures of the imagination.” “Because the objects that we fancy in our mind represent what we see in the eye.” What Addison was discussing in this paper was the imagination’s paradoxical ability to call forth phenomena that one had never actually seen with the eye, only those that one had perceived with the mind’s eye. Furthermore, these faint impressions could be “enlarge[d], compound[ed], and var[ied] at her own pleasure.” Beyond simply asserting his own good taste, this reference clued the readers of this review into the fact that these pleasures were virtual: here and yet not-here. This was the point of Addison’s essay which had defned these secondary pleasures as “agreeable Visions of Things that are either Absent or Fictitious.” This language of primary and secondary slides between reality and imagination without so much as a hiccup. Where are we, exactly? The Boston Intelligencer critic seemed to suggest that the answer did not really matter. In Granet’s composition, as well as the copies made after it, representational and compositional cues helped foster this split between absence and presence, primary and secondary experience that was so key to the exercise of the imagination. When a viewer walked into the hush of Scollay’s Building, leaving the bustling city and its crowds behind, it would have been diffcult to tell where the picture ended and reality

42

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

began. Capuchin Church is over six feet tall and is framed at the top by soaring groin vaults that seem to invite the viewer to stroll into an actual architectural chamber. The worn foorboards have no initial ledge or barrier to the viewer’s entry, making it almost possible that this ground would swallow him or her up and into this hushed, sacred space. Such temporal and locational fuctuations were a hallmark of the feet imagination, which could travel the globe, a “[w]akeful, vagrant, restless thing/Ever wandering, on the wing,” as the early national poet Philip Freneau put it.7 In this case, viewers were delivered from Scollay Square or Mr. Parmly’s rooms in Natchez to an ordinary chapel just off the Piazza Barberini in Rome. This sense of unsteadiness caused by the foor in front of the viewer is subtly echoed elsewhere in the painting. At either edge, for instance, where we might expect an intersecting wall or some other architectural feature to disclose the possibility of a space beyond this one, there is nothing. Instead, the high rails of the wainscoting carry the viewer’s attention along the two side walls to the back of the chapel like well-oiled tracks. The viewer is plunged into a space of meditative devotion without an anchor to another reality. These characteristics of immersion and astonishment help to create a sense of virtuality. As art historian and media theorist Oliver Grau has argued in his infuential analysis of virtuality, virtual images “seal off the observer hermetically from external visual impressions … observe scale and color correspondence, and … use indirect light effects to make the image appear as the source of the real” such that it “flls the observer’s entire feld of vision.” The resulting effects on the viewer are characterized by “diminishing critical distance to what is shown and increasing emotional involvement in what is happening.”8 We can locate this lack of critical distance in wordlessness and in the Boston Intelligencer critic’s “sigh.” A similar sense of absorption and immersion was effected by a pair of paintings called The Dinner Party and The Tea Party that were painted in 1821 and 1824, respectively by the Boston artist Henry Sargent (Plate 2 and 3). Like Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, both The Dinner Party and The Tea Party position their viewers in such a way that there is not a clear break between external reality and painted depiction. Looking at The Dinner Party, the viewer must struggle to discern the presence of a set of polished, presumably mahogany paneled doors on either side of the central scene. These dark doors would have blurred the boundaries between the space of the picture and that of the gallery, and, in low light, it would be reasonable to assume that this architectural feature, which flls the entirety of the painting’s fve-foot length, was constructed of real wood rather than pigments. In The Tea Party, the tremendous green drape that marks the transition to the parlor is also barely visible, and, like the dark mahogany doors, would have easily blended in with a darkened gallery. Sargent’s strategy of engrossing the viewer suggests that the artist understood that the effect was a key part of its commercial and critical success. The tendency of these paintings to blur their edges and therefore their constructed nature would have been intensifed by the fact that in a number of instances, the Granet, a copy by the artist Thomas Sully, and the Sargent paintings were displayed in such a way as to heighten their absorptive effects on viewers. When Capuchin Church appeared at Earle’s Gallery in Philadelphia in 1821, for example, it was surrounded by room-darkening green baize. The painter Charles Willson Peale wrote in a letter to his son Rubens that “6 tubes are laid in the front on the baise for the Visitors to view the Picture through them.”9 And when Sully’s copy appeared in the same gallery a short

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

43

time later, a critic remarked that it was staged “in the same situation” as Granet’s picture.10 Overhead light, from skylights or gas lighting, could also intensify the viewer’s experience of being contiguous with the painting, rather than merely looking at it. When Mr. Wiggins’ copy of Granet’s painting traveled to Charleston in 1822, a notice published in the newspaper called it an “Illumination of the Capuchin Chapel,” referring not to the practice of exhibiting a transparent painting that was a common spectacle in early national America, but rather to the fact that the picture itself was “brilliantly illuminated in the Evening.” Two years later in Natchez, the operators of the exhibition appeared to have used the same practice since the painting was on display until nine o’clock in the evening in January.11 Sargent’s Dinner Party and Tea Party were displayed in a similar fashion. Commissioned by David Brown, a drawing master for the Academy for Young Ladies and Gentlemen for his gallery at Cornhill Square, they were shown “with a green Curtain drawn before the frame arranged in a proper light” according to an account by the South Carolina artist John Cogdell.12 It is hard to know exactly what “a proper light” meant exactly—strong overhead natural light is a likely possibility, as are gas jets—but the “green Curtain” recalls the use of green baize at Earle’s Gallery and clearly seems to have fulflled the same purpose of obfuscating the boundary between reality and facticity. Whether the entrepreneurs who exhibited these paintings employed theatrical tricks like baize-lined walls and dramatic overhead light, however, a fundamental sense of doubleness pervaded both the compositions and their effects on viewers. The staggering number of frames within the pictures hammer this point home. In Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, some 11 paintings line the walls. Ten are visible in The Tea Party and eight in The Dinner Party (including the one refected in the large pier mirror at the painting’s center.) Their exact subjects are diffcult, if not impossible to see, but their presence functions as rhetorical sign of mediation, even as they are employed to make the paintings in which they occur seem viscerally immanent. Frames implied a sense of doubleness or virtuality not just because they served as some kind of semiotic sign of epistemological uncertainty, but because they were literally able to move here and there. It was the historical emergence of the frame as a light and portable structure that could be moved independently of heavy architectural enclosures such as altars that “worked … to virtualize the image and liberate its internal space of representation from the external space governing its own movement as an object,” as the art historian Jennifer Roberts has noted.13 The objecthood of these works was therefore visible only rarely, and usually in cases when their expertly managed virtuality was interrupted by an unforeseen accident. A writer with the Raleigh Register and North-Carolina Gazette in 1823, for instance, was “sorry to learn that” the vessel carrying Sully’s copy “capsized in [the] James River … and foated ashore full of water. The box containing the picture was recovered from the cabin, and on opening it, the picture was unfortunately found wetted and milldewed [sic].”14 This paradoxical sense of removal, coupled with an intense and multisensory engagement, was crucial to the fourishing of virtuality, and created a disorienting sense of “reality” that was not, of course, reality. No spectator really thought she had magically been transported from Savannah to Rome, in other words. And yet, “functionally or effectively” as Anne Friedberg put it in her useful defnition of virtuality discussed in the preceding chapter, the objects featured within these paintings were perceived as being one and the same with reality.15 To wit: “To see this picture is the

44 A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim same as to see the whole in real life,” reported “Amateur,” a critic in Washington, D.C.16 Similarly, a Saratoga reviewer who saw Sully’s copy of the painting claimed that “it [was] almost impossible for the mind to conceive, that the effect presented to the eye, is the result of light and shade displayed on a piece of smooth canvass, suspended against the wall.”17 The constituent parts of the painting—“smooth canvass” and “light and shade”—somehow became more physical upon closer inspection, and yet it was the mind that they tested most severely, whose exertions were hinted at in the phrase “impossible to conceive.” Rather than a hoax to foreswear, however, these painted, two-dimensional elements were, the critic suggested, both “true representations” and “the most striking effects of reality” despite their clearly manufactured, even deceptive nature. The constitutive materiality that made such an illusion possible was not paint, which carries a valence of obscuring and deceiving, but light, which emanates from within. Light has the effect of both dematerializing substance and animating the forms that it touches, making them seem possessed of their own agency. Light plays the dominant role in Granet’s little theater of the liturgy, bathing the smooth curve of the low apse in a bright glow, skittering across the foor, casting long shadows in its wake. It makes the gilt-edged frames of the pictures gleam in the darkness, while the canvases themselves, covered in darker pigments, seem to blacken. In the copy by Sully, ever the canny entrepreneur, the artist heightened and clarifed the central role of that light played in his model, suggesting that he understood its immaterial and virtual presence to be a key part of the painting’s visual rhetoric. Like the artist’s portraits full of fushed cheeks and fashing glances, his Roman chapel was infused with a dramatic, rosy glow that shines on the woodwork at the sides of the chapel. The importance of light was clear to viewers of the paintings, as well as the artists themselves. Echoing the reception of Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, one spectator looking at The Tea Party insisted “[t]he only explanation we can give [of the illusion] is, that the artist has actually painted an atmosphere—space blended with light … which produces by its magical infuence” the result that the viewer fnds it diffcult to “regain his mind from the illusion.”18 A Philadelphia reviewer of Sully’s copy noted the monks “illuminated as it were, by the light falling, actually falling upon them in masses which we can only describe, by supposing snowy fakes to have alighted on the bronze foreheads of the Monks.” And in an account published by the Boston Intelligencer, a “country girl” who came to see the Granet, exclaimed in disappointment, ‘Lord, have I come all the way from Maine to see this dingy picture.’ […] Presently the sun came out and lightened up the painting, presenting the principal fgures in a glare of lustre. Upon which … she observed ‘Ah! they’ve opened that window at the back of the altar and I can see it nicely now.’19 It was crucial, then, that viewers spend enough time with the picture to perceive these differences in light. Audiences’ apparent lack of suspicion when greeted with the disorienting effects of Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome or The Tea Party can read as risible naivete or willful delusion, but this misses the way in which the virtual, embodied imagination functioned. Done right, imagination was not meant to serve as a test of truth or falsehood, but rather to facilitate a noetic meditation on subjectivity and perceptual experience.

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

45

After all, what can we, as viewers, “know” about this small chapel in the center of Rome? Perhaps more to the point, what is there to know about an apparently ordinary afternoon? There is no shocking conclusion or earthshaking truth, only an awareness of the waning light that flls the chapel with a radiance refected in the rich wooden wainscoting and the monks’ shiny bald pates. Spending a hard-earned quarter on a ticket to see Capuchin Church in one of the cities or towns to which it or a copy traveled, one might realize that this light sets the delicate white fabric of the acolytes’ surplices aglow, that it catches on the undulating outline of the altar screen at the painting’s center. Regardless of his or her status in the everyday world, the viewer would almost have been able to fnger the silver chain of the priest’s incense-burning thurible, feel the warm fush of the red glow that emanates from the priest’s sun-drenched robe. These fnishes and textures within the painting are given a material specifcity that is hard to resist, their subtle highlights rendered in touches of pure white paint that coruscate in the low light. It is not, in other words, that there is nothing to know, but rather that such knowledge cannot be known, only experienced. This is not to say that such out-of-body experiences were completely proper, and critics effectively managed to have their cake and eat it too, so to speak, by doubling themselves. One body participated in all the pleasures that the imagination had to offer, while a separate mind proleptically anticipated a reader’s objections. Thus, one critic wrote of Granet’s Capuchin Church as if it were a moving picture, acknowledging that describing the scene as “passing before you” was “a strange phrase to use in describing a picture.” And, “yet,” the critic wrote, “it is strictly warranted in the case before us.”20 A Boston critic wrote of Sargent’s Tea Party that “when we come to speak of the general illusion of the picture, we are at the same loss that all are who undertake to discribe [sic] the process and effects of the illusion.”21 “Let those who doubt our account examine the picture,” another reviewer insisted. “Instead of being suspected of exaggerating or colouring too highly, we shall be accused of too much tameness and too little imagination.”22 These pictures, critics seemed anxious to point out, both exceeded their own understanding and somehow lay beneath it, with a nascent, corporealized experience that seemed to invite twinges of guilt at being compelled against one’s better judgment. “Instead of going to Church, as I ought,” one writer in Boston said, “I went this morning to see the PICTURE,” effectively pre-empting any judgment for his (or her) substitution of an aesthetic experience for a religious one. The reviewer continued, emphasizing his or her powerlessness in the face of the imagination’s independence: “Criticism is silent, being lost in admiration, as she dwells on the wonders of this exquisite production.”23

Tracing the Capuchin Church The section above will have given the reader a general sense that there were many apparently very similar copies of the same painting traveling to multiple destinations in a comparatively short span of years. Conveying just how complex and, quite frankly, dizzying these peregrinations were is a surprisingly tall order, however. Stephen Bann has written that the history of copies after Granet’s initial painting “develops with a complexity rarely paralleled in the history of painting,” but Bann was only interested in charting its voyages through Europe.24 Once the painting entered the Americas via Boston, the intricacy of its reception redoubles. According to Davis, who has traced the composition’s movement through the United States, “It was one of the most

46

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

infuential compositions of this era, and later historians have traced its imprint in the work of Charles Fraser, Henry Inman, John Krimmel, Henry Sargent, and Edward Troye, among others.”25 A copy of the painting traveled as far as Puebla, Mexico, and Wiggin’s copy of the Granet was exhibited in the United States as late as 1864 at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair.26 Granet was a French academic painter who studied with Jacques-Louis David, and when he made Rome his offcial home in 1804, he was able to attract support from the highest ranks of society. He initially exhibited Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome in his studio in 1814, and the appetite for acquiring copies of the composition was established soon after. “The picture, when fnished, was admired prodigiously. M. de Bressigny, the French ambassador, had it exhibited at his house, where it daily attracted throngs of visitors,” an account published in 1823 recounted.27 By the artist’s own count, he produced at least 15 copies of the work for patrons including Prince Metternich, Count Bulgari, and the Marquess of Conyngham.28 One of those copies was purchased by an American dealer who sold it to Benjamin Wiggin in 1818. Wiggin’s copy remained at Scollay’s in Boston from late in 1819 through April of 1820, and then traveled to Robert Earle’s Gallery, which Earle owned jointly with Thomas Sully, in Philadelphia. By 1821, two faithful copies, as well as Sargent’s Dinner Party, began to compete with Granet’s original. One, by the painters J. Borthwick and John Clarendon Darley, was exhibited in both Philadelphia and New York in the spring of 1821, while the other, by Sully, was exhibited at Earle and Sully’s Gallery.29 By 1824, David Brown’s commissions from Sargent, The Tea Party and The Dinner Party, would have added yet another site to this exhibitionary circuit. And yet, its complexity expanded even further. In addition to the two copies by Sully and Borthwick and Darley, respectively, a third copy of Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome of seemingly lesser quality by an unidentifed New England painter, as detailed by Rowena Houghton Dasch, appeared in Providence, Rhode Island, Salem, Mass., Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Portsmouth in 1822 and 1823. And Maurie D. McInnis has noted that a fourth copy by George Cooke was exhibited in Charleston 1823 while a ffth by a Mr. Bowman appeared in 1830.30 In the meantime, Wiggin allowed his “original” Granet to tour, usually for the beneft of some worthy institution. In 1827, for instance, a particularly busy year in the painting’s life, it was exhibited in May at the Boston Athenaeum to beneft that institution; in July in Providence, Rhode Island for the beneft of “a religious society, in the town of Hopkinton, New Hampshire”; and, in September in New York to beneft Kenyon College.31 Some version of Granet’s painting, then—whether the original copy purchased by Wiggin, a copy of that copy, or a looser imitation—traveled to nearly every major metropolitan center (and many small towns) in the United States in the 1820s, a striking fact unequaled by any other touring painting in this period. The painting’s reach even extended into the southern hemisphere. “I saw a bad copy of the ‘Capuchin Chapel’ in the cabinet of the Bishop of Puebla; it cost him an enormous sum,” wrote Joel R. Poinsett, the United States Minister to Mexico to Joseph Hopkinson, a judge, collector, and president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. A year later, another copy by Sully was bound for Mexico where it formed part of Poinsett’s collection.32 Like the quicksilver imagination was apt to do with diverse impressions and memories, the appearance of Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome in Boston or Charleston folded disparate parts of the globe together in anomalous, surprising ways, creating a

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

47

kind of virtual whole out of the world at large. This mode of dissemination was slow and ungainly, a far cry from the print distribution networks whose capacity and speed of image-making would explode only a few years later. And yet, the number of viewers across the world who saw some version of Granet’s painting was nevertheless comparable to the reach of engraved images. If we believe the critics who reported that up to 200–250 people visited the work when it was exhibited in large cities and we account for the fact that several different copies circulated across the eastern United States for decades, it is not hard to fathom that visitors who saw Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome numbered close to a hundred thousand or even more. As with the rapidly expanding audience for prints among the middle class, the work’s success in the United States was a product, in part, of its ability to escape the orbit of the traditional aristocratic and royal networks that Granet was able to exploit. By developing an innovative and distinctly modern form of “patronage” in which many tickets were sold to the public for a 25- or 50-cent fee, artists turned thousands of Americans into patrons for the day, at a distinctly affordable price. Indeed, as the art historian Tanya Pohrt has shown, the for-proft picture circuit is an important, if under-researched, element of the early emergence of a mass culture of images.33 Thus, while it may seem odd to include bulky, crated paintings in a familiar narrative of commercialized culture that included tourism, department stores, stereoscopes and other modern visual experiences, I contend that Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome and its copies were an important, if neglected, facet of modern visual culture. A nagging contradiction appears to be buried within this discourse of imagination and copies, however. How can a reproduction be seen as original? It is important to note then that there were important differences between the early nineteenth-century attitude toward reproduction and what it would come to mean in the later nineteenth century, particularly after the invention and widespread dissemination of various photographic practices, beginning with the widespread dissemination of the daguerreotype in 1839. In the early nineteenth century, the response of viewers to Granet’s image and its copies bordered on ecstatic, and the fact that it had been reproduced ad infnitum only added to its allure. In the winter of 1819–1820 in Boston, crowds of up to 200 people a day focked to see it, and critics published fulsome encomiums. “Go to day— lest you should die before the morrow,” one reviewer pleaded.34 Another writer for the New England Palladium crowed, “Many individuals repeat their visits, in further indulgence of their taste and benevolence.”35 At no time was there even a whisper that this proliferation of Capuchin Churches was somehow inauthentic. The excitement of audiences extended in equal measure to Sully’s copy, for instance, which was displayed in Savannah by the end of 1821; Charleston and Baltimore in 1822; Richmond, Virginia, Baltimore (again), New York City, Saratoga, New York, Portland, Maine, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Boston (again) in 1823; in Natchez, Mississippi in 1824; and in Washington, D.C. in 1825 and 1830.36 The profts that these tours generated were also considerable. According to Joseph Hopkinson, Sully received $120 to $150 per year from exhibiting and renting out to other artists his picture, a fgure that William Dunlap confrmed.37 If the networks that “reproduced” Choir of the Capuchin Church were modern, the modes of response were decidedly not. An embodied response that would not have been out of place before a saintly relic was a key element of these paintings’ popularity. Critic after critic nearly lost themselves in a range of sensory effects that went far

48

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

beyond the visual. A Saratoga writer spoke of “the beautiful display of light issuing from” the window at the back of the chapel, “the smoke of the burning incense, the blaze of the glowing torches” as if the viewer was encountering them in real life, rather than through the medium of paint.38 It was not just the movement of other bodies that astonished viewers perceived, however, but the sensory projection of their own bodies into the pictures, resulting in a welter of tactile, olfactory, and aural effects. As one critic wrote of Sargent’s Tea Party, All the fgures in the picture are not only alive, but speaking; every group is not only in motion, but in conversation—so that the eye actually betrays the ear into the deception, and while the frst gazes, the other listens.39 Similarly, a writer for the Democratic Press insisted that the “nap” of the Capuchin monk’s robes was “clearly raised upon them as upon the green baize upon which your hand rests.” The incense in the picture, he insisted, “so lightly foats upon the air that you not only see it gently ascending, but its very fragrance regales you.”40 Not only were sensible effects projected onto bodies, those very bodies seemed to be endowed with agency to move at will. A Boston critic in 1819 claimed that the monks in Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome “seem[ed] physically able to move from their places, if you did not perceive by the fxedness of their manner, that they are nailed to the spot by attention,” echoing his fellow resident quoted above who claimed that “spectator … is almost prompted to ask the kneeling friar to rise.”41 On the other side of the Atlantic, the Duc du Berry was reported to have commented with some amusement when awarding to Granet the Legion of Honor, “Monsieur Granet, someone tells me he has just heard one of your Capuchins sneeze.”42 Thomas Sully’s copy elicited similar reactions when it was exhibited in Philadelphia in 1821. The viewer was, as one writer alleged, wrapt in admiration at the power of this seductive and almost magical arrangement of harmonies and contrasts. We are, for a season, spell-bound, and imagine we are actually in the midst of those silent and abstracted fgures, with their woollen garments and their shorn crowns.43 These experiences in which sensory impressions and copies added to imaginative experience rather than detracting from it refect an aesthetic philosophy that defned the imagination in similar terms. In associationist philosophy, the copy was an essential part of the imagination, not a rebuke to it. As the historian of imagination James Engell has explained this process, Not only does each mind store a unique and huge volume of images, but it also connects is own passions, feelings, and habits with these images. There are so many ideas, images, and feelings that they cross and fuse in innumerable ways.44 These mental images gathered strength as they went, strengthening rather than etiolating a force of creation that was thought to have originated from the divine, the original source of all creation. Copies therefore did not imply a sense of declension or inferiority as they would a century later, but rather carried a sensuous richness that was multiplied with each

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

49

successive iteration. The fact that Choir of the Capuchin Church had copies made after it did not trouble critics then, as long as they were made with fdelity. “Copies and modifcations of external nature, and of works of art, constitute original works in painting,” one reviewer asserted in a review of “Sully’s Capuchin Church.” What was crucial to these experiences was not revision, but the reproduction of passion and feelings, whether in an affective or broadly haptic sense. Thus, the “spell-bound” critic quoted above justifed “indulging in sensations like these” because they originated with Sully’s presumably exquisite artistic temperament: “we yield implicitly to the taste, judgment, and execution of Sully; we acknowledge him to have felt fully, fercely, the passion for what is Beautiful.”45

Vexed Pleasures This is not to say that the embodied, associative imagination as mobilized by Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome and other paintings was universally accepted. After all, there was a host of reasons why virtuous republicans should reject a foreign picture without an obvious moral which pictured half-secreted, Catholic rites. This section explores why Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome would have raised suspicion among elite Protestants like Samuel F. B. Morse and virtuous republicans like Charles Willson Peale. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the specter of a morally compromised Catholic hierarchy conducting its business away from the disciplining gaze of society regularly incited such a profound mistrust among Protestant Americans that riots would break out in American cities like clockwork: New York in 1832 and 1835, Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834, Philadelphia in 1844, Cincinnati in 1853 and 1855. Crowds often violently ripped away anything that was shrouded, veiled, or occluded, and although people were often injured and occasionally killed, scholars have contended that these Jacksonian mobs were often highly “goal-oriented” and “instrumental” in their attempts to expose that which was concealed.46 In Charlestown, for example, Yankee laborers destroyed the elegant Ursuline Convent, which gossips and conspiracy theorists insisted shielded wicked kidnappings, forced conversions, and even murders from public view. Granet’s Capuchin Church redoubles rather than dispels this aesthetic of cloistered, secret spaces by locating the viewer at the center of a vertiginous tunnel that barrels toward a scene whose ultimate particulars are mysterious. Far from mitigating this logic of uncovering, Granet’s painting amplifes it. The specifc liturgical moment being celebrated, the identity of its celebrants, as well as the visual content of the pictures that line the chapel’s walls are all unknown. All of this mystery can come with an air of danger, even as it stimulates a voyeuristic appetite, and as John Davis has observed, the interpolation of a “‘safe’ proscenium” was a familiar move in the visual rhetoric of Catholic visual culture, not only in Granet’s painting, but also in Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of the Catholic Bishop Jean Lefebvre de Cheverus or Robert W. Weir’s history painting Taking the Veil (1863), among others.47 Indeed, Catholic rites regularly invoked touch, smell, taste, and hearing, all ofwhich had the potential to lead to what Protestants regarded as heretical knowledge. It was crucial to have some sort of insulating buffer, whether a proscenium, a sense of virtual remove, or what the historian Jenny Franchot has called a “bodily gaze [that] … fantasied the consumption of this foreign substance rather than conversion to it.”48

50

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

Imagination, a fantasy of moral danger, and the Roman church were diffcult to disentangle.49 The Church’s commitment to paintings, architecture, and sculpture on a grand scale was renewed after the Council of Trent concluded in 1563, and for many viewers, the rich appeals to the senses that the Catholic Church encouraged in its post-Reformation art and architecture were one and the same with its embrace of congregants’ imaginations. Even Samuel F. B. Morse, a particularly ferce xenophobe admitted with something bordering on grudging admiration that Catholics understood the importance of appealing to one’s embodied imagination. He wrote from Rome in 1831, How admirably contrived is every part of the structure of [Catholicism] to take captive the imagination. It is a religion of the imagination; all the arts of the imagination are pressed into its service; architecture, painting, sculpture, music, have lent all their charm to enchant the senses and impose on the understanding by substituting for the solemn truths of God’s Word, which are addressed to the understanding, the fctions of poetry and the delusions of feeling. These allusions to “fctions” and “delusions” expose Morse’s misgivings about the imagination, and the artist added that the Church was also “the mother of abominations” that “pretended” to teach lessons of morality.50 In at least one instance, Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome was identifed with an anti-Catholic visual culture since it served as the frontispiece to the third edition of the widely republished tract A Master-Key to Popery: Giving a Full Account of the Customs of the Priests and Friars, and the Rites and Ceremonies, of the Popish Religion. The book was allegedly written by a Spanish priest turned Virginia parson who wrote a shocking ‘expose’ of seductions and other abuses in the Catholic church, structured around his own loss of faith and international adventures.51 Plenty of critics might have objected to Granet’s Church or its copies on these grounds of moral corruption, but none that I have found did. Instead, critics interpreted the painting in aesthetic terms, which often glossed discussions of the body politic in terms of personal experience. How much pleasure, even aesthetic pleasure, was good for this civic body versus how much sacrifce and moral virtue required constant balance and negotiation because the imagination was vexed by its susceptibility to luxury, sensuality, and selfshness. Imagination’s close association with these delusive bodily energies particularly needled artists and supporters of the arts in the Revolutionary generation who had been taught to be keenly aware of its corrupting and degrading capacities. Thus, Gulian Verplanck, a wealthy Federalist and politician, addressed the American Academy of the Fine Arts in 1824, and cautioned his listeners to be wary of “the vitious gratifcation of grosser appetites,” holding up “Italy—lost, ruined, degraded Italy” as a monitory example of what might happen if those appetites were to be indulged. Avoiding this fate was not as easy as swearing off all Italian art or all imaginative fancies, however, for the fne arts “in their proper place and sphere, when controlled and purifed, and elevated by holier principles, they can, and they do contribute most effciently to the moral amelioration of society.”52 To be perceived as valid and informed, one could not fetter the imagination, but rather had to imply that its liberty was constrained. This is precisely what the

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

51

infuential artist and museum operator Charles Willson Peale did, undercutting the idea that the painting truly licensed the freedom associated with the imagination by associating it with merely mechanical trickery. In a letter to his son Rembrandt, he invoked the opinion of a Mr. Thackara who, in reference to the painting’s popularity, “says the taste of the Citizens is a burlesk on the Arts.” (Thackara was either James, a Philadelphia engraver, or his son, William, who worked as a portraitist.) This lack of taste and true freedom was implied by an anecdote Thackara then launched into, criticizing “a Gentleman” for having grabbed hold of a trompe l’oeil catalog painted by Raphaelle on a piece of tin: “ah! says Mr. Thackara, this must be the perfection of the art, since I see you are deceived and took hold of it.” The implication was that this gentleman viewer was powerless to resist the pull of a deceptive art, and was made a fool by his failure to exercise adequate skepticism, something that the Granet critics rarely seemed to do.53 Some critics seemed sympathetic to the idea that viewers should be more dubious of the Granet, but not because it was going to corrupt their virtue. One, writing from Philadelphia, dismissed the work as a species of “mechanical painting,” albeit a “happy” one. In contrast, however, Rembrandt Peale’s Court of Death, a very large, neoclassical history painting that also happened to be exhibiting in Philadelphia in 1820, was “the frst production of moral painting; an effort more of mind than of mechanism.”54 These terms again recall Mr. Thackara’s anecdote of the duped gentleman who could not distinguish painting from reality. In Boston, another critic employed similar terms, dismissing Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome as akin to the “mechanical labor of the engraver, in which the slowest intellect is sure to succeed best.” This “little style, where pretty effect is the sole end of the artist” was “directly opposite to the sublime, which strikes the mind, at once with one grand poetical idea.” Comparing the differences between Granet’s work and Rembrandt Peale’s, the critic compared the former to “the Dutch school” or worse, “hand-writing like copperplate,” while the latter was in “the grand Italian style.”55 The thought that “mind and mechanism” might work at cross-purposes, that the bodily interior that housed mind, moral character, and inner identity might be betrayed by an automatistic and mechanical body violated what Christopher Lukasik has described as a postrevolutionary “desire for a permanent, involuntary, and visible relationship between the face and moral character,” between surface and essence.56 As Peale knew well from his pleading with his less dutiful son Raphaelle Peale to “govern every unrully Passion” and “act the Man,” the younger generation was not so troubled by passionate dissent, sensory intensities, and wildly divergent affective states.57 To their credit, however, the most marginalized in American society correctly perceived that body politic implied by the “representative heads” that Peale famously displayed in his museum often excluded them. All through the 1820s, for instance, African Americans, Irish immigrants, and others at the bottom of the economic system rioted as New York City offcials outlawed squatting and banned hogs, an important source of food and income. The unpropertied classes and the poor were increasingly denied communal rights and were therefore left out of an economic system in which, especially in the 1820s and after, wealth was concentrating in the hands of a few.58 Preferring a painting without an instructive moral might pale in comparison to public demonstrations of violence like those, but they drew from the same well of subjectivity conferred by a sense of individual rights.

52

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

Applying rational control as a palliative to the dangerous and uncontained imagination was a fundamental premise of Rembrandt’s Court of Death, which, in contrast to the laissez-faire dreaminess of Granet’s painting was pedantic in its moralizing specifcity. (The artist had also lately been inspired by Unitarianism, and he intended the painting to demonstrate the rational choice that man had over sin and death.) Twenty-one fgures within the painting illustrated Despair, Fever, Consumption, Hypochondria, Apoplexy, Gout, Dropsy, Suicide, Delirium Tremens, Intemperance, Remorse, Pleasure, Pestilence, Famine, War, and Confagration.59 These fgures, taken from a poem by Bishop Beilby Porteus (“—Deep in a murky cave’s recess […] the Monarch sits/In unsubstantial majesty …”), span the painting’s twenty-four-foot width. Death sits in the center as king and judge, resplendent in its powers over Old Age, who was modeled by Charles Willson Peale. Such a tremendous statement on the unavoidability of fnal judgment implicitly rebukes the tranquilizing spell of the imagination, and, with such an end in mind, there was little danger that its pleasures would seem appealing in view of such a horrifying array of bodily consequences, many of which a diseased imagination was thought to infame Choir of the Capuchin Church was, however, as its critics often reminded viewers, an environment, one whose virtual reality would have contrasted sharply with the trompe l’oeil deception by Raphaelle Peale that reportedly hung in Earle’s gallery, beckoning passers-by to reach out for it, only to have them realize their sensory misapprehension and foolishness. In contrast to Raphaelle’s pointed trick, Capuchin Church united viewers’ senses with their minds rather than creating a sharp gulf between them. Indeed, as discussed previously, the ability of the virtual imagination to operate beyond the binary of truth and fction is part of what made it more than an artifcial tool of deception, but instead a force capable of instilling wonder and awe. As the striking success of Peale’s Court of Death showed, however, this did not preclude a mode of vision and spectatorial aesthetics that emphasized moral rectitude and rational control. Americans were capable of choosing, adjusting to one or the other depending on the cultural work that a given scopic regime performed, and the newly invigorated art marketplace was capable of indulging these tastes, especially if the price—25 cents in the case of both Granet’s and Peale’s pictures—was right. Choosing moral control, political virtue, and imaginative abandon was not a viable strategy in the marketplace of American visual culture, however, as demonstrated by yet another painting that would have crossed paths with Granet’s Capuchin Church in these years, Samuel F. B. Morse’s The House of Representatives (see Figure 2.1). Like Sargent and Sully, Morse intended to capitalize on the European painting’s success, and his composition has a similar compositional structure of an architectural space flled with fgures going about their normal activities while illuminated by a dramatic glow. Instead of debauched Catholic monks, however, Morse’s painting would show patriotic and self-consciously American subject matter, the governmental chamber where laws and treaties were debated and ratifed. The reaction to Morse’s bid for artistic fame was underwhelming. His approach combined the specifcity of Rembrandt Peale’s Court of Death with the air of pregnant mystery found in Granet. Morse took these 86 portraits “from life,” a testament to his industry and to his political and social connections, but these exact likenesses do not allow the viewer to project herself into the painting.60 Who, except Morse perhaps, would have been thrown into rapturous frenzy by dreams of becoming a congressional representative? Any fight of the imagination would also have been undercut by

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

53

Figure 2.1 Samuel F. B. Morse, The House of Representatives, 1822, probably reworked 1823, oil on canvas, 86 7/8 × 130 5/8 in., Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund), Courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Morse’s obsession with capturing the chamber itself. He rooted its architectural and sculptural complexity on a two-dimensional surface by using a camera obscura for the task.61 Several painted passages in the fnished painting bear witness to the sinking sense of weightiness that such a move encouraged. Carlo Franzoni’s Chariot of History (see Figure 2.2), for instance, is marooned on the furthest right edge of the canvas, pushed so far to the margin that it is only half-visible. For a mode of transportation and an emblem of fight, it is curiously stationary, and, although the feathered wings of Giuseppe Valaperti’s eagle on the far-right entablature formally echo the wing that projects out from Franzoni’s chariot, neither member of this stony fock seems likely to take fight any time soon. This stasis and locational specifcity are at odds with the looping, vibrational, and compounding trains of the imagination which required an unfettered sense of liberty. There was no in-betweenness, no fantasy of being both here and there. Morse wanted his viewer to stay put. This is not to say that all paintings had to speak the deliquescent language of fancy and imagination to appeal to the public in this period, however, but they did have to make their choices clear. For his painting Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 (see Figure 2.3) which also toured, John Trumbull took more than 30 years to traverse the country, making detailed, frsthand portraits of as many of the signers of the Declaration as he possibly could. Indeed, this is likely the model that Morse had in mind when he insisted on making exact copies of the faces of his representatives. Trumbull, however, knew his audience and did not try to summon the enigmatic mysteries of the imagination. He indulged in no sophisticated backlighting or dramatic

54

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

Figure 2.2 Detail, Samuel F. B. Morse, House of Representatives.

Figure 2.3 John Trumbull, The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776, 20 7/8 × 31 in., Trumbull Collection, 1832.3, Yale University Art Gallery.

effects, and this stolid adherence to one visual mode rather than, as Morse did, trying to have two at once seems to have been rewarded by public comprehension and, as a result, market success.62

Moving Pictures Thus far, I have focused on Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome as the primary agent of this kind of virtualized experience in the United States in the frst part of the

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

55

nineteenth century. Indeed, it was the frst and the most infuential, but Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome was far from the only popular and critically acclaimed touring picture exhibited in the 1820s and 1830s that plumbed the depths of an interiorized, affective, and multisensory virtuality. The phenomenon of the touring, singlepicture exhibition in the United States shifted in the late 1820s to include a new import from France, the diorama, which had its roots in Baroque theater. These under-investigated spectacles were an important element of the visual culture of American cities in the nineteenth century, and they extended the touring picture phenomenon for an even wider audience. Like those traveling pictures, dioramas were large, staged with external sources of light, and, occasionally, theatrical staging like curtains. Their owners toured them across the United States, profting handsomely from an expanding middle class hungry for cultural experiences that proved their taste, refnement, and capacity for engaging with the imagination’s antinomian pleasures. The subject matter was also similar: cathedral and abbey interiors were a favorite subject, as were delicately lit landscapes that produced similar feelings of interiority and enchantment. Moreover, many of the artists who helped to produce these works had, like Granet, been trained in the French academic tradition. The “original” diorama was patented by Jacques-Louis Mandé Daguerre and Charles Bouton (1781–1853) in Paris in 1822, and consisted of a large, unprimed canvas, approximately 70 feet by 45 feet, that was painted on both sides with translucent and opaque tints. Light issuing from a source in front of the canvas—usually an overhead skylight—caused elements painted in opaque colors to be visible, but when the source of light came from behind the canvas, the forms painted on the back materialized as if by magic. (In reality, this was usually managed via a complex system of shutters and pulleys that either admitted or excluded light.) In Paris and London, these spectacles were presented in large, circular, purpose-built auditoriums that would have been prohibitively expensive and awkward for American entrepreneurs who needed to tour their works to different cities in order to generate suffcient revenue. But American dioramas were smaller, more similar to large oil on canvas paintings, in that they were also presented theatrically, often lit from above, with natural or gas lighting. Instead of appearing to move, however, these works actually did move, usually by scrolling a very large piece of canvas from one roller to another. Dioramas clarifed and made literal the dynamic of light-flled virtuality and effortless motion that earlier touring pictures had mobilized, but they did not invent it; by the time the frst diorama premiered in New York in 1828, likely a version of the View from Calais to Dover, the basic contours of a virtualized, imaginative, and sensorially rich experience that Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome had established were already well fxed.63 Not unlike the railroads or the steamboats then revolutionizing the way Americans moved about the country’s interior, these works seemed to materialize far-distant environments before the very eyes of the viewer. The exotic and elite scenes depicted in both touring paintings and dioramas also helped reaffrm the fact that audiences were expected to engage their imaginations when looking at these works. A substantial number of them appeared to reconstruct an integral, cohesive environment, often using the same motif of the cathedral that Granet had employed. There was, for instance, the Cathedral of Reims (1829) painted by Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri and presented by Johann Nepomuk Maelzel in New York and thereafter in Albany, New York, Nashville, Tennessee, and New Orleans; the Interior of Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral (1834) by Hippolyte Sébron which was shown in

56

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

New York; and, The Cathedral of Upper-Wesel and the Old Castle of Schonberg on the Rhine, By Moonlight (1834) by the German painter Gustavus Grunewald which appeared in Philadelphia.64 In addition to these obviously architecturally based works, there were two other popular dioramas received in the same or similar critical terms as the Granet and its progeny. The Departure of the Israelites (1834) was based on a monumental 1829 painting by the Scottish artist David Roberts (see Figure 2.4), and the dioramic version of it was painted by Sébron. Belshazzar’s Feast, painted by the artist Hugh Reinagle and shown in 1830 and 1835 was based on a work by John Martin painted in 1820 (see Figure 2.5). Both of these dioramas transposed the Gothic architecture of European cathedrals into an Egyptian mode, replacing the exoticism of pointed arches from somewhere along the Rhine with Egyptianizing cavetto cornices from somewhere in the Near East. Specifcally, both also featured long colonnades that stretched into the distance, establishing an architectural structure crucial to the functioning of this perspectival form of illusionism. Neither painting’s location was terribly specifc which, as Reinagle and Sébron knew and Morse apparently did not, was crucial to their popularity. A third entertainment, the wildly popular Hudson River Diorama which premiered at the Bowery Theater in 1828 bears mentioning, although it is in some ways a departure from the chapels and cathedrals that presented exotic, far-distant realms. Like those cathedrals and temples which magically materialized before viewers’ very eyes, however, this journey was styled as a steamboat ride up the Hudson River from

Figure 2.4 David Roberts, Departure of the Israelites, 1829, oil on canvas, 51 3/16 × 72 1/8 in., Photo © Birmingham Museums Trust.

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

57

Figure 2.5 John Martin, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1820, oil on canvas, 31 1/2 × 47 1/2 in., Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

New York to Albany wherein landscapes appeared in quick succession. Its scenes had been adapted by the English painter of theatrical scenery, Robert Jones, from Wiliam Guy Wall’s watercolors for the Hudson River Portfolio, published in a series of etchings by John Hill in 1820.65 At its core, then, it was visually similar to the pictures surveyed above, evoking a capacious sense of space aided by dramatic effects of light. A moving rather than static diorama, its connected fats scrolled past the viewer, appearing to pass from daylight, through a thunderstorm, to twilight, and fnally to an evening view of Newburgh “with the town in the distance lighted up.” The effect, wrote the reviewer, “is that of an excursion up the river, and not of an evening spent at the theatre.”66 Notably, this imaginative, virtual journey received a rapturous critical and popular response similar to that of the Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome. Oral Coad records in his Annals of the History of the Stage in New York that it was shown “ffteen times in the frst month,” a rate unequaled by any other theatrical in 1828.67 It was frequently shown in New York through 1831, and received additional exposure in Boston with scenery that extended the journey up the Providence River. These spectacles capitalized on the associative discourse of the imagination, long pictured by philosophers as a force that could traverse vast distances at an instant, and it was this immensity which resisted accurate measurement which seemed to produce a sense of sublime wonder. “I will to ascend still higher, to the region of the fxed stars, at a distance from the earth which is no longer to be counted by millions of leagues, but by millions of millions,” the philosopher Thomas Brown wrote as he tried to

58 A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim explain the imagination’s ability to travel immeasurable distances in a mere moment.68 These terms of infnitude and also delight were the very same ones used by viewers in response to the dioramas explored here, with dramatic lighting that relied on deep shadows (in a cathedral) or foreboding storm clouds (in a landscape or perspectival view), often made more spectacular by their close juxtaposition with the glowing light of evening. Such spatial illusionism resulted in a discursive resistance to rational, accurate perception and measurement, in favor of an immanent and embodied experience that was typically spoken of as laying beyond words and, indeed, rational cognition. Departure of the Israelites, for instance, had critics insisting that they could scarcely tell the difference between representation and reality, a curious fact since, as a critic noted. [t]he subject was already familiar to our eyes, in a large engraving, of which good impressions have been visible in the windows of the print-shops, for more than a year past, and also in a smaller print contained in one of the English annals of 1834.69 These “counterfeit presentments,” as the critic termed them, merely mechanical reproductions, could in no way prepare viewers for a spectacle that critics reported was truly mind-boggling. The diorama premiered in 1835 at Niblo’s Garden, a pleasure garden in New York City that on other nights might have hosted balloon ascensions, freworks, or transparent paintings.70 These visual delights had apparently not prepared viewers for Departure of the Israelites, however. It was “impossible to believe you are looking at a sheet of level canvass [sic]. You might swear that you could fetch a ball over the summit, into the dark void,” one wrote.71 The critic for the Knickerbocker agreed, going on at length about the convincing nature of the spectacle, explicitly invoking the imagination, and writing that “the organ wanders from point to point, without fnding any prominent enough to fx its glance, except among the architectural wonders of the scene.”72 The Knickerbocker critic also agreed that efforts to test the distance of the Departure of the Israelites from the eye, to subject it to one’s own sense of space, were “all in vain,” and “the mind can discover no preference between ten feet and an [sic] hundred.”73 Finally, a short story published in Godey’s Lady’s Book had a character marveling, “The mists of 30 centuries seemed to have rolled away” noting temples and palaces that looked “as if you could enter into them and walk around them.”74 As with Granet’s picture and its many copies, such responses run together when considered alongside other large pictures of space and light. A critic pronounced that “[t]he art of perspective can scarcely go further than in this picture,” in the Cathedral of Reims diorama by Ciceri, for instance. Another wrote of the same production, “The idea of many is that the Cathedral is a mere picture. So it is; but it is such a picture as they have never seen before, and of the illusion produced by which they can form no notion, until they have looked at it for some time, and begin to mistrust their own senses.”75 Even Giovanni Paolo Panini’s mid-eighteenth-century Interior of St. Peter’s (see Figure 2.6), which met the requirement of having a vast space, although it did not quite have the same dramatic backlighting as Capuchin Church or the dioramas, was received in similar terms. Brought to the United States by a committee of gentlemen associated with the Boston Athenaeum, it was exhibited in both Boston and New York in 1834, and critics were keenly attuned to the way its representation of St. Peter’s magnitude affected their imaginations.76 A New York reviewer called the “effect of

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

59

Figure 2.6 Giovanni Paolo Panini, Interior of St. Peter’s, Rome, ca. 1756, oil on canvas, 64 11/16 × 88 in., Athenæum purchase, 1834, Boston Athenæum.

light” in the picture “absolutely magical,” admitting that “it is with diffculty that we realize to our imagination its full extent,” while another remarked, The imagination cannot, at frst, exalt itself to the full perception of its immensity […] in gazing upon it, we are lost in astonishment at the boldness which dared to conceive, not less the skill which could execute such amazing fabric. A third critic simply claimed, “It seems a half mile to the great altar.”77 This sense of the picture as a pleasurable test of the rational mind, familiar from the reception of Granet’s picture, surfaced again and again, particularly with regard to its vastness. A critic for the New-York Spectator wrote that, “like the original building itself, [the picture] fails at the frst view to give an idea of its immense magnitude—yet by repeatedly looking at it, the size is at length in some degree realized.”78 Again, as with the Granet and its progeny, those sensory experiences were defned by a certain vividness that bordered on hallucination. Interior of Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral, by Sébron, one of fve dioramas which premiered at the American Academy in October 1834, had the reviewer for The Knickerbocker in an almost synesthetic rapture: Pictorial illusion, it seems to us, can no further go, than in the splendid painting of the Interior of Trinity Chapel, in Canterbury Cathedral. The perspective is perfect.

60 A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim The damp gathers upon the walls; the spider has woven his tissue over the pilasters, and his flmy net hangs dimly upon the lofty columns. The struggling light falls upon the massive stone foor, and throws into solemn shadow the long galleries above. An air of listless repose marks the fgures reclining on the picturesque and decaying steps in the middle distance. The perfect nature of this picture grows upon the eye; and an hour’s examination almost gives to the ear of the beholder the sound of the foot-fall of the worshippers in the distant chapel.79 It was this sense of affective, immanent, and multisensory experience that caused another critic to laud the Hudson River diorama. A critic enthused, “The Palisades, as we look upon the scene seem to have forgotten their immutable fxedness, and to have taken up their residence in the bowery theatre [sic].” This was largely due to the virtual effects of light, which were “bright” or “glassy,” or which possessed a “glow” or “mellow richness.” Although the sites along the Hudson River could have been imbued with a leaden, topographical specifcity, it was nevertheless the nonlinear, yet vital and even visceral “in-between” qualities of phenomenal surface that drew the critic’s highest admiration. “The warm fush of the sunset sky, diffusing its glow to every object, and the softness of the moonlight landscape which ensues … charm and tranquilize the mind of the spectator with all the power of real nature.”80 These qualities of fush or glow, softness, or mystery resided not just on the canvas, but through it, not just in a static, rational certainty, but in oscillatory doubt and wonderment, crucial qualities of the vexed imagination which seduced and compelled viewers, often against their better judgment.

Excavating the Past The preceding section attended to the unlimited sense of space that touring paintings and dioramas seemed to encourage, and in this one, I want to make clear that this freedom also extended to historical time. I also want to suggest that these touring paintings and dioramas were fundamentally similar to a whole host of other “new media” that arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, including the neoclassical history painting, the ruin, and the classical cast. Indeed, in their presumption of a mobile, embodied gaze and in their presentation of a fundamentally nonlinear narrative, they also anticipate later virtual media like photography and the cinema. My point here is not to fatten these forms and genres into one, shapeless whole nor to suggest a causal link between the aesthetic discourses of the imagination and all of these cultural forms, but rather to point out the crucial role of the embodied, yet virtual imagination in mediating their essential features. I also want to point out the correspondences between a mobile and often embodied gaze split between past and present and the larger aesthetic discourse around imagination and fancy. Recall William Gilpin’s description of viewing a landscape through a Claude glass or Joseph Addison’s description of the imagination as a kind of camera obscura, as described in Chapter 1. Rather than some terminus post quem tied to the invention of the diorama, or of photography when viewers’ imaginations were fnally loosed upon the modern world, we can recognize that these ways of traveling through time and space had had always already been contained in centuries of philosophical discourses around the imagination. The frst feature that connects touring paintings and dioramas to later forms of modern media was a sense of the past as viscerally present. The paintings surveyed here

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

61

invited viewers to experience time as a spacious and even material medium in which one could move about in the present moment, and yet, like the ruin, a related cultural form that rose to popularity in the same era, this immediacy was also tied to a sense of irreversible, painful belatedness. In Granet’s painting, this feeling was activated not by some relic of the classical era, but by the arrival of French anticlerical troops in 1810.81 The painter had arrived in Rome in 1802, eight years before Napoleon’s empire was to transform the city, and he longingly remembered the “quiet Rome” and the “sweet peace” he had once been able to fnd in the city’s monasteries. With this in mind I betook myself to the convent of the Capuchins in the Piazza Barberini, but the good Capuchins were no longer there. This beautiful town had changed in appearance, and lost all its religious character. The men of war had taken the place of prelates, cardinals, and religious orders; the drum had silenced the sound of canticles and prayers. Instead, Granet found a Franciscan who he called “a kind of a farce.”82 Historicity was not located in Europe alone, however. Sargent’s Dinner Party, too, likely imagined a recent past, albeit a Federalist one, which Jane C. Nylander has dated to roughly 1798, twenty-three years before the artist painted the subject.83 Even the Hudson River Diorama pictured a river that was staunchly resistant to nascent forces of industry, including the very transportation networks it pictured (composed not just of steamboats, but canals, and, increasingly, railroads) as well as burgeoning industries like ice harvesting and tanneries that were already fourishing along its banks.84 Moreover, American viewers, encouraged to think of themselves as the “lost tribe of Israel,” might also have felt they could plausibly step into Biblical past like the ones pictured in Belshazzar’s Feast and Departure of the Israelites. In this respect as well as in their penchant for historical drama, dioramas and large touring paintings shared a common ancestor in the neoclassical history painting that was “invented” in the royal academies of the late eighteenth century. As Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued, these grandly sized paintings bring to mind the somewhat later appearance of the panorama in 1792 which, in turn, gave way to the diorama in 1822.85 In a similar vein, Bann has suggested that it was actually the appearance of Granet’s painting at the Paris Salon in 1819 that prefgured what he dubbed “the apotheosis of the back-lit spectacle,” Daguerre’s diorama, which would debut just three years later.86 Granet and fellow Troubadour School painters like Pierre Révoil created works that were imaginative, dramatically lit, and also rigorously historical. Attempts to fnd an object-zero, so to speak, for this Romantic sense of the past might ultimately be futile, however. Indeed, this early nineteenth-century passion for excavating and reconstructing various usable pasts connects to monuments as diverse as the Hôtel de Cluny, the frst museum of medieval art, and the immense earthwork mounds built by Native American tribes of the Eastern woodlands which were incorrectly, if imaginatively, identifed as having been built by “an errant band of Carthaginians, Phoenicians, Tyreans, Greeks, Romans” or even Welshmen, as Nick Yablon has shown.87 In all cases, however, the fact that these varied objects and experiences connected with a mobilized and embodied imagination that evaded the rational mind so prized by industrializing nations is less coincidental than it might seem. Paradoxically, however, this emphasis on the past was also connected to a sense of futurity, or, to put it in blunter terms, modernity. As Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka

62

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

have suggested, the modern practice of historical archaeology was perfected to a fault by German writers like Walter Benjamin in his unfnished Arcades Project, Dolf Sternberger in his Panorama of the Nineteenth Century (1938), or Aby Warburg in his “Mnemosyne Atlas.”88 These massive projects establishing correspondences between past and present were, they write, “a nonlinear way of understanding the temporal recurrence of images and their relations, raising also the issue of ‘intermediality’ by pointing out motifs that shifted and transformed across what we would now call media platforms.”89 The motley, transatlantic forms of touring single-picture exhibitions, dioramas, ruins, and period rooms would suggest, however, that modernity was not just a later nineteenth-century phenomenon, or even an exclusively European one. A third feature of these imaginative and modern new media was their virtuality, which was produced by imagination’s labile shuffe between absence and presence. Mirzoeff has also found this virtuality in classical casts, citing Goethe’s experience of being “transported out of reality” by a fragment of the Apollo Belvedere and Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that Jean-Germain Drouais’s painting Marius and the Gaul “fxed me like a statue for a quarter of an hour, or half an hour. I do not know which, for I lost all ideas of time, even the consciousness of my existence.”90 The hallmarks of this “virtual antiquity” are quite similar, however, to the accounts of being transported, transfxed, and absorbed that we have seen in touring paintings—being “lost in astonishment” at Panini’s Interior of St. Peter’s or “lost in admiration” of Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome.91 In all cases, however, the virtual space of history was accessible only through a fragment, a ruin, or an incomplete piece of a larger whole: a forgotten chapel on a light-flled afternoon in a bygone Rome or an elegant, though unremarkable dinner party in early national Boston. These lost worlds only become whole again when they are reimagined in the mind’s eye and animated by an illusive virtuality. The virtual imagination was therefore Janus-faced, looking back toward the academy, the ruin, and the system of aesthetics that arose in the long eighteenth century as well as forward to modernity. The methodologies we must use to interpret the imagination must be similarly heterogenous, particularly insofar as they allow us to see through space and time. The traditional art historical methods I have employed here, identifying genealogies of style, subject matter, provenance, and reception fall short when it comes to this kind of analysis, for framed oil paintings are not usually supposed to move, glow, or change. The study of sculpture comes closer, and there is a large body of literature dedicated to the exploration of that medium’s lack of fnality. But the particular media archaeology that I am describing might be most comfortably accommodated within what Roland Barthes called “the three arts of the stage” which he claimed were generated by the camera obscura: “perspective painting, photography, and the diorama”92 (A “species of perspective,” the reader will remember, was the generic term applied to Sargent’s Tea Party, and to Panini’s Interior of St. Peter’s, Ciceri’s Cathedral of Reims diorama, and the Trinity Chapel diorama, as well.) Perhaps because of their shared archaeological layers, it is the history of photography and, later, flm, that supply the critical terms that allow us to make sense of the strange bedfellows made by the virtual imagination. Like photography and, later, flm, ruins, casts, dioramas, and the like deny the facts of their making. They are not exactly mimetic nor are they readily understood as manufactured, despite their obvious constructedness. Rather, to put it in terms used by contemporary critics, these interactive,

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

63

even performative works of art were environments rather than objects, as complete as reality itself rather than a ruse pretending to be. In terms proposed by the contemporary philosopher Nelson Goodman, dioramas were—like many of the media I have touched on here and like the cinema later in the century—“allographic.” Unlike their opposites, autographic works, the former category showed no brushstrokes or other evidence of the artist’s hand, were time-dependent, and seemingly lacked a tactile surface on which an autograph could be inscribed.93 Indeed, like dance and music, two of Goodman’s allographic models, both touring paintings and touring dioramas could best be understood as performances. In the diorama, when a sunset moved across the surface of the canvas, it was not just painted on the canvas itself; the lighting in front of the diorama had to be slowly extinguished, while a strong light from behind the thin surface of the calico fabric had to be activated.94 This was a time-dependent medium that required the spectator’s presence and bodily perception to be truly complete. The touring paintings were perhaps less allographic than dioramas, but their evocations of light, movement, and change were no less important in how critics received them. Thus, the subject of these new media performances was not just contained on the painting’s surface, but through it in an ever-unfolding performance. This paradoxical agency was also a crucial dimension of the troublesome imagination itself, which poets and philosophers continually pictured “arising” and “exciting” or “arousing” trains of association that were, by turns, beautiful, transcendent, powerful, and even malignant. These performances of imagination were never completed, but were formed in the breach.

The Cultural Work of the Imagination I suggested in the previous chapter that a closer attention to beauty and the imagination might reveal a wider range of meanings than a poststructuralist “hermeneutic of suspicion,” to borrow the sociologist Paul Ricoeur’s phrase. But for whom? Who, exactly, was free to get lost in a timeless reverie? All of the entertainments in this chapter were certainly somewhat accessible to middle-class viewers. At 25 cents, equivalent perhaps to 5 dollars at the time of this writing, the price of a ticket was not cheap for a common laborer, mason, or carpenter who would have earned between 1 and 2 dollars a day, but it was economically feasible, though dear, for farm laborers and servants who earned between 5 and 8 dollars a day.95 Such a discounted rate fnally put imagination, which had long been part of an elite social and intellectual discourse of leisure and polite amusements, well within reach of a vastly wider social group. This wider range of meanings also included ones that were subtly modulated by the expanded audience that the dioramas attracted. In other words, this was not a oneway exchange. Particularly the dioramas, as they expanded their circuit, adjusted to ft their audiences. The in-betweenness of the embodied, performative, genteel, and virtual imagination may not have necessarily appealed to a farm worker as it did to a gentleman. These changes became apparent in the productions of two latecomers to the diorama, two brothers from New York named William and Henry Hanington.96 They began their careers as decorative painters, and they used this knowledge to make and subsequently tour dioramas to ever-increasing crowds. Their dioramas built upon earlier spectacles they called “phosphoramas” which they exhibited dating back to at

64

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

least 1832, but they eventually graduated to the grandly named “Dioramic Institute” at New York’s City Saloon in September 1836 where “the most overfowing and fashionable audiences, for upwards of ffteen months, … [were] visited by upwards of one hundred thousand persons,” or so the entrepreneurs claimed. The looseness of their commitment to highbrow culture was demonstrated by their fanciful Lunar Discoveries diorama, which dramatized The Sun’s famous hoax that was published in 1836, purportedly from the great astronomer Sir John Herschel, about the discovery of life on the moon, including lavender-colored bat-men, walking beavers, and unicorns.97 Nevertheless, such fantastic scenes, like the naval battles and images of European landscapes and ruins that formed the main fare of their performances, appealed to a sense of imagination that could lift people out of the everyday. A standard set piece of their usual fve-diorama show was called Scene in Switzerland, or sometimes Scene in Italy. It was similar enough in theory to the previous dioramas made by academically trained, European artists. Like the diorama of Altdorf by Gustavus Grunewald, a student of Caspar David Friedrich, that had premiered in Philadelphia two years prior, for instance, the Haningtons’ Scene in Switzerland was also set on the shore of a large lake. Like its more elaborate predecessors, geographical exactitude was not the point;getting lost in an immersive and virtual feld was. Viewers would have watched as dawn gradually gave way to daylight, while fshing vessels moved back and forth across the water. Day gradually gave way to evening as the “soft, clear, and mellow light” of an Italian sky at twilight took over.98 The viewer’s astonishment and solemn, corporeal immersion would have been disrupted, however, by a pair of goats (likely mechanical fgures in front of the diorama) that fought each other, kicking a “shepherd’s boy” in the rear end, which was said to have “afford[ed] infnite mirth to the spectators.”99 Thrilling to a fugitive and performative light was perhaps a part of this experience, but audiences were also given an easy escape from that taxing uncertainty, in the form of goats and slapstick. This humbugging play between fction and the real would have destroyed the sense of immersive projection into a far-distant space and time that had sustained earlier single-picture exhibitions. Expanding beyond the tight and subtle gradations of the virtual seems to have been a common response to regain a sense of novelty and the profts that went with it. Daguerre had employed a similar trick at his diorama in Paris in order to boost fagging ticket sales, and so it is more likely that the charms of the virtual imagination were mediated by class, rather than nationality.100 Nevertheless, American antebellum culture did have a different relationship to authenticity, and the Haningtons’ dioramas took place in a cultural landscape in which income-generating, sensationalist entertainments were becoming the norm. Among them were John Scudder’s American Museum and P. T. Barnum’s exhibition of Joice Heth, reputedly the nursemaid of George Washington, an exhibitionary complex that would burgeon into a national culture of fraud and its detection.101 The elegiacal, virtual time traveling that the diorama and the touring picture had effected might have been too subtle to compete with outrageous, winking bunkum, or, like Morse, they may have needed to pick one representational mode, virtual or actual/fctive. Their failure of the Haningtons to do both at once is demonstrated by a diorama that was called the Fairy Grotto, known today only through an illustration on sheet music (see Figure 2.7). It was another standard piece, likely calculated to invoke imaginative fights of fancy, but judging from the engraving made after it, this fancy was too broad to be taken seriously. The scene on Fairy Grotto and Fantoccini Waltz shows

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

65

Figure 2.7 Benjamin W. Thayer, Cover of “Fairy Grotto and Fantoccini Waltz,” (Boston: Henry Prentiss, 1840), lithograph, Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

fairies riding enormous swans in a multicolored underground lagoon. Here was the same formula of carefully rendered linear perspective, dramatic backlighting, and deep recession into space seen in other dioramas, and yet the performance of “here” and yet “away” fell far short. As an exasperated reviewer, Enoch Cobb Wines, exclaimed, The Fairy Grotto, ‘gotten up at an expense of over fve hundred dollars in the mere decorations,’ is indeed perfectly beautiful, if beauty consists in bringing as many gorgeous colors together as fve hundred dollars will buy, and in frst painting and then pulling backward and forward certain stiff and brawny fgures on what are called swans, under the cognomen of ‘fairies.’102 Wines, a Congregationalist minister who would later serve as president of St. Louis University seemed to object not only to the ridiculousness of the “stout fellows” masquerading as fairies, but to the presumption of lower-class audiences in appropriating what was supposed to be a more refned entertainment. Worries about controlling the imagination had always been part of its discourse, and were refreshed with an undercurrent of class anxiety that came to the forefront as the audiences for imaginative pleasures expanded exponentially. The “Fairy Grotto” could also be seen as a particularly pungent bastardization of Addison’s “dungeon” in

66

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

which, via the “pleasures of the imagination, or fancy,” “a man … is capable of entertaining himself with scenes and landscapes more beautiful than any that can be found in the whole compass of nature.”103 Ludicrously reimagined for antebellum America by the Hanington brothers, however, Addison’s dungeon—and the notion of the imagination more broadly—was governed by a logic of material excess that was at odds with the delicate dialecticism that had sustained earlier popular successes. What did it mean when such pleasures were co-opted and bastardized by an increasingly broad audience that misread, or were ignorant of, the implicit rules of aesthetic enjoyment? In fact, these class tensions had been inherent, if submerged, in the exhibitions of Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome. William Dunlap recalled that Thomas Sully’s copy came about because of “the suggestion of Mrs. Wiggins [sic]” that a copy would help to reduce the number of visitors who came to the Wiggin’s residence, for, as Dunlap wrote, “ladies do not like to have their carpets trodden by unhallowed feet.” By the same token, because “the original was the property of a man of fortune,” Dunlap supposed that middle-class visitors would not have felt “the same freedom as one feels when paying twenty-fve cents for admission, a kind of ease similar to one’s own enjoyment in mine own inn.”104 And yet, making these popular experiences of the embodied imagination into stories of elitism class-based struggle is somewhat beside the point. We should not lose sight of what these pictures actually did which was to construct a vaster sense of subjectivity made out of multiple subject positions of doubt and belief, sovereign and mastered. Ironically, for an age that would be remembered for its nascent populism, these pictures brought antidemocratic spaces to life. Reims Cathedral was the traditional place where French kings were crowned, for instance, St. Peter’s, the worldly seat of the church in Rome, and the Wednesday Evening Club in Sargent’s Dinner Party was an elite and exclusive group with an extremely restricted membership. As America passed into the Age of Jackson, and property qualifcations for voting were increasingly abolished, it was spaces of cathedrals and elite dinner parties that helped Americans to explore their own capacity for sovereign selfhood. Indeed, there were multiple avenues to the same goal, as evidenced by a wider antebellum visual culture of light-flled and imaginative domestic decorations and entertainments. The names of these objects are as multifarious as the diorama and the panorama: there were transparent or dioramic prints, translucent window shades with landscapes or other fancy scenes painted on fne cambric (see Figures 2.8 and 2.9), and a number of novelties that were given intriguing names like “protean views” and “lithophanes.” The terminology is less important than what these glowing visions managed to accomplish, however. In the words of one shade-seller, Samuel F. Bartol, they “promote contemplation, while they both delight the eye and the mind. No one is completely alone in a room where there is a fne pair of Window Shades.”105 Signifcantly, Bartol’s language recalls the redolent language of the embodied imagination. “The ear almost imagines it listens to the bubbling brook and the humming of the insect tribe that sport their golden wings in the light, so well imitated by the brush of the artist.” Their aesthetic effects were not complete without the body and the imagination of the viewer, which made anyone participating in their fights of fancy undeniably important, if only for a few moments. As with the endlessly reproducing touring paintings and dioramas, purchasers of these shades would have been untroubled by Bartol’s simultaneous assertion that these “unique” objects were manufactured “in great quantities” in his factory on Spruce Street in New York.

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

67

Figure 2.8 Painted cotton window shade, mid-19th c., 22 × 72 1/2 in., 26.63.16, Old Sturbridge Village.

Figure 2.9 Painted cotton window shade, mid-19th c., 22 1/8 × 78 in., 26.63.15, Old Sturbridge Village.

Whether a painting, a window shade, or a diorama, these objects were more than just impersonal things, they were extensions of selfhood and subjectivity. Their material translucency metaphorized the projection of internal affect and sensation into the external world, while their dancing play of refected light made them seem like they were full of life, sentiment, and a soul. Far from realizing dire predictions of indolence and dissipation, this vast visual culture of the embodied imagination allowed untold numbers of Americans to experience a subjective realm of potential in which becoming was just as important as being.

Notes 1 Somewhat ironically given its earlier reputation as a site of refnement, the building was later razed to make room for Scollay Square, known for its vaudeville and burlesque shows. See David Kruh, Always Something Doing: Boston’s Infamous Scollay Square (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999), 13–15. 2 “Multiple Classifed Advertisements,” Mississippi State Gazette [Natchez, Mississippi] 22 May 1824: n.p.

68

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

3 Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2011), 284; Davis, “Catholic Envy: The Visual Culture of Protestant Desire,” in The Visual Culture of American Religions, eds. David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 115. 4 Stephen Bann, “Envisioning Rome: Granet and Gibbon in Dialogue,” Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, ed. Catharine Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 45. 5 At a Legal Meeting of the Freeholders and Other Inhabitants of the Town of Boston: Holden on the 14th Day of January, A.D. 1822: Voted—That the Selectmen be Requested to Cause to be Published … a Correct List—stating the Amount of Real and Personal Estate … Taxed for the Year 1821—and Also All Abatements that Have Been Made from the Estimation, If Any, Previous to the First Day of January, 1822. Attest … Thomas Clark, Town Clerk (Boston, MA: True & Greene, 1822), 194. 6 “For the Boston Intelligencer. Collectanea. the Capuchin Church,” Boston Intelligencer and Evening Gazette, March 25, 1820. 7 Philip Freneau, “Ode to Fancy,” Poems Written and Published During the American Revolutionary War, and Now Republished from the Original Manuscripts; Interspersed with Translations from the Ancients, ad Other Pieces Not Heretofore in Print 1 (Philadelphia, PA: Lydia R. Bailey, 1809, 3rd ed.) 56. 8 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 13. 9 Charles Willson Peale to Rubens Peale, 5 May 1822, The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family, ed. Lillian B. Miller et al., 5 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press [1983- 1996]), 4, 116. 10 Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 288; Davis, 123–126. 11 Classifed advertisement, City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston, SC), January 29, 1822. Mississippi State Gazette [Natchez, MS] May 22, 1824: n.p. 12 John Cogdell, Diaries and Letter books, Collection 252, Joseph Downs Collection, Winterthur Library, 47–48. On the availability of gas lighting in this period, see David E. Nye, “The Artifcial Lighting Available to European and American Museums, 1800– 1915,” in From Darkness to Light: Writers in Museums, 1798–1898, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi and Katherine Manthorne (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2019), 26–27. 13 Jennifer Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 2. 14 “Capuchin Chapel,” Raleigh Register, and North-Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, NC), May 9, 1823. It is unclear whether Sully managed to salvage this work, or if he simply made another copy. I am not aware of any archival or published sources indicating that he did make a copy to replace this one, however. 15 Friedberg, Virtual Window, 11. 16 Amateur, “Sully’s Capuchin Chapel.” Daily National Intelligencer [Washington, DC] January 25, 1825. 17 “Specimens of the Fine Arts,” Saratoga Sentinel (Saratoga Springs, NY) August 5, 1823. 18 “Mr. Sargent’s Last Picture,” Columbian Centinel (Boston, MA), May 8, 1824. 19 “Capuchin Chapel,” Boston Intelligencer and Evening Gazette, April 29, 1820. 20 “Mr. Sully’s Capuchin Church.” City Gazette and Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA), November 20, 1821. 21 “Mr. Sargent’s Last Picture,” Columbian Centinel (Boston, MA), May 8, 1824. 22 Mr. Sully’s Capuchin Church, City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, November 20, 1820. 23 “Communication,” Boston Intelligencer & Evening Gazette, December 25, 1819. 24 Bann, “Envisioning Rome: Granet and Gibbon in Dialogue,” Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789–1945, ed. Catharine Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 45. 25 Davis, 125. On the popularity of the Granet and its copies in antebellum Charleston, including the watercolor by Granet or one of his followers, Friends and Amateurs in Musick owned by collector and rice planter John Ashe Alston, as well as Henry Inman’s An Abbey Window, copied by Charles Fraser and John Beaufain Irving, see Maurie D.

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

26 27 28 29

30

31

32 33

34 35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42

69

McInness, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2005), 302. No. 51, United States Sanitary Commission and Metropolitan Fair, Catalogue of the Art Exhibition at the Metropolitan Fair in Aid of the U.S. Sanitary Commission (New York: Goupil & Co., 1864), 4. Sholto Percy and Reuben Percy, The Percy Anecdotes: Original and Select, 4 (London: Printed for T. Boys, 1823), 127–128. Ibid. For the Philadelphia exhibition, see Connecticut Gazette (April 4, 1821). For the New York exhibition, which took place between May 9 and June 7, 1821, see “Celebrated Painting,” New York Gazette & General Advertiser, May 9, 1821. My knowledge of these notices comes from Rowena Houghton Dasch who provides an especially clear treatment of the various Capuchin Church paintings in her dissertation. See Dasch, “Now Exhibiting”: Charles Bird King’s Picture Gallery, Fashioning American Taste and Nation, 1824–1861, (Ph.d. diss.: University of Texas at Austin, 2012), 89. On Earle and Sully’s gallery, see John Clubbe, Byron, Sully, and the Power of Portraiture (London: Routledge, 2005), 11–12. See Charleston Mercury, January 20, 1823 and March 27, 1830. Cited in McInness, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston, 365 n46. Dasch also points to an exhibition of a copy by a Mr. Francis C. Hill at the Charleston, South Carolina Ladies’ Fair of 1839. “Communication: The Ladies Fair,” The Southern Patriot, April 25, 1839, cited in Dasch, “Now Exhibiting”, 89. For the exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum, see Stanley Ellis Cushing and David B. Dearinger, Acquired Tastes: 200 Years of Collecting for the Boston Athenaeum (Boston, MA: Boston Athenaeum, 2006), 42. For the exhibition in Rhode Island, which is noted in Dasch, “Now Exhibiting”, 88, see “Capuchin Chapel,” Providence Patriot, July 11, 1827. For the exhibition in New York, see “Kenyon College, Ohio,” Church Register: Devoted to the Interests of Religion in the Protestant Episcopal Church, July 28, 1827. Joel R. Poinsett to Judge Joseph Hopkinson, July 7, 1825, Hopkinson Family Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, quoted in Biddle and Fielding, The Life and Works of Thomas Sully 1783–1872, 397. See Tanya Pohrt, Touring Pictures: The Exhibition of American History Paintings in the Early Republic (Ph.D. diss.: University of Delaware, 2013); and, Pohrt, “Gallery of the Louvre as a Single-Painting Exhibition,” Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre and the Art of Invention, Peter John Brownlee, ed. (Chicago, IL and New Haven, CT: Terra Foundation for American Art, distributed by Yale University Press, 2014), 78–79. “Exhibition,” Boston Intelligencer & Evening Gazette (December 25, 1819). “Capuchin Chapel; Hospitals, Many,” New England Palladium (January 25, 1820). “Independence,” Richmond Enquirer (Richmond, VA) July 11, 1823; “Sully’s Capuchin Chapel,” Saratoga Sentinel (Saratoga Springs, NY) July 22, 1823; Mississippi State Gazette [Natchez, MS] May 22, 1824: n.p. Amateur. “Sully’s Capuchin Chapel,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, DC) January 25, 1825. Biddle and Fielding also cite Dunlap’s diary of March 22, 1822 recording that Sully’s receipts from two weeks’ exhibition in Norfolk totaled about $200, so this fgure varied. Catherine Kelly explores the precipitating infuence of the Panic of 1819 on artists and other cultural entrepreneurs in her The Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). “Specimens of the Fine Arts,” Saratoga Sentinel (Saratoga Springs, NY) August 5, 1823 “Mr. Sargent’s Last Picture,” Columbian Centinel (Boston, MA), May 8, 1824 Mr. Sully’s Capuchin Church, City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, November 20, 1820. “Mirror of Life,” Boston Intelligencer and Evening Gazette (December 25, 1819): 2. This is quoted in Isabelle Néto-Daguerre and Denis Coutagne, Granet, Peintre du Rome (Aix En Provence: Association des Amis du Musee Granet, 1992), 168. My awareness of this passage comes from Bann, “Norman Abbey as Romantic Mise-en-scène: St Georges de Boscherville in Historical Representation,’’ in Conjuring the Real: The Role of Architecture

70

43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61

62

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth Century Fiction, ed. Rumiko Handa (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 98. Mr. Sully’s Capuchin Church, City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, November 20, 1820, 2. The original review was said to come from the Philadelphia Democratic Press. It was republished as [No headline], Boston Weekly Messenger, November 15, 1821; “Mr. Sully’s Capuchin Church,” City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser (Charleston, SC), November 20, 1821; and, “Mr. Sully’s Capuchin Church,” Carolina Gazette (Charleston, SC), November 24, 1821. Engell, The Creative Imagination, 65. Mr. Sully’s Capuchin Church, City Gazette and Commercial Daily Advertiser, November 20, 1820. Michael Feldberg notes that this is one of the “general tendencies” of urban mob violence in this era in “Urbanization and Violence,” The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790–1940 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 65. Davis, “Catholic Envy,” 117. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 234. Davis also makes this point in “Catholic Envy,” 114. Samuel F. B. Morse, diary entry, July 31, 1831, Samuel F. B. Morse Papers, Library of Congress, quoted in American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 417. The “mother of abominations” was a reference to the Book of Revelations, which prophesied a woman sitting on a “scarlet beast” with seven heads and ten horns. “And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.” Revelations 17:5, King James Version. Needless to say, this account may not have been strictly accurate. For more, see Joan R. Gundersen. “Anthony Gavin’s “A Master-Key to Popery”: A Virginia Parson’s Best Seller,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 82, no. 1 (1974): 39–46. Gulian C. Verplanck, Address, Delivered before the American Academy of Fine Arts (New York: Charles Wiley, 1824), 32. See Bellion’s discussion of this episode in Citizen Spectator, 285–286. “For the American Daily Advertiser,” Poulson’s Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia, PA) July 27, 1820. No title, Franklin Gazette (Philadelphia, PA), November 1, 1820. Christopher Lukasik, “The Face of the Public,” Early American Literature 39, no. 3 (2004): 414. On the generational confict between Charles Willson and Raphaelle Peale, see David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, ”Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8, no. 3/4 (1994): 97–121; and Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, 88. On the hog riots, see Joanne Reitano, The Restless City: A Short History of New York from Colonial Times to the Present (London: Routledge, 2018), 35; on the sharp increase in economic inequality after 1820, see Jamie L. Bronstein, Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2016), 1–16. Amy Werbel, Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 22. William Kloss, Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1988), 72. Paul Staiti, Samuel F. B. Morse (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 78. See also William C. Allen, History of the United States Capitol: A Chronicle of Design, Construction, and Politics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Offce, 2001), 119–120. On Trumbull’s painting, see Helen A. Cooper, John Trumbull: The Hand and the Spirit of a Painter, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982); and Irma Jaffee, Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence (London: Allen Lane Penguin Books Ltd, 1976). The version of Trumbull’s painting illustrated here is the smaller and earlier

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

63

64

65 66 67

68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79

71

one that he started painting in 1786. The Capitol version was painted in 1817–1818, and placed in the Rotunda in 1826. See Kevin Avery, The Panorama and Its Manifestation in American Landscape Painting, 1795–1870 (Ph.D. diss.: Columbia University, 1995), 39–57, 65–72. The clearest and most complete source on the many variants of the diorama and the source on which I draw here is Huhtamo’s Illusions in Motion. The diorama also continues a rich and complex tradition of translucent and transparent painting in Europe in eighteenth and nineteent- century Europe. For an overview of sources on this history, see Chapter 1, n. 108. For Sébron, see Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 147–148. There are many sources on Maelzel and his Turk, but few on his career as a dioramist. The most complete addresses the complicated history of his long-running Confagration of Moscow and the Diorama of Reims: see John F. Ohl and Joseph Earl Arrington, “John Maelzel, Master Showman of Automata and Panoramas,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 84 (1960): 57–92. Avery, “The Panorama and Its Manifestations,” 54; and Claire A. Conway, “Robert Jones,” American Drawings and Watercolors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications, 2002), 321. “Fine Arts,” The Critic, a Weekly Review of Literature, Fine Arts, and the Drama 7 (December 13, 1828): 104. Oral S. Coad, William Dunlap: A Study of His Life and Works and Of His Place in Contemporary Culture (New York: The Dunlap Society, 1917), 108. The Boston production is documented in a review entitled “From the Boston Patriot of Monday last,” Newport Mercury, June 19, 1830, 3. Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, With a Memoir of the Author, By the Rev. David Welsh, Minister of St. David’s, Glasgow (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1820, repr. 1830), 276. “The Fine Arts,” The Knickerbocker 5 (February 1835): 172. Niblo’s Garden was established by John Niblo (1790?–1878) and was the most fashionable of the pleasure gardens in New York in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. For more, see John W. Frick, “Fireworks, Bonfres, Balloons, and More:’ New York’s Palace Garden,” in Pleasure Gardens, eds. Stephen M Valillo, Maryann Chach, and Katy Matheson (New York: Theatre Library Association, 1998), 25–26; and, Katy Matheson, “Niblo’s Garden and Its ‘Concert-Saloon,’ 1828–1846,” in Pleasure Gardens, 52–105. “Miscellaneous Notices,” American Monthly Magazine 4 (January 1, 1835): 285. “The Fine Arts,” The Knickerbocker, 172. The Fine Arts,” The Knickerbocker, 172. “Miss Leslie” [Eliza Leslie], “The Beaux,” Godey’s Lady’s Book, and Ladies’ American Magazine 24 (March 1842): 142. “Maelzel’s Diorama,” New-York Spectator [New York, New York] 15 September 1829. Hina Hirayama, With Eclat: The Boston Athenaeum and the Origin of the Museum of Fine Arts (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New Hampshire, 2013), 26. “Miscellaneous Notices,” The American Monthly Magazine 3 (July 1, 1834): 354; “The Fine Arts: Panini’s Architectural Paintings,” The New – York Mirror 12 (August 9, 1834): 43; for “half mile,” see “No title,” The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine 4 (August 1834): 161. New-York Spectator, (New York, NY) Thursday, July 3, 1834. It is worth noting that this rhetoric of astonishment, awe, and even fear of a loss of self connects to Sir Edmund Burke’s notion of the sublime in Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Idea of the Sublime and Beautiful. As Christine Holbo has noted, Burke’s project was trained on society, as he attempted to understand how an individual’s taste and perception mapped onto the political economy. Rather than focusing on the “closure, moral wholeness, and fxity” of the beautiful, however, Burke seemed ineluctably drawn to the sublime, which he associated with “imaginative excess, political atomism, and radical factionalism.” Holbo, “Imagination, Commerce, and the Politics of Associationism in Crèvecoeur’s ‘Letters from an American Farmer’,” Early American Literature 32, no. 1 (1997): 29. “Article 1—No Title,” The Knickerbocker 4 (October 1834): 325–326.

72

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

80 “Fine Arts,” The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature, Fine Arts, and the Drama 7 (December 13, 1828): 104. On the “in-between-ness” of affect, see Seigworth and Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), 1–4. 81 Bann, “Envisioning Rome: Granet and Gibbon in dialogue,” 46. 82 Granet, Mémoires, quoted in Néto-Daguerre and Coutagne, Granet, Peintre du Rome, 142. 83 Nylander, “Henry Sargent’s Dinner Party and Tea Party,” 1172. 84 On industrialization along the Hudson River, see David Schuyler, Sanctifed Landscape: Writers, Artists, and the Hudson River Valley, 1820–1909 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012); and Kenneth Myers, The Catskills: Painters, Writers, and Tourists in the Mountains, 1820–1895 (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum, 1987). 85 Mirzoeff, “Virtuality: From Virtual Antiquity to the Pixel Zone,” in An Introduction to Visual Culture, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge, 1999), 91. 86 Bann, “History and the Image: From the Lyons School to Paul Delaroche,” The Built Surface, vol. 1: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Antiquity to the Enlightenment, Christy Anderson, ed. Series: Reinterpreting Classicism: Culture, Reaction, and Appropriation, (London: Ashgate, 2002): 282–284. 87 Bann, “Envisioning Rome: Granet and Gibbon in Dialogue,” 48–49; Yablon, Untimely Ruins, 49. 88 My understanding of historical archaeology as a form of media archaeology comes from Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, “Introduction: An Archaeology of Media Archaeology,” Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Huhtamo and Parikka, eds. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011), 7. 89 Huhtamo and Parikka, Media Archaeology, 7. 90 Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture, 90. 91 “The Fine Arts: Panini’s Architectural Paintings,” 43; “Exhibition,” Boston Intelligencer & Evening Gazette, December 25, 1819. 92 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography, Richard Howard, trans. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1980), 31. 93 My understanding of the allographic versus the autographic in Goodman’s work comes from D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 13–15. 94 Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 145–146. 95 National Bureau of Economic Research, Trends in the American Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960), 10 96 Despite their success with the diorama, they also apparently continued other lines of work. Henry Hanington was listed as a window shade maker in John Doggett, Doggett’s NewYork City Directory, Illustrated with Maps of New York and Brooklyn, 1848–49 (New York: John Doggett, Jr., 1848), 146. 97 See Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 98 “Hanington’s Grand Moving Dioramas,” Unpublished broadside, annotated: May 4, 1837. Center for American History, University of Texas. Retrieved online from January 21, 2008. At an earlier performance in 1836, however, this scene was called a “Grand Dioramic Scene in Italy.” The same sailing and fshing vessels on a lake, “presenting a busy scene of animated life,” were present, as were the “focks and herds … seen driven forward by the shepherds” “Hanington’s grand moving dioramas,” Unpublished broadside. (Philadelphia, PA: s.n., 1836). McAllister Collection, Library Company of Philadelphia. 99 “Hanington’s Dioramas,” The Ladies’ Companion, a Monthly Magazine (June 1836): 102. 100 Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 146. 101 Barnum eventually bought their dioramas of the Creation, the Deluge, Fairy Grotto, and Storm at Sea in 1841 to exhibit at his museum. See P. T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs, Or the Recollections of P. T. Barnum (London: Ward, Lock, and Co., 1882), 66.

A Representation So Completely Ad Vivim

73

102 [Enoch Cobb Wines], “Hanington’s Dioramas,” The Gentleman’s Magazine 3, no. 4 (October 1838): 291–292. 103 Addison, Paper no. 411 (June 21, 1712). The Spectator: Complete in One Volume, 593. 104 William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress, 2, 134. 105 Samuel F. Bartol, Practical Hints on the Subject of Window Ornaments (New York: C. Willets, 1849), 8.

3

Staying on the Surface

The 1830s and 1840s saw a veritable platoon of fancy pieces modeled after Old Master paintings depicting young women in a state of reverie. Alone and seemingly unaware of the viewer’s presence, these maidens slept, dreamt, sang, and sketched, their virtue apparently secured by their apparent ignorance of the viewer. Their protection from an intruding gaze has been doubly secured, however, by their contemporary treatment in the scholarship on American art. Dismissed by scholars as insipid and howlingly sentimental, there is little extant literature on this large and important genre. Nineteenthcentury artists most certainly did not share this view, however. Artists like Asher B. Durand, Daniel Huntington, and others continued to rate these works among their most signifcant, even late into their careers. And well they should have; paintings of young women in creative reverie were critically admired and publicly adored in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, their yearly presence at exhibitions and their subsequent reproduction in engravings practically a given. These works were not meant to be imaginative in the contemporary sense of novelty, however, and I argue here that they had a deeply generative sense of repetition and recursion that was native to the sportive and lively faculty of the fancy. This nonlinearity was appropriate to an associative imagination which was seen as a force that continually built and arranged impermanent forms, only to dissolve and amalgamate them once more. This subtext of creativity is often made literal as the subjects not only dream, but also sketch (e.g., Italy; The Student; Susan Walker Morse (The Muse)), read (Roman Lady; A Love Letter; A Sibyl), or sing (Evening Hymn). That the specter of generation or reproduction also implied a sexual subtext was tempered by the fact that the daughters of artists were often used as models (in Rosalie; Mary Inman; Susan Walker Morse (The Muse); and, The Student), and by the fact that their throes of passion were often interpreted as religious in nature. Still, paradoxes abound in this bevy of painted beauties. They were American works of art whose raison d’etre was not to seem American at all, and they were primarily regarded as vehicles for demonstrating an artist’s facility with a rich and glowing palette of colors inspired by Venetian painters like Titian and Veronese, as well as other notable Old Masters. Like the perspective paintings discussed before, they were strangely virtual. Their beauty was brought out by a technique called vellatura, which involved adding a translucent glaze that contributed color, but not form, light, and shadow, if not actual, palpable matter. Also like the paintings examined previously, these works seemed to come to life before the viewer’s very eyes, conducting themselves as if they were “real.” Finally, even the materials that constituted these refulgent surfaces, like the paintings themselves, were far from quiescent. The glazes used by

Staying on the Surface

75

American artists in this period were highly experimental, often incorporating materials such as beeswax, molasses, and cream which were discursively linked to appetitive taste, as well as to carnality, flth, and sin. Given this emphasis on surface, beauty, and materiality, it is tempting to dismiss these fancy pieces as merely superfcial. After all, calling something a “mere fancy” in this period meant one thought it insignifcant, unreal, or insubstantial. For latter-day scholars, this quality of superfciality can also contribute to a hunch that these works were empty exercises in establishing “correct taste” or in aping European techniques. Instead, I argue that a dialectic of surface and depth was crucial to how these works were received in the nineteenth century. In review after review, as well as in artists’ own journals and letters, it was the brilliance or faultiness of color and tone that was seen as worthy of comment. Far from indulging a bovine stupidity that dodged the complexities of life in the early nineteenth century, however, I argue that paintings of young women dreaming served as vehicles for engaging with some of the most pressing questions in American culture. How were Americans to reconcile an embodied imagination with moral judgment? How could body and soul be joined together against an alienating dualism? As we will see, these paintings and engravings never offered defnitive answers to these questions, but rather rejected binaries of body or mind/soul, male or female, object or process. Instead, they delivered a message that was perfectly in keeping with associative theories of the imagination which valorized creativity as a dynamic, and seemingly endless, chain.

“A New Class of Pictures” In the previous chapter, I suggested that imagination exerted an increasingly compelling pull on American audiences of the 1820s and 1830s, arguing that an extensive and under-researched visual and material culture attested to this fascination. A similar current of interest can be tracked within the vogue for fancy pieces of young women posed in creative reverie. Like those perspective paintings, this genre was also undoubtedly transatlantic. Although it originated in Europe, it was wildly popular with American audiences, and I will argue that this interest was not simply motivated by a defensive desire to contradict chauvinist stereotypes of Americans as uncouth and tasteless. Indeed, artists like Allston, King, Sully, and Morse who had studied in London in the frst few decades of the nineteenth century would have been aware of the fancy piece, which the historian of British art Martin Postle has called “among the most original, popular, and self-consciously modern art forms to have emerged in Britain during the eighteenth century.” Nor were the British the only producers of fancy pieces, as Melissa Percival has shown in her study of Fragonard’s fgure de fantaisie.1 The fancy piece, and the American understanding that would have fowed from it, valorized fancy and imagination over portraiture’s transcriptive dullness, presuming a detached viewer who looked to artists for more than an accurate transcription of a familial visage. Carol Soltis, a curator who organized a signifcant exhibition of Thomas Sully’s paintings of theatrical subjects has noted that the fancy piece was often used interchangeably with the term “subject picture,” and that such a designation was simply meant “to describe something other than a portrait or a history painting.”2 This leaves a wide range of potential subjects, although Postle, one of the fancy piece’s most knowledgeable explicators, proposed that the genre was “a character study of an

76

Staying on the Surface

individual, or small group of individuals presented in the format of a portrait, an idea which fnds its origins in the seventeenth century European tradition.”3 Focusing on the character and individuality of a wan chimneysweep or rural peasant posed “by the cottage door” allowed the viewer to center his or her own emotions and feelings, a term that helpfully conveys meanings of both affect and sensation.4 Such an interest in imagination and feeling was not merely driven by dumb pleasure, but, as discussed in the frst chapter of this book, was rather infuenced by the sensationalist philosophies of John Locke and Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, among others.5 Pleasure was not an insignifcant part of the fancy picture’s appeal, however, and critics often praised them for their direct and fuid appeal to the body. The English poet, critic, and sometime artist William Hazlitt thus praised “a look of real life, a cordial fow of animal spirits, to be met with nowhere else,” in genre paintings by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, a key infuence on the genre.6 This animate feeling arose from both mind and body. As Hazlitt wrote, “After making the colors on the canvass feel and think, the next best thing is to make them breathe and live.”7 Predictably, given the vexed layers of sensuality contained in notions of fancy, this attraction toward imagination and embodiment was also ambivalent. For example, Reynolds lauded history painting in his Discourses on Art as the highest test of an artist’s mettle. As a painter and a collector, however, he produced many of his own fancy paintings and quickly bought Gainsborough’s Girl with Pigs for his own collection, writing the artist a letter “with half-a-hundred graceful compliments.”8 In his Fourteenth Discourse, he also claimed Gainsborough’s fancy pieces found “natural grace … and such an elegance, as are more frequently found in cottages than in courts.”9 But such unambiguous praise struck even his contemporaries as a little odd. “Why … does Sir Joshua hang Mr. Gainsborough’s little picture of the pigs in his cabinet collection of all the great masters of past times?” The interlocutor suspected it might have been meant as an “invidious comparison” rather than a true compliment.10 American artists in the early nineteenth century produced all kinds of sentimental genre paintings that would be considered fancy pieces, but I will not focus on those here. Rather, my interest is in the dozens of paintings and engravings of young women produced ca. 1820–1850 that seemed to make imagination, that is, the act of creating a different reality through art or simply thought, their subject. There is some evidence for a tradition of depicting imagination in this manner although it is hard to say whether American artists would have known of it. In emblem books such as Jean Baptiste Boudard’s Iconologie, tirée de divers auteurs (see Figure 3.1, 1766) and George Richardson’s lightly adapted Iconology, or A collection of emblematical fgures (1779), imagination was depicted as a young woman seated and with her hands folded in her lap, looking heavenward.11 This was not merely wool-gathering, however, for Imagination was, in Boudard’s words, “painted with wings at the temples, to denote quickness” (promptitude). As Richardson put it, that quickness “demonstrate, that tho’ the other faculties be unemployed, this power may be said to be in continual motion, even when involved in sleep.”12 In the United States, Washington Allston led the vogue for pictures of women in absorptive reverie. His explorations in the genre can be traced to a pair of paintings, a portrait of his wife Ann Channing which he then revised with minor changes into Lady Reading a Valentine. These works were followed by Beatrice (Plate 4), a painting begun in London while the artist was still grieving over the loss of Channing. Like those two earlier works, Beatrice featured a single young woman in a state of

Staying on the Surface

77

Figure 3.1 Jean-Baptiste Boudard, “Imagination,” Iconologie, tirée de divers auteurs: utile aux gens de lettres, aux poëtes, aux artistes, & généralement à tous les amateurs des beaux-arts (Parma: chez l’auteur, 1759), etching, digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.

reverie, her pensive, fne features highlighted against a dark interior background. The composition loosely suggested works by Renaissance masters, such as Raphael’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria which the painter surely saw when it was exhibited at the British Institution in 1816, as well as the Raphael’s St. Cecilia altarpiece, after which he made two sketches of when he visited the Louvre in 1804.13 The subject, likely the early Renaissance poet Dante’s beloved Beatrice Portinari was cloaked in fashions appropriate to the ffteenth century, including a mantle, high waistline, and leg-ofmutton sleeves. This was not a passionless exercise in historical reproduction, however, a fact borne out by the picture’s patterning of presence and absence. This pattern can be read in the two raking slashes that ran down Beatrice’s sleeve, decorative features that dramatized what was not there. These slits led the viewer’s eye to the immense folds of fabric that cascaded toward the painting’s bottom edge, swallowing the subject’s girlish fgure. The painting was rescued from too much heaviness, however, by the fgure’s elegant hand pointing upward toward delicate, almost immaterial chains, as well as a strand of pearls and a golden caul that punctuate the picture’s gloom.14 This contradictory play of ethereal and earthly was also carried out in the accessories Allston chose for the picture. According to Diana Strazdes, an Allston scholar, the string of lustrous

78

Staying on the Surface

pearls in Beatrice’s hair might have been associated with Venus, goddess of marriage and earthly love, while the red stone cross she fngers was plainly an emblem of religious devotion. These early paintings of idealized women by Allston were followed some 10 years later by a veritable explosion of works that were hailed as “ideal portraits … [that] belong to a new class of pictures.”15 This group included A Roman Lady, A Tuscan Girl, and Spanish Girl in Reverie (Plate 5), all from 1831. Four years later, in 1835, Allston produced Evening Hymn and Rosalie (Plate 6).16 The terms of the critical reception that met these paintings were strikingly similar to earlier British reviews that had emphasized the near-sentience of fancy pictures, albeit with a more virtuous cast. The same reviewer quoted thus wrote: Unlike the single fgures of any other artist, they are not created merely to be looked at and so remind us of ideal beauty; but to be communed with as living beings whom we may love, and who love us; and who bid us rise, with them, into the heaven of poetry, in which their Creator dwells and they with him. Clearly, this reviewer did not really believe that Allston’s painted ladies were truly “living beings.” Their animacy did, however, signal that art could be a vital force in precipitating refections on beauty, ethics, and ideality. This freedom of movement and will was linked to the freedom of the imagination, although the notion that rote copying might be liberatory might be an odd thought to consider. In fact, the gloss of novelty that now falls on the imagination is recent. In this sense, the Oxford English Dictionary cites the writer M. E. Robinson, whose 1981 character laments, “I know I’m not very imaginative about trying new things. I’m such a stick in the mud.”17 In the nineteenth century, however, copying was understood as distinct from mere imitation, and was held to be a crucial part of an artist’s training. Reynolds’ Thirteenth Discourse, for instance, which drew on received notions of mimesis and imitatio in classical rhetoric, stressed that the copy was not “servile imitation,” but something more like translation which ultimately gave the artist a profound sense of freedom.18 Allston, a theoretician as well as an artist who was revered in both roles by younger American artists, understood this doctrine well, and frequently endorsed the notion that copying stimulated creativity. He criticized Hazlitt, for example, for a copy of a work by Titian that was “very well done. But,” the artist claimed, “he would not have gone far beyond copying, for he was entirely destitute of the imagination.” Hazlitt, Allston said, had “no idea of the art beyond its mimetic character,” a grave error in his estimation.19 Although he may have been the artist most closely associated with them, Allston’s idealized portraits of poetic and historic women were far from the only works of this type among American artists of the period. Rembrandt Peale, for instance, made a copy in rich, glowing colors, now called Day Dreams, of a work by Reynolds, which he likely knew through a print source, one which Samuel F. B. Morse would later use as an exemplar in his Lectures on the Affnity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts frst delivered in 1826.20 Peale also painted a work called Erinna, a Greek Poetess which he kept in his studio, along with a copy after Rubens’ St. Cecilia which showed the patron saint of music seated at a spinet, her eyes cast up toward the heavens.21 Thomas Sully was another key fgure in the production and dissemination of the American fancy pieces. Often unfairly dismissed as a formulaic and unoriginal artist

Staying on the Surface

79

in the twentieth century, Sully was extremely active in American art circles in the nineteenth century as an artist, theoretician, institutional administrator, and, eventually, a kind of paterfamilias to a generation of artists, particularly those clustered in Philadelphia. A subscription plan formed in 1809 by a group of Philadelphia patrons led by Benjamin Chew Wilcocks, an infuential merchant in the city, allowed him to travel to England, where he lived with his countryman Charles Bird King and studied at the Antique School of the Royal Academy of Arts under Henry Fuseli. Allston, who returned to London for a second trip from 1811–1818, would have just missed Sully by a year, but their letters of introduction would have admitted them into a similar range of private and public collections where fancy pieces were prominently displayed. There is no record of individual fancy pieces that Sully saw or admired in this period, but his journal from the period records a number of fancy subjects, including, a striking landscape with a female child of seven years keeling [sic] by the side of a dead fawn, under a massive tree, split by lightning, which had killed her favorite. … A mother bathing her infant. [… and] A celebrated actress in the character of the Comic Muse.22 Sully leaned toward a more insouciant eroticism than Allston’s purer visions. His rosycheeked infant in Mother and Child, for instance, provided a moralizing cover of sentiment but, as Carol Soltis has noted, “its tiny fngers gently, almost imperceptibly, lift the gauzy fabric resting over her breast, an effect surely calculated to stir the viewer’s senses.”23 In A Love Letter (Plate 7), he pursued a similar strategy, teasing the viewer with what could be known and seen versus what remained invisible. The subject of the painting, a ringletted beauty in dishabille cradling her chin and seemingly oblivious of the viewer, was bathed in light that glanced across her forehead and bared shoulders. Shewas lost in thought, however, the contents of her unfolded love letter a mystery despite its suggestive bend toward the viewer. Glowing reds picked up by the wax seal on the letter, the drapes that frame her curtained bed, and her ruddy cheeks contrast with the whites of her sheets, rumpled gown, and pale skin, their cool bluish tone serving to separate the young girl, barely, from her louche surroundings and the decadence they implied.24 As if breaking through the fimsiness of the pretext that allows the viewer to gaze upon the subject’s body, however, the red seal on the letter is perfectly placed to read as a surrogate for her nipple. Younger artists took notice of Sully’s and Allston’s efforts. Morse, a student of Allston’s who claimed “I go to Allston as a comet goes to the sun,” was a characteristically quick study; he echoed his teacher’s portrait of his wife reading with an image of his mother doing the same, followed by a later portrait-cum-fancy-piece, (Susan Walker Morse (The Muse)).25 George Whiting Flagg, Allston’s nephew, made Portrait of a Lady Sleeping (1834) for Luman Reed, the dry-goods merchant, in 1834, as well as The Match Girl (1834) which hewed more closely to Reynolds’ fancy pieces of the urban poor than it did to Allston’s timeless beauties.26 Finally, Daniel Huntington, who had also been Morse’s student, practically made ideal portraits of women sketching or dreaming his stock-in-trade. His string of ideal women began with Florentine Girl (1839, now lost), a composition he reproduced, with minor changes and a different title, in Venetian Girl (1840–1841), and it also included the well-received A Sibyl (Plate 8), Roman Girl (unlocated, but known through a print, 1842), and Italy (1843, Plate 9).27

80

Staying on the Surface

Even artists who were better known for other genres appeared to execute at least one ideal picture of a beautiful girl dreaming or drawing, bravura performances which served to signal their aspirations to do more than turn out “low” art, particularly portraits which were often an antebellum artist’s bread and butter but which offered limited possibilities for artistic inspiration. Charles Cromwell Ingham, known for his crystalline portraits of well-to-do women in silken fashions, had a painting called The Day Dream, for instance, in the collection of Jonathan Sturges, a prominent New York merchant and patron of the arts. Although the artist’s sedulous attention to sartorial detail often led to critical disdain, the painting, now-lost, was noted in biographical profles through the nineteenth century as one of his major works.28 Other pictures like The White Plume, no longer extant but known through an engraving, split the difference between portraiture and the fancy piece, a strategy that appeared to soothe critics tired of “monotonous” works “instead of higher order pieces” that “please the eye and awaken the imagination.”29 Girl With Flowers (see Figure 3.2), one of Ingham’s best-known paintings, was also praised for being imaginative rather than mimetic. Like its model, a painting by Murillo in the Dulwich Picture Gallery called The Flower Girl which was widely known through engravings, it depicted a fower seller posed in front of a high, buff-colored wall and a distant landscape, offering up loosely piled blooms to the viewer. Finally, even artists like William Sidney

Figure 3.2 Charles Cromwell Ingham, The Flower Girl, 1846, oil on canvas, 36 × 28 3/8 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of William Church Osborn, 1902.

Staying on the Surface

81

Mount and George Caleb Bingham who were better known for their folksy genre paintings nevertheless produced depictions of ideal, somnolent beauties, including Mount’s Girl Asleep (1843), and Bingham’s The Dull Story (1843–1844), which was based on Mount’s composition. Print networks multiplied the number and reach of these paintings considerably, especially when one accounts for the fact that individual compositions were re-used with different titles multiple times. The publisher Edward L. Carey, for instance, commissioned a number of Sully’s fancy pieces including The Gypsy Girl (1839, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and The Love Letter, in order to feature engravings after them in his bestselling gift annuals. As the literary scholar Isabelle Lehuu has written of this surfeit, “Young women in a state of reverie illustrated Apprehension, Resignation, Contemplation, Hesitation, Refection, Imagination, … by the late 1830s annuals rarely appeared without at least one female portrait, frequently recycled in subsequent publications.”30 Charting the tangled web of copying, allusion, and resemblance among these copies and near-copies can be challenging, and recalls the cottage industry of copies after Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome. Like nimble fancy itself, these convolutions were intricately complex, leaping from subject to subject but risking a collapse of the correspondence between meaning and image. Consider, for instance, Daniel Huntington’s Mary Inman (see Figure 3.3). Although not a direct allegorization

Figure 3.3 Daniel Huntington, Mary Inman, 1844, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mrs. Dave Hennen Coddington, in memory of her husband, 1964.

82

Staying on the Surface

of imagination—Mary Inman was the daughter of an artist, but is not pictured here as an artist herself—the painting nevertheless pictured an idealized, beautiful young woman wearing historical dress in a format that was familiar from the fancy piece genre. It was also a spur to creativity, as there were at least two versions of this painting by Huntington himself, as many as six by his students, and several engravings.31 As an engraving, Huntington’s work lost its original title, and drew from a familiar well of idealized female literary characters. In the 1844 edition of The Gift, Mary Inman was engraved as a frontispiece by John Cheney, and, with a simple wipe of the plate, became Beatrice (see Figure 3.8).32 The following year, she turned into “Fair Inez,” her literary double taken from Allston’s poem, “The Spanish Maid,” in R. L. Griswold’s Poets and Poetry of England.33 By the time The Gift was published again in 1845, she re-appeared as Beatrice once more. These images were quintessentially Romantic in their attention to sentimentality and subjectivity, as well as in their projected pose of anti-capitalism. Muses, gypsies, and saints did not have to labor in factories or felds, and their non-productiveness could be read as a rebuke to an excessively pragmatic American commitment to work and utilitarianism. An unsigned review of Ingham’s White Plume, known today only through an engraving by Durand, made this nostalgia for a prelapsarian past clear. The critic praised the fgure’s “brilliancy of complexion, a mouth which you wish to fold your arms and gaze on forever,” lamenting that the alternative to this galvanizing vision of loveliness was “going back to bargaining and businesss.”34 Such autonomy from a booming Jacksonian economy was only an illusion, however, not least because appearing to withdraw from commerce was an effective strategy for garnering more commissions.35 The doublings, substitutions, and recursions of artistic authorship that occur in the dreaming young woman genre insistently put sensuous female bodies, rather than male artists, at their center. Or did they? To return to Mary Inman, whom we last saw exchanging identities with female heroines at will, we must account for the fact that, as the daughter of Henry Inman, she could be read as an extension of her father. Indeed, in at least four of these fancy pictures, the fgures were modeled after daughters of artists. In Thomas Sully’s The Student (see Figure 3.4), the subject is Sully’s youngest daughter, Rosalie Kemble Sully, who was an artist herself and is pictured holding a pencil, her hands draped over a sketchbook bulging with drawings. Rosalie Sully may have appeared again in Allston’s Rosalie, as her older sister, Ellen, remembered that “Mr. Allston admired her very much” for her beauty as well as her talent.36 Likewise, Morse’s fnal major painting before he devoted himself fully to his telegraph, The Muse (Susan Walker Morse) (see Figure 3.5) gives us a parting image of the artist not as Samuel Morse, the accomplished, middle-aged painter, but as his 17-year-old daughter. What was the point of these substitutions? Of course, painting family members was a common practice, for these models are close at hand and often more willing to endure the tedium of sitting for a portrait.37 And yet, the critical reception of these paintings points to the fact that something more than mere convenience was at work. Reviewers consistently used sensual metaphors that were practically auto-erotic in their intensity, and they appeared to confate the enthusiasm of creative inspiration with the sexual arousal of procreation.38 Rosalie (Plate 6), Allston’s painting that was so admired that viewers referred to “bow[ing] at the shrine of the divine ‘Rosalie’,” serves as an apt example of this synthesis of aesthetic beauty and sexual desire.39

Staying on the Surface

83

Figure 3.4 Thomas Sully, The Student, 1839, oil on canvas, 23 1/2 × 19 1/2 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Francis T. Sully Darley, 1914.

The three-quarter length painting depicted Sully’s daughter in vaguely Renaissance garb, looking wanly into the distance. Two splayed fngers press gently against her chest, a gesture of sensory activation to which critics thrilled in delight. Writing in Boston, Jedidiah Huntington, the brother of the painter, praised “the position of the arm across the breast, of the fngers … touching [the neck] with a slight, sweet pressure.”40 This logic of touch and movement was repeated elsewhere within the picture, notably in Rosalie’s “peculiar vest” which was “mould[ed] to the bosom” and yet “could not hide its gentlest swelling, all breathe [sic] young and innocent desire.” Writing 15 years later, the critic E. Anna Lewis averred that Allston had “put into the mouth” of Rosalie his own lines of poetry, a strikingly sexualized image for so spiritual a painter.41 In truth, these lines took their cues from Allston’s own words. The poem, also called “Rosalie,” that the artist appended to his painting had also pursued a thematic of ecstasy expressed in metaphors of fuidity and liquescence. The music that “pour[ed]” upon Rosalie’s soul, for instance, made her “heart to overfow/ As from a thousand gushing springs.” The speaker in the poem insisted that this inspiration was “not born of aught below,” a reference probably meant to refer to the earthly plane. And yet, her assertion that this joy awoke “deeply-seated springs/Of silent joy” reads just as easily as an orgasmic experience of physical gratifcation as it does a metaphysical awakening to spirit beyond forms.42 The eroticized imagery of these responses and the images’ proclivity for incessant transformation had been typical of how European philosophers had imagined fancy

84

Staying on the Surface

Figure 3.5 Samuel F. B. Morse, The Muse (Susan Walker Morse), ca. 1836–1837, oil on canvas, 73 3/4 × 57 5/8 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Herbert L. Pratt, 1945.

over the long eighteenth century, as a roving, protean force of exhaustless fertility. It recalls the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s oft-quoted lines about the secondary imagination: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create.” To understand this connection, we might reach back to German philosophers like F. J. W. Schiller and Gottfried Lessing whom Coleridge translated from the German, tracing his close friendship with Allston as a vector of infuence on other American artists.43 Alternatively, we might turn to French eighteenth-century aesthetics and its attention to the passions and enthusiasm, a topic discussed at length by theoreticians such as Roger de Piles, Voltaire, and Louis de Cahusac.44 Even these options do not exhaust the potential theoretical sources for critics who gendered fancy as feminine, and pictured it as a combinatory and paradoxical drive. These readings, though valuable, also set up an obvious historiographical quandary. Had Thomas Sully read Voltaire? Were American critics more familiar with Kant’s model of apperception, or with Coleridge’s secondary imagination? These questions are diffcult, if not impossible, to answer, and they also presume that philosophical texts must precede images. Instead, I suggest two things. First, as discussed in the frst chapter of this book, imagination’s bifurcation into two unequal faculties and its connection to fancy’s voluptuous somaticism had been mainstays of British aesthetic philosophy since the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, disseminated not

Staying on the Surface

85

only through erudite treatises but also through highly popular epic poems like Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). These conventions were then spread even more broadly in the sentimental literature, often by women, that abounded in American periodicals in the frst half of the nineteenth century. Second, as the present chapter and the one preceding it have tried to show, even absent this pervasive and accessible aesthetics there was a vast and widely available visual culture of images that produced a complex engagement with imagination, fancy, and aesthetics rather than simply refecting one that preexisted it in textual forms. Such conclusions help to construct a broader American Romanticism, one that was not dependent on encountering a few visionary poets (the so-called “Big Six” of British Romantic poetry, for example, or American Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson) or continental philosophers (such as Immanuel Kant or Schiller).45 Instead of being trained upon the male geniuses that latter-day literary historians have privileged, this Romanticism is broadly populist. It was built upon a coherent and accessible body of Anglophone aesthetics that did not determine meaning from the top down, but rather, via new models of patraonage like the annual exhibition and the gift book, encouraged participation from the bottom up.

Weighing the Fancy Piece Despite the fact that the American contribution to the fancy piece genre was clearly valued by the artists who painted them and the viewers, critics, and collectors who lavished them with praise, scholarship on the subset of fancy pieces that depicted dreamy and idealized women is sparse. The most sustained treatment of these paintings occurs within scholarship on Allston. And yet, Theodore Stebbins and William Gerdts, two authorities on Allston’s oeuvre, have dismissed the idea that the fancy piece might have a place in American art. Of Allston’s dreaming women, they write, The hierarchy of thematic values had no name for this type of subject [i.e., the dreaming young woman]; it might later have been referred to as a ‘fancy piece.’ But fgure painting did not really enter into the categoric consciousness of American art until the late nineteenth century. The authors maintained that Allston’s works in this vein “[owed] little to his contemporaries … and establish[ed] few immediate progeny.”46 This denial is puzzling not only because the zenith of the fancy piece was not “later,” but earlier, but also because Allston, Sully, and Huntington made fgure painting a cornerstone of their respective artistic practices. A result of this inattention to the sentimental fancy piece is that connections between antebellum and late nineteenth-century fgure painting, particularly of women in states of leisure, have been obscured. In Bailey van Hook’s otherwise excellent Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914, for instance, the author asserted that only in the later nineteenth century did American artists move away from anecdote and narrative “toward a vaguer ‘fgure painting.’” Such an idea repeats the conclusions of an American art history that has privileged genre and landscape painting, both of which are more easily assimilated to a social art history methodology, but which ignores the slippery complexities of aesthetics. This is consistent with a broader dismissal of such concerns as “merely aesthetic,” or trivial, and yet it

86

Staying on the Surface

warps our understanding of American antebellum art, suggesting that nonproductive reverie had no place in it before the “cosmopolitan” shift in fgure painting after the Civil War. It goes without saying therefore that close analysis of these paintings as a group is sparse.47 A notable exception is the historian of American art Lillian B. Miller, who, writing about Rembrandt Peale’s Day Dreams in 1992 recognized that it was part of a “critical mass of ‘young women asleep’ pictures that seemed to clash with Victorian ideals of feminine piety, chastity, and duty.”48 Carol Eaton Soltis, who was Miller’s co-author and co-curator on the Peale exhibition, has lately returned to the topic with her groundbreaking exhibition on Sully’s fancy pieces and connections to the theater. This is an exceedingly slight literature for what was, in the nineteenth century, a large and well-received genre, however. In fact, the response to fancy pieces, usually confned to monographs or catalogs that deal with individual artists, has usually been one of disdain rather than simple neglect. Natalie Spassky and Kathleen Luhrs, writing in the 1965 catalog of American art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for example, reassured readers that the “sentimental nature” of Huntington’s Mary Inman “is made palatable by competent execution and beautiful coloring.” The same catalog dismissed even Allston’s Spanish Girl in Reverie, which was one of his most cherished pieces in his own time, explaining that “Although this painting was once acclaimed as one of Allston’s most beautiful pictures and praised for its color, it now appears dark and sentimental.”49 As Cynthia Patterson has shown, Sully’s fancy pictures were even more roundly damned with language calling them “saccharin” and “unambitious.” Patterson also found no evidence to support the notion that Sully was somehow embarrassed by these works, which he contributed to gift books, annuals, and illustrated monthly magazines and which sold for between $150 and $300, nor that they were, per a 1967 master’s thesis on the artist, “executed entirely by assistants.”50 These reactions tell us more about the modernism’s repudiation of sentimentalism than they do about the contemporary, nineteenth-century attitudes toward such pieces. An indication of how highly nineteenth-century artists rated these ideal works is indicated by Asher B. Durand’s choice to send his fancy piece Il Pappagallo (see Figure 3.6) as one of fve works in total to the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876. The painting showed a young, fashionably coiffed girl cloaked in a burgundy mantle whose warm tones glowed against a dark background and established a striking contrast with the parrot’s brilliant emerald plumage.51 Its purview was not the American wilderness, a subject with which Durand is usually associated, but the wilds of the body, represented here by the sitter’s creamy expanse of bare shoulder. And why wouldn’t he continue to value the painting? When it was exhibited at the National Academy of Design’s 1842 annual exhibition, the artist was rapturously congratulated for his Titanesque “tone … which we rarely see in modern productions.” This keen attention to pleasure, sensation, and voluptuous charm was surely licensed by any number of seventeenth-century painters, including Watteau and other French Rococo painters but an important Old Master precedent in this regard was the seventeenth-century Spanish painter Murillo. The artist’s exceedingly popular genre pictures of Spanish beggar boys depicted subjects that hungrily devoured melons and grapes, or searched themselves for lice, invoking both taste and touch.52 His infuence can be found in Reynolds’ early fancy piece, Haymaker and Sleeping Girl (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). This was not mere sensualism, however, since Murillo was also

Staying on the Surface

87

Figure 3.6 Asher B. Durand, Il Pappagallo, ca. 1841, oil on canvas, 29 1/2 × 24 in., 1903.5, Gift of the Durand Family, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

a distinguished painter of religious subjects. His infuence was institutionalized with the opening of the Dulwich collection to Royal Academy students in 1815 where the beggar boys were given pride of place in the gallery next to the painter’s Virgin of the Rosary, Veronese’s Saint Jerome and a Donor, and Guido Reni’s Saint John in the Wilderness.53 For a country supposedly awash in dubious forgeries of Old Masters, American artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century had a surprising degree of access to paintings by Murillo. At Bush Hill in Pennsylvania, the estate of the former governor, James Hamilton, a painting by Murillo of St. Ignatius that had been “captured in a Spanish prize” was open to visitors to the gallery. Before traveling to London, Benjamin West copied it, and also made “a portrait of the Rev. William Smith, in the attitude and style of St. Ignatius, after Murillo.”54 It was Murillo’s genre paintings of attractive young Andalusians that most attracted the succeeding generation, however, and his infuence only seemed to increase through the early and midnineteenth century. In addition to Ingham’s apparent familiarity with the painter’s The Flower Girl through a print source, Thomas Sully recorded having seen multiple original works by Murillo in the picture gallery at Point Breeze, the New Jersey estate of Joseph Bonaparte, brother of Napoleon. The exact subjects of the paintings he saw are unknown, but, tellingly given Murillo’s reputation for mingling the sybaritic with

88 Staying on the Surface the sacred, Sully was most attentive to their carnal qualities. “Murillo looks dirty and clouded in the tone, and in the fesh,” he wrote, “except in some small pictures of a portrait size—there the fesh was rich and natural.”55 His three copies of Murillo’s Gypsy Mother and Child (painted in 1828, 1834, and 1859), based on a print by Simon Francis Ravenet the elder, lingered on the pearlescent tone of the young mother’s exposed shoulder, neck, and collarbone, and gave her cheeks a high rouge that lent what Sully presumably thought was an appropriately “rich and natural” quality.56 Murillo’s infuence lent historical credibility to works that lingered on the fesh and it continued in the works of artists who shaped institutions of American art. Rembrandt Peale, who carried the mantle of his father, Charles Willson Peale and was an infuential fgure in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among other institutions, made two copies of Gypsy Mother and Child which were “nearly identical” to Sully’s and numbered among his collection until it was sold after his death.57 Morse gave a miniaturized version of Murillo’s Beggar Boy a prominent position, just to the right of the immense doorway that offered an imagined view down the museum’s famed Grande Galerie in his Gallery of the Louvre.58 Finally, although it is uncertain how closely he was inspired by Murillo directly, a now-lost work by Huntington called Shepherd Boy of the Campagna was deemed “equal to Murillo’s Beggar Boy, [and] was painted in the incredibly short period of four hours,” proving, a contemporary critic proclaimed, the artist’s “wonderful genius.”59 Huntington stayed with the theme later in his career; his oval-format A Magdalen was exhibited at the British Institution in 1853, the same year, coincidentally, as one of Murillo’s own.60 Murillo’s penchant for a fully embodied idealism thus combined with an American mid-nineteenth century preoccupation with imagination and fancy, thus revealing a complex and embodied sentimentalism which later scholarship has rejected or elided.

Depth and Surface Useful though it may be to understand how ubiquitous paintings of women in reverie were, what we should do with this knowledge is not immediately apparent. Do these images presume the desire of a male voyeur motivated by sexual desire or darker urges? After all, this is a cadre of dreaming young women who never awake or join in with modern society. Perhaps this is a destructive wish-fulfllment, a patriarchal response that seeks to metaphorically entomb women. More common than psychoanalytical analyses are social art historical ones that read images and objects in terms of identity, power, and politics. It would not be inaccurate in the least to read these compositions as a display of cultural nationalism. It is no mistake that Durand sent Il Pappagallo to the Centennial Exhibition, a World’s Fair that celebrated an American techno-imperialism which was not only expanding globally but was also waging an endless war against sovereign Indian tribes.61 In many ways, the genre of the fancy piece itself grew up out of an Anglo-French rivalry that paralleled contemporaneous military engagements. The prestige of the genre in eighteenth-century Britain was amplifed by its early association with cosmopolitan French painters like Watteau and Alexis Grimou, and fancy pictures by Reynolds and Gainsborough might read as veiled statements of cultural nationalism.62 Indeed, the fact that the high watermark of the genre occurred just after Britain’s stunning and unexpected victory over France in the French and Indian War tends to support the latter interpretation.

Staying on the Surface

89

There is no shortage of evidence for reading fancy pieces as civilizationist support for nascent American imperialism. American artists’ production of ideal subjects rather than portraits or lower genres presumed a disinterested and refned spectator that helped proclaim a nation ready to take its place on a global stage. The very existence of so many ideal and technically accomplished paintings seemed to disprove Benjamin Franklin’s earlier caution that “with young countries as with young men, you must curb their fancy to strengthen their judgment” and that “the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael.”63 The logic of American fancy as an instrument of cultural nationalism was articulated with particular clarity by the artist George Whiting Flagg. When the British landscapist John Constable made the cutting claim not to have heard of Allston, Flagg’s teacher and uncle. Flagg, his ire aroused, left with a resolve to demonstrate to Constable that he knew something of art and, encountering a matchseller on his way back to his hotel, painted the wistful study of The Match Girl, which in many respects proved the masterpiece of his artistic life.64 If one wanted confrmation that this genre spoke to American nationalist ambition, it is not hard to fnd. Similarly, Allston, who proclaimed that he had “returned to a mighty empire” on his arrival back in America in 1818, could not resist boasting about his technical prowess in nationalist terms.65 He reportedly crowed that both William Beechey and Gainsborough believed themselves to be the only ones to have discovered that painting into glazing enabled them to achieve great effects. “‘That is no news to me,’ said Gainsborough,” Henry Greenough related in material later published in Scribner’s Magazine, “‘but I thought I was the only man in England who knew the secret’.” Allston also reported with apparent satisfaction that some dubious French painters had been forced to make an “amende honorable for their previous rudeness,” having initially reported to John Vanderlyn that his “countryman … was in a sad mess” when they frst saw Allston’s unexpected technique.66 My main purpose in this section, however, is to consider what we might gain by staying on the surface rather than diving after concealed drives or ideologies, for fancy pieces were not all nationalist pretension or disingenuous pandering.67 Rather, they allowed artists and audiences to engage with complex ideas about mind and matter, depth and surface, ideas that go to the very heart of aesthetics’ doubleness. Daniel Huntington’s idealized portrait Italy (Plate 9) provides a valuable case study for exploring these tensions. The painting, executed in 1843 after his return from his frst trip to Europe as a young artist, shows a dark-eyed beauty in historical dress sketching before a sunset on the campagna. Loose, brushy strokes defne the notebook’s ivory edges, forming a slashing diagonal that travels across the picture’s lower right corner. The actual form of the drawing as it is taking shape on the paper is denied to the curious viewer, however, highlighting the gap between desire and its fulfllment. The notion that the painting explores themes of purity and temptation is further suggested by the landscape in the distance which pairs a classical ruin barely visible on the left side of the picture with a lofty and much taller campanile of a church on its right. The art historian Wendy Greenhouse has argued that Huntington declared his ultimate allegiance to self-abnegating piety by signing his name on the side of the church

90 Staying on the Surface and not the classical temple ruins. By doing so, Huntington proclaimed an ethic that he shared in common with many antebellum Americans, that, as Greenhouse phrased it, “the hand and its material tools merely serve a higher end directed by mind and imagination,” a theme that he would “reiterate” throughout his career.68 The painter would likely approve of of the notion that he had effectively transcended a classical, pagan past in favor of a purifed Christian history that his staunch Episcopalianism led him to view with favor. As Greenhouse has written, High Church Episcopalians like Huntington traced their moral authority to “the earliest, pure church of Christ, the ‘true catholic’ church of which modern Roman Catholicism was also a descendent—albeit a corrupt and wayward one.” To the thoughtful viewer, however, Italy offers more than a compositional structure weighted toward piety. The painting’s singularly compelling surfaces, including the flmy whiteness of Italy’s veil, the gleaming hardness of her ruby brooch, and the exquisite fligreed patterns on her collar and shirtsleeves, seem to invite intimate touch rather than distanced looking. This invitation to make physical contact is given further visual force in the fgure’s delicate hand which is picturesquely and prominently silhouetted against the landscape and glowing sunset in the background. A similar sensory involution occurs between vision and hearing. The fgure’s thickly coiled, nearly black forelock is parted over her ear, slipping to reveal her auricle, the anatomical structure that would have worked to amplify and funnel sounds like that of the church bells into her inner ear. This emphasis on sound folds the senses together, suggesting that touch, implied by the fgure’s thick tangle of hair and her gossamer veil, is intercalated with hearing, symbolized by her delicate and partly visible ear. These swirling auricular structures serve as a convenient graphic model for the troublesome imbrication of feshy reality and purifed immateriality that critics of the period so often noted. Here, for example, is the critic H. T. Tuckerman on Italy: “Is she not splendid? … What a rich contour! The oval brow, raven hair, and vivid lips (una bocca che invita le bacie),” a mouth that invites kisses. “What deep, melting jet!” So moved was Tuckerman that he appended a poem whose lines once again emphasized erotic intensities. “And felt they not their very manhood coursed/Beneath thine earnest and bewildering gaze?” he asked.69 The tension between the sacred spirit and the profane body continues in other passages of Italy. Although the cross on top of that bell tower seems to establish the “one, true church” as the ultimate authority, the appealing beauty of women and the ruins outlined against a lambent sunset surely mount a fair competition. Indeed, as if in recognition of the temptations that could corrupt her virtue, Italy’s gaze is directed over her right shoulder, away from the church itself, which is not painted with a pure white, but is whorled with patches of coral and aquamarine. Admittedly, this reads the pious painter of religious subjects against the grain, but I stress that these terms were set by the artist himself. In his 1851 lecture on Christian art before the National Academy of Design, Huntington cautioned that there were people who “would frown upon all art as injurious to the Christian Religion as endangering its simplicity and vitality.” He continued, They say that the fne arts are enervating indulgences, beguiling the soul, and luring it from the sense of duties of a life that should be a struggle and a combat. That they seduce the Pilgrim from the narrow and rugged way into easy and pleasurable paths blinding the sense of Truth by the hazy and glimmering atmosphere of beauty; and the unwary soul is lulled into a delicious dream of soft enchantments, and unftted to cope with the stern and naked reality of Life.70

Staying on the Surface

91

The gendered terms of softness, seduction, beauty, and delectability are clearly juxtaposed with a masculine sense of Christian duty. And yet, as the enticing materiality in Huntington’s own picture and the critical aporias it elicited suggest, this was a battle that was not so easily won. One trope that pointed to this moral unsteadiness was the idea that depictions of sleeping or contemplative women might become fesh and assume human agency, perhaps even admonishing viewers for their impudence. A critic writing in 1834 thus claimed in exaggeratedly arch language of Flagg’s Portrait, “so admirably is thy pouting mouth portrayed that we almost momentarily expect thy orbs of vision to unclose, and to be greeted with a blush for daring to look upon thy beauty sleeping.”71 Huntington repeated this idea when he recalled seeing Durand’s painted copy Ariadne (see Figure 3.7), another oneiric, sensuous woman, in the painter’s studio: [Durand] at once drew back a dark green curtain which hid the picture from the vulgar gaze. A sudden light seemed to burst on the shaded studio from the luminous and palpitating fgure of the sleeping beauty. The somber depths of olive foliage under which she reposed heightened the glow of her graceful and tenderly rounded form. One fancied that her calmly closed lids would open and the startled girl hastily wrap the drapery about her to hide such loveliness from profane eyes.72

Figure 3.7 Asher B. Durand, Ariadne, ca. 1831–1835, oil on canvas, 17 1/8 × 19 3/8 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Samuel P. Avery, 1897.

92 Staying on the Surface These imagined corrections away from decadence and toward chastity are not the same as virtuous abstinence, however, and they license a taboo sensuality that was inconveniently central to the practices of so many American artists in the period. The frequent appearance of glows and blushes in these accounts also hint at an independent will or judgment that emanated from deep within, one which was not easily extracted from humans’ fallen, bodily form.73

“Getting Stuck in Matter” Despite the obvious piety of Huntington and his cohort, completely renouncing the embodied mystery and forbidden allure of surface, fancy, and imagination would have been anathema to the ambition of their generation to become more than mere painters of portraits, signs, or coaches. Huntington, for instance, resented “[t]he drudgery of painting every face that comes along, in all its cold, vacant vulgarity,” calling it “stupid” and claiming, “wood-sawing is better.” On the other hand Even portraiture that had “invention” and was “independent!” was far superior to obedient mimesis, in the eyes of Huntington and his critics.74 This turn toward the subversive and unruly imagination was literally written into the eighteenth-century art theory that American artists had inherited, a fact which obviously rankled against Christian dicta requiring penitent obedience. American artists in the period affrmed these lessons again and again. In his memorandum book, for instance, Sully repeatedly copied down extracts on the inferiority of mimetic exactitude. “The only merit in Loitard’s [sic] pictures is neatness, which, as a general rule, is a characteristic of a low genius, or rather no genius at all. — Reynolds,” one entry read. “Minute discriminations of stuffs in drapery belong to the inferior style,” read another. Yet a third encapsulated the neoclassical approach to Grand Manner style. “A picture should be composed of few and large parts, which fll the eye distinctly. This is the foundation of a grand gusto.”75 These books were frequently shared among artists in Sully’s circle which included Charles Robert Leslie, John Neagle, and others, and so Sully’s harping upon the subject would have resonated beyond his own practice. In Sully’s circle and beyond, the disdain for the merely “mechanick” was based on a vibrant neoclassical and Romantic tradition of the sister arts. The older, classical tradition of the ekphrastic paragone had long viewed interarts comparisons as competitions, a tradition that was familiar enough in earlynineteenth-century aesthetic criticism. Far more popular, however, was the gentler, Horatian tradition of “Ut pictura poesis” that saw poetry, painting, sculpture, and the other arts as sisters, not adversaries.76 The critical history of the sister arts is an important context for early to midnineteenth century Anglophone painters because it implied that painting was subtly inferior to her elder sister, the more abstract and logical art of poetry. Poetry more easily sidestepped the lingering condescension toward craft and materiality, and it was seen as being able to take greater imaginative fights than the often dull and mimetic visual arts. Preferring the darkly messy imagination to strict mimesis offered a chance at artistic genius precisely because it led into dangerous territory.77 As with the beguiling surfaces and moral purity discussed above, these qualities were ineluctably swirled together, making for an inescapable tension between abstract beauty and gross materiality. This confict was particularly signifcant for painters, whose studios stank of turpentine

Staying on the Surface

93

and whose materials tended to smudge and stain clothes and hands. As a medium, oil paint is odorous and wet, and getting it to adhere to a primed canvas while conducting luminosity into the viewer’s eye required a storehouse of different pigments, grounds, binders, varnishes, and drying agents. Not only were these materials inchoate and viscous, the knowledge required to manipulate them had half-seriously been regarded as a kind of occult knowledge since the Middle Ages.79 Of course, proponents of the imagination, notably Reynolds, professed to renounce the decay that was associated with materialism, which he associated with color and the Venetian school.80 Just as thread must pass through a needle, however, artists had to pass through this matrix of formlessness and all its immoral associations in order to achieve the abstract and transcendent ideal of beauty embedded within it. Given these perils, one might have expected late eighteenth and early nineteenth century artists to exercise restraint around the substances they used in their practice, but, in fact, a transatlantic fever for experimentation with exotic and appealing artist’s materials bloomed in this period. Rumors of long-forgotten secret recipes circulated and traded hands for princely sums. Sometimes, these materials made the connections between bodies and paint quite literal. Glazing paintings with paint made from pulverized mummies, it turns out, lends to works a rich brown tone that is particularly useful in the diffcult task of painting fesh that appeared lit from within. James Forrester, making his grand tour in 1769 described mummy brown as “the fnest brown used by Mr. [Benjamin] West in glazing,” although he added that only the “most feshy” parts, cleaned of thread and dirt, were useful.81 Not all were convinced, and by the mid-century, a new generation would look askance at “smearing our canvas with a part perhaps of the wife of Potiphar.”82 Despite their putative preference for line and rational severity, this fascination with color and tone swept up Reynolds, West, his successor as president of the Royal Academy, as well as other infuential American painters like Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, and his son, Rembrandt Peale. They were especially taken with the notion that exotic ingredients might allow them to give their paintings the tone found in works by Venetian artists like Annibale Caracci, Correggio, Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese.83 At all times, the skillful rendering of radiant skin remained the benchmark of this kind of skill. Rembrandt Peale, for instance, bragged of having discovered a method for painting “liquid fesh” using encaustic and even tried to sell his secret to John Neagle.84 Even the more pedestrian substances used by American artists in this period managed to insinuate a sensual and appetitive body, however. Allston, for example, used milk as a binder in the underpainting of Elijah in the Desert, and Morse, his student, followed suit in a painting of his relative Lucretia Pickering Morse 1823.85 In the mid1830s, Morse also made the unusual addition of beer to his binder, which inspired Sully who, in fact, needed very little encouragement to try new techniques. He copied down extracts from Pierre François Tingry’s widely read treatise A Painter and a Varnisher’s Guide (1804) for instance, seeming as attentive to the olfactive, and even gustative dimensions of these materials as he was to their visual effects. Mastic, Sully noted, quoting Tingry, gave off “a sweet and slightly aromatic smell” when melted over a fre. Even more stimulating was the fact that the purest mastic was “reserved for the use of the Turkish women who chew it, as it has the property of cleaning the teeth, strengthening the gums and rendering the breath sweet.” Sandarac, however, could be identifed by its grainy mouthfeel and bitter taste.86 Indeed, some of these recipes for 78

94 Staying on the Surface artistic processes read less art theory and more like menus. Sully noted that his process for painting a copy of Charles Robert Leslie’s copy after Hogarth’s The Gate of Calais (also known as O, the Roast Beef of Old England for the enormous side of beef that its central fgures carry) involved mixing “a dessert spoonful of mastic … [with] a piece of bleached wax melted by fre,” which formed a “thin jelly” when cold.87 In 1809, a young Sully had recorded the process for obtaining wax for varnishing, “by boiling the honey comb and extracting the wax with care,” a delicate process that would have been redolent with the smell of honey heated on a stove or fre.88 In and of themselves, nineteenth-century Americans should have had little quarrel with molasses, honey, jelly, or mastic. When considered in relation with a lingering, eighteenth-century vitalism that viewed bodies as host to fuids or spirits that could be infamed by a vitiated imagination, however, they appear more troublesome; all the more so when we account for the fact that these substances helped conjure up visions of so many breasts palpitating under silks and flmy muslins. These substances and surfaces would also have elicited troubling associations with dissemblance and sinful pleasure, ideas which were old but extremely durable. Evil, the ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus had proposed was “getting stuck in matter and being satisfed with it,” an idea that continued to reverberate within a Christian theology that defned separation from God through various material metaphors.89 Benjamin Keach’s Tropologia, Or, A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors, an authority on religious metaphors frst published in 1681 and continuously republished throughout the nineteenth century, thus defned sin as a heavy burden, a wound, or even vomit.90 How were virtuous Americans, mindful of the need to demonstrate their imaginative capacities, supposed to “walk not after the fesh, but the Spirit,” as the Book of Romans suggested?91 The wriggling body and its unruly intimations of gustatory and libidinal appetites stuck in the craw, so to speak, of the fne arts.92 The substances eagerly documented and tested by Sully and his fellow artists were also vehicles for color, long associated in Western culture with a dialectic of lust and repulsion. Whiteness was fetishized by devotees of classical sculpture, especially the German theorist and antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, while color was associated with women, exotic “others,” flth, and the body.93 Emphasis on color is evident throughout the pictures of young women dreaming. To return to Sully’s Love Letter (Plate 7), for example, the painting is dominated by warm tones: crimson curtains, a red wax seal, and fushed cheeks. That this color palette is accompanied by iconography of sexual purity (and its potential violation) in the form of the broken seal on the eponymous letter is almost unnecessary, so effectively did these radiant colors communicate a message of desire. Other works in the genre such as Huntington’s Sibyl (Plate 8) might seem innocent of color’s associations because of their outwardly moralizing message, but I would argue that this message is destabilized by the painting’s seductive hues. The Cumaean sibyl was reputed to have foretold the birth of Christ, and Huntington confrmed that she was “receiving intimations of the advent of Christ.”94 The central fgure looks up toward the heavens in an apparent pose of piety that is reminiscent of Domenichino’s Cumaean Sibyl, another seventeenth-century painting whose rich colors were much admired in the nineteenth century.95 The purity of this overtly religious fgure is nevertheless complicated by the high fush that spreads down her cheeks, which is echoed in the copper tones of her voluminous robe and hair. A green veil and border that winds its way down her left shoulder sets off and draws attention to these warm tones.

Staying on the Surface

95

The viewer might wonder what immaterial and spiritual knowledge the Sibyl is receiving but the high chromatic contrast of her raiments draw attention to her mundane loveliness.

The Shroud and the Veil As with the knowledge that these sensuous and seemingly eroticized paintings were unavoidable in American art during the 1830s and 1840s, it is not immediately apparent what we should do with the fact that their material and technical qualities stimulated an already unsteady imagination. How and why was this incessant firtation with sin and decadence acceptable? We can fnd the answers by turning back to Allston, particularly to two of his most famous works, his 12 × 16 foot history painting Belshazzaar’s Feast which remained incomplete at Allston’s death, and The Spanish Girl in Reverie which he did complete in 1831 and which was, as I have discussed previously, one of a number of similar works that seemed to pour forth from his studio in the frst half of the 1830s. As a number of scholars have documented, Belshazzar’s Feast creatively incapacitated Allston for decades, particularly because the artist had accepted money from his wealthy friends to complete the commission, a decision that apparently sent him into paroxysms of guilt.96 After his death, a group led by Richard Henry Dana, Sr. decamped upon Allston’s studio, fnding, according to Richard Henry Dana, Jr., “the great sheet of painted canvas—but dimmed, almost obscured by dust & lines & marks of chalk.” Aghast at the picture’s wretched state, Dana Senior gestured at the thick layer of paint obscuring the central fgure of Belshazzar, and stated, “That is his shroud.” Sarah Burns, an art historian, and Teresa A. Goddu, a scholar of literature, have both contributed nuanced readings of Belshazzar’s Feast that cast it in terms of a gothic veil or shroud that obscured horrifc realities of a slave economy that powered the global engine of capitalism. Metaphorically then, Allston’s shroud screened not just one corpse, but those of millions who endured the Middle Passage and enforced servitude on plantations and in households across the Atlantic world, whether this resulted in an early physical death or merely the painful “social death” of racialized chattel slavery.97 Burns has demonstrated that Allston’s early study in London was supported by profts gained from his family’s plantation in Waccamaw, South Carolina, and has connected the painter’s love of the Gothic with this shrouding process. As Burns explains, “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.”98 A similar model of repression might be applied to the inexplicable eroticism of paintings of young girls in reverie. Indeed, explaining his novel technique in Spanish Girl in Reverie, for example Allston jokingly explained why he alternated “body color” (which added shadows) and “dead color” (an underpainting in monochrome that established tonal values) over and again. “Whatever be the color of the ground it will show through and have its effect on the eye, unless with malice prepense you entirely bury it with opaque color.”99 If on one side of the Allston coin is the darkness of the shroud, the lightness of the other side is metaphorized for some scholars by the veil. David Bjelajac, for instance, claimed that Allston “displayed no interest in the physical presence of the Venetians’ pigment” and that he wished to break free of “painting’s enslavement to the visible … the palpable real or actual.” Color thus became “an ambient, translucent veil through

96 Staying on the Surface which the imagination may perceive a host of ‘indefnite forms’ … appeal[ing] to the ear, not the eye.”100 Similarly, Barbara Novak has written that Allston was one of a few American artists “willing to give themselves over to the vague world of the irrational and impalpable, with no hold on reality,” as if Allston were somehow veiled from sin.101 Allston’s self-fashioning and his later hagiography quite frankly encourage this immaterialization of the body, particularly the artist’s own. With a “slender fgure,” “quiet manner,” and a general expression of “mildness and sweetness, bordering on effeminacy,” the artist was remembered as “one of the most graceful dancers ever seen in Massachusetts.” He was also fastidious, his biographer Moses Foster Sweetser stressed; he could not bear to touch his rubber overshoes, preferring to put them on using tongs, and disliked touching his skin to metallic door knobs. (He often used a handkerchief to avoid the sensation.)102 I do not want to imply that there is no place for reading Allston’s art as one of suppression, as Burns has argued, and as I make clear in the following two chapters, Anglo-American aesthetics was saturated with fears and anxieties about race and racial purity. Nor do I think the emphasis on Allston’s ideality, his almost unbearable lightness of being, is misplaced. And yet, the important philosophical role of bodies and materiality tends to get lost in these two poles of analysis, and I offer the veil here as an emblem of an approach that takes into account the rich and unsettled doubleness of aesthetics. The embodied imagination instantiated in images of young women in reverie was meant to tarry with corporality and tangibility, neither shrouding an oppressive system lurking beneath a deceptive surface nor for unveiling viewers a completely pure and idealized analogical world. As I discuss below, the veil combines carnality and immateriality, grotesque and ideal into a richly woven fabric that is durable enough to accommodate both extremes. This recursive logic moves forward and back between poles of attraction and repulsion, and is made visual in omnipresent motif of the veil that runs throughout the genre of the dreaming young woman. We can fnd it in the caul worn by Allston’s Beatrice (Plate 4), as well as the stunning mantilla made of blonde, a delicate and translucent silk lace, worn by Huntington’s Italy (Plate 9).I It is also there in the very name of the technique of glazing employed by Allston and his contemporaries, velatura. More subtly, we can also fnd veils of diamond-shaped lozenges in the mezzotint engravings in this genre, including John Cheney’s Florentine Girl (see Figures 3.8 and 3.9) and John Casilear’s Sibyl, both after Huntington, as well as in the most accomplished engraving of fesh of the period, Asher B. Durand’s Ariadne (see Figures 3.9 and 3.10). These virtual nets of line were deployed to address the technical diffculty of rendering supple fesh with a hard line. Metaphorically, they invoked the ideal of disegno and rational intelligence but their troubled sensuality also reveals the limitations of mental control itself. These lines form a virtual screen that militates against sensuality, but their undulating “fabric” was neither disincarnated, nor fully bodied, its fuzzier areas of mezzotint and stippling alluding to, but never quite approximating, the licentiousness of color. In these “nets of rationality,” to appropriate the curator William Ivins, Jr.’s apposite phrase, the swelling curves of those female bodies strain—literally and conceptually— against the representational logic that is supposed to contain them.103 This logic of absence and presence reverberates through these veils and nets that proliferated in American paintings and engravings in the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. This is because screens, veils, and nets can not only be looked at, they can also be looked through. Looking at puts us on steady ground in the realm

Figure 3.8 John Cheney after Daniel Huntington, Donna Isabella (or Florentine Girl), 1843, Engraving and etching on cream wove paper, 3 3/4 × 3 1/16 in., Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. John S. Phillips Collection.

Figure 3.9 Detail, John Cheney after Daniel Huntington, Donna Isabella [or Florentine

Girl], 1843.

98

Staying on the Surface

Figure 3.10 Asher B. Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1834, engraving; ffth state of eight, 17 5/8 × 20 13/16 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1927.

of mimesis and knowledge. Looking at revealed, for instance, the grapes painted by Zeuxis in a story of the artistic competition from Pliny the Elder which was often retold in this period. Looking through, however, requires the skill of imagination, allowing the viewer to see beyond mere reality. This undirected looking can feel dangerously unmoored, and lacks the reassuring landmarks of a geographic or mensurational gaze that parcels space into objects, territories, or saleable commodities. It was the skill of looking through, however, that Parrhasius, the ultimate winner in Pliny’s story, had perfected, having painted a picture of a curtain so life-like that Zeuxis mistook it for reality.104 In so doing, “Parrhasius unveils what is beneath the representation,” the art historian Pascale Dubus has written, “that which forms a gap in our gaze, but which vehemently seizes the spectator’s imagination.”105 This was the rather metaphysical victory that American artists like Sully and Huntington prized, as indicated in their instinctual rejection of the dull mimesis of portraiture, a genre that, like Zeuxis’ rather simple still life, encouraged looking at, not through. With an imagination that promises transcendence through the body, our gaze “is caught in the stitches” of the canvas, however, as Dubus put it, caught in a dangerous materiality that includes corruptible fesh as well as fabric. Indeed, the task of separating gross matter from abstract virtue was harder than it might have appeared, a diffculty that can be traced in the veil’s duality. Brides and nuns, for instance, assumed the

Plate 1 François-Marius Granet, The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, 1814–15, oil on canvas, 77 1/2 × 58 1/4 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of P. L. Everard, 1880.

Plate 2 Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party, ca. 1821, oil on canvas, 61 5/8 × 49 3/4 in., Gift of Mrs. Horatio Appleton Lamb in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Sargent 19.13, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Plate 3 Henry Sargent, The Tea Party, ca. 1824, 64 3/8 × 52 3/8 in., oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. Horatio Appleton Lamb in memory of Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop Sargent 19.12, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Plate 4 Washington Allston, Beatrice, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 × 25 3/8 in., Anonymous gift, Photograph © 2020 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Plate 5 Washington Allston, Spanish Girl in Reverie, 1831, oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Lyman G. Bloomingdale, 1901.

Plate 6 Washington Allston, Rosalie, oil on canvas, 43 × 39 in., Courtesy of Historic New England. Gift of William Sumner Appleton, Mrs. R.H.F. Standen, Mrs. George F. Weld, and Gladys H. Winterbottom, 1941.1697.

Plate 7 Thomas Sully, The Love Letter, WA 1902.3, 25 3/16 × 29 15/16 in., Image © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford.

Plate 8 Daniel Huntington, A Sibyl, 1839, oil on canvas, 30 1/2 × 25 in., 1863.9, Gift of the American-Art Union, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Plate 9 Daniel Huntington, Italy, 1843, oil on canvas, 38 5/8 × 29 1/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum Purchase.

Plate 10 Charles Bird King, The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, 1830, oil and graphite on canvas, Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Grenville L. Winthrop, Class of 1886, Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Plate 11 Asher B. Durand, Peter Stuyvesant and the Trumpeter (Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant on learning the capture, by treachery, of Fort Casimir), 1835, oil on canvas, 24 1/4 × 30 1/4 in., 1858.28, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Plate 12 Asher B. Durand, The Pedler (The Pedlar Displaying His Wares), ca. 1836, oil on canvas, 24 × 34 1/2 in., 1858.26, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, NewYork Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Plate 13 Detail, Asher B. Durand, Boys Playing Marbles, 1836.

Plate 14 Asher B. Durand, The Beeches, 1845, oil on canvas, 60 3/8 × 48 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Maria DeWitt Jesup, from the collection of her husband, Morris K. Jesup, 1914.

Staying on the Surface

99

veil, but so too did female slaves in tales of eastern harems and seraglios that Western readers loved to consume.106 Where was the line that separated the ideal from the grotesque? The answer came only through constant dialecticism that swerved between sublimity and disgust, virtuality and actuality, spirit and matter. Despite “an obsession with ideality [that] bordered on the pathological,” as Burns has noted, these discourses of amalgamation and impurity also resonate through Allston’s artistic practice.107 As conservator Joyce Hill Stonor has noted, Allston glazed paintings with a mixture he called “Titian’s dirt,” consisting of “asphaltum, Indian red, and ultramarine plus megilp,” a substance that was meant to render skin, the ultimate test of an artist’s skill, as clear, pellucid, and beautiful as possible. If one of his students fell short of this, Allston would stand before the young painter’s canvases and, after a “long silence,” say, “‘Very bad, sir; that is not fesh, it is mud, sir; it is painted with brick-dust and clay.’”108 Even in his more carefully considered Lectures, the artist did not simply yearn for the gossamer refnements of music and Old Master paintings. He also praised the beauties of the human form for their appearance in a “mixed mode, not in its high, passionless form, its singleness and purity.” Indeed, the artist ridiculed those who “resort to the schools, for their supposed infallible rules,” adding that beauty “is not to be reasoned about, but felt.”109 This was not simply an American discourse or one that was unique to Allston, however. Henry Merritt, a British artist, restorer, and writer who lived and worked in London at roughly the same time as Allston, echoed Allston’s grudging materialism in 1854 when he spoke of the “slow decay which lurks beneath the surface of resplendent colors” in his evocatively named treatise Dirt and Pictures Separated. Merritt may have known Allston, or he may not have. As I have tried to show, what these artists shared in common was an ingrained awareness of an Anglo-American system of aesthetics whose internal tensions arose from the long-vexed imagination around which it was oriented. The challenge of keeping dirt and pictures separated, as Merritt put it, of separating the material and the abstract, can be demonstrated by turning to one of Allston’s Spanish Girl in Reverie (Plate 5), one of the most critically acclaimed and admired works of this genre. The painting was completed simultaneously with a poem called “The Spanish Maid” which Allston published in The North American Review in October 1831 to accompany the exhibition of Spanish Girl at the Boston Athenaeum.110 Reading Allston’s verse, we learn that the maiden, sweet Inez, was led into reverie by the memory of the trumpet blast that summoned her beloved, Isidore, who has gone to war.111 Allston’s goal was not to achieve topographical exactitude—this Spanish landscape was, after all, modeled after the Swiss Mount Pilot—but to deliver a radical, phenomenal presence effected by layer after layer of translucent glaze. He told Greenough that he had gone over the mountain in the painting “I suppose at least twenty times,” not, he emphasized, by “scumbling,” a process that used tints of white to soften the “hardness or over-distinctness of detail,” as one period painting manual put it, but continually returning to “ferce” tints like black and Indian red.112 Thus, the mountain behind the Spanish girl looms in the distance, not in the finty exactitude we might expect of such a geological form, but into a spongy and formless muted brown. The same is true of the tangled vegetation in the distance, bushes or trees that look like nothing more than olive-colored skeins of wool. Perhaps this is why critics suggested that it was the material landscape of Spanish Girl in Reverie, not the wistful and tremulous girl, that they noticed most. Franklin Dexter, the critic for The North American Review, lingered on the landscape’s “fantastic

100 Staying on the Surface forms” and “deep veil of invisible vapor.” The critic Elizabeth Peabody claimed that the ravine in the picture was “covered in the softest foliage, among which you see and hear a sweet little cascade falling into a stream whose quiet tune it hardly disturbs.”113 And the Unitarian minister William Ware went the furthest of them all, writing: The Spanish Girl gives her name to the picture, but it is one of those misnomers. … One who looks at the picture, scarcely ever looks at, certainly cares nothing for the Spanish Girl, … the landscape, of which her presence is a mere inferior incident, is never forgotten, but remains forever, as a part of the furniture of the mind.114 Although Ware seemed ready to disavow the body of the central fgure, it is clear that their perception “caught on the stitches,” as it were, of the body beneath the veil, with the same involutions of ear, eye, and touch that had marked other idealized women like Huntington’s Italy. Greenough, one of Allston’s most devoted and perceptive critics, even conveyed his understanding of this embodied mode of cognition by adding taste to the mix, claiming that Allston’s mountains looked “as if one could with a spoon help himself easily to a plateful.”115 The following two chapters will return to the troubled imbrication of imagination with gustatory pleasure, but for now I want to leave the subtle intimacies of surface and offer some reasons why this hermeneutic of the fesh would have been acceptable for deeper, contextual reasons, particularly in Unitarian-dominated Boston.

Incarnate Redemption An important social context for understanding these contradictory attitudes toward body and spirit is the ongoing liberalization of Protestant denominations led by the Unitarians. Protestantism was by no means monolithic, but I argue that there was a reasonable correlation between an increasing tolerance for ritual and feeling in one’s religious faith and the same attitude toward inciting an embodied imagination in art and visual culture. As the theologian Eboni Marshall Turman has explained, Unitarianism was a Romantic alternative to orthodox Calvinism which “heralded the incarnate over dogma insofar as it proposed embodied experience and reason rather than orthodoxy as the primary resource for Christian inquiry and belief.”116 Seeing critics’ somatic responses to these paintings of dreamy and embodied reverie in the context of this shift, as infuential Protestant clergymen like Cyrus A. Bartol, Henry Ward Beecher, Horace Bushnell, Orville Dewey, and Samuel Osgood “parted with a long tradition of both Platonic philosophy and Protestant theology that for centuries had elevated words and hearing at the expense of images and any tactile perception of the divine,” makes the intensity of their embodiment more comprehensible.117 The embodied imagination promised a similarly transformative experience of incarnation as a means of salvation, and did so, moreover, in a manner that was refreshingly free of religious cant and denominational quarrels. Pictures of dreaming women were not exactly religious icons but they bore the unmistakable imprint of the sacred, for a painter “speaks in parables that are of an easy interpretation,” as Huntington asserted, and their commingling of body and spirit answered a higher call.118 They were also congruent with a burgeoning metaphysics that promised an ecstatic unifcation of body and mind that would not be out of place

Staying on the Surface

101

in, say, a Unitarian church. Crucially, however, this metaphysics was not simply mistyeyed foolishness. Throughout Europe and the United States, the imagination was seen as a crucial faculty in the pursuit of scientifc knowledge that would not only explain the visible world but would, it was thought, reveal a deeper kind of anti-dualist truth. Practices like mesmerism claimed to magically and instantaneously reconcile body and soul, thus giving audiences what Catherine Albanese, a historian of religion, has called a sense of “comfort and spiritualized pleasure.”119 Charles Poyen, a mesmerist who enchanted audiences across the United States from 1836 through the 1840s supposedly used magnetic fuid, which he thought of as a kind of electricity, to heal the sick and comfort the downhearted. Poyen would perform his feats of healing on young female assistants to demonstrate their effcacy, and the magical re-embodiment of these somnolent girls paralleled the living presence response critics wrote about in response to fancy pictures.120 It is easy to dismiss the bodily wholeness and physical redemption promised by mesmerism as popular quackery, but similar expressions of hope can be found in many more “legitimate” scientists and medical practitioners; as with mesmerists and Unitarian preachers, the embodied imagination was a crucial ingredient in the marriages of body and soul that they promised to effect. Alexander von Humboldt, the great German naturalist, for instance, closed his “Ideas for a Physiognomy of Plants” by invoking “the power of our imagination [to] create a living picture of exotic Nature.” Other scientists specifed the imagination’s importance in the discovery of relative atomic mass, the voltaic battery, and ultraviolet light.121 Even Darwin, whose theory of evolution is now remembered as producing an irreparable cultural schism, took part in this optimism. The naturalist wrote in a short entry in his notebook in 1838—“Origin of man now proved. Metaphysics must fourish. He who understands baboon would do more toward metaphysics than Locke.”122 Such a statement seems faintly ridiculous in its naivete but it refects the magical and restorative powers that the imagination still held. Whether it operated in science or art, the imagination was important not because it was completely given to licentious, bodily pleasure, but, more subtly, because it promised to broker a compromise between pure reason and the material world that contained it. Meaningful struggle rather than the wholesale conversion preferred in older, Calvinist dogmas became signifcant, thus offering a fexible, yet moderate path towards transcendence. Durand, for example, who had been raised a Calvinist, gravitated toward the emerging “physical Arminianism” espoused by a group of reformers that included his close friend, Sylvester Graham. Graham, as James C. Whorton has written, evinced “a belief that bodily salvation might be open to all who struggled to win it, and that disease and early death were not an ineradicable part of the earthly passage.”123 This required a paradoxical willingness to grapple with the physical body, and with the forces that threatened to destroy it from within, something that Durand appears to have affrmed in his own theories of art. In his “Letters on Landscape Painting” published between January and July 1855 in The Crayon, for instance, Durand praised the “true purpose” of “real Artists” as being “invisible and immaterial,” but emphasized that this could only come through struggle: “the highest rank [is awarded] to the artist who has kept in due subordination the more sensuous qualities with which material beauty is invested.”124 Morse, on the other hand, a committed Calvinist whose father had led the Trinitarian opposition to Unitarianism in Boston, appeared less interested in suggestive temptations, as evidenced by his serene

102

Staying on the Surface

and unworldly Muse (see Figure 3.5) which inspired no critical aporias of corporeal ecstasy. Morse’s strict Calvinism would have repelled artists such as Huntington who in the late 1830s converted from the Congregationalism of his youth to Episcopalianism, however.125 Allston, too, although he attended Episcopalian and Congregationalist churches, vigorously rejected the rigidity of dogma, and the bitter, denominationalist infghting that it spawned. “I am neither an Episcopalian nor a Congregationalist, I endeavor to be a Christian,” he is said to have declared in response to being censured for leaving the Episcopal church to attend his second wife, Martha Dana’s Shepherd Congregational Church in Cambridge. His religion was “so full of love and reverence” that Jared Bradley Flagg insisted he was “universal, all-embracing, [c]atholic.”126 His catholicity echoed that of William Ellery Channing, one of the leaders of American Unitarianism who was at the vanguard of Protestant liberalization, and who was a lifelong friend of Allston’s and the brother of his late wife, Ann. Like Allston, Channing prized the independence of thought that liberal Protestantism encouraged. “[Unitarianism’s] friends think each for himself and differ much from each other.” Indeed, American Unitarianism, he claimed in 1834, was marked by “the entire absence of a sectarian spirit in their habits of feeling and thinking.”127 In fancy pieces of young, sexually available women, materiality was not completely purifed of its heterodoxy, but nor was it irredeemably defled by its imbrication with lust and sin. Rather, the generative and (pro)creative bodies of young women and, by extension, their artist-fathers served as a medium for redemption through the fesh itself, a transubstantiation in paint. These paintings of imagination enacted a fragile, anti-dualist materialism that hinted at redemptive wholeness. Beatifc and unperturbed in their sheltered microcosms, the popularity of these paintings and engravings lay partly in their assurance that the imagination could be cultured, tamed, and made to mediate between spirit and matter in a way that was fundamentally harmonious and pleasurable. This paradoxical emphasis on surface was hardly placid or derivative, however. Looping between surface and essence, sacred and profane, their beauty unfurled in an unending chain as mobile and unpredictable as fancy itself.

Notes 1 Melissa Percival, Fragonard and the Fantasy Figure: Painting the Imagination (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 2 Carol Eaton Soltis, “Sully’s Women: Real and Imagined,” in Thomas Sully: Painted Performance exh. cat., ed. William Keyse Rudolph and Soltis (New Haven, CT and London: Milwaukee Art Museum, in association with Yale University Press, 2013), 51, n23. 3 Martin Postle, Angels and Urchins: The Fancy Picture in Eighteenth-Century British Art. (Nottingham: Djanogly Art Gallery, 1998). 4. 4 On Gainsborough’s cottage door landscapes, see Ann Bermingham, ed. Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door” (New Haven, CT and London: Yale Center for British Art and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in association with Yale University Press, 2005). Bermingham discusses the dual meaning of sensibility in her essay “Introduction: Gainsborough’s Cottage Door, Sensation and Sensibility,” 8–9. 5 Postle, 8. 6 William Hazlitt, The Champion (July 31, 1814): n.p., quoted in Ellis K. Waterhouse, “Gainsborough’s ‘Fancy Pictures’,” The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 88,

Staying on the Surface

7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20

21 22

103

no. 519 (1946): 134. For an interpretation of Hazlitt’s response as a means of attaining social distinction, see John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: The Body of the Public (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 323. Hazlitt, “Gainsborough’s Pictures,” The Collected Works of William Hazlitt: Fugitive Writings 11, eds. A. R. Waller and Arnold Glover (London: J. M. Dent & Co.; New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904), 205, n1. William Thomas Whitley, Thomas Gainsborough (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1915), 261. Reynolds, quoted in Postle, Angels and Urchins, 6. Whitley, Gainsborough, 261. For Boudard, these wings signifed “la promptitude dont elle se forme idealement des objets, lesquels font indiques par differentes petites fgures qui ornent une couronne qu’elle a sur la tete” (“the quickness which [the imagination] ideally gives to objects, which are indicated by various small fgures which decorate a crown on her head.”) On the popularity of Richardson’s emblem book in the United States, see Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 102–104; and Christopher Harris, Public Lives, Private Virtues: Images of American Revolutionary War Heroes, 1782–1832 (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 35. Although Richardson’s title advertises the book’s connection to Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1593), the emblem for Imagination does not appear in Ripa. Its frst illustration seems to have been in Boudard. Richardson, Iconology: or A collection of emblematical fgures … [chiefy composed from the Iconology of Cesare Ripa …] / [collected and arranged] by George Richardson. (London: G. Scott, 1779), 57. Diana Strazdes, “Washington Allston’s ‘Beatrice’,” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 6 (1994): 63–75. On the caul, often incorrectly referred to with the better-known Victorian term “snood,” see “caul,” in Hats and Headwear Around the World: A Cultural Encyclopedia, repr. ed., ed. Beverly Chico (ABC-CLIO, 2013). “Allston the Painter,” American Monthly Magazine 7 (May 1836): 444. I omit here Allston’s The Virgin and Child, a painting that was more religious than imaginative. It met with mixed reviews, until the artist re-titled the work with the more-secular A Mother Watching Her Sleeping Child. I also do not consider Allston’s works with multiple fgures like Lorenzo and Jessica (1832). On that painting, see Gerdts and Stebbins, 141. On its reception, and the engravings that reproduced it in gift books, see Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 86–88. “imagination, n.”. OED Online. June 2019. Oxford University Press. https://www.oed .com/view/Entry/91643?redirectedFrom=imagination. Accessed August 20, 2019. Christina Oberstebrink, “Plagiarism and Originality in Painting: Joshua Reynolds’s Concept of Imitation and Enlightenment Translation Theory,” in Cultural Transfer through Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation, ed. Stefanie Stockhorst (London: Brill, 2010), 45–59. Jared Bradley Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1893), 363. Lillian B. Miller and Carol Eaton Hevner, In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778– 1860 exh. cat. (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, 1992), 237. A painting called The Day Dream by Rembrandt Peale, presumably the same one, was exhibited as no. 3 for the Artist’s Fund Society exhibition in 1838 in Philadelphia and in 1852 as no. 67, at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1852, it was listed as the property of John Towne, and was for sale. See The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts: 1807–1870, ed. Anna Wells Rutledge and Peter H. Falk, v. 1 (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1955, repr. 1988), 167. For references to what he called The Sleeping Girl, see Morse, Lectures on the Affnity of Painting with the Other Arts, ed. Nikolai Cikovsky, Jr. (Columbia, MO and London: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 92, 93, 95, 121. For documentation of Erinna, see John Mahey, “The Studio of Rembrandt Peale,” The American Art Journal 1(Fall 1969): 23, 24, 31. Sully Typescript, Folder 9, Thomas Sully Papers, Winterthur Library & Museum. “Copied, August–September 1921, from the original manuscript in the possession of Mrs. M.

104

23 24

25

26

27

28

29

30 31

32 33

Staying on the Surface H. Sully, 102 Cambridge Place, Brooklyn, New York City.” Hereafter cited as “Sully Typescript.” Soltis, “Sully’s Women: Real and Imagined,” 29. Clearly, the subject of A Love Letter is reading a message from a lover, but American artists also depicted women reading novels or poetry. Reading such works was thought to rely on the imagination, and was therefore thought perilous for young women who lacked the discipline to resist the fancy’s unwholesome infuence. On the morality of reading fction in early national America, see Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). Quoted in Carleton Mabee, An American Leonardo: A Life of Samuel F. B. Morse (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1943), 42. Morse may have known of Rembrandt’s Old Woman: The Artist’s Mother, versions of which belonged to the King and the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House. Morse’s painting The Goldfsh Bowl tends more towards portraiture than the fancy, but could also be considered as an extension of the transatlantic interest in fancy pieces given its visual resonances with well-known genre paintings like JeanBaptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles. For a brief overview and further references on Chardin’s painting, see Philip Conisbee, “Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Soap Bubbles, ca. 1735–40,” in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, eds. Colin B. Bailey, Philip Conisbee and Thomas W. Gaeghtgens (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2003), 184. Flagg’s efforts, including The Match Girl and Young Woodchopper, appeared to draw upon the infuence of Gainsborough and Reynolds most directly. I focus here, however, on works that consciously embody reverie, dreaming, or creativity, whether musical or artistic. Huntington continued to produce works in this vein throughout his career, including The Sketcher: A Portrait of Mlle. Rosina, a Jewess (1858), The Fair Student, or Girl Reading (1858), and Philosophy and Christian Art (1868), although I will not be discussing these later works in detail. For a discussion of the print distribution of Roman Girl and Florentine Girl in The Gift, see Stephanie Gray Mayer Heydt, The Art of “The Gift”: Edward L. Carey, William Sidney Mount, Daniel Huntington, and the Antebellum Gift Book (Ph.D. diss.: Boston University, 2008), 211–221. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists, 1867, 627. For a summary of the disdain directed at Ingham, particularly a long, derisive poem that was probably by the “mad” poet MacDonald Clarke, see Albert Ten Eyck Gardner, “Ingham in Manhattan,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 10 (May 1952): 245–251. The reviewer for the New-York Mirror praised Ingham’s The Flower Girl and White Plume even though the latter was reportedly a portrait of “the celebrated beauty Jane Lawrence.” “The Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” The New-York Mirror, May 7, 1831, 350. For the portrait identifcation, see Sturges S. Dunham, “Bond Street,” Valentine’s Manual of the City of New York, ed. Henry Collins Brown (New York: The Old Colony Press, 1917), 268. Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popular Print Media in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 93. On the three known copies by Huntington, see “Mary Inman,” in Kathleen Luhrs and Natalie Spassky, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Museum in association with Princeton University Press, 1985), 58–60. Information about additional copies was taken from “Studio of Daniel Huntington, American, 1816–1906, MARY INMAN AS FLORA MACDONALD, 1830,” American Furniture and Decorations, Sale 0011291, lot 17, November 29, 2000. http://doyle.com/auctions /0011291-american-furniture-and-decorations/catalogue/17-studio-of-daniel-huntington. Accessed July 26, 2019. Cheney’s engraving also refers to the fgure as “Donna Isabella.” S. R. Koehler, Catalogue of the Engraved and Lithographed Work of John Cheney and Seth Wells Cheney (Boston, MA: Lee and Shepard, 1891), 70–71. It is unclear which historical Beatrice Cheney wished to invoke. For an excellent discussion of which Beatrice might

Staying on the Surface

34 35

36

37

38

39

40 41

42 43

44 45 46

105

have been intended, as well as a fuller discussion of Huntington’s idealized women, see Heydt, The Art of The Gift: Edward L. Carey, William Sidney Mount, Daniel Huntington, and the Antebellum Gift Book, 218–225. “National Academy of Design,” New-York Mirror 8, no. 44May 7, 1831: 350. Far from an American perversion, this practice conformed to the earliest history of the genre. The eighteenth-century French emigrant painter Philip Mercier’s fancy pieces were engraved by John Faber, Jr. and sold by subscription. See Postle, Angels and Urchins, 6. On the ramifcations of art’s autonomy, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 10. On anti-capitalism as a defning feature of Romanticism, see Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). For the evidence that the sitter of The Student was Rosalie Kemble Sully, see Nathan Appleton’s misleadingly named Russian Life and Society: As Seen in 1866–67 by Appleton and Longfellow (Boston, MA: [Press of Murray and Emery Co.], 1904), 125–129. Brief notations in the journals of Charlotte Cushman, the famed American actress, document a love affair with Rosalie (“Rose”) Sully. For more on their relationship, see Lisa Merrill, When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 69–74. The Folger Shakespeare Library has a gold-rimmed miniature of Cushman by Rosalie Kemble Sully. The verso contains a bouquet rendered in hair work and seed pearls which may have served as a physical memento of their connection. Fancy pieces in the late eighteenth century also provided numerous examples of this practice, including works by Gainsborough depicting his daughters and Reynolds depicting his favorite niece Theophila Palmer in A Girl Reading. Rembrandt, in turn, depicted his mother in Old Woman: The Artist’s Mother, versions of which belonged to the King and the Earl of Pembroke. See Postle, Angels and Urchins, 13. There was a precedent for this kind of eroticized aporia in French eighteenth-century paintings of sensuous women, as discussed by Mary D. Sherriff, Moved by Love: Inspired Artists and Deviant Women in Eighteenth-Century France (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004). I agree with Sherriff’s interpretation that this eroticization did nothing to promote the art or even potential creativity of actual women, but rather served as an “inscriptional space necessary for the reproductive process,” one which nevertheless “contributes nothing, not even matter, to the representation.” See pp. 38–41. Appleton, Russian Life and Society, 126. These words are attributed to Tom Kemper Davis, a Boston lawyer, who visited the painting in the Appleton home on the occasion of a visit to the city by Thomas Sully. Upon seeing it, Davis reported that Sully exclaimed, “Raphael and Titian combined!” J. Huntington, M.D., “The Allston Exhibition: A Letter to an American Artist, Traveling Abroad,” The Knickerbocker 14, no. 2 (August 1839): 171. E. Anna Lewis, “Art and Artists of America,” Graham’s Illustrated Magazine of Literature, Art, Romance, and Fashion 47, no. 1 (July 1855): 57. Drawing on critical comments such as these, Bryan Jay Wolf has asserted that Allston’s maidens are brimming with sexual energy, simultaneously idealizing and offering them up as sacrifces on the altar of sexual initiation. Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision, 73. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, 396. For just such an analysis, see Jonathan G. Koefoed, Cautious Romantics: Trinitarian Transcendentalists and the Emergence of a Conservative Religious Tradition in America (Ph.d. Diss.: Boston University, 2004), 68–82. Coleridge’s quote occurs on p. 75, and is taken from Coleridge, Biographia Literaria in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 7, no. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 304. On the gendered nature of pleasure and the contradictory associations between creativity and sex, see Sheriff, Moved by Love, 15–41. I stress that this is not a commentary on whether and to what degree these writers and philosophers were known in the United States. Bailey Van Hook, Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876–1914 (State College, PA: Penn State Press, 2004), 2–3 and 221, n 6. William Gerdts and Theodore E.

106

47

48 49 50 51

52

53

54

Staying on the Surface Stebbins, Jr., A Man of Genius: The Art of Washington Allston exh. cat. (Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), 60. Gerdts did, however, discuss the fancy piece genre in relation to Henry Inman’s paintings of children in “Henry Inman: Genre Painter,” American Art Journal 9, no. 1 (1977): 32. Carol Troyen has also discussed the genre more broadly in her article, “Thomas Sully’s ‘The Torn Hat,’” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 4 (1992): 4–16. There is a good deal more scholarship on images of sentimentalized women in antebellum print culture than there are of the same subject in American painting. Richard Bushman and Katherine Martinez have read these prints as an extension of eighteenth-century refnement and Victorian culture, respectively, affrming their civilizing pietism. Bushman, The Refnement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Vintage Books), 283–286; Martinez, “‘Messengers of Love, Tokens of Friendship’: Gift Book Illustrations by John Sartain,” in The Illustrated Book in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Gerald Ward (Winterthur, DE: Winterthur Museum, 1987), 89–112. Isabelle Lehuu, on the other hand, has also read these works against the grain in Carnival on the Page. In addition, Stephanie Heydt’s discussion in her dissertation The Art of The Gift gives the most thorough and contextual exploration of the full range of images that were published in gift books. In addition to Peale’s work, Miller also named Flagg’s Portrait of a Lady Sleeping; Allston’s The Evening Hymn and Rosalie; Bingham’s The Dull Story, and Mount’s Girl Asleep. Miller and Eaton Hevner, In Pursuit of Fame, 237. “Mary Inman,” American Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 59, 144. To be fair, the darkness of Spanish Girl in Reverie was probably also a function of the painting’s condition. David M. Robb, Jr. Thomas Sully: The Business of Painting (M.A. Thesis: Yale University, 1967), quoted in Cynthia Lee Patterson, Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2011), 32. United States Centennial Commission, International Exhibition, 1876, Offcial Catalogue: Art Gallery, Annexes, and Outdoor Works of Art. (Philadelphia, PA: John R. Nagle and Company, 10th rev. ed., 1876), 20. For the review of Il Pappagallo, see “Editor’s Table,” The Knickerbocker, or New York Monthly Magazine 19, no. 6 (June 1842): 589. Tijana Žakula, “The Indecorous Appeal of Beggar Boys: Murillo, de Lairessse, and Gainsborough,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art 35 no. 3/4 (2011): 171. Žakula has argued that Gainsborough’s urchins were more “decorous” and “crisp” than Murillo’s comparatively louche models. As documented by Xavier Bray, this arrangement seems to have been based on the way the paintings were originally hung in the house of Sir Francis Bourgeois, a picture dealer who inherited them from his fellow dealer Noel Joseph Desenfans, between 1807 and 1813. Xavier Bray, Murillo: At Dulwich Picture Gallery (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2013), 16–18. Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress, (New York: George P. Scott and Co. Printers, 1834), 44. In emphasizing the importance of Murillo, Dunlap was not only reporting factual information, but following historiographical precedent. Matthew Pilkington claimed, probably erroneously, that West himself had actually purchased the Murillo, a detail that demonstrates how important West’s connection to the Spanish painter was to his biography by the 1820s. Pilkington, A General Dictionary of Painters, Containing Memoirs of The Lives and Works of the Most Eminent Professors of the Art of Painting […] vol. II. (London: Thomas McLean, 1824), 492. Indeed, by the time of Charles Edward Lester’s re-telling in 1845, the Murillo “had a great deal to do with West’s advancement.” Lester, “Letter XII,” The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman: Of the Age of the Medici, and of Our Own Times, vol. 2 (New York: Paine & Burgess, 1845), 224. For the Rev. Smith portrait, see John Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609– 1884, vol. 2 (Philadelphia, PA: L. H. Everts & Company, 1884), 1031. Isabelle Lehuu has also noted that engravings in American gift books, such as The Christian Mother, which appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1850 was modeled after Murillo’s Madonna and Child. See Lehuu, 177, n. 34. On the importance of Murillo to Gainsborough’s fancy pieces, see David Brenneman, A Critical Response to Thomas Gainsborough’s Painting: A

Staying on the Surface

55 56

57

58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70

107

Study of the Contemporary Perception and Materiality of Gainsborough’s Art (Ph.D. diss.: Brown University, 1995), 85–109. Sully typescript, Winterthur Museum & Library. Rudolph and Soltis, Thomas Sully: Painted Performances, 32–35 and 52, n 40. Soltis noted that the text below the print emphasized the very qualities of moral goodness and eroticism that particularly animated American interest in the fancy: the gypsy, the text declared, was an “idle wench” and an outsider who “wanders the world,” who was nevertheless redeemed by “a good constitution.” Sir Thomas Lawrence was also a painter of gypsy girls which Sully admired. His Gipsy Girl of 1794, for example, was submitted to the Royal Academy as his diploma work. See Mahey, “The Studio of Rembrandt Peale,” 31. Peale also made a large, neoclassical painting called The Roman Daughter (1811) to exhibit in his Apollodorian Gallery showing Pero (the eponymous Roman daughter) breastfeeding her imprisoned, starving father Cimon which may have been modeled after a Roman Charity by Murillo owned by the Philadelphia collector Richard W. Meade. On this painting and a spate of related female mythological nudes displayed in Philadelphia around the same time, see William T. Oedel, “After Paris: Rembrandt Peale’s Apollodorian Gallery,” Winterthur Portfolio 27, no. 1 (1992): 18–27. David Bjelajac has written about metaphors of Calvinist theology in this painting in “Honey from the Louvre: Gleaning God’s Word from the Old Masters,” in Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre, 150. A LANDSCAPE PAINTER. “World of Science and Art,” The New World; a Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News (1840–1845), 8, no. 6 (February 10, 1844): 18. Dearinger, Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design, 294. For an account of the technologically advanced, “handsome weapons of death” in the American War Department pavilion juxtaposed with “savage weapons” taken from Indian Country, see Katherine Bjork, Prairie Imperialists: The Indian Country Origins of American Empire. (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 30–31. Durand’s ideal fgure would have served as further confrmation of the white, United States American victory over what was called an Indian “savage state.” For a more general account of American nationalism at the Centennial, see Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876–1916 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Postle, Angels and Urchins, 6. Quoted in John Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, 143 “The Match Girl—London, 1834,” quoted in Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery, Ella Foshay, ed. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990), 29. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, 140. Henry Greenough, “Washington Allston as a Painter: Unpublished Reminiscences of Henry Greenough,” Scribner’s Magazine 11 (January–June 1892): 223. For a summary of this approach in literary studies, see Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (2009): 1–21. On the related issue of “reparative reading” versus “paranoid reading” see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, ed. Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 123–151. Wendy Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” Winterthur Portfolio 31 (Summer/ Autumn 1996): 109. H. T. Tuckerman, “A Day Among Artists,” Sargent’s New Monthly Magazine of Literature, Fashion and the Fine Arts 1 (May 1843): 215. Daniel Huntington, “Lectures on Christian Art, read at the National Academy of Design [NAD], Written by request of the Committee on Lectures, 1851, Dan. Huntington, 48 E. 20th,” Archives of American Art, Charles E. Feinberg Autograph Collection and Artist’s Letters, reel D-316, quoted in Heydt, “The Gift,” 203.

108

Staying on the Surface

71 New York Evening Post, May 23, 1834, 2, quoted in Timothy Anglin Burgard, “George Whiting Flagg, Portrait of a Lady Sleeping, Plate 23,” “The Luman Reed Collection: Catalogue,” in Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery ed. Ella Foshay (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in association with the New-York Historical Society, 1990), 154. 72 Huntington, Asher B. Durand: A Memorial Address (New York: The Century Association, 1887), 24. Admittedly, the living presence response of sensual portraits of idealized women was a common trope of the period. A short story called “The Veiled Picture” published in 1833 had a painted version of Heloise rising from a couch, as “[b]eauty seemed to breathe in the swelling outline of her form, and passion appeared to dwell in the melting fondness of her looks.” It is hard to say whether the literature infuenced the criticism, or vice versa. “The Veiled Picture,” Literary Gems 1, no. 16 (May 1833): 61. 73 Interestingly, the etymology of fancy derives from the Greek phantasia, to make visible, a word root from which phainen, to bring light or shine, also comes. fancy n. and adj. Oxford English Dictionary. 74 “Fine Arts: Mr. Huntington’s ‘Christian Art’” Literary World 8 (March 8, 1851): 196. 75 Sully typescript, Winterthur Museum & Library. 76 On the sister arts as a specifcally Romantic theory in British art, one that did not die out with neoclassicism, see Thora Brylowe, Romantic Art in Practice : Cultural Work and the Sister Arts, 1760–1820, Cambridge Studies in Romanticism (New York: Cambridge University Press.) 77 On this paradox in Grand Manner painting, see Leo Costello, “Ch. 2: Turner and the Varnishing Days,” in J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 2017). 78 On the gendered dimensions of the debate regarding disegno and colore during the Renaissance, see Patricia Reilly, “The Taming of the Blue: Writing Out Color in Italian Renaissance Theory,” in The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, eds. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 88. 79 Cennino Cennini alluded to this in The Craftsman’s Handbook (1437). On this context, see Pamela H. Smith’s discussion of artisanry and alchemy in The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientifc Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 140–142. 80 On this paradox in Grand Manner painting, see Leo Costello, “Ch. 2: Turner and the Varnishing Days,” J. M. W. Turner and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 2017). 81 James Forrester, A Tour Made in Italy in the Year 1769 (London: No publisher listed, 1787), 72. My knowledge of Forrester’s discussion of mummy brown comes from Mayer and Myers, see below. For a discussion of mummy brown as a part of an “imperial palette,” see Natasha Eaton, Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 30–34. 82 Laughton Osborn and P. L. Bouvier, Handbook of Young Artists and Amateurs in Oil Painting, Being Chiefy a Condensed Compilation from the Celebrated Manual of Bouvier (New York: J. Wiley & Son, 1865), 57. 83 This paragraph relies on Lance Mayer’s and Gay Myers’ indispensable American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011). The advice about West’s use of mummy brown was also reprinted in A Compendium of Colours, And Other Materials Used in The Arts (London: C. Taylor, 1808), 221 quoted in Mayer and Myers, American Painters on Technique, 15. Lending credence to the (sometimes unwise) obsession with painting fesh like the Old Masters, the authors also discuss West’s involvement in the 1797 “Venetian secret affair,” in which the artist paid £600 for a secret technique supposedly perfected by Titian himself which discredited him in the eyes of his peers. See Mayer and Myers, American Painters on Technique, 15–20. 84 William Dunlap, Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839): The Memoirs of a Dramatist, Theatrical Manager, Painter, Critic, Novelist, and Historian vol. 3. (New York: Printed for the New York Historical Society, 1930): 696. 85 Mayer and Myers, American Painters on Technique, 67. 86 Pierre François Tingry, A Painter and a Varnisher’s Guide, Or, a Treatise, Both in Theory and in Practice (London: G. Kearsley, 1804), 20. 87 Sully typescript, Winterthur Museum & Library.

Staying on the Surface

109

88 David Bjelajac has explored the typological and redemptive dimensions of substances like honey, with a focus on Biblical, Masonic, and literary texts. See Bjelajac, “Honey from the Louvre.” 89 Quoted in Georges Didi Hubermann, Fra Angelico: Dissemblance and Figuration (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 46. 90 Benjamin Keach, Tropologia, Or, A Key to Open Scripture Metaphors (London: William Hill Collingridge, 1856), 905, 907, 915. 91 Romans 8:4, King James Version. 92 Kyla Wazana Tompkins has also used this phrase to describe the unruliness of the black body in nineteenth-century American culture. See Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 8. 93 See David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London: Reaktion Books, 2000). 94 Daniel Huntington, Catalogue of Paintings by Daniel Huntington, N.A., Exhibiting at the Art Union Buildings (New York: Snowden, [1849]), 22. 95 In 1846, an American travel writer, noting its importance in the novels of Edward Bulwer Lytton, called Domenichino’s painting of the Cumaean Sibyl “so familiar through copies dispersed every where” William Ingraham Kip, The Christmas Holydays in Rome (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1846), 230. Maurie D. McInnis has identifed at least 17 contemporary copies of the work. See McInnis, In Pursuit of Refnement, 150. 96 For more on Allston and his diffculties with Belshazzar’s Feast see Nathalia Wright, The Correspondence of Washington Allston (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1993) 102–107; William H. Gerdts, “Allston’s Belshazzar’s Feast,” Art in America 61 (March 1973): 59–66; Gerdts, “Belshazzar’s Feast II: ‘That Is His Shroud’,” Art in America 61 (May–June 1973): 58–65; Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 75–78, 97–98; and David Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 101–104. 97 Theresa Goddu, “(Un)Veilng the Marketplace,” in Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). A more recent interpretation of Allston and the gothic can be found in Kerry Dean Corso, “‘Banditti Mania’: The Gothic Haunting of Washington Allston,” in American Gothic Art and Architecture in the Age of Romantic Literature (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2014). 98 Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 80–81. 99 Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, 194. This discussion of veils and shrouds raises obvious parallels with Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1822. Peale’s painting also plays with absence and presence, as well as abjection and sublimity. The painting has been well-discussed by other scholars, however, and it is beyond this chapter’s scope, so I exclude it here. For more, see Bellion, Citizen Spectator, 319–324; Nemerov, The Body of Raphaelle Peale, 74–80, 189–201. 100 David Bjelajac, “The Boston Elite’s Resistance to Washington Allston’s Elijah in the Desert,” in American Iconology: New Approaches to Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 48–49; and Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 120. 101 Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, 3rd ed.), 38. 102 Moses Foster Sweetser, Allston (Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood, and Company, 1878), 172–173 103 The phrase “net of rationality” is from William M. Ivins, Jr. Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 69–70. On Durand’s print, see Patricia Junker, “Ariadne, 1835,” in An American Collection: Works from the Amon Carter Museum, Patricia Junker, ed. (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with the Amon Carter Museum, 2001), 36; and William F. Gerdts, The Great American Nude: A History in Art (New York: Praeger, 1974), 57,61; and Catherine Holochwost, “The Paradoxical Pleasures of Asher B. Durand’s Ariadne,” American Art 27 (Fall 2013): 84–105. 104 Or, to put my argument in terms borrowed from Norman Bryson by W. J. T. Mitchell in his essay “Looking at Animals Looking,” the embodied imagination (an embodied mode of

110

105 106

107 108 109

110 111

112 113

114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

Staying on the Surface image-making) is not an “innocent or Plinian vision.” Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 335. Bryson’s terms can be found in Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 34. Pascale Dubus, “Screen, Support, and Trompe-L’œil: Parrhasius’ Painted Fabric.” trans. Lindsay Holowach. Octopus 4 (2008): 71. See, for instance, Susanna Rowson’s play Slaves in Algiers (1794) or Edward Daniel Clarke’s Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia, and Africa, frst published in 1810 and republished in many editions in both America and England. Although I have not included sculpture in this chapter, a similar brew of voyeurism, orientalism, and imagination was exploited by the sculptor Hiram Powers in his Greek Slave (modeled 1841–43, carved 1846). See Joy Kasson, “Narratives of the Female Body: The Greek Slave,” in Reading American Art, eds. Elizabeth Milroy and Marianne Doezema (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1998), 163–189. Burns, Painting the Dark Side, 91. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, 86. Henry Merritt, Dirt and Pictures Separated, In the Works of the Old Masters (London: Holyoake and Co., 1854), 71. Allston, Lectures on Art, 22. I should also note the importance of George Field’s color theories to Allston. Field viewed color through the lens of religion and philosophy, with the three primary colors standing in for the Trinity. On Field, see David Brett, “The Aesthetical Science: George Field and the ‘Science of Beauty’,” Art History 9 (September 1986): 336–350 and Bjelajac, “The Boston Elite’s Resistance,” 49–51. On Allston’s practice regarding color in his painting, see Elizabeth Johns, “Washington Allston’s Theory of the Imagination,” 108–118. “Exhibition of Pictures at the Athenaeum Gallery,” The North American Review 33 (October 1831): 507. This depiction was also based on a scene from the fourth act of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s play “Remorse,” originally called “Osorio.” In Coleridge’s version, a Spanish girl named Alhadra waits on the return of her lover, Isidore, from war, soliloquizing on the Sierra Morena landscape (a moonlit version, in the play) that surrounds her. Wright, The Correspondence of Washington Allston, 241. Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, 194; J.S. Templeton, The Guide to Oil Painting (London: Rowney, Dillon, and Rowney, 3rd ed., 1845), 42. [Elizabeth Palmer Peabody], Remarks on Allston’s Paintings (Boston, MA: William D. Ticknor, 1839), 16. Peabody’s trenchant criticism was originally written as a series of dispatches for the Salem Gazette and was later published as an anonymous pamphlet as an aide to the extensive 1839 Allston retrospective at Chester Harding’s galleries on School Street in Boston. For more on the Allston exhibition and its reception, see Elizabeth Garrity Ellis, “The ‘Intellectual and Moral Made Visible’: The 1839 Washington Allston Exhibition and Unitarian Taste in Boston,” Prospects 10 (1985): 39–75; and Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (Boston, MA: Houghton Miffin, 2005), 382. William Ware, Lectures on the Works and Genius of Washington Allston (Boston, MA: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1852), 78–79. Quoted in Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, 194. Eboni Marshall Turman, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 89. Lehuu, Carnival on the Page, 85. Daniel Huntington, A General View of the Fine Arts, Critical and Historical (New York: Putnam, 5th ed., 1858), 25. Catherine Albanese, A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 197, 4, 7. Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). See Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 4, 5, 9.

Staying on the Surface

111

122 Charles Darwin, Notebook M, “Appendix C: From Darwin’s Notebooks”, in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, ed. Joseph Carroll (Toronto: Broadview Texts, 2003), 467. 123 James C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 15. 124 Durand, “Letter IV,” reprinted in Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, ed. Linda S. Ferber (New York and London: Brooklyn Museum in association with D Giles Limited, 2007), 238. 125 Greenhouse, “Daniel Huntington and the Ideal of Christian Art,” 106–107. 126 Flagg, The Life and Letters of Washington Allston, 245–246. 127 Quoted in John White Chadwick, William Ellery Channing: Minister of Religion (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Miffin and Company, 1903), 343.

4

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

Henry Sargent’s painting The Dinner Party (Plate 2)—which, as discussed in Chapter 2 was painted to capitalize on the overwhelming popularity of Francois-Marius Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome—is full of inviting objects: desserts in futed molds, glasses and bottles of wine, and small dishes of what are likely exotic dried fruits and nuts. The room includes other materials that invite imaginative and embodied projection into the picture, including rich, velvet curtains, gleaming candlesticks, and crystal decanters that would rest cool and heavy in one’s grasp, and a fre that crackles away before elegant brass andirons on the painting’s left edge. The way these lushly rendered and fnely wrought objects melt under the viewer’s gaze begs for them to be imaginatively consumed by the viewer just as they would literally be consumed by the dinner guest. Charles Bird King’s painting The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream (Plate 11), painted six years after The Dinner Party, is similar to the latter painting in many ways. It, too, adopts the architectural frame-within-a-frame format that helped to construct the illusion of an independent, immersive world, albeit on a smaller scale. It, too, is about the pleasures of the imagination, a point made rather literally by the book splayed open in the bottom right corner to show a title page that reads Pleasures of the Imagination. Rather than offering up these pleasures, however, King painted their notable absence. The painting is a stunningly detailed depiction of an artist’s cabinet, but it contains little more to consume than a hunk of stale bread and a glass of water. Instead of emphasizing ease and abundance, Vanity of the Artist’s Dream highlighted their utter lack. In its most ideal forms, the imagination managed to create a virtual realm in which the material and the mental were woven together, but King’s dark Dream raises the question of its inevitable destruction. In this chapter, then, I consider what a shift from the ideal imagination to its dysregulated cognate might tell us about the troubled intersection of pleasure, desire, and judgment. Sargent’s pendant pieces and King’s work in particular are interesting in this regard because they connect with two discourses of incorporation that were particularly relevant to the imagination’s combinatory powers, namely, eating food and drinking alcohol. In their discussions of the imagination, associationist philosophers like Richard Payne Knight and Thomas Brown emphasized processes that paralleled digestion and inebriation through what Brown called a “spontaneous chemistry of mind” composed of “sensations, thoughts, emotions, all mingling together, and almost every feeling modifying … the feelings that succeed it.”1 This unsteady and non-rational “mingling” lent itself quite naturally to comparisons with drunkenness and Knight posited that associationism was similar to drinking to excess. Intoxication, he theorized, was a “temporary lunacy,” originating “from a similar derangement in the trains of ideas.”2

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

113

Given the tireless automaticity of these processes, and their potential for derailment, how could one stay in command over body and mind? How could one consume the pleasures of the imagination, as pictured in Sargent’s and King’s paintings, and still remain in control? The question was particularly urgent because the will or moral judgment that was supposed to discipline and regulate them was understood to be fatally weakened. By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the idea that judgment was solid and dependable and imagination was more limited in its powers had begun to invert itself. Alexander Gerard thus wrote in his Essay on Taste (1774), “In a man of genius, imagination can scarce take a single step, but judgment should attend it. The most luxuriant fancy stands most in need of being checked by judgment.”3 Buried within this confdent expression of judgment’s powers is the assumption that imagination was necessarily exuberant, fertile, and volatile. Although it might seem that Gerard’s appeal for judgment simply served to discipline an already chastened imagination, in fact, it had the opposite effect. As James Engell has put this conundrum, “By describing imagination as vigorous and untamable, and by bringing ‘passion’ and ‘judgment’ within the scope of imagination, especially as it works in the fne arts, Gerard gives a more organic, responsive, and immediate picture of the mind.”4 Deep within the body produced by aesthetic discourses of the period, then, there was a restless and powerful faculty that could overpower one’s sense of reason, and, more menacing yet, result not in defeat, but in nothingness. Even in 1712, one of the most energetic boosters of imagination and its pleasures, Joseph Addison, had spoken of an “abyss” that imagination was incapable of fording. “The understanding, indeed, opens an infnite space on every side of us, but the imagination, after a few faint efforts, is immediately at a stand, and fnds herself swallowed up in the immensity of the void that surrounds it.”5 This immensity was overwhelming, even destructive, a drawback of the imagination’s close connections with the Sublime. That this caused a sense of abjection within was affrmed by the German Idealist philosopher F. W. J. Schelling, who wrote in 1809 of logic as a process of ingestion that also ate up being, summoning images of primitivist anthropophagy.6 What happened when imagination was forced to confront itself and the darkness within?7 I argue in this chapter that the dark wretchedness at the heart of the dysregulated imagination was redeemed and regulated by being projected onto raced bodies that were perceived as less rational, more emotional, and less in control of their imaginative faculties. The intersections among race, imagination, and abjection form a symbolic economy, a calculus of arcs and subtended angles rather than a strictly Euclidean geometry. In other words, I do not mean to suggest that Henry Sargent sat down and consciously thought about the black servant he painted in the corner of The Dinner Party merely, no doubt, to set the scene of his elite soirees. As I make clear in my discussion of Sargent and King, however, white supremacist racial hierarchies were the easiest ones which lay to hand, and hints of their infuence permeate these pictures and the discourses of cultural authority that clung to them.

Wine-Bibbing and Authority The 17 men sitting around the table in Sargent’s Dinner Party seem the very epitome of persons who would be able to discipline their imaginations. All but one were members of the Wednesday Evening Club, a social fraternity that “had one singular merit— it had no serious purpose.”8 No purpose except, of course, to demonstrate a social exclusivity that was unobtainable for all but the wealthiest individuals. Sargent himself

114

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

was a member of the club, which was founded in 1777 and originally allowed only nine men to join. By the time Sargent was inducted, their ranks had swelled to 16 of Boston’s wealthiest and most infuential citizens. By the club’s centenary in 1877, they could count “one President of the United States; two Ambassadors Plenipotentiary from the United States to the Court of St. James,” two senators, and many eminent physicians and clergy among their rolls. To the astute viewer, these transatlantic webs of power would have manifested in architectural terms as well as social ones. The room in The Dinner Party is marked by elegant, Palladian proportions, and fashionably Adamesque moldings adorn its interior. The setting is thought to have been based on Sargent’s own home at number 10 Franklin Place in the Tontine Crescent, an urban complex of rowhouses in Boston remembered as “the centre of fashion.”9 It was certainly hard to miss. Built by the architect Charles Bulfnch who modeled it on John Wood the Younger’s Royal Crescent in the stylish resort town of Bath, its 16 townhouses formed a 400 foot-long crescent surrounded by grass and trees, its monumentality and pure, gray exterior a striking contrast with a city that was still full of wooden structures on streets laid out in the haphazard manner typical of mercantile cities.10 The contrast between the starchy irreproachability of the assembled gentlemen’s wealth and taste makes the activity they are engaged in—drinking—all the more interesting. Early national Americans followed the English custom of serving imported wines after the main meal of dinner, which was then served in the early afternoon.11 On the right-hand side, there is a Sheraton-style sideboard the size of a small tank which would have held wines imported from places like France, Portugal, or islands like the Azores or Madeira would emerge. Henry Cabot Lodge recalled a typical meeting of the Club at a slightly later period, but still with “various old Madeiras which had come to me from my great-grandfather and grandfather, who had possessed a very fne assortment of vintages of that wine, so much prized at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”12 In The Dinner Party, there is also an octagonal cellaret in the left foreground made from mahogany and lined with lead which would have been chilled, disgorging cool drinks through the afternoon and into the evening.13 The expense of these items affrms the fact that, for wealthy men in early nineteenth-century America, wine was serious business. As with the imagination, gentlemen of this sort had rejected the thought that drinking imported wines might lead to dissipation. Just as they manfully restrained their imaginations from indulging in excess, gentleman drinkers were supposed to be of the “better sort” who never got drunk, although the evidence and the essentials of human physiology belie these claims. James Logan, who served as the colonial secretary for William Penn in Philadelphia, thus descried the Native Americans for drinking rum which caused “mischief.” In contrast, he claimed All of us here … can every Day have as much Rum of their own to drink as they please, and yet scarce one of us will take a Dram, at least not one Man will on any Account be drunk, no not if he were hired to it with great Sums of Money. As they often did, Logan and his peers closed the council meeting with a drink, seeing no contradiction between their own “genteel” consumption of alcohol as a means to lubricate the necessities of business and their complaints about the inebriation of indigenous leaders who also oversaw matters related to trade and governmental policy.14

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

115

Like the exercise of one’s imagination, drinking imported wines was allegedly an act of aesthetic discernment that depended on an exquisite sensibility. David Hume had used the relative ability of certain individuals to discern subtle notes of leather and iron in wine as an example of the “delicacy of imagination” that was required to “feel … the proper sentiment of beauty.”15 Coming into the second quarter of the nineteenth century, American gentlemen like those in The Dinner Party approached “wine-bibbing” with the seriousness of a true connoisseur. Gentlemen from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century prided themselves on being able to distinguish, say, Madeira from Tokay, a strong and sweet Hungarian wine.16 Consuming these drinks also required specialized equipage, such as cut-glass decanters, silver salvers, mahogany sideboards and wine coolers, and, of course, servants who were trained in the rituals associated with these elite objects. The expense, craftsmanship, and fne materials used in these appurtenances refected the fact that, more than just offering guests a glass of Madeira here or there, being a good host meant maintaining a well-stocked cellar. Finally, one needed to perform this knowledge as well, using a fnely honed suavity, wit, and an extensive store of references that ranged from contemporary politics to Augustan poets to the history of the Roman republic.17 As with all aesthetic activities that placed the unpredictable imagination at their center, however, the elevation of one’s sensibility was simultaneously endangered by the very activity that helped to constitute it. Choosing a fne Claret could prove that you were a man of taste, but drinking too much of it could put you under the table.

Luxury’s Other The inherent unsteadiness of tippling as evidence of a superior constitution was unsustainable and required a steadying foundation to naturalize its contradictions. We can recognize this grounding infuence in the black butler standing at attention in the left corner of the room in Sargent’s Dinner Party (see Figure 4.1). On some very basic level, his presence in the corner adds interest to a composition so tightly clustered in the center that it runs the risk of turning monotonous. But his body adds difference in other ways, too, in ways that seem designed to confrm the authority of the Wednesday Evening Club members and their inborn ability to use their judgment to discipline an imagination thought to contain an abyss within. The frst of these details is the degree to which the black butler’s features are dictated by racial caricature. His forehead is uncommonly broad, highlighted by a receding hairline and facial features that are fattened and squeezed, rendered almost cartoonish in comparison with the men sitting opposite him. Seen at a glance, one might suppose that Sargent had little instruction in classical anatomy, but the aquiline noses and strong jawlines of the white dinner guests contradict this supposition. This man’s difference is marked most notably by his position within the composition and his physiognomy but it is signaled in other ways as well. Rather than an elegant black suit, he wears blue trousers and a buff-colored waistcoat. His very body language also betrays Sargent’s assumption that there is something superior in the aesthetic capabilities of his own circle. While the white members of the Wednesday Evening Club are arrayed around the table in poses ranging from passionate interest to thoughtful contemplation, this fgure appears to have no inner mental world. His lack of contemplation is not simply a function of his subordinate social position since

116

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

Figure 4.1 Detail, Henry Sargent, The Dinner Party, ca. 1821.

another servant entering from the door on the right side of the room, a young, white man, seems captivated by the scene before him, and wears an expression of innocent awe on his sunlit face. This pattern of black, mute labor and white elegance repeats itself in Sargent’s The Tea Party, a pendant piece to The Dinner Party. More complex compositionally than The Dinner Party, the Tea Party depicts some three dozen guests turned out in glittering array. The men are uniformly slender, their silk-clad calves catching the light that spills out from the dining room into an adjoining parlor. The women’s bodies are similarly swathed in rich fabrics that transform them into spectacles of color and texture. Their ease is highlighted not only by the glow of a winter’s fre, but by the presence of another black male servant, apparently the same one, lingering in an adjoining room with a silver tea service in hand (see Figure 4.2). The white guests’ aesthetic superiority seems to confrm the racial logic of an 1824 essayist who wondered that tea, another marker of aesthetic refnement, was taken from “enlightened, improving Europe, from the sleepy unintellectual Chinese.”18 In both Sargent’s paintings and in the aesthetic philosophy that shaped them is a tautological merry-go-round. The Sublime and abject void generated by the imagination could never be associated with white elites because there was a less civilized, less white group that they alleged was even less able to discipline its inherently disruptive tendencies. African American butlers like the one in The Dinner Party and The Tea Party cannot speak to tell their side of the story but sources indicate that they well understood

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

117

Figure 4.2 Detail, Henry Sargent, The Tea Party, ca. 1824.

the function they played in reinforcing the ostensible superiority of elite white men and women. Robert Roberts, an African American man who served as butler in the mid-1820s to Christopher Gore at his palatial Federalist mansion in nearby Waltham, instructed his fellow bondsmen not to let any kindness on the part of their employers “excite your self-conceit, so as to make you for a moment forget you are [a servant.]” As valuable as his advice on cleaning boots or polishing plate, the need to appear respectable and subservient was the essential message of Roberts’ detailed household manual.19 At the same time, however, we should not fall into the same tautological trap that construed imagination as a faculty inaccessible to non-white audiences. It is possible that the black man depicted in Sargent’s paintings (who would have been free, not enslaved, after 1783 in Massachusetts) also viewed and enjoyed these paintings himself since they were, after all, displayed in his place of work. On this possibility, the archival record is silent, but there are others in Boston who can attest to the fact that imaginative freedom was a possibility no matter one’s skin color. This, for instance, was the message of the Bostonian freedwoman Phillis Wheatley’s “On Imagination” which celebrated the “silken fetters” and “soft captivity” of fancy, as opposed to the diabolical bondage of chattel slavery.20 Viewers of Sargent’s pieces were probably not meant to register race consciously although a writer for the Boston Commercial Gazette in 1821 did note that the “two servants in waiting are extremely well done, particularly the negro.”21 Race was not the subject of his painting, but it was rather, as W. J. T. Mitchell has written, a medium.

118

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

As Mitchell has observed, “race is not merely a content to be mediated, an object to be represented visually or verbally, or a thing to be depicted in a likeness or image … but [is] itself a framework for seeing through.”22 The inclusion of a black presence in the margins affrmed that judgment and will were wielded with exquisite aplomb by white gentlemen over an imagination that threatened to corrupt them both. It therefore helped to establish a framework of social superiority, a lens in which to focus the white elite’s capacity for discipline over embodied pleasures that were smooth (silver, porcelain, and silk), sweet (dessert and tea), stimulating (tea and tobacco), or intoxicating (alcohol). Consuming these substances, just like appreciating the classical elegance of Sargent’s rooms, would have put viewers in danger of the corrupting powers of luxury, but the introduction of a less-refned Other would have served as visual confrmation that the indiscriminate “mingling” of association would not spiral out of control. It was not just artists and connoisseurs who worried about these temptations. Even John Adams, the second President of the United States and an avowed enemy of luxury, was not immune. After visiting a “Romish chapel” in Philadelphia in 1774 (likely St. Mary’s on Fourth Street), he wrote in his diary, “The scenery and the music are so calculated to take in mankind, that I wonder the reformation ever succeeded,” noting that the “chanting [was] exquisitely soft and sweet.”23 This was Adams’ way of making aesthetic pleasure acceptable, by viewing it with an ethnological detachment that displaced his own interest onto supposedly wanton and dissolute Catholics, and it would later prove a familiar move in the context of François-Marius Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church and other large paintings of cathedrals that circulated throughout the country. Casting off these desirable yet improper qualities onto the subaltern is typical of a Western self who tries to see herself as seduced or compelled by an Other. As the feminist theorist bell hooks has written, “longing for the ‘primitive’ is expressed by the projection onto the Other of a sense of plenty, bounty, a feld of dreams.” This is imperialist nostalgia, a desire not to completely invert the normal social hierarchies but to get “‘a bit of the Other’ to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness.”24 If the subaltern was exciting in small “bits,” it provoked sheer hysteria when administered in larger doses since this upset the unsteady hierarchies lodged within the aesthetic project and particularly within the fervid powers of imagination and fancy. Benjamin Wiggin, for instance, who owned a little talisman of Catholic, subaltern difference in The Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, demonstrates this pattern in a book-length diatribe by the New York attorney Reuben Vose called Despotism, Or the Last Days of the American Republic (1856). Oddly for a man who owned a wildly popular depiction of a Catholic Mass, the book shows Wiggin joining in with other representatives of the Protestant, northern elite against what was claimed to be the Catholic “conspiracy” to rule America. “England would not exist one year, if every ignorant man were a voter. France has shown us the evils of ignorance, and democracy, and is now governed by tyrants, said Mr. Wiggin,” Vose has the Boston merchant say in his treatise.25 He and his interlocutor continue: ‘Will America fall under the rule of the Catholics, and go back to the darkness which existed for ages, when they had the rule over all Europe?’ asked Mr. Peabody. ‘Of course they will. … The Catholics are already a political party, bound together by the strongest bonds that can bind an ignorant and superstitious race of beings under one head. … When these beings were in power in England, any man

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

119

who wrote a book, or made an astronomical discovery, was subjected to trial in the Inquisition … ,’ said Mr. Wiggin, as he turned to join his friends. It is hard to know if these words really came from Wiggin’s mouth directly, but letters published from him in Vose’s book would seem to indicate that he did, for it is hard to imagine that Vose would have dared to use his name and correspondence without explicit permission. In those letters, the themes were similarly focused on the superiority of England and the declining power of white Protestants in the United States. Wiggin’s true complaint, like that of many of his Federalist peers, was not necessarily confned to Catholics, however, but to those of lesser station who would usurp their power which was predicated not only on vast sums of money, but on hierarchical binaries built into aesthetics. These fears were inversely proportionate to any real discomfort or powerlessness. After a perilous transatlantic passage, for instance, Wiggin wrote to a friend that “Crossing The Atlantic is, to me, full of horror; the numerous disasters have induced me to abandon, for the present, the thought of returning.”26 And yet, as the co-owner of the bank B. & T. Wiggin, a fnancing frm for American exports that he owned with his brother, Wiggin’s vast fortune which facilitated his art collecting would have been impossible without profts from cotton, which required shiploads full of Africans to make the same journey in reverse in conditions that were far more horrifying than what Wiggin feared.27 Wiggin’s or Sargent’s claims to delicacy, coupled with their complete disregard for the senses of others, invites us to refect upon the fact that aesthetic beauty is not inherently good. Although sympathy was connected to the imagination, it could also power its opposite. Rather than imagining someone as human, one could imagine them as monsters whose lack of intellect, imagination, and taste justifed colonialist imperialism. This gave further impetus to the notion that aesthetic delights like wine-bibbing could only properly be enjoyed by the cultured imaginations of men who were white, male, Protestant, and American. This was the point of Reuben Vose’s book Wealth of the Worlds Displayed (1859), a book that succeeded his earlier screed to which Wiggin had contributed. Like Despotism, it too was concerned with the fate of the American republic, but saw naked economic and geopolitical domination as the only way to combat this threat. Proclaiming that the “statesmen of Europe know that the American Union will ultimately include the whole continent [of Europe],” he asked, “Who, besides politicians, need care whether we produce 3,500,000 bales of cotton by the labor of one race or the other?” Whether slave labor came from Asia, Africa, or even Europe was immaterial. What was important was that, as Vose put it, “This democratic republican empire of North America is predestined to expand and ft itself to the continent; to control the oceans on either hand, and eventually the continents beyond them.”28 Vose easily appropriated the language of aesthetics and the imagination in service of his disturbing vision of the United States American global domination. Writing from the opulent Fifth Avenue Hotel, Vose admitted, Here as we gaze on the Wealth of the World, we feel at ‘home.’ Yielding to the illusion of the place, and to a suggestive imagination, we often fancy that we are the happy owner of all that glides in beauty before us.29 Here, with its language of a virtual, mobile world of sensational delights, was eighteenth-century aesthetic rhetoric, perfectly ftted to the era of slave capitalism.

120 Race-ing the Embodied Imagination Whether in texts or in paintings, then, positing a black presence into the space of the imagination introduced a scapegoat who was unable to exert control over the imagination’s propensity toward luxury and vice. Pitting a shadowy, caricatured black presence against a free, white population whose capacity for aesthetic control was only realized against such a counterpoint was a common gesture that was constantly performed in aesthetic writing of the early nineteenth century. Discussing the National Academy of Design’s inaugural 1827 exhibition, for instance, one critic protested, “An exhibition of paintings, sculpture, architectural designs, and engravings, does not attract to it that class of people who are fond of nine days’ wonders, lusus naturae, calves with six legs, and kittens with three tails.”30 Africans and African Americans were frequently regarded as lusus naturae, or sports of nature, and this fear that white Americans would also cross some liminal boundary between culture and nature pervaded discussions of the imagination. The crucial question for white critics was how to avoid “those grosser and more corporeal indulgences.”31 Maintaining the purity of one’s imagination was not so easily accomplished, however, because of the inherent openness of associationism. In associationist psychology, one’s mind had to be open to the world to glean new thoughts and impressions that the mind, aided by the imagination, might turn into worthy forms of art. Samuel F. B. Morse, for instance, praised “connexion” which “pervades the Universe” and was “bound together with a mysterious chain,” and which he claimed as of the core principles in the fne arts. As if anticipating the transposition of aesthetic into racialized terms, however, he attempted to discipline the imagination’s porosity by appealing to the natural sciences. He asked his listeners to “witness the negro, the oran outan, the baboon, the monkey by gradual and downward steps blending the human face divine, with the unseemly visage of the brute.”32 Where, he asked with not a little anxiety, did the human body stop and the animal and material world begin? The taste that cultured and regulated the imagination therefore played a critical role in achieving a delicate yet masterful control over one’s selfhood and the sensory capacities that constituted it. As Carolyn Korsmeyer, Denise Gigante, and others have demonstrated, “Taste,” often capitalized to denote the word’s sense of aesthetic judgment, was a key marker of subjecthood. Whether one was examining the fnest marble statuary or a simply selection of broadcloth and calico, weighing options, discerning quality and defects, and appreciating formal properties like color and texture was closely tied to the production of a rational, educated, and virtuous civic self. Taste was haunted, however, by tastes, one of the body’s lower orders which was associated with pleasure and overindulgence. Nor were these ideas recent. As far back as Aristotle, gluttony was understood as “the clear enemy of philosophy, the love of wisdom.”33 In a global economy powered by the slave trade, the notion of social and cultural authority born of taste was inextricably intertwined with the fantasy of whiteness as a trope of purity. Whether it was expressed as a blush on the skin of an aristocratic white woman in an eighteenth-century portrait, a sculptural cast of an antique sculpture rendered in chalky gypsum, or fne porcelain whiteware, whiteness was synonymous with beauty and moral clarity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century.34 This aesthetic drew on the cultural authority of the ancient ruin and the classical cast, and governed countless examples of material culture in the long eighteenth century, including Sargent’s own Tontine Crescent which was constructed out of brick but painted light gray to mimic stone.35 Scholars have had to turn to mute witnesses like buildings, portraits, casts, and teacups to make whiteness visible precisely because knowledge of

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

121

the true moral perfdy of slavery had to be repressed. In a similar way, the “pleasures of the imagination,” which would have included appreciating paintings and fne wines, relied on disciplining symbolic, inner darkness that emanated from a system of hierarchy and repression in aesthetics itself. 36

The Darkness Within Because of this tendency towards elision and repression, it can be diffcult to fnd evidence acknowledging that gentlemen might transgress any moral or aesthetic boundaries whatsoever, but the discourse around wine-bibbing, with its mingled qualities of elegance and intemperance can serve as a corrective. Curator Judith A. Barter, for instance, discussing Sargent’s Dinner Party, turned to an 1803 account of another allmale dinner party. When the host asked what duty guests had in response to the honor of having a “very choice wine” opened, one replied, “To see the bottom of it.”37 Visual and material culture also punctures affectations of having transcended gross materiality in pleasingly direct ways. A British engraving published a decade before Sargent’s painting, Aaron Martinet’s L’Après-Dînée des Anglais (see Figure 4.3) lampoons the Anglo-American display of “refnement” through copious consumption of alcohol. The print shows seven gentlemen arrayed around a table, dining in the English style

Figure 4.3 Aaron Martinet, L’après-dinée des Anglais from Scenes Anglaises dessinees a Londres, par un francais prisonnier de guerre, 1814, hand-colored etching, 9 3/4 × 13 in., © The Trustees of the British Museum.

122 Race-ing the Embodied Imagination which dictated the consumption of wine after dinner. Each of the attendants wears an elegant waistcoat framed by starched, white collars and breeches, and they sit in a dining room that is also graced by framed paintings and candlelight sconces. So far, so similar to Sargent’s work but thereafter the print dispenses with all pretenses of fattery. The bodies of the “gentlemen” drinkers are not under rational control but rather visibly betray them. Their cheeks fush with a vivid scarlet, and various bodily necessities (urination, sleepiness, intoxication) draw them downwards as the pull of gravity or the call of nature transforms their elegantly bound and disciplined bodies into rumpled piles of fesh and cloth. Material evidence of these dinner parties would tell a similar story. One of Thomas Sheraton’s sideboard designs actually included a chamber pot “made to hide itself in the end rail as much as possible, both for look and secrecy,” acknowledging, as Martinet did, that men who had been drinking for hours on end often took the liberty of urinating in whatever object lay at hand.38 This particular model of a Sheraton sideboard may not be the one in The Dinner Party but the concept of a glossy surface mediated by illogic and darkness within is perfectly at home in Sargent’s painting. As viewers, we are invited to slide from the (painted) mahogany doors that appear to swing wide to greet us and barrel down the raking implied lines formed by the gentlemen’s heads and echoed by the table. Our entry could not be smoother, and is further facilitated by a geometry of orderly rectangles (in the table, the tall windows, the doors, and the freplace) that seems to pull us toward the dramatic pier mirror at the room’s far wall. These nested grids give structure to the viewer’s gaze, and keep it from slithering all over the mirrored and polished surfaces contained within. There are slippages in this genteel exercise of oversight, however. First, it is uncomfortable to make the scalar shifts between the immense, rounded doorway that contains the scene within and the sedulous detail of the men seated around the table and their refned equipage. If the point was to emphasize that an architecture of control, represented by the doorway, can coexist with intoxicating and delectable pleasures, the disorienting transition from one to the other seems to beg the question. Second, this metaphor of oversight, which is expressed so clearly in the arrowstraight tracks of seated men, falls apart under close inspection. The table in the middle of the painting is unnaturally elongated given the viewer’s ostensible position on the same plane and in the same room. The rules of foreshortening should mean that the heads of the men furthest from us are obscured, but Sargent has made them visible by tilting the table upwards so as to differentiate each of the heads of the dinner guests, distributing them in two clearly visible rows of eight along the sides of the table. We see some leaning forward and others craning sideways, as if to express the liveliness of their conversations. Looking down upon them in this way would be impossible unless the viewer was hovering in mid-air, however, and still one must strain to tell one dark suit and high, patrician forehead from the next. Other distortions include the fact that the table itself is oddly off-center and to the left, an effect that is heightened by the fact that the left half of the mirror is darker than the right. And at the center of this mirror, where one would expect a spectator to appear, there is no visible refection, only darkness. These distortions twist and bend the space of the painting, as if refecting an invisible perversion of the very judgment that wine-bibbing was supposed to confrm. The way in which Sargent’s Dinner Party insists upon an evenly articulated perspectival order while warping it from within reminds us of the illogic of an aesthetic system dedicated to the imagination and yet afraid of its hybridity and mobility. Rather than

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

123

exposing this incompatibility, however, it was displaced onto fgures of alterity whose lack of intelligence, it was thought, could better accommodate the incongruity of a mind at war with itself. Picking these inconsistencies apart, making them visible, is nearly impossible within a totalizing system that generates its own hypnotic reality, not unlike the cognitive distortions generated by whiteness itself. As in Sargent’s convoluted and inconsistent perspective, it is diffcult to see what the critic Toni Morrison called the “fshbowl” of whiteness, “the structure that transparently (and invisibly) permits the ordered life it contains to exist in the larger world.”39 Turning toward materiality, then, and the global economic and colonial forces that were mobilized in order to turn these materials into saleable goods, can help to refocus our attention on the system that allowed Sargent to naturalize the economic and social power that he and his fellow elite Bostonians wielded. Stuart Hall memorably wrote that his presence in London in the 1950s was inconvenient, his presence as a postcolonial subject of the Crown disrupting a fantasy of English-ness that had been created by capitalism, colonialism, and industrialization. It was these invisible, structuring forces that allowed generations of northern islanddwellers to see a plant grown in the tropics and the sub-tropics as uniquely theirs. “I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea. I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of English children’s teeth,” Hall wrote.40 Bringing marginalized black people like the servant in Sargent’s household into focus destabilizes the illusion of an inalienable social order structured around slavery, countering the long-established strategy of dissolving the Other into a sweet fantasy of national or class identity. The gritty immediacy of sugar or indeed any of the other aesthetic pleasures enabled by a slave economy breaks the trance of white superiority that was constructed in Sargent’s paintings, Reuben Vose’s maniacal geopolitics, or any of a number of other cultural artifacts that appeared to confrm white sensibility as more refned and white imagination as more judicious, and therefore more deserving of liberty. There is no shortage of material presences we might deconstruct to expose the falsity of an inherent white aesthetic supremacy in The Dinner Party or The Tea Party. The sugar, for instance, that sweetened the desserts, tea, and wine enjoyed in both would have been harvested in wretched and degrading conditions by slave labor in the West Indies. Cutting cane was dangerous, and it had to be rushed within 24 hours to be milled where enslaved workers were often maimed or crushed to death if they had the misfortune to be caught in the rollers. The boiling process turned the sugarcane juice into thick, molten syrup so hot that contact with it was often fatal. This cycle of production was sustained through the night, lit by spermaceti candles made from the oil harvested by New England whalers, a pace of production that only increased the rate of accidents.41 That such an inhumane system was set in place in service of nonessential luxuries like the cake, liquors, and sweetened tea consumed by the elite guests in Sargent’s two paintings seems a cruel irony. Similarly, the mahogany wood used in the sideboard, cellaret, and vast dining table was also the product of slave labor, and although this work was not quite as hazardous as sugar production, this is a small distinction. Mahogany trees grew in tropical rainforest in the Caribbean where they were hunted, felled, and transported by gangs of enslaved, young men. By the 1810s, the coastal rainforests where mahogany grew had been deforested and turned into land for sugarcane cultivation, forcing scouts to go even deeper into thick, mosquito-ridden forests. Mahogany and sugar were symptoms

124

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

rather than causes, however, attesting to a capitalist system that commoditized the pleasures of the imagination enjoyed in tea and dinner parties for elite, white consumers, while simultaneously treating the enslaved laborers used to produce those pleasures with brutal disregard.42 Sargent would have been well acquainted with the global fows of capital and the trade in Caribbean commodities like sugar and mahogany. His grandfather, Epes Sargent, was a very wealthy Gloucester, Massachusetts merchant, depicted by John Singleton Copley in a 1760 portrait that he willed to Daniel Sargent, the artist Henry’s father, when he died just two years later. Henry’s father, Daniel, Sr., also commissioned a resplendent portrait by Copley of his wife, Mary Turner Sargent, for which the artist required 15 or 16 sittings, 6 hours at a time, as Henry later insisted to William Dunlap.43 Henry’s uncle, Epes Sargent II, was also depicted by Copley in a 1765 painting. Having so many portraits by one of the best painters in America would not have seemed remarkable in a family as prosperous as the Sargents. Epes Sargent was remembered as “the greatest merchant of a family which has produced many successful men of affairs,” and he became so wealthy that his “house and grounds” in Boston were remembered as being “of an almost spectacular splendor.”44 This splendor belied the means by which it was gained, however. The family’s money came not from the sale of Africans to be enslaved in the Americas per se, but from the next leg of the triangle trade, sending salted cod and perhaps pickled mackerel, the cheapest and least desirable kinds of fsh, out from Gloucester to the West Indies where it fed enslaved people on production-mad sugar plantations.45 Sometimes the relationship between salted cod and the slave trade was even more direct since it could be traded for molasses, sugar, or enslaved laborers.46 In any case, the affuence that was so clearly signaled in all of those Copley portraits as well as in Sargent’s visions of Federalist Boston were inextricably bound up with the slave trade, without which the wealth that they pictured would have been impossible. As the economic historian Eric Kimball has written, “it is diffcult to overstate the importance of the Caribbean plantation complex, and the labor power of the enslaved Africans working on them, to the economic fortunes of New Englanders” in the late eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century. “What have we to do with slavery?” he continues. “New Englanders knew the answer: everything.”47 Without these tainted profts, Sargent would not have been able to study in London, to take rooms near the house of Benjamin West where he had “free access to the great painter’s” casts and pictures, and without his family’s exceedingly generous patronage, he might not have “received the kindest and most courteous treatment from Mr. Copley.”48 Without slavery, he certainly would not have had the means to host such glittering and luxurious parties as the ones depicted in The Dinner Party and The Tea Party. It was not just Sargent who inhabited this world of contradictions, however. Allston, for instance, who had grown up along the banks of the Waccamaw River in South Carolina, had similar ties. As Sarah Burns has revealed, the painter inherited three tracts of land totaling 879 acres from his father, literal “blood money, wealth generated by slave labor” that helped to fund his artistic education in London. As in Sargent’s picture, wine connoisseurship was intertwined with both slavery and the pursuit of refnement in the Allstons’ Carolina social world. The painter was the frst cousin, once removed, of Joseph Allston (1732/1733–1784), who owned a plantation called “The Oaks,” where he “propagated the Lisbon and Wind-Island grapes with

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

125

great success.” Maintaining sovereign control over an estate and the enslaved labor required to run it was valued highly. As Josiah Quincy, Jr. moved from plantation to plantation along the Santee River in South Carolina’s low country, he noted approvingly that Joseph Allston had an income of “fve or six thousand pounds sterling a year,” possibly more, and had “fve plantations with an hundred slaves on each.” He concluded, “His plantation, negroes, gardens, etc. are in the best order of any I have seen!”49 Ironically, although imagination was intimately tied to notions of superiority and control, it was not inherently destructive of mutuality, and, hypothetically at least, had the tools to sense and care about the kinds of brutality involved in producing sugar or mahogany furnishings. As discussed in Chapter 1, sympathy was held to be a critical intellectual faculty that allowed people to project their minds beyond their own bodies to experience the pain of another. Adam Smith, the Scottish philosopher, for instance, opened his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) with a chapter on sympathy, using the example of a man stretched out upon the rack, a form of torture. He claimed that it was “by the imagination only” that one could project her individual senses into the body of the sufferer, thereby forming the basis of all moral action.50 By the end of the eighteenth century, the connection between sympathy and the imagination was a well-established part of the associationist philosophy, but Sargent’s paintings, like the larger social and cultural order from which they sprung, did not evoke this tender ethics turned outward on one’s fellow man. Instead, he turns our senses inward, toward an illusion of superiority. Although the agentic imagination had the power to rebel and revolt, Sargent used his to maintain the status quo.

Hunger and Desire in Palette’s Cabinet Much like the Sheraton sideboard that concealed a chamber pot, The Dinner Party placed the desired qualities of taste and imagination into an architecture of control that masked their tendency toward disorder. As discussed at the outset of this chapter, however, The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream inverts many of the assumptions of The Dinner Party as well as the representational conventions of the genre of perspective paintings from which it descended. Where the perspective paintings were grand, King’s subject matter is inconsequential, the personal effects of a failed artist. Where perspective paintings telescoped viewers into deep interior space, King’s painting is intentionally shallow. And where the imagination is left to linger on picturesque surfaces like stone cathedrals or glossy wainscoting in the perspective pictures that toured through American cities, King has lavished mimetic attention on moldering and dogeared books, broken sculpture, and haphazard personal effects. An Africanist embodied presence that was a cipher for white masculinity and its imaginative control was no less important to King’s apparent departure from describing the pleasures of the imagination, however, as I will discuss. Vanity of the Artist’s Dream told the story of one C. Palette, a pathetically unlucky, allegorical American painter, through his abandoned belongings, pictured in all their chaotic detail. The artist’s works had scarcely been noticed by critics, and his fnancial failures were so numerous that his possessions were seized and are to be sold in a sheriff’s sale announced in the large note nailed to the frame in the upper left corner. Given these details, King’s painting has been interpreted as an allegory that narrates the impossibility of high ideals in a crassly materialist country. Scholars note the small

126 Race-ing the Embodied Imagination newspaper clipping in which even an exhibition of a portrait of Benjamin West by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a master of the British Royal Academy, is eclipsed by its rival, “The Exhibition of a Cats Skin.”51 As the curator and art historian Carrie Rebora has recounted, Thomas Lawrence’s Grand Manner portrait of Benjamin West was indeed hailed as a great masterpiece when it was exhibited in Philadelphia in 1823 at Thomas Sully and James Earle’s gallery, and all but ignored by critics and the public, much to the dismay of Colonel John Trumbull and the other members of the American Academy of the Fine Arts who commissioned the work. Rebora wrote, “Records from Sully and Earle’s gallery are scarce, but on June 6, Joshua Emlen, who was Trumbull’s collecting agent in Philadelphia, sent $20.12, ‘that being the only money received from Sully and Earle.’”52 These references suggest that the painting’s topic was a familiar one, the scarce support for artists in a utilitarian society. Better “a Butcher or a Shoemaker, than a Painter,” as Trumbull had warned.53 Limned by a crumbling tradition of elite patronage and a still-underdeveloped system of an art market for middle-class buyers, I contend that The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream is just as much a meditation on the excesses and irrationality of creativity and the imagination as it is a refection of the failures of the economic system that enabled the exercise of those faculties. This subject matter is announced by the contents of Palette’s cabinet which directly attend to aesthetics, and imagination, in particular. One of the largest and most legible texts in the painting is a splayed copy of Mark Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination in the lower-left corner, its pages interrupted by the “Pleasures of Hope by Camp” (see Figure 4.4, referring to another epic poem by the Scottish poet, Thomas Campbell.) The composition also spills over with an excess of texts, jumping from poetry to theater to art criticism in a manner native to the associative imagination which was the central pivot in a Reynoldsian aesthetic theory. Fluidly jumping among these texts matches the notion of an imagination that was equally at home in philosophy, poetry, art criticism, sculpture, painting, as well as in the rest of the fne arts. King’s painting also delves into imagination’s propensity toward pleasures that were rather more lascivious than those offered by Augustan poetry. The key to this reading is a piece of paper, turned sideways and wedged between these two books, that is titled “Ode to Dearest Mary.” The story of “Dear Mary” wends its way through the painting, marking a frustrated sexual desire that is layered with references to hunger, another thwarted appetite. The trope l’oeil pencilings on the “frame” of the cabinet in King’s painting are flled with references to food and hunger: “Roast Turkey and Beef—painted from recollection,” for example, or “Memo, To write a parody on Hamlet’s soliloquy. Thus to eat or not to eat that is the question.” Eating and taste are crucial textual and visual metaphors throughout this discourse, in that they were associated with basic human and economic survival, as well as taste and aesthetic discrimination. These bodily appetites and pleasures are given centripetal force in the painting’s composition as they threaten to spiral out of control. Food as a bodily necessity rather than a refned pleasure occurs again in the undignifed crown of books worn by Apollo, one of which is labeled Cook’s Oracle. Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook’s Oracle, which was a cookbook frst published in England in 1817 and subsequently reprinted through the 1830s there and in the United States. It contained “receipts” (recipes) for hundreds of dishes, which its author, William Kitchiner, billed as “The Result of Actual Experiments Instituted in the Kitchen of a Physician.” Apollo, King has implied, the god of rationality, and the ideal fgurehead to preside over a regulated imagination, has come to this, a footstool for a book that

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

127

Figure 4.4 Detail, Charles Bird King, The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, 1830, oil and graphite on canvas, 35 1/8 × 29 1/2 in., Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Gift of Grenville L. Winthrop, Class of 1886, Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

has inverted tastes over Taste. Open the Cook’s Oracle, and you might learn how to roast a woodcock, stew a knuckle of veal, or make “Lemonade in a minute.” There were no French pretensions or “fantastic dainties, as the brains of peacocks or parrots, the tongues of thrushes or nightingales,” just solid and economical fare.54 King has also painted in his cabinet an early eighteenth-century text by the Scottish doctor George Cheyne who advocated for a diet of milk and vegetables to evade the intemperance of a diet rich in meat, alcohol, spices, and other luxuries. The sturdy, green spine of a book bearing the title “Cheyne on Vegetable Diet” is pointedly located right behind the spread-open pages of The Pleasures of the Imagination in King’s painting, suggesting that Palette’s two-fold lack of control—over his gustative appetite and over his imagination—were responsible for his failures. With Apollo’s dunce cap of a modern cookbook, King’s work makes literal the collapse of aesthetic discernment into a brute alimentary and gustatory sense that required little intelligence or rationality. In place of Taste’s complex hierarchies, gustatory tastes traded in blunt, iterative lists, such as the one wedged behind and to the left of the piece of bread in the lower half of the painting. The exotic and favorful food and drink listed there—fgs, anchovies, Tokay, Madeira, and tongue (another pun playing on the sense of taste)—recall the Federalist bon ton pictured by Sargent although the artist in this painting, unlike Sargent, is excluded from those pleasures.

128

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

These representational codes dramatize a different kind of frustrated desire narrated in the painting’s margins. These texts can be shaped into a loose narrative structure, from Palette’s perplexity over Mary’s behavior to his reaction over her apparent betrayal. In the lower-left corner, one fragment appears to be the product of the artist’s private musings refecting trouble in their relationship: Mary looked cold last night could it have been because I called, by the merest accident [illegible] the world; or had things gone wrong in Denmark? Women after all are certainly a little wayward, just made to fatigue or please us, I think I’ll sigh and live single. And rail at the sex like Benedict before he was fooled. The narrator’s nonchalance glosses over the agonies of sexual temptation for which the likely Benedict in question, Benedict of Nursia, a sixth-century Italian ascetic, was known. Tempted by the memory of a beautiful woman, “infamed with concupiscence” and “overcome with pleasure,” the saint wrote in Book II of his Dialogues that he threw himself into a bramble of thorns which painfully tore at his fesh, in order to escape. The circuit of sexual desire, disappointment, and painful humiliation suggested by this portion of text is an apt bit of palimpsest for a trompe l’oeil painting such as Vanity of the Artist’s Dream that continually seems to tempt the viewer with objects (the glass of water) and textures (the wooden frame, the feather on the quill) that it cannot and will not deliver. The indelicate cause of Mary’s “coldness,” infdelity, is obliquely referenced in two other passages in the painting, one of which is visual and the other textual. The textual reference is written rather ironically on the torn and curled title page of “Pleasures of Hope by Camp” that faces outwards toward the viewer in the lower left quadrant of the picture. The poem was published in 1799 and was, in King’s telling, “dedicated to painters.” Woven through this text, however, are a few verses of doggerel: “Mary Mary quite contrary/ How does the garden … / Hope is dead gracious … / Cruel Mary.” The line “hope is dead” may have recalled the chorus in Romeo and Juliet, in which the crowd cries at the discovery of Juliet’s body: “And all our joy, and all our hope is dead, / Dead, lost, undone, absented, wholly fed.”55 Since the audience knows, however, that Juliet is merely sleeping, this dramatic chorus is more burlesque than tragic, however. Similarly, King’s off-kilter version of the well-known nursery rhyme might refer to bawdier, eighteenth-century versions in which the last line of the second couplet referred to “cuckolds all in a row,” reportedly a reference to the promiscuity of Mary, Queen of Scots, rather than the tamer “silver bells, and cockle shells.”56 Reading Palette as a cuckold is also supported by an oil sketch tossed into the upper left corner of the artist’s cabinet that depicts an emblem of a woman, likely Abundantia, holding a cornucopia or “horn of plenty.”57 Standing women holding cornucopias and other attributes were frequently used by Roman emperors to advertise their generosity and

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

129

liberality, and the symbol was adopted by artists in the Renaissance. But a much more widely known association with the horn was its use as common slang, as either a verb or noun that signifed cuckoldry.59 This meaning was in such wide use that an 1825 article in the Minerva asked “why the absurd ascription of a pair of horns to the husband of an adulteress had become so general.”60 The absent artist’s lack of control over his bodily passions is further denoted by his copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, whose subtitle promised that the topic’s “members” would be “philosophically, medicinally, historically opened and cut up.” The source of this malady was mental, and it was understood that “melancholy and sick men … can be imputed to nought else, but to a corrupt, false, and violent imagination.”61 This “anatomy” is central to Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, its broken body made visible through details like a severed (sculptural) head, the artist’s absent indexical traces of scribbled text, starvation, and even an alternate title, The Anatomy of Art Appreciation. This is the joyous, fertile, and anti-dualist body of the artist doubled by female creators, as seen in the preceding chapter, cut into material fragments placed at a scene of violence and subjection, as witnessed by the splintered, doorless cabinet. Palette’s collapse as an artist, a man, and a breadwinner is complete. 58

Finding Othello As with Sargent’s languid ode to taste, however, these debilities are shifted onto nonwhite men. The frst sign that race is important in The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream is the alabaster head of Apollo Belvedere at the painting’s center, the preeminent sign of whiteness and civilization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture and in (pseudo)scientifc theories of polygenesis, which posited white racial supremacy.62 Next to this, inscribed on Palette’s palette, the literal and symbolic center of the painting, is a line from Shakespeare: “Othello’s occupation’s gone.” The phrase refers to a scene in which the proud general is fnally convinced by Iago of his beloved Desdemona’s infdelity and quits his post, therefore rendering the character strangely absent, themes that resonate with King’s exploration of an artist’s abandoned property. The racialized character of this allusion is reinforced by another reference that appears at the center of the bottom of the “frame” of Palette’s cabinet, “It certainly was wrong in Blue Beard to cut off so many of your heads.” As with Othello, this character was explicitly raced; Bluebeard had “turned Turk” in a popular 1798 adaptation Blue Beard; or, Female Curiosity! of the original French fairytale by Charles Perrault. After that date, the character was so often thought of as a menacing, swarthy fgure, often from Baghdad, that a mid-nineteenth-century editor felt compelled to insert an explanatory note in an edition that made the anomalous choice to depict him as “a Gaul” (i.e., French).63 Race was not just a subject, however, but a medium, one that allowed an unaccustomed sense of freedom and rebellion around the embodied imagination and the discourses of masculinity, whiteness, civilization, and sexuality that were embedded in it. This pattern of longing and denial is echoed by the representational play of trompe l’oeil. Belief in the crystalline edge of the glass of water on the bottom “edge” of the shelf or the thumbed-through pages of the books will be followed by disappointment upon realizing that the tantalizing objects are, in fact, painted. The painting’s churning composition fgures the loss of that supreme marker of whiteness, property,

130

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

culminating at a black void at the painting’s center formed by Apollo’s dislocated head and the “tongue” of white sketchbook pages that fap beneath it. This vortex begins in the upper left corner of the work next to the note of a “Sheriff’s Sale,” whose explanatory centrality is visually marked by the skeleton key (ironically labeled “Wine Cellar”) that hangs next to it. We then accelerate through the painting via Abundantia’s inverted cornucopia that showers golden coins into the waiting ear of the Apollo Belvedere below, before coiling back along an implied diagonal that shoots from the hunk of bread along the case of painter’s tools to the feathered quill on the cabinet’s opposite side. Despite this frenzy of activity, the painting’s literal and metaphorical center is characterized by multiple absences—of Palette or of King, of a door to the cabinet itself, of the right half of the Apollo’s neck. Instead of the god of reason’s famously smooth, white body and the totalizing culture it implied, we get fragments, rupture, and lacunae. King’s visual abyss conjures the overwhelm elicited when the imagination confronts the sublime “in the immensity of the void,” as Joseph Addison put it. Our reason can pursue a particle of matter through an infnite variety of divisions, but the fancy soon loses sight of it, and feels in itself a kind of chasm, that wants to be flled with matter of a more sensible bulk, … The implications of this rather existential sublime are vast since it places terror and dread in the mind within, rather than relocating it in a more comfortably anodyne nature. It is this false opposition between nature and culture that allows the very idea of the history and culture enshrined in Palette’s belongings, for, as the literary scholar Neil Saccamano has argued, “the historical narrative … propels itself by expelling or abandoning its inferior terms.”64 Racial difference, however, would have served as a convenient shorthand for the idea of progress and mastery over the imagination’s powers, rendering complex philological argument unnecessary if one could telegraph messages of race thinking within the context of aesthetics. The Africanist presence of Othello in his painting also brings to mind other midnineteenth-century cultural productions that buried all mention of the American slave economy, only to resurrect it metaphorically as existential dread. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for instance, published 20 years after King completed his painting, a symbolic and literal whiteness commands the center, much as Apollo in Palette’s cabinet. And although the white whale is the ostensible target of the book, darkness rings Melville’s novel. As the Pequod rounds the Cape of Good Hope, for instance, the crew is confronted with a “desolate vacuity of life” a sense of alienation that clings to the ship, “a thing appointed to desolation,” which “heaved and heaved, still unrestingly heaved the black sea, as if its vast tides were a conscience.”65 One wonders if the imaginations of Washingtonians might have experienced similar convulsions of conscience as they walked to and from King’s museum on 12th near F Street. For there, in the center of the city, the African presence would have been made literal as visitors would walk past the teeming “pens” that would have returned people who had escaped slavery back to it. This is what Frederick Douglass called “the dark shelter” where the “darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders fnd the strongest protection.”66

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

131

Whether or not King or the visitors to his museum explicitly linked the abnegation conjured by The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream to the horrors of the slave trade, however, there was no avoiding the specter of racial mixture in an ostensibly white American early to mid-nineteenth- century culture, particularly with a touchstone like Othello. On both sides of the Atlantic, a white actor in blackface was almost unfailingly cast in the title role of Othello, one of the most popular Shakespearean plays in the period, and a rising tide of burlesque versions of the play even further exaggerated the play’s racial politics.67 The same period also saw what one scholar has called Washington Irving’s “Othellophilia” in the articles he published in his literary journal Salmagundi in the frst decade of the nineteenth century.68 Irving’s Salmagundi writings are hard to logically summarize in full but their layers of allegorical and often racialized characters like Othello are similar to King’s own. King might well have had Irving’s style in mind since he had painted Rip Van Winkle Returning from a Morning’s Lounge (ca. 1825, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) from Irving’s novel only fve years before. The olla podrida of humor, racial masquerade, and self-aware collisions of high and low culture found in Irving’s writing or in burlesques like Othello Travestie allayed anxieties about a society that was consumed with the supremacy of Western culture and white manhood, or, per King’s subversive version, their mutual collapse. Burlesques turned these anxieties into comic fodder and therefore neutralized them giving audiences a chance to laugh at matters that were deadly serious in other contexts. The medium was in large part the message and writers of burlesque opted for short, bobbing rhymes that almost turned the plays into nursery rhymes. The playwright John Poole’s burlesque Othello Travestie, for instance, consisted of rhymed couplets that abbreviated Shakespeare’s original language, leavening it with contemporary vernacularisms. “Look to your house, your daughter, and your bags!” in Shakespeare’s original becomes “Your daughter’s fobb’d! / Your house is robb’d!” Similarly, Iago’s promise to Brabantio, father of Desdemona—“Because we come to do you service, and you think we are ruffans, you’ll have your daughter cover’d with a Barbary horse; you’ll have your nephews neigh to you”—becomes “Your grand-sons shall discreetly paw, / And neigh your nephew ponies. / This very night / An anti-white / Your only daughter’s chanc’d t’entrap.” What would King have thought about race? His written statements are mute on the subject but like so many Americans in the nineteenth century on both sides of the color line, he would have had to be keenly attentive to the nuances of racial mixture since the two places he lived the longest, Newport, Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., both had deep ties to slavery, as Rowena Houghton Dasch has noted. By 1830, King was also deeply involved in helping to create a vast archive of Native American life assembled by Thomas L. McKenney, who was frst superintendent of Indian trade and, later, the frst commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. McKenney began collecting in 1816, authorizing the traders he supervised across the nation’s territories to barter trade goods for artifacts like tomahawks, ceremonial pipes, and other “Indian implements.” By far his biggest expense was paying King to complete what eventually grew to include at least 143 portraits of Indian delegations visiting Washington, D.C. that ultimately resulted in the lavishly illustrated History of the Indian Tribes of North America (1837–1844).69 Indian-ness is often marked in these portraits by feathered headdresses, amulets, bear-claw necklaces, and face paint, emphasizing racial difference as spectacle. And yet scholars like Dasch note that King’s careful attention to

132

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

these details emphasized the individual humanity of his subjects rather than forcing them into an abstract Indian “type.” To inquire about what King thought about race, slavery, or indigeneity is to miss the point, however. King used race in a way that was similar to his use of trompe l’oeil, as a strategy of fguring the absences that imagination promised to make present. Like the embodied imagination trompe l’oeil suggests longing (to touch the gleaming rim of the inviting glass of water in the painting’s lower half, for example), as well as self-abnegation (fnding out that this “object” is merely painted). As Richard Shoch, a scholar of Shakespearean bardolatry, has written of burlesque, which “never comes to rest at a single point, never affxes itself to a single, invariable meaning,” imagination’s illusory and associative powers continually generate new combinations whose hybridity is fundamentally at odds with attempts to place it at the center of a stable and hierarchical aesthetic system.70 This is made literal in King’s painting in dozens of lines of text that cover nearly every available surface, leading the viewer’s eye from point to point with the promise of a coherent narrative that instead spools out into lists, memoranda, records of expenses, and intimate refections that iterate, repeat, and fold back on themselves. Similarly disorienting struggles between appearance and reality awaited nineteenth-century scientists, philosophers, politicians, and others who attempted to construct race as an essential, biological reality rather than a social construct. Although neither were “caused” by the discourses of the aesthetics, the conjoined search for an obdurate and timeless racial and cultural purity inevitably ran afoul of the mingled, associative, and softbodied imagination at its core. These combinations of high and low, speech and image, self and doubles fnd purchase in discussions of hybridity in postcolonial and critical race theory but as the critic John C. Young has reminded us, “‘Hybrid’ is the nineteenth century’s word,” used to denote the innumerable racial mixtures to which antebellum Americans had to be keenly attuned.71 This undercurrent of mixing and boundary-crossing would also come to defne the character of Othello whose words about Desdemona’s devotion— “’twas strange, ’twas passing strange”—came to take on additional meanings of racial passing in the United States in the Jim Crow era.72 And yet, this evocation of passing or slipping the yoke are not entirely comfortable in traditional methods of art history which have historically been used to establish authenticity and market value. Indeed, King has long been located in stable traditions of “high art” rather than contemporary forms of mass culture like blackface minstrelsy whose hallmarks are an ephemeral combinativeness. This path was frst laid out by Wolfgang Born, who wrote in 1945 that King’s work “really belongs to an old European tradition rather than to that of Philadelphia, where he lived when he painted it.” In fact, King was living in Washington, D.C. in 1830, which matters little. Born continued, “King picked up the thread dropped by the European baroque painters in the late 1700s,” and he goes on to connect Vanity of the Artist’s Dream forward to the trompe l’oeil still lifes of William Michael Harnett.73 Plainly, King was very aware of European traditions of art, particularly the Netherlandish vanitas still lifes of the seventeenth century of artists like Cornelis Gijsbrechts that were also illusionistic and made particular reference to an artist’s studio and tools of the trade.74 Yet to ignore the joking and juking play between invisible black and male body of Othello inscribed at the very center of the painting and the visible ideal of white manhood, the head of Apollo Belvedere, is to ignore the framing racial logics that structured

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

133

King’s painting, as well as antebellum cultural politics. As with Henry Sargent’s choice to remain detached from the connections between his family wealth and slavery, this ignorance is a choice to remain in Morrison’s invisible “fshbowl” of whiteness, unaware of the mutually animating forces of racial satire and a raced imagination that subtended both art and aesthetic discourse in the frst half of the nineteenth century. Race-as-medium therefore refects illicit desire and dreaded revulsion, the push and pull between self and other, between the sensory pleasures that fow from bodies on the one hand, and the capitalist and imperialist systems that consumed them, on the other. Like the medium of trompe l’oeil or the genre of a skillfully constructed perspectival illusion, imagination mingled sublimity and abjection, aesthetic terms that were displaced onto period notions of whiteness and racial difference.

Notes 1 Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: W. and C. Tait and London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), 225. 2 Richard Payne Knight, An analytical inquiry into the principles of taste (London: Luke Hansard, 2nd ed., 1805), 137–138. 3 Gerard, An Essay on Genius (London: W. Strahan, et al., 1774), 75. 4 Engell, The Creative Imagination, 80. 5 Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Paper no. 420, in The Spectator: Complete in One Volume. With Notes, and a General Index (London: W. Wilson, 1813), 68. 6 David L. Clark, “Hegel, Eating: Schelling and the Carnivorous Virility of Philosophy,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 115–139. 7 See for instance, Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (London: Routledge, 1997); David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (London: Reaktion Books, 2002); Monique Roelofs, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015). 8 Henry Cabot Lodge, Early Memories 1 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913), 273. 9 “On Franklin Street” as the “centre of fashion,” see The Centennial Celebration of the Wednesday Evening Club (Boston, MA: J. Wilson, 1878), 3–4. For the Tontine Crescent, see Nylander, “Henry Sargent’s Dinner Party and Tea Party,” 1172, pl. 1, and Phebe S. Goodman, The Garden Squares of Boston (Dartmouth, NH: UPNE, 2003), 25–36. 10 The Centennial Celebration of the Wednesday Evening Club, 102. 11 See Catherine Stewart Thomas, Class by the Glass: The Signifcance of Imported Wine Consumption in America, 1750–1800 (Master’s thesis: University of Maryland, College Park, 2007), 45–46. I rely on Thomas’ work on wine consumption and equipage throughout this section. 12 Henry Cabot Lodge, Early Memories (London: Constable, 1913), 273. 13 The cellaret depicted in The Dinner Party descended in the Sargent family, and is preserved in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Cellaret, ca. 1810–1820, mahogany, brass ftting, lead lining, accession no. 1975.755. 14 This section draws on Peter Thompson’s incisive analysis of toasting, drink, and gentility in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, where he also quotes Logan. See “‘The Friendly Glass’: Drink and Gentility in Colonial Philadelphia,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 4 (1989): 567–569. According to Thompson, “Logan’s claim … that one couldn’t hire a gentleman to get drunk—was cherished by gentleman drinkers” (568). 15 This is discussed in Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 52–53. 16 On madeira, see David Hancock, “Commerce and Conversation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: The Invention of Madeira Wine,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 2 (1998): 197–219. 17 Thompson, “‘The Friendly Glass’,” 560–564.

134

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

18 “Tea,” The Nic-Nac; Or, Literary Cabinet 2, no. 94 (September 18, 1824): 330. 19 Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, “Work, Class, and Respectability in Robert Roberts’s House Servant’s Directory or, A Monitor for Private Families (Boston, 1827)” in Writing History from the Margins: African Americans and the Quest for Freedom, eds. Claire Parfait, Hélène Le Dantec-Lowry, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti (London: Taylor & Francis, 2016), 73–87. 20 Phillis Wheatley, “On Imagination,” from Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (1773) in Phillis Wheatley and Vincent Carretta, Phillis Wheatley: Complete Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 2001), 36–37. On Wheatley as a Romantic, see John C. Shields, Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics (Nashville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2010). 21 “Communication. the Dinner Party-by Col Sargent,” Boston Commercial Gazette (Boston, MA) 58, no. 1, July 2, 1821: [2]. 22 W. J. T. Mitchell, Seeing Through Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13. 23 John Adams and Charles F. Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1850), 395. 24 Bell Hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Media and Cultural Studies: Keyworks, eds. Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Malden, MA: Blackwell Press, 2006), 369, 372. 25 Reuben Vose, Despotism, Or the Last Days of the American Republic (New York: Hall & Willson, 1856), 64. 26 Vose, Despotism, 355. 27 On the economic supremacy of cotton in this period, see Slavery’s Capitalism A New History of American Economic Development, ed. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). 28 Reuben Vose, Reuben Vose’s Wealth of the World Displayed (New York: R. Vose, 1859), 22. 29 Vose, Wealth of the World Displayed, 182. Emphasis in the original. 30 “Review: In Painting. in Sculpture. in Architecture. in Engraving,” The United States Review and Literary Gazette (1826–1827) 2, no. 4 (July 1827): 31. 31 “Catalogue of Pictures in the Athenaeum Gallery,” The North American Review 29, no. 64 (July 1829): 250–251. There is a large literature on the history of non-white people being exhibited. See, for instance, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Deborah Willis, Black Venus, 2010: They Called Her “Hottentot” (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010); and Benjamin Reiss, The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 32 Morse, Lectures on the Affnity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, 64–65. 33 On the contributions of Plato and Aristotle to theories of taste, especially as an aid or hindrance to thought, see Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste, 11–26. This quote is from p. 16. 34 See Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture,” Art History 27 (September 2004); Bridget T. Heneghan, Whitewashing America: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003). 35 Lawrence W. Kennedy, Planning the City Upon a Hill: Boston Since 1630 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 27. 36 Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 100. 37 Quoted in Judith A. Barter, “Drunkards and Teetotalers: Alcohol and Still-Life Painting,” in Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, eds. Annelise K. Madsen, Sarah K. Oehler, Ellen E. Roberts, and Judith A. Barter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 111. 38 Thomas Sheraton, The Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing Book (London: T. Bensley, 1802), 364, quoted in Thomas, “Class by the Glass,” 56. My discussion in this section, including my knowledge of Martinet’s print, is indebted to Thomas’. 39 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 17.

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

135

40 Stuart Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader, Les Back and John Solomos, eds. (London: Taylor & Francis, 2000), 147. 41 Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 47–49; Jenny Shaw, Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2013), 78–81. On spermaceti candles, see Eric Kimball, “‘What Have We to Do with Slavery’: New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies,” in Slavery’s Capitalism, Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 283. 42 Jennifer L. Anderson, Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 156–183. This section has also been informed by Jason W. Moore’s writing on the “the rise of the plantation complex —indeed the rise of capitalism—as a socio-ecological project.” “Madeira, Sugar, and the Conquest of Nature in the ‘First’ Sixteenth Century: Part I: From ‘Island of Timber’ to Sugar Revolution, 1420– 1506,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 32, no. 4 (2009): 345–349. 43 On John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Henry’s mother, Mary Turner Sargent (Mrs. Daniel Sargent), see Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 49–69. 44 Winthrop Sargent, Early Sargents of New England (Place of publication not identifed: [publisher not identifed], 1922), 31; Charles E. Mann, The Sargent Family and the Old Sargent Homes (Lynn, MA: F.S. Whitten, 1919), 51. 45 Winthrop Sargent, Early Sargents of New England ([Place of publication not identifed]: [publisher not identifed], 1922), 31–32. Honor Moore, The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2009), 13. 46 Candice Lee Goucher, Congotay! Congotay!: A Global History of Caribbean Food (London: Routledge, 2015), 12–13. 47 Kimball, “New Englanders and the Slave Economies of the West Indies,” 29–296. 48 William Dunlap, The Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States 2 (George P. Scott and Co. Printers, 1834), 60. 49 Josiah Quincy, Jr. “Journal of Josiah Quincy, Junior, 1773,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 49 (1915–16): 453. To Quincy, this enslaved labor read as a kind of genteel appurtenance, much as a crystal decanter or a mahogany sideboard. 50 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments discussed in Engell, Creative Imagination, 145–147. 51 Transcriptions of the texts in King’s picture were made by Dr. Daniel D. Reiff, a professor in the Art Department of the State University of New York at Fredonia, and were placed on deposit in the Archives of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard. I am grateful to Dr. Reiff for his careful work, and to the Fogg for making it available. 52 Carrie Rebora, “Sir Thomas Lawrence’s ‘Benjamin West’ for the American Academy of the Fine Arts,” American Art Journal 21 (1989): 38. Erika Schneider has also analyzed the painting as a commentary on the art market, and more fully than I have here, nineteenthcentury ideals of masculinity. See Schneider, The Representation of the Struggling Artist in America, 1800–1865 (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2015), 62–68. 53 Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society: The Formative Years, 1790–1860 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1966, 1982), 61. 54 William Kitchiner, Apicius Redivivus; Or, Cook’s Oracle (London: Samuel Bagster, 1817), n.p. 55 William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet IV.V.1854–1855. 56 E.F. Bleiler, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” Mother Goose’s Melodies: Facsimile Edition of the Munroe and Francis “Copyright 1833” Version (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), xvii. 57 Andrew Cosentino has argued that King’s special attention to the senses in The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream and his earlier work in this genre, The Poor Artist’s Cupboard (1815, Corcoran Collection) may relate to the traditional eighteenth-century “attributes” paintings like Pierre Subleyras’ Attributes of the Arts (ca. 1730s, Musée des Augustins, Toulouse).

136

58 59

60 61

62

63 64 65

66 67

68 69

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination Cosentino, Charles Bird King, 232–233; and Cosentino, The Paintings of Charles Bird King, 81–82. Sarah Blake Wilk, “Donatello’s ‘Dovizia’ as an Image of Florentine Political Propaganda,” Artibus et Historiae 7 (1986): 17–19. “horn,” n. The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang, Eric Patridge and Jacqueline Simpson, eds. (London: Routledge, 1973), 457. Wolfgang Born also identifed this fgure as Abundantia. See Born, Still Life Painting in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 22. Cesare Ripa, Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery: The 1758–60 Hertel Edition of Ripa’s ‘Iconologia’ with 200 Engraved Illustrations, Introduction, Translations and 200 Commentaries by Edward A. Maser (New York: Dover Publications, Inc. 1971), 152. Frustrating the identifcation of this fgure as Fortune is the fact that she carries two cornucopiae: one “spill[s] money, crowns, medals, scepters, and marshal’s batons; … [the other] pens, brushes, and scrolls.” Much is also made of her inconstancy and shifting instability, symbolized by the wheel or ball she usually balances on, aspects that seem to be absent from King’s version. “Arts and Sciences: Minutes of Conversationes at Dr. Mitchill’s,” The Minerva; or, Literary, Entertaining, and Scientifc Journal 3(July 23, 1825): 248. Democritus Junior [Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy, What It Is, with the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostics, and Several Cures of it. In Three Partitions. With Their Several Sections, Members, and Subsections, Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically Opened and Cut Up (London: B. Blake, 16th ed., 1836), 168. Perhaps King was also aware that blindness itself was seen as a kind of emasculation, in the poet John Milton’s Samson Agonistes, for instance, and that blinding was often (in the case of Tiresias or Oedipus, to cite two well-known examples) a punishment for sexual violations. On the Apollo Belvedere in King’s painting, see Andrew Cosentino, The Paintings of Charles Bird King (1785–1862) (Washington, DC: Published for the National Collection of Fine Arts by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 233. On its racial valences in nineteenth-century America see Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 9–15. For a broader view of “the white beauty ideal as science,” see Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010), 50–70. The play, Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity! (1798) was written by George Colman the Younger. I rely here on Cassie Hemansson, Bluebeard: A Reader’s Guide to the English Tradition, (Oxford, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 48–49. Neil Saccamano, “The Sublime Force of Words in Addison’s ‘Pleasures’,” ELH 58, no. 1 (1991): 84. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the Whale (New York: Signet Classics, 2013), 251. The Africanist presence of this passage is more fully discussed in Gesa Mackenthun, Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature, in Routledge Transatlantic Perspectives on American Literature (London: Routledge, 2004, repr. 2014), 160–163. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 103. By 1830, when King painted this work, burlesque productions had been published and produced in the United States for 30 years. Some place the rise of the burlesque genre in the 1810 publication of John Poole’s Hamlet Travestie. There were six editions of the play between 1810 and 1820, including one American one, and Poole followed on its initial success with an Othello travesty in 1813. John Poole, Othello-Travestie In Three Acts, with Burlesque Notes, in the Manner of the Most Celebrated Commentators, and Other Curious Appendices (London: Printed for J. J. Stockdale, 1813); Stanley Wells, “Shakespearian Burlesques,” Shakespeare Quarterly 16, no. 1 (1965): 51; Lawrence Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 37. See Celia R. Daileader, Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50–74. Many of King’s Indian portraits were burned in the devastating 1865 fre at the Smithsonian Institution, but Henry Inman made a series of copies in oil. See William Gerdts and Carrie Rebora Barratt, The Art of Henry Inman. (Washington, DC: The National Portrait

Race-ing the Embodied Imagination

70 71 72 73 74

137

Gallery in association with the Smithsonian Institution, 1987), 40–41. Herman J. Viola, The Indian Legacy of Charles Bird King (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976), 14–21. See also Rowena Houghton Dasch, “Now Exhibiting:” Charles Bird King’s Picture Gallery, Fashioning American Taste and Nation 1824–1861 (Ph.D. diss: University of Texas at Austin, 2012), 135–148. Richard W. Shoch, Not Shakespeare: Bardolatry and Burlesque in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 31–33. Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), 3–5. Ayanna Thompson, Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). Wolfgang Born, “Notes on Still-Life Painting in America,” Antiques 50 (September 1945): 158–160. Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., “Charles Bird King, 205., The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream (The Anatomy of Art Appreciation, Poor Artist’s Study)”, in A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University, ed. Stephan Wolohojian (New York and New Haven, CT: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2003), 455.

5

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

On the third foor of Luman Reed’s gallery at No. 13 Greenwich Street in New York City, a curious painting by the artist Asher B. Durand stood in marked contrast to the stately elegance that surrounded it (see Figure 5.1). A barefoot boy and his dog are in a headlong chase after a terrifed pig who has vaulted over a ramshackle split-rail fence, escaping the settled landscape of the farm implied in the distance on the far right and returning to the leafy woods that anchor the left half of the composition. On one side, the pig was free and independent; on the other, it was food, an outcome to which Durand might have alluded in his companion panel, now lost, titled Farmers Eating Dinner. The outcome of this little chase was always unsettled, however, even if the artist did intend these two works as a pair. Boy Chasing a Pig was mounted within a door that could swing back and forth, a material support that added a phenomenological dimension to its meaning. “Catch me if you can,” the pig seemed to say. The swinging door held out the possibility that this chase could be enacted and reversed again and again. The elegance of Reed’s gallery belied this moment of disorder, however. It contained collections of shells and mineral specimens overseen by the choicest specimens of Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and British paintings. In contrast to many other collectors, however, Reed placed living American artists like Durand, Thomas Cole, and William Sidney Mount at the very apex of this hierarchy, making it a particularly symbolic space for the institutional formation of American art. Other collectors, notably Philip Hone and Daniel Wadsworth, had also assembled collections of Old Master painters and contemporary American artists, but Reed’s was one of the best.1 As if to confrm the nationalist pride an American should feel in the cultural achievement that his carefully assembled collection represented, Reed also commissioned Durand to paint copies of the seven American presidents to preside over the collector’s impeccable displays of culture and nature. Under the watchful eyes of George and Martha Washington, as well as the six men who followed in the offce of president, the space of the gallery would have conveyed a seamless natural, social, and political order, a sense of unimpeachable impregnability that also characterized the fate of Reed’s collections after his unexpected death in 1836. After a period of instability, it became the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts in 1844 and was fnally assured lasting fame in 1858 when it was absorbed into the “new fre proof Edifce” of the New-York Historical Society.2 This chapter explores the contradictions between control and chaos in Reed’s gallery, and, by extension, in a period that would come to be regarded as the infancy of American art, locating that chaos in an embodied imagination that was considered dangerous and unpredictable. In many ways, this simply expands on what other

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

139

Figure 5.1 Asher B. Durand, Boy Chasing a Pig, 1836, oil on wood, 9 1/8 × 26 1/8 in., 1940.483, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

scholars have written about the lability of history in the Jacksonian era. Giving pride of place to American artists in Reed’s gallery invoked the meta-cyclical historicity of classical republicanism, suggesting that in the life cycle of nations, the United States was young, bursting with vigor, and destined for greatness.3 Such dynamism could just as easily spin off into ruin, however, and Durand’s little sketch, mounted within a door, offered the sudden and disconcerting possibility that, like the boy’s chase after the hotfooted pig, all of this progress could reverse into chaos. I suggest that these divergent meanings of the imagination—as civilization and its ruin—wended their way through the margins of Reed’s gallery, creating fault lines within apparent solidity, order, and stability, the dominant aesthetic concerns of the antebellum era. They appear in door panels and minor genre paintings, in sketches and scraps of poetry and drawings that Durand, Reed, and others in their milieu generated in the meetings of the Sketch Club, a social, literary, and artistic club that augured the overthrow of the patrician social order that had once dominated New York. These liminal spaces spoke of a republican counter-aesthetic rooted in bodily functions like eating, disgust, and desire. These qualities of the informel intersected with the attributes assigned to the unregulated imagination, and, as in Charles Bird King’s The Vanity of the Artist’s Dream, this struggle for control often dipped into the slanting, ribald, and often racist language of the burlesque. The rightful location of these anxieties was not with African Americans or other people of color, however, but with men like Durand and Reed who were busily creating a new cultural order made in their own image.

Cultivating Taste Luman Reed’s gallery and townhouse were on New York’s tony east side, adjoining other spaces of leisure like Battery Park and Atlantic Garden, a pleasure garden so close that its music could be heard through open windows in the Reed mansion. “For years Mr. Reed enjoyed the luxury of listening to the choice music in the summer time,” the journalist Joseph Alfred Scoville remembered, “and witnessing the happiness of hundreds of couples who, at one time, made it a place of regular resort to

140

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

get their ice cream and talk sweet things.”4 Mary Cady Pemberton Sturges, who lived across the street from the Reeds and was married to his business partner, recalled that moving into their own house with its trees of apricots and peaches and bushes full of lilacs and rose bushes was “like being moved into a little Eden.”5 The Reed family had moved to the new house in August of 1832, however, after having lived next to the Reed & Sturges warehouse, a wholesale depot for the groceries Reed imported located at No. 125 Front Street on New York’s east side, as was the custom for merchants at the time. Their new location would have formed quite a contrast with their old life on the east side, where they had not been far from the city’s infamous Five Points neighborhood, and, of course, the busy docks that provided Reed with his wealth. Although pictured as still and empty in a calotype captured by Victor Prevost (see Figure 5.2), the Reed & Sturges warehouse would have been flled with barrels, casks, boxes, and bales of coffee from Havana, tea from China, raisins from Malaga, and tobacco from Virginia, and with local and more perishable produce from up the river. A small army of clerks would have been on hand to unload, inventory, and sell it all. It would have been loud, busy, and chaotic, and just as the packages were spirited away to be sold,

Figure 5.2 Victor Prevost, Reed & Sturges Warehouses, 125–127 Front Street, Victor Prevost photograph collection, 1853–1857, 80195d_PrevostPrint_032, Prevost 32, Gelatin silver contact print made before 1906 and donated to the New-York Historical Society by Eugene Hoffman, the son of Samuel V. Hoffman, on February 2, 1943, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

141

steamboats, packets, barges, and sloops would have arrived at the nearby docks facing Brooklyn and the East River, replenishing the supply of saleable goods in an unending cycle. Instead of the refned gallery’s classifcations of paintings, prints, shells, and minerals frozen in adamantine order, the warehoused goods in Prevost’s daguerreotype literally spill out of its strict, rectilinear openings. A small mountain of bales oozes out of an arched doorway at the far left of the photograph, and one of them is almost the size of the young boy (a clerk, perhaps?) who sits confdently atop another small promontory of jumbled boxes on the right. Reed made his fortune by turning this warehouse into a great maw of consumption and digestion, buying immense quantities of goods wholesale, “by the cask or package,” as Scoville recalled, and “jobb[ing] them out again to the country merchants in broken packages. They also received in exchange all sorts of country produce.” He continued, “They kept the store, No. 123, flled with this part of the business.”6 The Reed townhouse, with its Neoclassical façade and collections that connected it to a notion of everlasting, immemorial civilization, helped to obscure and efface the endless shipping and distribution, or metaphorically, consumption and digestion of Reed’s business. Reed made a fortune selling tea and other high-value goods, but the core of his business had always been providing goods that could easily spoil and decay. A classifed advertisement from October 1825, for instance, recorded a shipment of “50 casks prime Goshen Cheese, 23 frkins Lard, just rec’d and for sale by REED & LEE, 125 Front St.”7 The unctuous suppleness of the goods contained in this delivery was the polar opposite of the heavy, mahogany doors and carved marble fttings that adorned Reed’s new townhouse. Fittingly, however, townhouse and warehouse serve as faint mirror images of one another, as if acting out the Janus-faced nature of aesthetics itself. The warehouse was a vernacular structure that was not designed by a professional architect, but which nevertheless echoed its more refned relative. Both were four stories tall, the warehouse six bays wide to the townhouse’s four, and both were steeped in a neoclassical grammar of design that eschewed ornament. One space, however, was dedicated to a fantasy of inviolability and immortality, while the other heaved with consumption and elimination. Hints at the same process of consumption and digestion snaked their way into Reed’s gallery, however, despite its pretenses. Art’s status as a rich delicacy to be consumed by wealthy collectors would have been driven home by Reed’s copy after the Dutch painter Willem Kalf’s Still Life with Chinese Sugarbowl and Nautilus (see Figure 5.3). It announces voracious appetites for luxury through objects like a Turkey carpet, marble table, and a Wan-li porcelain bowl with polychrome fgures that seem to spring to life from the vessel’s blue-and-white ground. Beneath the moralistic message of Kalf’s memento mori rumbled a mercantile network whose easy access to luxuries raised the unholy specter of self-consumption through enervating, corrupting luxury.8 As if in recognition of this danger, a fanciful sea-creature curls around the translucent shell of a nautilus on the right side of the painting, while a long orange peel spirals off the side of the table to reveal the glistening citrus fruit. Drinking from the beast’s gaping, toothed maw, one would consume while appearing to be consumed.9 The painting raised a troubling question of who, exactly, was the master of tastes? Such a quandary would have been especially pointed for Reed, who, like those seventeenth-century Dutch traders, made his wealth by importing costly and potentially corrupting luxuries like Chinese tea, tobacco, coffee, sugar, spices, gin, and wine.10

142

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

Figure 5.3 Unknown, copy after Willem Kalf, Still Life with Chinese Sugarbowl, Nautilus Cup, Glasses, and Fruit, ca. 1675–1700, oil on canvas, 1858.15, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

These extravagances would have been noteworthy for a native of Coxsackie, New York who had not descended from wealth. According to Reed’s brother Abijah, the “greatest luxury” of their childhood was “in the way of eating and that with long intervals between was a piece of gingerbread.” Other than these occasional, humble treats, there was “pork, beef, bread, milk, bean porridge, and suppaum [a kind of hasty pudding] enough, but very little more.”11 In keeping with his humble beginnings, Reed was invariably memorialized as gentle man, uncomplicated in his simple tastes. He “approved of keeping a good store dog, which he liked to pet,” his nephew remembered, and “liked the decission [sic] and actions of President Jackson,” and, although Alan Wallach has noted the limits of Reed’s egalitarianism, he felt himself enough of a Democrat to commission Durand to paint a portrait of Jackson from life which then hung in the gallery.12 One has to look carefully to fnd records of opulence like Kalf’s painting or surviving household receipts for 2,000 oysters or an inventory of almost 250 bottles of fne wines and liquors. These details tell a more complicated story than the numerous hagiographical venerations of Reed that fourished after his early death.13 The contradictions revealed in these sumptuous materials recalls Terry Eagleton’s characterization of aesthetics as “radically double-edged.” Like culture, which in the early nineteenth

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

143

century was largely used as an active verb, rather than a stable noun, Eagleton has argued that aesthetics once enjoyed a much broader sense of a process that involved “the whole region of human perception and sensation, in contrast to the more rarifed domain of conceptual thought.” Cut down by bourgeois elites to a commodifed and diminished form of itself, this “discourse of the body” nevertheless offers the possibility that “there is something in the body which can revolt against the power that inscribes it.”14 In the 1830s, these bodily anxieties would have been closely linked to an embodied imagination identifed not only with taste, but with digestion. Thomas Reid, whose works “dominated college curricula in America for nearly a century” wrote that there was “a constant ebullition of thought [from the mind], a constant intestine motion.”15 He continued, “This continued succession of thought has, by modern philosophers, been called the imagination.” In part, the metaphor was appropriate because like digestion which involves chewing, swallowing, dissolution, and absorption within the body, imagination was a process “made up of many other operations of mind, as well as of conceptions, or ideas.”16 Assimilating food into the body also combined the exterior world with the body’s interior, producing things both welcome (life itself) and foul (feces). As late as 1852, some sages were still trying to map this aesthetic discourse onto human anatomy with extreme, and absurd, precision. As the bile was produced in the spleen, one writer contended, “and … afterwards drawn down into the liver; so the ideas, combined by imagination” became thought. Thereafter, the mind might select among them judiciously, “which process is analogous to the functions of the liver.”17 Indeed, the specter of eating, which necessitates taking a foreign object into one’s body in order to incorporate it into one’s sinew, bone, and viscera was just as troubling as an imagination which suggested a lawless congress between the outside world and the inner mind.18 Such indelicacy was well concealed within Reed, as within the orderly monument that was his three-story townhouse, however. Given its signifcance in the annals of American art, it is ironic that the only surviving record of this structure is an inchhigh sketch in ink preserved in the records of Alexander Jackson Davis, one of the city’s most sought-after architects at the time. Nevertheless, we know from frsthand accounts that Reed’s townhouse was one of the most refned interiors in the city. The merchant “was one of the frst to introduce gass [sic] into [a] private house and mention of it was made in the newspapers.”19 Heat was supplied by “a rude furnace heater,” and Reed also installed a rudimentary system of indoor plumbing, both of which were practically unheard-of luxuries in the early 1830s. These modern technologies made it possible to distance oneself from the constraints posed by darkness or fading light, from bodily discomfort, and, most signifcantly, bodily waste. The gallery’s consecration of static and refned culture over base nature was sometimes literal. Theodore Allen, Reed’s son-in-law, crowed from Naples as he sent a shipment of shells, “The greater part of the specimens [were] procured alive. [I] removed the animal myself.”20 In addition to the shells, which Reed had his agents collect in Costa Rica and St. Croix, as well as Australia and French Polynesia, by way of Boston, Reed purchased a collection of minerals from the Austrian Consul-General to the United States, Baron Alois J. X. von Lederer.21 These specimens were carefully classifed, numbered, and displayed in “low cabinets,” below the gallery’s paintings, a strategy of display that concretized art’s superiority over the merely biological and drew upon Enlightenment systems of Linnaean taxonomy.22 This collection of art and over

144 Culturing the Embodied Imagination a thousand unbound prints was kept on the third foor of the townhouse, metaphorically crowning the humbler domestic spaces below. These hierarchies were not simply a display of culture over nature or man over mollusk, but would have explicitly and implicitly established whiteness as a key ingredient of American cultural authority. A third of Reed’s library was devoted to books on history like George Bancroft’s History of the United States from the Discovery of the Continent, and his collection clarifed a racialized notion of liberty which saw white Anglo-Saxons as exclusively deserving of freedom.23 As Dorothy Ross has written of this Whiggish view of history, Americans saw themselves as connected to an “ancient lineage” that stretched from the Teutonic tribes of Rome to the Saxons who carried “the seeds of democratic and federal self-government … to England.” History was therefore not the product of “local, temporary conditions,” but rather was manufactured by the universal, ahistorical perfection of a “genetic chain of Teutonic liberty’in its millennial form, the last link but one, the bearer of liberty to the world.”24 If prolix books in Reed’s library envisioned an orderly and progressive culturing of American history and life, a quieter narrative of imperial domination over men and beasts was carried out in the house’s material contents. The façade of number 13 Greenwich Street, imagined from Davis’ miniscule sketch, communicated a restrained, Neoclassical simplicity, announcing its connection to centuries-past antiquity. Inside were works that acted as talismanic links to empire like a four-volume set of engravings of works in the Louvre, which celebrated the plunder gained from Napoleon’s 1798 Egyptian campaigns. Carrying out this message of culture over savagery were the furnishings in the gallery like the 12 mahogany armchairs en gondole, apparently made by the master cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe.25 The upholstered chairs had rounded backs for comfort, and were decorated with Egyptian lotus leaf motifs on the arm supports, making visible an iconography of empire in a material made available because of the incursions of European powers into the Greater Caribbean.26 Reed’s purchase of such a prized material displayed his ability to wrest order from nature, since the wood could not be grown on plantations due to a complex ecology and susceptibility to pests and disease, “def[ying] the Enlightenment idea that humans could master the living world,” as Jennifer L. Anderson has written. These messages were inscribed into Reed’s residence in other ways, however, such as the elegant dinner service decorated with Greek key scrolls and, on the pot-de-crème, a stylized animal-head grip rendered in gilded porcelain (see Figure 5.4). Picking it up to scrape some of the last remnants of sweet custard served at the Reeds’ elegant table, guests would have literally had nature under their thumbs. As if to write America’s own ascendent history in mahogany and marble, the materials used to construct the house itself were recalled as being the epitome of solidity and permanence. The house was “better constructed, the materials being of the very best quality and the mechanics employed ‘the best that money could procure,’” as Asher B. Durand’s son, John Durand, who worked for Reed as a clerk during these years, recalled, and the mansion itself was remembered as “in many respects the fnest mansion at that time in the city.”27 The marble “was purest Italian,” and the very doors in which the panels were set were “solid mahogany,” “the old, black, costly St. Domingo, now so rare,” another writer remembered.28 These luxurious materials were hardly used stintingly. The author Thomas Bangs Thorpe recalled that the parlors in Reed’s home had marble dado rails and mantelpieces which “extended to the ceiling in the form of rich, deep mouldings, which served for frames of splendid French mirrors.” The double parlor was also divided by a pair of “Corinthian columns of

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

145

Figure 5.4 Pot de crème with lid from Luman Reed’s dinner service, ca. 1832, glazed porcelain, overall: 4 1/4 × 3 × 2 1/2 in., 1992.5cd, Gift of John van Cortlandt Parker, Luman Reed’s great-great-great-grandson, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

exquisite workmanship,” also presumably of marble.”29 Even the pavement in front of the house was exceptional; the “immense sidewalk stones” were called “the wonder of the day,” for both their immense size and their rumored price, $250 each. As Scoville recalled, “We all used to stop and admire their great dimensions.”30 Despite the anxieties elicited by Willem Kalf’s still life or the Reed household’s indulgence in sensuous pleasures of the table, the embodied imagination’s vulnerabilities were hard to fnd in the aesthetic world Reed had created. Where they went, or rather, onto whom they were inscribed is explored in the following section.

“Rather Ultra” The exaggerated, Rabelaisian physicality of one of Durand’s genre paintings, The Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant On Learning of the Capture, By Treachery, of Fort Casimir (also known as Peter Stuyvesant and the Trumpeter) (Plate 11), comes as a bit of a shock amid the bloodless polish of Reed’s elegant home. The painting was praised by the reviewer for its “humor and excellence.” “The fat, roystering Trumpeter, is fnely embodied in the cunning and contented Heer, who stands to the right of Hardkopping Peter,” he noted approvingly. The critic for the well-heeled Knickerbocker was more ambivalent, objecting to the painting as “questionable” and the fgure of Schuiler as

146 Culturing the Embodied Imagination “rather ultra.”31 It was based on a scene in Washington Irving’s novel, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, and showed the moment when the enraged governor Peter Stuyvesant learned of Swedish plans to seize the Dutch-controlled military complex. He is accompanied by his trumpeter and aide-de-camp, Antony van Corlear, and a third, shadowy fgure by the name of Dirk Schuiler. According to John Durand, the “tall, frightened” fgure of Schuiler was modeled on Durand himself and his lanky frame and thin face are easily recognizable from later daguerreotypes. Judging from portraits which depict the painter with a rather bulbous nose, it is also possible that Durand’s fellow Sketch Club member, Thomas Seir Cummings, served as the model for the “dumpy, rubicund” Antony van Corlear, although Durand’s assertion that Luman Reed served as the model for Governor Stuyvesant seems rather a stretch.32 On one hand, the painting functions within Reed’s idealization of an antique, colonialist past, as discussed above. On the other hand, however, this history is complicated by the insertion of Durand’s own body for that of Schuiler, who was a “half-breed,” who was, in Irving’s novel, partly Native American. Rejecting the civilizing effects of the market economy, Schuiler was said to be “an utter enemy to work” who lied, stole, and cheated as a matter of habit. As Irving wrote, He was one of those vagabond cosmopolites who shark about the world as if they had no right or business in it, and who infest the skirts of society like poachers and interlopers … created for no other earthly purpose but to keep up the ancient and honorable order of idleness. Schuiler’s person, in other words, was defned by his liminality, for like other “persons of Indian mixture” he was “half civilized, half savage, and half devil.”33 Durand effected this sense of ambiguity visually by positioning Schuiler, also known as “Gallows Dirk,” between Stuyvesant and van Corlear, his head framed by a map on the wall that served as a trenchant counterpoint to his stateless abjection. Race thinking also forms the subtext of Durand’s second genre painting for Reed, The Pedler (see Figure 5.6) which was based on a similar work by the British genre painter David Wilkie which Durand would have been likely to know through a print source.34 It imagines a man of African descent with an overtly racialized physiognomy lingering at the margins of the room. The trope of a black, subordinate body in the corner of a room or at the elbow of some aristocratic patron reverberated from the Renaissance up to the nineteenth century, denying his or her humanity by making an individual an ornament.35 In the center of Durand’s picture is a white, multigenerational family of eight contemplating the wares of an itinerant salesman. The threat of pleasure snakes through the painting in the form of undulating lines, implied and actual, that take on a quality of visual drama in this shallow, stagelike scene. The sash that had bound the peddler’s sack lies on the foor in a sinuous tangle, an alluring S-curve that is echoed in the ribbons, brightly colored fabrics, and necklaces that are draped over the simple bench at the painting’s center. The heads and outstretched arms of the assembled group, particularly the entreating arms of the young son and daughter on either side of the central father character, also form an implied line that organizes their movements into a play of openness and desire. The denouement of this kinetic drama occurs at the point where this rolling stroke is interrupted. Hands thrust in his pockets, the calm householder looks down and away from the sack of shiny baubles, calm in his removal from their cupidity. He is a nonconducting node in a

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

147

gesticulating, grinning, twisting circuit of emotional and bodily interaction, a sturdy column of circumspection and authority. The white father’s frm, closed boundaries exist in a productive tension with the half-seen black man (see Figure 5.5) who serves as his double and alien.36 This man is roughly the same height and build as his white counterpart, and their bodies are placed so close together that the comparison seems inevitable. His marginal placement and open body, suggested by a gleam in his eye and a hint of shine on his red, open lips, suggest that he is an unassimilable barbarian in a scene that is dedicated to domesticity, the exotic spice or intoxicating alcohol in an antebellum diet. In contrast to the white adults’ restraint around consumption, he appears to be devoured by the doorway in which he stands, even as he apparently wishes to “devour” the shiny baubles before him. He is therefore both food and consumer, with an unhealthy taste for luxury that would merit his expulsion from a healthy republican body politic. As he eagerly takes in the scene of consumption before him while being disgorged by the opening door and potentially swallowed by it again, he recalls the Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s words about the grotesque body which was “a body in the act of becoming … never fnished, never completed … continually built, created.” He “swallows the world and is [himself] swallowed by the world.”37 To state the obvious, race was a crucial determinant in determining whether a person was consumer or consumed, both in antebellum United States in general and in Reed’s life in particular. Although the merchant did not record any specifc thoughts on race in writing, positing cultured whiteness over ‘barbaric’ darkness would have been

Figure 5.5 Detail, Asher B. Durand, The Pedler (The Pedlar Displaying His Wares), ca. 1836.

148

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

thoroughly uncontroversial in his social world. Reed’s uncle and frst business partner in Coxsackie, Epenetus Reed (1773–1857) is recorded in the 1820 Census as having “owned” one enslaved person. “Rosel” (probably Roswell) Reed, his uncle and business partner from 1815–1822 is likewise recorded as having enslaved two people in the 1800 Census. In addition, Sarah Reed of Coxsackie, likely Luman Reed’s older sister, who had also married Roswell, her second cousin and Luman’s uncle, was listed as enslaving four people in the 1810 Census.38 The notion that darker-skinned African Americans were meant to be deprived of liberty because they lacked taste, imagination, and sensibility was rationalized in terms of white people’s supposedly superior culture over nature. This argument would not have surprised Reed, who had a copy of James Kirke Paulding’s bilious defense of slavery in his library which spoke in the same terms. For Paulding, and likely for many in his Knickerbocker circle, the fact that “like their own native deserts [African Americans seem] to be incapable of cultivation, destitute of the capacity of improvement” was justifcation enough for slavery.39 Paulding and Durand were also well acquainted, as he had commissioned the latter to paint The Capture of Major Andre (1833), an iconic episode from the Revolutionary War said to demonstrate American troops’ virtue and restraint in refusing a bribe from the aristocratic British spy. I have not found any evidence that Durand was familiar with Paulding’s views on race but it is hard to imagine, given the intensity of Paulding’s conviction and the centrality of slavery to the politics of the era, that the issue went completely unmentioned in conversations in which Durand participated. In contrast to mythic acts of American self-denial like that of Major Andre, imagined black fgures like the one in The Pedler appear to be in a perennial state of sensuous appetite, incapable of cultivating and disciplining their imaginations. This was further supported by the entrenched ideology of stadial history which saw a progression from savagery to barbarism to agriculture, and fnally to the enlightened and industrializing present where an ability to regulate the imagination produced works of genius. Dugald Stewart, for instance, alluded to this theory in a chapter entitled “Of Imagination,” hypothesizing that “the rude compositions of the bard and the minstrel may have been instrumental in humanizing the minds of savage warriors, and in accelerating the growth of cultivated manners.” For Stewart, white Scandinavians and Celts were particularly advanced in their appreciation of poetry and music, “distinguished by a delicacy in the passion of love, and by humanity and generosity to the vanquished in war, which seldom appear among barbarous tribes.” Unsurprisingly, the prize for the most exalted taste went to England.40 Seen through this lens, black bodies were defned in terms of their static physical and material properties, rather than through the agentic and civilizing realm of culture. Although Luman Reed himself did not appear to have relied on enslaved labor, he would have had plenty of opportunities for viewing African Americans as raw material rather than sensing subjects since New York City was home to a bustling slave trade that was only outlawed in 1828. As in grander theories of civilizations, the appropriateness of dark-skinned people performing manual labor was justifed in terms of culture. In Robert Roberts’ House Servant’s Directory, for instance, a book which Reed owned, the publisher noted that “our oboriginal [sic] servants need grilling,” or, switching metaphors from meat to textiles, fnishing “[l]ike certain ‘woolens imported in a raw state’.”41 The implication was that black people had not cultured their senses of taste or imagination, making a detailed manual on the fner points of domestic labor necessary.

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

149

Playing in the Margins The literal and the metaphoric location of anxieties about culture and dissolution was not the black body, however, but in the margins of Reed’s gallery itself. Even in their most nascent stages, the panels placed at the gallery’s edges were infected with a rhetoric of unexpected transformation and antic disorder. In February of 1836, Reed wrote Thomas Cole to tell him, “I have been thinking of having some statuary painted on one of the doors in the back room, please think of it.” Later that month, he repeated the idea in a letter to William Sidney Mount.42 Painted versions of statuary, often rendered in grisaille, were common features on the external panels of ffteenth-century Netherlandish altarpieces by painters like Rogier van der Weyden and Jan and Hubert van Eyck, evoking the Renaissance paragone, a debate over which medium was superior, painting or sculpture. Their representational logic relied upon a trompe l’oeil style which thrives in shallow spaces like doors or cabinets, allowing for moments of confusion between what might be real and what was merely painted.43 Mount, who lived in Long Island, never made it to Manhattan during the spring of 1836, however, and, to the great and genuine grief of the artists he had supported, Reed died suddenly in May 1836. The paintings that were executed by Durand (who painted ten), Cole (who painted four), and George Whiting Flagg (who painted one) were rendered on soft wood panels set within six doors that punctuated the gallery. Two of these doors were large, dividing the double-parlor space in the middle, while four of the doors were smaller, and led to some bedrooms that were also housed on the third foor. As Timothy Anglin Burgard has noted, the panels seem to correspond to the artists’ larger and more fnished works within the gallery.44 Cole’s subjects—The Balloon Ascension or The Conquest of Air, Seascape with Waterspout, Black Birds on Mullein Stalks, and The Ruined Tower— alluded to the four elements, a cosmological theme whose scale and ambition alluded to those of The Course of Empire, Cole’s famous fve-painting cycle of an unnamed civilization that rises and falls in dramatic fashion.45 Similarly, Durand’s panels were rural genre scenes, and although only one of the panels by Flagg, Falstaff (see Figure 5.6), has been discovered, it seems closely related to another, larger painting by the artist depicting a very similar literary subject, Falstaff Playing King.46

Figure 5.6 George Whiting Flagg, Falstaff Playing King, ca. 1834, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 × 28 1/2 in., 1858.16, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

150

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

I contend that Reed and the artists he supported understood these door panels as a place to joke about a common frustration, an aesthetic system centered around an embodied imagination in a pragmatic and utilitarian society that mistrusted its potentially deranging effects. Although they probably did not think of these works as an “intricate, iconographical program,” a temptation against which Ella Foshay has cautioned, there are nevertheless relationships among Durand’s set of ten door panels that mirror the rhetoric of construction, dissolution, and transformation that attended imagination and the civilization it was thought to support.47 The artist’s Woodchopper (see Figure 5.7), for instance, cuts down trees which could be seen as the raw material for the boards in Barn Builders (see Figure 5.8), which would have been set into one of the larger doors subdividing the gallery. Back on one of the small doors in, a woman milks a cow (see Figure 5.9); across the room on the large door, that product might be transformed into butter in a churn (see Figure 5.10). Even the propulsive energies of School Let Out (see Figure 5.11), in which a crowd of exuberant children fan out from a country schoolhouse, seem to reach their highest state of fnish in Man Reading at a Table (see Figure 5.12) as a white-haired man (who looks a great deal like an older version of Reed himself) thumbs the pages of a book, no longer itching for a school-bell to dismiss him from his studies.48 And as discussed at the outset of this chapter, Boy

Figure 5.7 Asher B. Durand, The Woodchopper, 1836, oil on wood, 29 5/8 × 11 5/16, Collection of Mrs. Wendy Wolff.

Figure 5.8 Asher B. Durand, Barn Builders, 1836, oil on wood, 20 3/4 × 14 3/4 × 1 1/4 in., 1991.2.1, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Sturges III, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Figure 5.9 Asher B. Durand, Woman Milking a Cow, 1836, oil on wood, 7 3/4 × 11 1/2 × 1/2 in., 1959.118, Gift of Elinor M. Parker, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

152

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

Figure 5.10 Asher B. Durand, Woman Churning Butter, 1836, oil on wood, 18 5/6 × 12 3/16 in., Collection of Mrs. Jean Wolff Stevens.

Figure 5.11 Asher B. Durand, School Let Out, 1836, oil on wood, 20 15/16 × 14 13/16 × 1 1/8 in., 1940.482, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Chasing a Pig might relate to a missing panel that was referred to by Reed as “Farmers eating dinner under a tree.”49 Haying Scene (see Figure 5.13), which pictures the harvest of hay, an agricultural product that was used to feed livestock over a long winter, might have been related to a scene that is no longer extant, perhaps one picturing the spring grass that hay is harvested from, or the livestock that it was used to feed. Read in one direction only, these panels helped to fgure a mythical and idealized American republic in which industry andimprovement contributed to an upward trajectory of prosperity and virtue. Durand’s evocation of building and “culturing” would have had special resonance in this discourse, since the growth of American art itself was discussed in similar terms. “Let us make something of ourselves out of our own materials & we shall then be independent of others,” wrote a confdent Reed to Durand. “It is all nonsense to say we have not got the materials.” The correct way to develop those materials required a metaphorical shift from building to the “culture of the imagination” which implied that, if properly cultivated, imagination might transform the American republic into a proper empire. The emphasis here was on manful

Figure 5.12 Asher B. Durand, Man Reading at a Table, 1836, oil on wood, 29 1/4 × 11 in., 2006.13, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ralph F. Wolff, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

Figure 5.13 Asher B. Durand, Haying Scene, 1836, oil on wood, 24 3/8 × 11 3/8 × 1/2 in., 1963.9, Bequest of Mrs. Andrew Chalmers Wilson, great-grandaughter of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

154

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

control over the “apparently lawless” imagination. As one writer put it in an essay titled “The Culture of the Imagination,” published in 1841, The reason of so much severe censure of poetry and imagination, by logical men, is from the examples they have daily before them, of men of weak imaginations, who are also weak reasoners. [… ] In a strong man, however, the imagination is a robust and sturdy faculty, and can do its work manfully.50 Doors, however, swing both backward and forward, and whether Durand consciously intended it or not, with every movement through them, there would have been an implication that all of this progress might suddenly reverse. This dialectical rhetoric of culture and construction versus dissipation and ruin would have resonated with Cole’s celebrated fve-painting series Course of Empire, the jewel of Reed’s gallery which pictured the formation—and spectacular dissolution—of an ersatz, vaguely classical civilization from its “savage” to “pastoral” stages, to its apotheosis and, fnally, destruction. Such jumps violated a republican aesthetics in the period that stressed, as Ross Barrett has written, “edifcation, pacifcation, and harmonization,” particularly “in the face of growing disorder and the accelerating process of democratization.”51 As important as luxury and the specter of political violence were in the early nineteenth century, however, imagination’s pivotal infuence over the judgment (discussed in the previous chapter) meant that it was the governing structure behind both of them.52 Left uncorrected, the imagination could help cultivate a taste for wealth and licentiousness, and, with them despotism and tyranny. Despite confdent predictions of the powers of manful and robust cultivation, the bidirectionality of this cultivating process meant that such instability could never be completely eradicated. Discretion was key in managing these contradictory imperatives, something that Cole should have understood better than most. As he famously suggested toward the end of his life, “instead of working according to the dictates of feeling and imagination, I have painted to please others in order to exist,” and he rued the fact that, as he put it, “my imagination should not have been cramped, as it had been.”53 Only a few years before his commission from Reed, he had famously differed with another patron, the Baltimore collector Robert Gilmor, over how much imagination was appropriate, with Gilmor objecting that an imagined “composition” of American scenery that diverged from truth and nature was destined for failure. Cole wrote back cautiously so as not to anger his powerful patron, but nevertheless emphasizing, I really do not conceive that compositions are so liable to be failures as you suppose. … If I am not misinformed, the fnest pictures which have been produced, both Historical and Landscape, have been compositions: certainly the best antique statues are compositions. Cole continued, writing, “If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry.”54 Cole took the point as far as he dared, but since imagination was synonymous with social and even political power, conservative patrons of American art, including Gilmor, a member of what Wallach has dubbed “the remnants of the ultraconservative landlord faction,” had serious reservations about how widespread its applications should be in American culture.55

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

155

For wealthy landowners, as for the more socially progressive and yet still socially conservative Democrats like Reed, nature had been provided by God so that it could be mastered and controlled, seamlessly collapsed into an industrialized present and a “savage” past. Seriously challenging this orthodoxy was unlikely to meet with the approval of patrons, as demonstrated by a small painting that Cole tried to interest Reed in called The Titan’s Goblet (Plate 13). Drawing on some as-yet unidentifed myth, Cole placed a brobdinangian goblet at the center of a landscape.56 It is so large that a vaguely classical city hugs its shores and the sailboats that ply its waters are mere specks in comparison to its size. The moss-covered rim of the massive “goblet” clearly evokes decay, while its uncertain references to Titans summons the kind of impossible time travel that was invariably identifed with the mobile imagination’s rapid scalar shifts. This painting offered none of the assurance supplied by The Pastoral or Arcadian State (see Figure 5.14), that the culture represented by the Titan’s goblet would be disciplined by or become congruent with nature, however, a sense of disjunction that also plays out in compositional terms. There is little to temper the transition from culture to raw nature, from the goblet/city in the foreground to the forbiddingly rocky, purple mountains in the distance. Cole had been able to get away with these startling and dramatic shifts in his wilderness scenes; as the curator Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque noted in 1987, works by Cole like Falls of Kaaterskill “break so decisively with the orderly rules of smooth recession and secure vantage point … [that they] border on aesthetic bad manners.”57

Figure 5.14 Thomas Cole, The Course of Empire: The Arcadian or Pastoral State, 1858.2, Gift of The New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, New-York Historical Society, digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions.

156

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

Paintings which were clearly “compositions” rather than topographical “views” were another matter, however, and ran afoul of a prejudice against the imagination’s propensity toward vice and sensuality. The fact that there is no soothing, pastoral middle distance in Titan’s Goblet to suggest that this civilization had achieved harmony between wildness and civilization was a worrying possibility for a nation bent on explosive growth that erased forests at an impressive clip.58 Despite the cataclysmic end of Cole’s Course of Empire cycle, which shows a society glutted with excess and fnally suffering the political and social ramifcations for their iniquity, these extremes were fundamentally balanced. Titan’s Goblet was not, and without this tempering of savagery (marked by the mountainous landscape in the distance) and luxury (marked by the civilization perched on the goblet’s fanciful banks), the picture allows the imagination to run rampant. Tellingly, it failed to impress Reed, who declined to purchase the work and sent it back to Cole without comment in 1834. Reed’s rejection of Titan’s Goblet might give the impression of a judicious and conservative patron who disliked agitation and change but his biography belies this calmly serene exterior. The early nineteenth century was a time when market transactions felt drastically accelerated. “The life of a merchant is, necessarily, a life of peril,” Joseph Hopkinson wrote in his 1832 “Lecture upon the Principles of Commercial Integrity.” “He can scarcely move without danger. He is beset on all sides with disappointments, with fuctuations in the current of business, which sometimes leave him stranded on an unknown bar, and sometimes sweep him helpless into the ocean.”59 Reed, who “liked to see and hear of improvements and enterprize” and “was allied to new conceptions and new modes of proft, credit, and gain” was well suited for such a moment. As if taking up Hopkinson’s maritime rhetoric, Reed’s nephew recalled, “He favored changes and alterations to suit current demands of trade and trafc [sic]; although he discarded unknown channels.”60 Reed’s go-ahead ambition matched a city that was changing at breakneck speed. New York’s population practically doubled in size every decade from 1820–1850 and the city was accordingly shaped and processed to make room for people and industry.61 Bluffs along the Hudson River were fattened to make level ground for warehouses and factories; farms and gently rolling felds were parceled into lots for speculators. Even fuid shores were turned into marketable commodities, as the riverine shores west of Tenth Avenue were flled in with debris to produce salable “water lots.”62 Working on the diffcult composition of Consummation, Cole alluded to this manic pace of development, writing Reed to explain that the delay in fnishing was because “I have had to tear down some of the buildings that were nearly fnished in order to make improvements a la mode N York.”63 Cole’s patron for the ambitious series was able to offer the Medicean sum of 2,500 dollars for those 5 paintings because of profts gained from anticipating the quickmoving cycles of supply and demand that were inherent to the mercantile trade. As a young man, Reed had moved from one partnership to the next. There was a failed attempt to buy lumber from Oswego, New York with his brother and sell it in Baltimore which resulted in losing their entire investment; a deal to purchase shares of his father’s farm with the understanding that they would buy it for a favorable price after his death, but their father “not liking our management thought we had better quit, [and] we did so,” wrote his brother Abijah.64 After these false starts, however,

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

157

Reed learned to manipulate these fuctuations in price and demand more skillfully. He formed a partnership with his uncle, Roswell Reed, and established his warehouse and store on Front Street in 1817–1819, away from where the rest of the wholesale grocers were clustered, a move considered “bold,” even “suicidal,” since few believed a groceries business could prosper away from Coenties Slip.65 Even in this situation, Reed took on the greater degree of uncertainty, for, “Roswell Reed supplied the credit and capital and stayed in Coxsackie; Reed ran the grocery business, in New York City.”66 It was not simply Reed’s willingness to brook his own fnancial “embarrassment” (defaulting on credit, in other words) that made him successful, but his understanding that public misfortune could be manipulated for proft, long before scholars defned “disaster capitalism” in the twenty-frst century. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1822 struck, they moved the frm up to then-suburban Greenwich Village and eluded the worst of the outbreak and the mayhem that it wrought upon the city. Others did so, as well, but Reed surmised that the city would be paralyzed after the epidemic and in need of goods, thereby making a tidy proft. And when the Great Fire of 1835 struck New York, and most fre insurance was rendered valueless, Reed had the brilliant idea to load his most costly goods, mainly “teas, coffee, spices, and foreign liquors,” onto a schooner and take them out into the harbor, where a hastily bought marine insurance policy in the amount of $30,000 insured their value.67 Thus, Reed was not just a simple merchant of goods but a canny and confdent manipulator of credit and proft, too. The swinging doors in Reed’s gallery seemed tacitly to acknowledge that fuctuations from country to city, wilderness to settlement, were more routine than the fantasy of changelessness that his townhouse and its interiors constructed. The unprecedented mobility that such expansion of capital, divorced from labor, allowed was perhaps freeing—if you knew how to play the game—but it was also frightening in its scope, speed, and restless energy. In appropriately measured doses, however, Reed was open to kinetic play of Durand’s sketches of building and children playing, or George Whiting Flagg’s small panel of a rotund Falstaff cowering under his shield in fright. He also apparently collaborated with Durand to some degree in planning his door panels in a spirit of fun that would have been familiar from their membership in the Sketch Club, discussed below. Writing to Cole, still stuck in Catskill, in the spring of 1836 as Durand was busily painting ten panels on site, Reed explained, “I have not told you what subject Durand has painted on the large Door, one is a Woman Churning under a Shed with a Child on the foor & Landscape in the distance.” He continued, “Now for this we want a cheese basket & cheese ladder and want you to make a drawing of both & bring with you if you fnd it convenient.” Cheese baskets and the ladders were common implements in nineteenth-century farmsteads, used to strain the liquid whey from the curds of cheese, with the ladder suspended over a kind of tub.68 Although the frm of Reed & Lee (one of the corporate predecessors of Reed & Sturges) had also done a brisk business in cheese, lard, and butter in the 1820s, Reed was almost certainly not planning to make his own cheese, but rather appeared to be collaborating with Durand on his oil sketch for the door.69 Further evidencing this claim, in his letter to Cole, he added, rather inscrutably, “They are wanted to hang on a post.”70 There are two posts supporting the roof of the shed in Durand’s Woman Churning Butter (see Figure 5.12) on which these supplies could have been “hung,” and the fact that they do not appear may simply be a result of the unusually harsh winter of 1835–1836. More to the point, cheese, like butter, is also

158

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

cultural product, and the appearance of a cheese basket in the small painting would have amplifed Durand’s message of transformation, a topic that the two men might well have discussed in the warmth of Reed’s heated gallery that winter. This spirit of artless play, backed perhaps by harder economic realities, echoed through Durand’s other contributions to the project. In Boys Playing Marbles (see Figure 5.17), two boys play in the foreground, revealed by a half-open door that gives the viewer a sense of having entered in medias res. Given that the actual door on which this painted door was rendered might plausibly have been left ajar, the small panel would have provided lingering viewers a chance for a wrenching perceptual dislocation, that is, seeing a miniature, painted half-open door within a much larger, physical half-open door. In the rest of the composition, the capricious rhetoric of trompe l’oeil is expressed in visual riddles that play on similar themes of misprision. Beyond the two playing boys is a genteel couple who appear to be promenading while making polite comments on the immense architectural space. In the far distance, there is a completely inexplicable double column of soldiers marching in centurions’ dress, marked by their unmistakable red cloaks, bare legs, and vermillion imperial crests (see Plate 13). The outlandishness of these fgures in what otherwise might appear to be an American antebellum setting is matched by the architectural grandeur of the space itself which surely had no real-world equivalent in 1836 New York. Two linked

Figure 5.15 Thomas Cole, The Titan’s Goblet, 1833, oil on canvas, 19 3/8 × 16 1/8 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Samuel P. Avery Jr., 1904.

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

159

Figure 5.16 Asher B. Durand, Boys Playing Marbles, 1836, oil on wood, 27 × 21 1/2 × 1/2 in., 1940.484, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

passageways bound by colonnades roughly 15 feet tall disappear into two larger chambers before terminating at yet another passageway marked off by two rich, red drapes. Throughout, Durand has covered the stone with fourishes to suggest marble veining, a popular decorative painting technique that was often dismissed as deceptive trickery.71 Like the other panels that Durand painted for Reed, Boys Playing Marbles was after more than straightforward mimesis—more than looking at, but rather seeing through, to revive terms employed in Chapter 3—and rather offered viewers a brief and destabilizing sense of losing oneself within a limitless spatial fantasy. The back-and-forth play of reference and referral that the doubleness of this panel would have evoked—a game between two boys, as well as a game between two worlds, one imaginary and one real—would have been amplifed by the lively Blind Man’s Bluff (Figure 5.17). This sketch was likely on a nearby panel, possibly on an opposite door, and shows a mirthful girl chasing two smaller, male playmates, upending the usual hierarchies of size and gender. Indeed, the game was often played during holidays and allowed for a temporary reversal of traditional structures of authority in which “the oldest were happy to become children again, and the wise and the aged to lay aside wisdom and years.”72 Here again, however, games of child’s play give way to more sophisticated games of visual recognition. The painting features another halfopen door, this time located toward the back of the room rather than at the crucial

160

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

Figure 5.17 Asher B. Durand, Blind Man’s Bluff, 1836, oil on wood, 1940.481, Gift of Dudley Butler, grandson of Luman Reed, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

threshold between the gallery space and the painting as in Boys Playing Marbles.73 This playfulness masked a competitive and speculative economy whose reversals and overnight successes were sudden and dramatic. The game of marbles can be read as a kind of allegory for the United States’ cash-based economy which was subject to infation, speculation, “fevers” and panics such as the one that would descend on the country (and the world) in 1837. Indeed, “The object of the game was to claim opponents’ marbles by hitting them with one’s own marbles, risking them in the process; not playing marbles ‘for keeps’ was not really playing.”74 That these inversions of authority and expectations occur in the margins is no mistake. Margins, as the anthropologist Mary Douglas famously argued, are liminal spaces that help to concretize sociological moments of transition, danger, disorder, and impurity, departures from the norm that help to establish a larger pattern of order, stability, and safety.75 Writing in a similar vein, though drawing on the Soviet literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s grotesque body, the medievalist Michael Camille memorably argued that the profane depictions of scatological, sexual, and social deviance in the margins in medieval manuscripts were not bizarre and uncreditable departures from Gothic piety but rather, like the sites of power in medieval society that he examined, helped to limn boundaries of “arenas of confrontation, places where individuals often crossed social boundaries,” particularly along class lines.76 In the same way, by daring

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

161

to explore their opposites, Durand’s small paintings clarifed a social and artistic commitment to bourgeois control over nature, a word whose unassuming air of innocence masks its metonymy for the world. This mastery was easier to effect in theory than it was in daily life, and Reed’s townhouse once again supplies an example of how chaos bred in the margins. As if in secret congress with the little moments of dissolution and Rabelaisian excess fgured in the door panels, the indoor plumbing at No. 13 Greenwich Street, which was so symbolic of the United States’ advanced state of progress, also never drained properly. Knowledgeable commentators, drawing on the miasma theory of disease then accepted as epidemiological fact, intimated that this caused the merchant’s sudden demise in May of 1836. The “seven inch iron drain pipe … [was] too level and limited for water soon chocked up and ceased to fow freely.” This “fouled the air of the house and worried [Reed] much; for in the summer of 1836, he fell a prey to a fatal fever, although that evil was not proclaimed to the public.”77 Even in a gaslit, furnaceheated, refned interior like Reed’s house, intellectual progress could not quite outpace the body’s lower faculties of digestion, excretion, and olfaction. The notion of flth as a necessary, though evil, adjunct to progress was a common theme in a period which saw the global rise of industrial capitalism. In Manchester, Alexis de Tocqueville observed with disgust the “[h]eaps of dung, rubble from buildings, putrid, stagnant pools,” and the “marshy land which widely spaced muddy ditches can neither drain nor cleanse.”78 New York was not Manchester, but its citizens were certainly familiar with the noisome flth and disorder that a sudden and precipitous rise in population and industry could cause. These material realities also seemed to hint at fears of excess and indiscipline, ciphers for the appetitive and economic consumption that was both necessary and anathema to the moral and cultural order that men like Reed and Durand presumed to author. Luxury thus caught them in an impossible bind, though not an uncommon one. “A civilized gentleman differs from a savage principally in the multiplicity of his wants,” explained Lady Morgan, an Irish novelist and literary doyenne. Citing Bernard Mandeville’s axiom that “extravagance is the nursing mother of commerce,” she summed up the catch-22 that culture and progress presented, exclaiming, “What, indeed, are railroads and macadamisation, … patent corkscrews, and detonating fowling-pieces, safety coaches, and cork legs, but luxuries at which the wisdom of our ancestors would have scoffed, yet how could the nation now get on without them?”79

Morbid Extravagance The kind of hijinks memorialized in the doors from Reed’s gallery would have been perfectly familiar to Durand, Reed, and their fellow members of the Sketch Club, a literary, artistic, and social club founded in 1827 that challenged its members to display their wit, taste, and imaginative faculties at regular meetings that called for drawings and poems produced on the spot.80 The club was modeled after the English “Munro Academy” held by a physician and amateur artist Thomas Munro and the Sketching Society, founded in 1799 by members of the latter. The Sketch Club met bi-weekly, every other Friday between November and April, at the home of one of the members for an hour of sketching (or versifying) on a given theme, after which food and drink were served.81 Themes for the meetings were primarily taken from literature, particularly from well-known British poets like Felicia Hemans, Lord Byron, and

162

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

James Thomson. These meetings were not merely social visits but rather highlighted the importance of the convivial exercise of the imagination since “solitary refection” was thought by philosophers like Dugald Stewart to lead to morbid and deranged fantasies.82 The club was later memorialized as “a very prominent artistic and social institution … [including] many who have since achieved renown in Literature and Art and whose names are closely and honorably connected with the intellectual progress of the country.” And yet the actual meetings were far from somber or academic, and, through humor, created a nervous dialectic between authority and abnegation, the duty of earnest labor and the nonproductive pleasures of the imagination. Although these worries took several forms, the most visible was the near-constant discussion of the appropriateness of various kinds of food and drink in club minutes and regulations. Reviewing this early history for the Century Club, John Durand noted its “great fear of the sensual element of club life,” and the “mental commotion” that talk of eating and pleasure seemed to cause. Indeed, the putative suitability of various “eatables and drinkables” was actually encoded in the club’s third bylaw. Just as the imagination was not prohibited but rather forced to exist within an economy of license and restraint, club members refused to reject outright the pleasure that eating to satisfaction might confer. As they remarked, Your Committee have deemed it not advisable to lay down any strict or defnite regulation respecting the quality or quantity of refreshments to be consumed at each meeting, but to leave that matter to the taste or convenience of the several members. Notably, however, this freedom was subject … to the general understanding that the Club is not an association of gourmands or bon-vivants, and that its objects have relation rather to the head, than to the once mutinous but certainly not unimportant member of the body corporeal, the belly.83 Given the fact that eating was regulated (and not regulated) in the club’s regulations, and that the subject occupied so much of their thoughts, it seems appropriate to wonder whether the members protested too much. For it was the belly, time and again, that found its way into the records of the club. As they explained, Claret and Cake may be found highly gratifying at one time, and Punch and Pumpkin-pies be welcomed at another; Raisins and other simple productions of the soil may be swallowed with relish at one meeting, and Sandwiches or Oysters incorporated with sensible pleasure at the next. Therefore, your Committee beg leave to recommend that the disposition of edibles be left to be regulated by every individual at his own pleasure and convenience.84 The farcical tone of much of these records makes this discourse on eating easy to dismiss, but the specter of luxury and its antisocial and antidemocratic pleasures was more than a joke or annoyance. Early club records record “the frst great outbreak” of “extravagance” occurred at the poet James Abraham Hillhouse’s house in New Haven

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

163

where “the drawing room doors were thrown open and an elegant supper appeared before the astonished guests.” Upon this outrage, “[a] general revolt took place.” Hillhouse was stripped of his membership for “entertaining too lavishly,” and The Sketch Club itself then dissolved for eight months and reconstituted in order to strip Hillhouse of his membership after his unforgivably rich bill of fare.85 Paradoxically, however, this “‘rule’ was more observed in the breach than in the observance,” as club offcer Thomas Seir Cummings recalled.86 Such self-conscious violation of norms around morality and consumption recall the Wednesday Evening Club and the gentlemanly propensity toward drinking to excess at the same time as upholding exacting standards of decorum. Certain members of the Sketch Club were more inclined toward correctness than others on this point, however. The minutes for the meeting on January 21, 1830, noted that “In the absence of [Samuel F. B.] Morse,” who was not a teetotaler but nevertheless practiced moderation in alcohol consumption, “whiskey punch fourishes.”87 Drinking as an aide to the imagination (or was it camaraderie?) was a frequent occurrence. In the winter of 1829, there was “No drawing, but of corks.” And three years later after a meeting hosted by Dr. John Neilson, Jr. where the members had been plied with a “vintage of ’97,” the Sketch Club’s secretary noted that the members had to be “furnish[ed] … with charts of the route,” presumably because they were too drunk to make it home without help.88 Since these minutes were read aloud at the next meeting in order to be approved, they would have functioned as a kind of performance, one that wittily shifted among a multitude of ideas, historical periods, and literary allusions that were also considered to be under the purview of imagination’s charms. At one spring meeting, for instance, the attendees parodied the sort of antiquarian connoisseurship in which gentlemen were supposed to be adept, discussing the “ancient” history of the rocking chairs in which they sat. “One supposed they must be Spanish, from the gravity and dignity of manner wherewith one must necessarily rise, if he rise at all.” Another reckoned they were “charmed, as he declared he never sat down in them without going to sleep,” and claimed they were made by “the same that made the famous carpet of Bisnajar.”89 There were other discourses on supposedly intellectual topics. Three successive meetings in March 1829, for instance, were given over to discussing “the domestic economy … of Bull-frogs.” Later that May, Giulian Verplanck held forth on “antediluvian butter churns” while William Cullen Bryant set out to prove that diving into a snowbank was “the perfection of bathing.”90 Self-consciously performing their own marginality, cluelessness, and low status, they simultaneously reaffrmed their importance by reproducing the very cultural hierarchies they sought to mock. A crucial element of this low humor depended on grotesque bodies that swill and gobble, burp and fart. Notably, the club’s discussion of various topics—cockroach traps and butter churns, Romantic poetry and philosophical questions—was pictured as a kind of digestion. On April 12, 1832, the secretary noted that “we had digested the whale,” clarifying that members of the group had gone to see a harpooned whale that had been towed to Castle Garden, where “certain members of the Sketch Club of course visited his aquatic majesty for the purpose of taking a scientifc survey, the result of which was discussed at the meeting. Thus [we] metaphorically digested him.”91 These ludic acts performed the body and its liminality, making intellectual digestion a ritual that reinforced exclusive social ties just as much as eating stewed oysters and toasting with champagne. They also recalled associationist theories of imagination as digestion, the “ebullition of thought” and “constant intestine motion”

164

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

of Reid, which acknowledged that considering such an astounding variety of ideas could be a source of ideality, as well as disgust. Although the group members positioned their discussions of imagination and eating as witty novelties, the interlinked systems of ingesting and digesting food and taking in images and ideas through the mind had been a topic of deep interest for philosophers and physicians in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Theories of dreaming and digestion suggested a compelling alternative to more mechanistic explanations of consciousness and selfhood, positing a subjectivity that was produced by the interrelated operations of imagination and human physiology. These ideas were taken up by intellectuals ranging from Scottish Common Sense philosophers like Reid and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to cookbook authors like William Kitchiner, discussed in the previous chapter. The linkage between the regulated imagination and the proper way to eat also shaped the concerns of phrenologists and physicians like Andrew Combe, Robert Macnish, and Orson Squire Fowler, and obsessed British Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge.92 The timing of this bubbling of activity was not coincidental, as the 1820s and 1830s saw medicine’s “emergence as a distinct institutional and professional practice” and the subsequent construction of a so-called “abnormal” body, as the Romanticist Paul Youngquist has argued.93 Refections on the imagination’s physiological effects were also pervasive in American periodicals of many different types during the antebellum period. A writer for The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal thus cautioned readers over “the power of the imagination over the stomach.” Foods that were normally perfectly digestible, under the infuence of the imagination, could become “heavy as lead.” Led astray, the imagination could make “cucumbers and pickles … as indigestible as fints; … and the pulp of the most delicious watermelon … as nauseating as Araucanian horsefesh.”94 Literary journals like the Minerva told of a poet and physician who was reported to have imagined that his body was butter, and was flled “with the continual dread of melting,” while the Monitor related a story of a person who fancied he was a teapot.95 Short notices like these frequently appeared in popular periodicals with titles like “Infuence of the Imagination on Health” or “Another Instance of the Power of Imagination,” warning readers of the imagination’s ability to make victims believe that they were starving, rabid, or dying of cholera.96 The satirical nature of these associations belied a deeper seriousness, as William Cullen Bryant contended in 1835, for example, that he had “watched the course of the cholera at New York to the end, and [knew] that it borrows a great part of its terrors from the imagination.”97 The dangers of a rapid, associative imagination subtended these discussions, and its dialectic of pleasure and disease were implicated in their moral effects. The physician and phrenologist Charles Caldwell, a student of Benjamin Rush, thus denounced Americans as “slaves of appetite” and claimed that by “excessive and luxurious” eating, they became “gross and useless masses of animality, retaining but little of man about them, except the bloated and dishonored form.”98 The common thread among all of these ideas was adherence to French theories of vitalism that saw the human body as animated by vital fuid, life force, or other vague energies that coincided with the ethereal powers of the imagination. Sketch Club members may also have been aware of the vitalist theories of Sylvester Graham via Durand,

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

165

who had been a good friend of the reformer’s since boyhood. In the place of the meatheavy traditional American diet, Graham recommended a diet of whole grains and plenty of vegetables built around “coarse, wheaten bread” rather than that made from “superfne four.”99 Like Caldwell, Graham also argued that “[a] very large proportion of all the diseases and ailments in civic life” could be cured by a proper diet, in this case, eating bread made from unrefned four.100 Race thinking is never far behind in these constructions of purity and wholesomeness, however. Like Caldwell, who was later to become a leading advocate of polygenesis and scientifc racism, Graham also had in mind a fantasy of a hypersexual, hyperembodied racial Other, and couched his promotion of baked bread in civilizationist terms of racial and imperial superiority over those who subsisted on rice, potatoes, plantains, or yams.101 A wholesome diet was not enough to ward off depravity, however, and he also argued that sex, and particularly ejaculation, disturbed the body’s vital energies and infamed the imagination. This symbolic economy of eroticism, perversity, and gross materiality intersected with the aesthetic discourse of the embodied imagination, expressing itself in the work of American artists who held themselves as exemplars of virtue. I have argued elsewhere, for instance, that this nexus of issues animates Durand’s glowing and sensuous Ariadne (see Figure 3.8) which invites viewers to linger on and become absorbed by the maiden’s voluptuous and, in some versions of the myth, post-coital, body. This was not simply a concern of Grahamites like Durand, however, and the notion that culture might decay the civic body into a state of gross, appetitive desire dogged the fne arts in this period in the United States. As Huntington explained a few years later in the opening lines of his treatise on the arts, “The man who is a true lover of the fne arts is generally benevolent and cheerful … a devout worshipper of the great Author of all that is beautiful and good.” In contrast, The man who is a sensualist … whose chief care is that his table should be well furnished with delicious viands, whose eye lights up only when bottles and glasses begin to rattle, whose cheeks are streaked with the unnatural redness of high living is rarely a lover of art unless it be the art of cooking or making punch.102 Huntington may have sought to reject this “sensualist” discourse, but his condemnations of the mere suggestion of hedonic pleasures limned anxieties that bloomed and rankled beneath the apparently unruffed surfaces of beauty and taste. In Huntington’s case, this is more than metaphor, for as a young artist, he remembered having executed “two colossal heads of Rage and Laughter, strangely painted on the walls of a room in Hamilton College,” Huntington’s alma mater, where they served as a subversive model for the “uproarious students who gloried in insubordination, till they were effaced by the command of that discreet friend of propriety, the late Dr. Penny.”103 Huntington’s concern was understandable. Leaders in the period frequently sounded alarms about the arts’ dangerous propensity toward decay and formlessness, warning of their ill effects on the personal body—and, by extension, the body politic—in terms that were closely linked to corporeality and eating. Speaking on the “prospect of art

166 Culturing the Embodied Imagination in the United States” before the Artists’ Fund Society in Philadelphia in 1840, for example, the Reverend George W. Bethune claimed that it was “most unkind to feed this generous appetite [for the arts] into morbid extravagance, as unkind as it was in that populace who smothered their patriot with the robes they heaped upon him for his honor,” alluding to an obscure story of Draco, an Athenian lawgiver who was suffocated by his countrymen. Indulging the imagination by touring Europe was linked to a similarly stifing fate, albeit via “dinners at Very’s, ices at the Café de Paris, or green oysters at the Rocher de Cancale,” elitist morsels that made Americans “too good to be plain republicans.”104 Predictably, these anxieties about a grotesque, excessive, and uncivilized body were projected onto women and racialized Others, notably in the performative verses composed at Sketch Club meetings. A collaborative poem written by Henry Inman, Robert Sands, William Cullen Bryant, John Neilson, and John Inman at a meeting in 1830, for instance, told the story of Zantippe, scold and wife of Socrates, characterizing her in blatantly misogynistic terms as a “nasty old bitch[,] fat and greasy” who had 17 illegitimate children. The poem continually transgresses corporal boundaries: Zantippe’s “rump is all rank with an ulcer,” while Socrates “Complained that his bowels let wind in … Crying out that the devil was pinned in/His tripes thought he’d swallowed a sturgeon.” Such lines trod territory of violent and sexualized burlesque that was also common in early blackface, and similarly used a pose of detachment to conceal a “roiling jumble of need, guilt, and disgust,” as the cultural historian Eric Lott has argued.105 While the bodies of Zantippe and Socrates were not explicitly raced, others were in an 1832 poem described as a “morceau” or morsel composed as a kind of antebellum, literary exquisite corpse. It satirized the British poet James Thomson’s account of the tragic lovers Celadon and Amelia, taken from his epic poem “The Seasons.” In the Sketch Club version, however, the title characters are not British youths but “yellow Philadelphia negroes.”106 In place of what they judged to be Thomson’s “hum-drum affair,” the poets referred to Amelia’s “mammy” and “daddy,” closing with a tonguein-cheek comment on the poem’s hybridity: “This mingled yarn! How quickly he or she grows! / But now let’s bring this metre to a fnish; / To end it here its merits won’t diminish.”107 It was not just the poem that was mingled, however, but the characters, as implied by the term “yellow,” which denoted an African American with “white blood.”108 The actual sketches produced by the Sketch Club are harder to evaluate since so few survive, perhaps due to the fact that they were executed in between handfuls of peanuts and swigs of wine. Nevertheless, these “sad, combining wretches, [who] Profess to meet and meet alone / To make up scraps, and sketches” also seemed to circle around themes of the abnormal body.109 Two sets of drawings produced at meetings have been preserved, and rather signifcantly, both are devoted to deformed and grotesque monsters. One set, held at the Albany Institute of History and Art, was based on Lord Byron’s poem “Darkness,” originally entitled “A Dream,” a macabre exploration of the last two humans on a dying planet. The other was based on Sir Walter Scott’s “Elfn Page” in Lay of the Last Minstrel, which imagined the creature’s “crippled joints” and “fendish” rage. Except for Cole, who rather inventively told the story through landscape and made his fgures miniscule, the others dutifully pictured the page as a horned devil, sometimes even, as in Morse’s case, replete with cloven hooves and a tail (see Figure 5.18).110

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

167

Figure 5.18 Samuel F. B. Morse, Scene from Scott’s “Lay of the Last Minstrel,” n.d., graphite on paper, 5 1/8 × 6 in., Yale University Art Gallery.

Effacing Class These anxieties, however, did not belong to the bodies onto whom they were projected, but to those of the white, male artists and patrons with whom they originated. It is worth turning, then, from the illusive and self-concealing realm of art and aesthetics to biography and sociological typologies for a different perspective. In this realm, Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and his related notion of “generative forgetting” can help clarify the obfuscatory sleight of hand that allowed artists and patrons to naturalize what often appeared to be a detached immateriality and a rational bodilessness. By contrast, the habitus into which Durand was born necessitated a deep familiarity with materials and strenuous physical labor which permanently shaped him—and Reed, who came from similar circumstances. In fact, many of the artists who would come to defne American art in the mid-nineteenth century worked to excise the dingy pall of the tradesman from their biographies. Cole was born to a small-scale woolens manufacturer and had been apprenticed to a calico print works in the gritty town of Chorley and, later, an engraver based in Liverpool.111 As Durand’s son John later remembered, All [artists of his father’s milieu] had to earn their living some way and study art as best they could. COLE, for instance, helped his father in a small manufactory; Mr. WEIR was a clerk in a store; my father was apprenticed to an engraver; MOUNT

168

Culturing the Embodied Imagination served his brother, a sign-painter, in the same manner, and PAGE was a boy in a lawyer’s offce.112

Reading Durand’s biography for its valences of class is instructive. He could “claim no ancestry at the venerable hands of John Bull” and was the sixth of seven brothers.113 The son of a watchmaker, small-scale farmer, sometime mason, and occasional cooper, he grew up in the rural village of Jefferson Township, New Jersey, starting work for the family business at an early age, having been entrusted to engrave the silver of “the neighboring gentry and well-to-do farmers.” The family’s farm included an orchard and corn and wheat felds, which allowed them to barter for goods and services, but much beyond those basic necessities was apparently out of reach. A village blacksmith obligingly beat pennies into engraving blanks for the aspiring artist, and he was only accepted to an engraving apprenticeship because, in an act of mercy for the Durand family’s penury, the fee was waived.114 Similarly, although Reed is often remembered as a kind of antebellum Maecenas, he too came from notably modest beginnings. He was the youngest of six children, and, in a mark of his family’s constrained economic status, was seven years old before his parents bought him something from a store. Prior to that momentous purchase—a wool hat—“everything had been homespun and home-made,” Reed’s brother Abijah reported. “He had not yet had a pair of shoes; he staid in the house winters or slid on the ice barefooted, and ran out summers barefooted and bareheaded.”115 Men like Durand and Reed, who was condescendingly remembered as “a plodding Front street grocer,” labored diligently for their money and therefore challenged the early national ideal of the gentleman as detached, independent, and, usually, independently wealthy.116 Although this ideal was widely pervasive, the Sketch Club’s immediate predecessor, James Fenimore Cooper’s club The Lunch, offers the most acute point of comparison. The Lunch counted Cooper, Washington Irving, and William Cullen Bryant as members, all men who did not necessarily need to work for income. Irving was able to embark on his literary career because he was supported by a ffth of the proceeds of his family’s mercantile business, while Cooper’s family had been members of the professions, mainly clergy and physicians. The assumptions of their class and education undergirded an early nineteenth-century culture in which suavity, wit, and rational argument were valued. Their model in this respect was Edinburgh’s literary culture, which was, according to the cultural historian Thomas Bender, “managed by a group of gentlemen, mostly trained in the law, who were deeply involved in the male social world of urban clubs, taverns, and dinners.”117 Training in the law was an important signifer of class, indicating that one shrank from the vulgar world of physical labor, and it was an important shared experience for members of New York’s Knickerbocker elite. Irving and Bryant had both received legal training, as had the writers Giulian Verplanck and Robert Sands, while Cooper, who was an amateur lawyer, represented himself in his many suits for libel.118 Unlike these men who made their living crafting sentences, Reed and Durand were frmly anchored in the material world, a dimension of habitus that affected the way they viewed culture, too. A doubtful Durand had thus written to his patron, marveling that he, the humble native of Jefferson Village, had been sent to take the portraits of former presidents, mixing with “strangers and of such a Class too!” He continued: Now I never doubted sir, for a moment the correctness of your calculations in a business point of view, where you had to deal with materials only, of which long

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

169

experience had made you master, but you will pardon me if I say I have dared to doubt your fattering prognostications in relation to myself, because I feared you might not be so thoroughly acquainted with the stuff in hand, as not being analogous in its nature with that which has hitherto recd your attention.”119 And yet both men had good reason to efface the “stuff in hand,” given the vexed place of materiality in antebellum New York’s strict social hierarchies. For gentlemen of Cooper’s Lunch, working directly with goods was unrefned, disqualifying one for true taste or genius. George Templeton Strong, a patrician lawyer who was also deeply involved in the arts in New York, dismissed Peter Cooper, for example, as a “self-made millionaire glue boiler.”120 In a similar vein, Cooper warned Greenough in 1836 that he was returning from Europe to “a country in which every man swaggers and talks; knowledge or no knowledge; brains or no brains; taste or no taste. They are all ex nato connoisseurs … and everyman’s equal.” Greenough’s “matured and classical thoughts,” Cooper cautioned, would be “estimated by the same rules as they estimate pork, rum, cotton.” Strikingly, Cooper emphasized that his was not merely a kneejerk reaction to “the lower class of Irish voters,” but specifcally to “the merchants and others a degree below them,” a class that surely would have included Reed and Durand. Cooper was outraged that these “foreigners,” were so emboldened that “they no longer creep but walk erect,” he wrote, invoking a rhetoric predicated on the disgust of human-animal hybridity.121 Although it was fraught, Durand and Reed led an emerging social order in New York in which one’s imaginative faculty might result in higher status, but which, at the same time, also threatened that status with its unwelcome associations of low-born materiality. The art collectors who were counted among the membership of the Sketch Club included Reed, his business partner, Jonathan Sturges, and a successful leather tanner named Charles Leupp. All were included in this elite group not because they had been born into wealth, but because they were “lovers of Art” who were willing to participate in the rites and rituals of the imagination with the self-styled “paper-spoilers” of the club.122 To this day, imagination is supposedly a key requirement for entry into the Century Association, which traces its genesis to the Sketch Club. Members can be “of any occupation provided their breadth of interest and qualities of mind and imagination make them sympathetic, stimulating, and congenial companions in a society of authors and artists.”123 Imagination or taste alone would not insure Reed’s acceptance within an elitist social order, however, and so he also put literal and fgurative distance between himself and the mercantile profession that required an intimate familiarity with bags, bales, and hogsheads of wholesale goods. Before moving in August of 1832, Reed, like many merchants before the early national period, lived with his family at 125 Front Street, next to the Reed & Sturges warehouse, as discussed above. The practice of craftsmen living above their shops, or of merchants living above their stores, gave cities a geographic and social unity, for, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has written, “Sharing economic interests and class assumptions, living under one roof, ties of familiarity and trust bound together merchant and clerk.”124 Moving to Greenwich Street, however, he lived opposite Millionaire’s Row which was home to socially prominent men descended from the Dutch patroon class like Augustus Wynkoop (who lived at no. 32), Nicholas I. Roosevelt (no. 62), and DeWitt Clinton (no. 82).125 The dislocating effects of Reed’s mercantile business and his move to the west side were profound. Not only did he leave transient and unattached clerks who could not

170 Culturing the Embodied Imagination afford to live in lower Greenwich Street behind on the west side, where they were obliged to live in boardinghouses or hotels, but they, in turn, had also left behind multigenerational families in rural villages, having poured into the city in droves in the 1810s and 1820s to serve as clerks for large mercantile houses like Reed & Sturges. The bonneted grandmother caring for an infant on The Pedler’s left side was thus an index of the social order that Reed himself was helping to dismember. At the same time, Reed’s position as a wholesale grocer made him less like Durand’s humble Yankee homesteader and more like the grinning peddler. The wholesale grocery business, a relatively new occupation that arose in the late eighteenth century, was underwritten by the deregulation of public food markets which had formerly been overseen by the city.126 His sweet, stimulating, or intoxicating goods, “jobbed … out … to the country merchants in broken packages,” also fooded into village groceries up the Hudson River and beyond, tempting residents to spend greater and greater shares of their household budgets on luxuries.127

Nightmares I have already explored how a private club like the Sketch Club helped to conceal humor, drinking, and vulgarity that would not be acceptable in public, but here I focus on how friendship performed a similar role for Durand and Thomas Cole in the mid1830s. The artists were acquainted from their shared interest in the development of the institutions of American art in New York but they became especially close in the spring of 1836 when their friendship was annealed by grief. The following summer, the two artists went on a summer sketching trip with their wives to the Adirondacks. They wrote one another frequently during this period, discussing the trials and tribulations of the creative imagination in frank, vivid, and often dystopic terms. It began with an exchange of gifts after their summer trip. Durand gave to Maria, Cole’s wife, a glowing portrait of her husband looking rather dashing against a setting sun, and Cole returned the favor with a sketch (see Figure 5.19) of the painting that would eventually become Dream of Arcadia. Dream of Arcadia was a large and complex classical landscape that Cole exhibited at the National Academy of Design’s annual exhibition in 1838 with his View of Schroon Mountain, Essex Co., New-York, After the Storm, a wilderness scene.128 The sketch uses trompe l’oeil to create a virtual whole that cracks wide open at the slightest touch. Its material support is meant to be a piece of paper tacked onto a rough wooden board. This “paper” on which the scene is painted curls up at the corners, refusing to lie fat despite two nails driven into its corners. These three-dimensional elements—nails, paper, and wood—distract the observer from what should have been an immersive plunge into a fctive and idealized Arcadia, denying him or her the easy entry both into and through that the perspective paintings and dioramas explored in Chapter 2 encouraged. Reaching out to test which level of representation, virtual or actual, could really be felt with the body, and the results would be sharp and embarrassing. The artists used text to satirize the dystopic realities of the creative imagination, as well, exchanging a long chain of letters in which they revived the Sketch Club trick of performing their own marginality and hybridity in bodily terms. It began with an exchange of letters in which the two artists commiserated over the diffculties of creating what Durand called a “new style of painting.” Durand wrote frst on Christmas Day in 1837, adopting the structure of a classic anxiety dream. Despite the artist’s

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

171

Figure 5.19 Thomas Cole, Study for “Dream of Arcadia,” 1838, oil on wood, 8 3/4 × 14 1/2 in., 1903.9, Gift of the children of the artist, through John Durand, New-York Historical Society, Photography © New-York Historical Society.

“extreme impatience” in the dream to see a “new style of painting” by Cole, Durand had somehow missed the (steam)boat. On arrival, however, he was foiled again by a screen composed of painted leaves and fowers, as well as real ones, which were bizarrely interspersed with “doll babies.” As he put it to Cole, I could hardly get a view in consequence of the crowd of Ladies that were visiting you and expressing their admiration, and withal, the Dolls and the Ladies were so mixed together that I could scarcely tell which were the living ones.129 Producing something from nothing, as mandated by Durand’s dream, shadowing forth substance that might yet be disfgured from dreams or mental exertion was also one of the central anxieties that plagued the discourse associated with the imagination. The following spring, Cole wrote back to share a dream of his own in a well-known and often-quoted satire that demonstrated his shared understanding with Durand of the troubling vulnerability of the artist in the exercise of an imagination with embodiment at its core: I took a trip to Arcadia in a Dream. At frst start the atmosphere was clear, and the travelling delightful: but just as I got into the midst of that famous land, there came on a classic fog, and I got lost and bewildered. I scraped my shins in scrambling up a high mountain—rubbed my nose against a marble temple—got halfsuffocated by the smoke of an altar, where the priests were burning offal by way of sacrifce (queer taste the gods had, that’s certain)—knocked my head against the arch of a stone bridge—was tossed and tumbled in a cataract—just escaped—fell

172

Culturing the Embodied Imagination fat on my back among high grass, and was near getting hung on some tall trees: but the worst of all are the inhabitants of that country. I found them very troublesome very—they have almost murdered me – Alas! I am in their hands yet—but I hope to dispose of them one by one … and have them hung as a striking Example in the Exhibition of the National Academy by hangmen of our acquaintance.130

Durand wrote back with “sympathy” for Cole’s allegorical troubles, for “no ‘pauvre diable’ ever “trudged harder thro’ Bogs Lakes and Fens, rocks, caves and glens than I have for many weeks past,” as he put it.131 The reference was a misquotation of the poet John Milton’s fery Alpine landscape in Paradise Lost where “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” created a place “where all life dies, death lives, and nature breeds, /Perverse, all monstrous, all prodigious things, / Abominable, inutterable.”132 Cole replied, demonstrating his knowledge of literature but more importantly his rich sense of bodily humor by satirizing his friend as “a monster with seven heads & ten horns,” adding, “I perhaps should not have the courage to answer were I not horned and hoofed too—But I fnd myself among the cast offs in public favour, as well as odious as a Hangman—Detraction is croaking and casting its venomous spawn on my reputation.133 In these humorous exchanges, the artists ironically performed a familiar burlesque of Western high culture. Like “Palette” in Chapter 4, they positioned themselves as outsiders whose marginal status was confrmed by violence and alienation. As Durand hastened to tell Cole in March of 1838, “most pointedly have I felt most of the shocks and bruises which you seem to have experienced now & then.”134 Their evocation of a savage unfortunate cast out of society and subject to constant violence, torture, and even hanging inevitably summons comparisons with enslaved people for whom these experiences were realities, rather than nightmares. Although lynching is popularly identifed with the Jim Crow era, it was pervasive enough in the antebellum period that a young Abraham Lincoln spoke in 1838 of the “accounts of outrages committed by mobs” as “every-day news of the times.”135 Even if Cole and Durand were ignorant of these “outrages,” they would have recently born witness to the race riots of the summer of 1834, in which white mobs fearing integration at the Chatham Street Chapel, a church and meeting place established by the abolitionist brothers Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan destroyed more than a dozen houses of black families in the Five Points area, as well as black-owned businesses, churches, and public institutions. The historian and literary critic Carla L. Peterson has explained that it was the fear of racial mixture or “amalgamation” that incited the mob most powerfully. Many New Yorkers could not abide the sight of a meeting house that looked “like the keys of a piano forte,” a reference to the diverse racial makeup of the abolitionist movement.136 Indeed, imagination, aesthetics, and fears of racial difference or miscegenation were closely, if associatively, linked in the period. As discussed in the previous chapter, imagination’s combinatorial fuidity, its ability to endlessly make and remake new creations from existing thoughts, sensations, and memories, needled at a simultaneous cultural imperative to create art that would outlast the next revolutions of the wheel of progress. Anxieties about combination and miscegenation also bubbled up in the racist visual culture of the period like Edward Williams Clay’s 1839 lithograph Practical Amalgamation: Musical Soiree.137 To cultural arbiters invested in white supremacy,

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

173

Clay’s print would have been a nightmarish inversion of Sargent’s Dinner Party. Black men are gentlemen, not servants, and women and men are as mixed as the harmonies they sing. For plantation owners who invested in it as property, the black body itself was the quintessential agentic object in this period, in the sense that it was defned as legal property that ran the risk of gaining personhood through physical movement to “free” states.138 Newspaper woodcuts of the time made sure to depict runaway slaves as bodies in motion, one heel raised, attesting to a notion of blackness as something that was most troublesome when it was uncontained and unregulated.139 These modes of visual humor mirrored the kinds of spirited and unpredictable energies, not to mention the grotesque corporeality, that the unbalanced imagination was thought to exhibit. Worries about appetites and authority were not just confned to racial caricatures, however, and can be found in other examples of Durand’s work in this period. The picture, now lost, that Durand and Cole were corresponding about in the original dream-letter that started their exchange after the summer trip to the Adirondacks was Durand’s Rip van Winkle’s Introduction to the Crew of Hendrick Hudson, a dramatization of what it meant to be placeless and without a stable history. The scene had Washington Irving’s famous character coming upon the ghostly crew of the Dutch explorer Hendrick Hudson playing ninepins; when the explorer offered to share his fagon full of strong brew, Rip subsequently slumbered for 20 years. Satirizing his own lack of autonomy, Durand reported that “Sir Hendrick’s faggon” had “overwhelmed” him and “held [him] in bondage for the better part of twenty days,” in contrast to Rip’s 20 years. Before this letter, Cole awaited news of the picture and progress and performed a playful inversion of his own, comparing himself to “an old woman … who putting her nose to the bung hole of an empty wine cask exclaimed ‘if thou art so delightful now, what must thou have been when full!’,” lamely joking that this story of taste occurred “I believe in one of Esops Tables,” substituting the T for an F and showing himself to be fully capable of low, if inexpert, humor.

The Sublimated Body Cole as an old woman. Durand as a “half-breed” or “monster.” These purportedly humorous masquerades provided psychological distance from far more serious worries about economic survival, masculinity, and social belonging. It would be impossible to conclude this chapter without acknowledging their stunning success as arbiters of a landscape tradition that would later be referred to as the “Hudson River School.”140 Cole was habitually referred to as the “father” of this movement, but Durand, who outlived Cole by nearly 40 years, had a far greater role in shaping the kind of landscape painting that the Hudson River School moniker would come to denote. It was Durand who was remembered as the “Dean of the Hudson River School” and who served as the president of the National Academy of Design for nearly 20 years, lending an air of avuncular virtue that found its aesthetic parallel in the painter’s sweetly pastoral landscapes. In contrast to the hidden moments of rupture and tension in his early career, this narrative of American art was one in which the body was perfectly sublimated to the spirit. Tellingly, this was a theme of which nineteenth-century poets, philosophers, orators, and ministers never seemed to tire . Soul and nature were joined together in

174 Culturing the Embodied Imagination the holy writ of Nature that was purifed of every degrading infuence. As Durand put it in the second of his “Letters on Landscape Painting”: It is impossible to contemplate with right-minded, reverent feeling, [Nature’s] inexpressible beauty and grandeur, for ever assuming now forms of impressiveness under the varying phases of cloud and sunshine, time and season, without arriving at the conviction — ‘That all which we behold Is full of blessings’:— that the Great Designer of these glorious pictures has placed them before us as types of the Divine attributes, and we insensibly, as it were, in our daily contemplations, — ‘To the beautiful order of his works Learn to conform the order of our lives’.”141 Durand’s description of transcendent nature ordered into an obediently tame pastoral evokes paintings like The Beeches (Plate 14) wherein his aesthetic strategies are everything that his unsettling dreams and burlesque genre paintings were not. Two immense trees frame the left half of the painting, sheltering a vaporous glade that bursts out from its sylvan confnes into clear and open air. Durand took plein-air studies of these two trees (a beech and a basswood), gesturing at a sense of wilderness but ultimately giving it little scope. Instead, the viewer’s eye is drawn toward the rolling felds overseen by a white steeple in the far distance, a vision of perfect harmony. Here, in Durand’s soaringly transcendent painting, is an art cleansed of shadows, dirt, and disorder, as well as of the racialized fears of the black body privately articulated in anxiety-ridden letters and other exchanges. The patches of moss and decaying stump in the left corner of the painting appear to insert some hint of these qualities, but their pert and sprightly articulation makes them unconvincing heralds of chaos. No hygienes or rituals of purifcation against the embodied imagination need be performed, for no bodies are out of place. No errant pigs threaten to revert to their feral state, no bodily or ecological systems masticate, swallow, absorb. The Beeches presents the viewer with Bakhtin’s bourgeois, neoclassical body whose orifces are closed, whose “individuality … does not merge with other bodies and the world.”142 There is little hint of an associative and hybrid imagination that loops between mind and matter, body and soul. The body was not so easily dispatched, however, especially for an artist who had once been called “the best engraver of fesh in America” due to his celebrated engravings of Musidora and Ariadne.143 Indeed, the human fgure had been essential to his training and the artist “maintained that a landscape painter in his early studies … [should] be trained by drawing the human fgure, both from the antique and from the living model.”144 John Durand, the artist’s son, even claimed that “fgure pieces” constituted “a class of subjects to which [his father] would willingly have devoted himself had the opportunities for studying from life or from models been suffciently abundant.”145 And although he largely abandoned fgure painting after the mid-1830s, his friend Daniel Huntington marked that shift in language that suggests a corporeal allure within landscape: “the open felds invited him. […] He began to yield to the

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

175

delight of landscape, and was heard to say, ‘I leave the human trunk and take to the trunks of trees.’”146 These delights, however, were associated with a sense of materiality and decay which Durand articulated in his mature landscapes in limited amounts, usually in small oil sketches no more than two feet by one-and-a-half feet. When these interior forest studies were turned into larger studies, as in the fve-foot by four-foot In the Woods (see Figure 5.20) commissioned by his old friend and Reed’s old business partner, Jonathan Sturges, they still seemed set apart from the rest of his oeuvre, with the immense trees he used as framing devices appearing to contain and even sequester the fertile darkness within. To be sure, this sense of nature-as-body could be redemptive and cathartic, just as the immensely popular paintings of papist cathedrals and eroticized maidens had been only decades earlier. And yet, the chaos inherent in these forest interiors was neatly balanced within a dialectic that tirelessly sought balance between wildness and civilization. Durand’s ideal, which entailed keeping the deterioration associated with the sensuous imagination in check, seems more clearly expressed by his friend Daniel Huntington’s 1857 portrait of him (see Figure 5.21). The artist’s ramrod-straight body doubles the upright branch just behind and above him, and establishes visual resonance with the vertical supports of the easel holding his canvas. Canvas, body, and tree combine seamlessly in a gently precise harmony. As Angela Miller observed, the landscape on Durand’s easel also shares a horizon line and subtle

Figure 5.20 Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855, oil on canvas, 60 3/4 × 48 in., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges by his children, 1895.

176

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

Figure 5.21 Daniel Huntington, Portrait of Asher Brown Durand, 1857, oil on canvas, 56 1/8 × 44 in., 1864.8, Courtesy Century Association, New York.

color palette with the rolling hills in the distance, naturalizing the painter’s control over the landscape. And as Adrienne Baxter Bell has noted, this control is further articulated by the meticulously clean appearance of Durand’s brushes and palette, in contrast to her subject, Albert Blakeham Ryder who used wax, debris, his own fngers, and even brooms in painting his thickly encrusted canvases.147 The stubborn persistence of corporeality in Durand’s work was no anomaly when seen in the context of a long, Anglo-American philosophical tradition that was roiled by dualism. The embodied imagination promised a fragile solution to this stark division, bringing the body and dumb materiality into productive exchange with the superior, though often sterile and seemingly mechanistic mind. There was no denying that mixing the metaphysical with the material was unsettled and unsettling, however, and so artists and critics had to tell the truth, but tell it slant, to paraphrase the poet Emily Dickinson. It would be left to a later generation of American artists, including Ryder, George Inness, and Abbot Handerson Thayer, to embrace the sense of accident and contingency that the embodied imagination had tacitly licensed in antebellum American art and culture. As I have tried to show across these chapters, however, the vexed antinomies that they built upon had long structured key areas in the production and reception of American art, enriching and complicating both its aesthetics and its politics.

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

177

Notes 1 Wayne Craven, “Introduction: Patronage and Collecting in America, 1800–1835,” in Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art, ed. Ella Foshay (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc. Publishers, in association with the New-York Historical Society, 1990), 17–18. 2 Minutes of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, held by the National Academy of Design and available as microflm Reel 2209, quoted in Abigail Booth Gerdts, “Newly Discovered Records of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts,” Archives of American Art Journal 21, no. 4 (1981): 9. On the history of the New-York Gallery of the Fine Arts, see Wayne Craven, “Luman Reed, Patron: His Collection and Gallery,” American Art Journal 12, no. 2 (1980): 40–59. 3 On meta-cyclical theories of history, see Nick Yablon, Untimely Ruins: An Archaeology of American Urban Modernity, 1819–1919 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 24–32; and, Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 21–39. 4 Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York, vol. 4. (New York: Carleton, 1863), 48. 5 Mary Pemberton Cady Sturges, Reminiscences of a Long Life, 157. 6 Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York, vol. 4, 47. 7 See, for example, National Advocate (New York), October 14, 1825. Goshen cheese was made in Goshen, Connecticut, and was recognized for its “unusually delicious” favor which some speculated was due to the absence of bitter weeds in their pastures. “Goshen Cheese,” The Canadian Agriculturist, and Journal of the Board of Agriculture of Upper Canada 13, no. 4 (February 16, 1861): 117. 8 For a fuller discussion of Taste as aesthetic judgement versus taste as a gustative faculty, see chapter 2, p. 26, and chapter 3, p. 20. 9 On this point, see Timothy Morton, “Consumption as Performance: The Emergence of the Consumer in the Romantic Period,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Morton (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1–18. 10 As Thomas Greaves Cary noted, “the tea-market … had been the great feld of his success,” Cary, The Dependence of the Fine Arts for Encouragement, In a Republic, on the Security of Property: With an Enquiry into the Causes of Frequent Failure Among Men of Business: An Address Delivered Before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, November 13, 1844 (Boston, MA: C. C. Little & J. Brown, 1845), 1845. 11 Abijah Reed to Theodore Allen, February 26, 1844, 2. 12 Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” page. 13 Luman Reed Inventory, 12–13. Three of these bottles were demijohns which held up to 10 gallons of liquid. The household receipts are in Miscellaneous, Folder 10, Luman Reed Papers, N-YHS. 14 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990), 13, 28. 15 Toni Vogel Carey, “The Life and Death of Common Sense: An Obituary by Toni Vogel Carey,” Philosophy Now 110 (October/November 2015): n.p. https://philosophynow.org/ issues/110/The_Life_and_Death_of_Common_Sense. Accessed April 15, 2019. 16 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind (London: Thomas Tegg, 1827), 212. 17 The Body, Mind, and Spirit; Or, the Life of Nature, of Reason, and of Heaven, Separately Traced in Man (London: H. J. McClary, 1853), 89. 18 See Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 193, n19. 19 “Luman Reed; Reminiscence by [George Barker]”. Box 1, Folder 1, Luman Reed Papers, New-York Historical Society. 20 Theodore Allen to Luman Reed, date, Luman Reed Papers, New-York Historical Society. 21 D. E. Cotheal to Luman Reed, Cartago, April 25, 1835; Francis Stanton to Luman Reed, Boston, June 12, 1835; David Rogers to Luman Reed, St. Croix, September 24, 1834. Luman Reed Papers, New-York Historical Society. 22 Sturges, Reminiscences of a Long Life (New York: F. E. Parrish, 1894), 160. Although this account is from the time when Theodore Allen maintained the gallery, it was kept in the same confguration established by Reed

178

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

23 The works in Reed’s library are listed in “A True and Perfect Inventory of all the Goods, Chattels, and Credits, which were of Luman Reed, late of the City of New York,” Filed July 16, 1836, County of New York. Winterthur Library. 24 Dorothy Ross, “Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century America,” The American Historical Review 89, no. 4 (October 1984): 917, 918. 25 See Peter M. Kenny, Michael K. Brown, Frances F. Bretter, and Matthew A. Thurlow, Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011), 98. 26 Lot 104, “The Luman Reed Classical Carved and Figured Mahogany Upholstered Armchair En Gondole,” Important American Furniture, Folk Art, Silver, Paintings and Prints including Masterworks from the Westervelt Company and Selections from Thomas Molesworth’s Ranch A Commission, Christie’s. http://www.christies.com/lotfnder/furni ture-lighting/the-luman-reed-classical-carved-and-fgured-5717109-details.aspx. Accessed 12 April 2014. See also Peter M. Kenny and Michael K. Brown, Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York (New York, 2011), 98, fg. 118. The Luman Reed inventory indicates that there were 12 mahogany chairs in the picture gallery. 27 John Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand (New York: Charles Scribner & Sons, 1898), 121–122. 28 Walter Barrett [Joseph Alfred Scoville], The Old Merchants of New York, vol. 4. (New York: Carleton, 1863):48. 29 T[homas] B[angs] Thorpe, “New-York Artists Fifty Years Ago,” Appletons’ Journal of Literature, Science, and Art 2, no. 165 (May 25, 1872): 572. 30 Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York, vol. 4. 49. 31 New-York Mirror 13 (June 4, 1836): 390. 32 Huntington, Asher B. Durand: A Memorial Address (New York: Printed for the Century [by G. P. Putnam’s Sons], 1887), 26. John Durand, in The Life and Times, 121, asserts however that the painting was “imaginary in all respects.” On this point, see Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery, 147. See also Richard J. Koke, in American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the New-York Historical Society (New York and Boston, MA: NewYork Historical Society in association with G. K. Hall, 1982) 1, 300–303. 33 Washington Irving, A History of New York: From the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty … by Diedrich Knickerbocker (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Company, 1915), 208–210. 34 Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery, 148–149. 35 See Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “Signifying Enslavement and Portraying People,” in Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth CenturyGwendolyn DuBois Shaw, ed. (Seattle, 2006), 18–24 for a concise overview of this trope in early modern French and British and colonial American portraiture. 36 Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery, 148–149. Foshay has argued that the standing white male fgure will soon render payment to the leering peddler, giving in to the consumerist appetites of his children. 37 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), 317. 38 New York Slavery Records Index. The 1810 Census does not list names or ages, but it is possible these additional enslaved persons were the children of the slaves Sarah Reed’s husband, Roswell, enslaved in 1800. 39 James Kirke Paulding, Slavery in the United States (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 71. 40 Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (New York: Garland Publishing, 1971), 258. 41 “Advertisement of the Publishers,” in Robert Roberts, House Servant’s Directory, or a Monitor for Private Families: Comprising Hints on the Arrangement and Performance of Servants’ Work [… ] (Boston, MA: Munroe and Francis and New York: Charles S. Francis, 1828), iii. 42 Luman Reed to Thomas Cole, New York, February 4, 1836. Typescript from New York State Library, Albany, New York consulted at the New-York Historical Society. Luman Reed, Box 1, Folder 10. For the letter to Mount, see Wayne Craven, “Luman Reed, Patron: His Collection and Gallery,” American Art Journal 12 (Spring 1980): 43.

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

179

43 Sibylle Ebert-Schifferer, “Trompe L’oeil: The Underestimated Trick,” in Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe L’oeil Painting, ed. Ebert-Schifferer (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art in association with Lund Humphries, 2002), 27. 44 Timothy Anglin Burgard, “Two Painted Door Panels from Luman Reed’s Gallery,” American Art Journal 23, no. 1 (1991): 74. 45 See Ellwood C. Parry, III, “Thomas Cole’s Ideas for Mr. Reed’s Doors,” American Art Journal 12 (July 1980): 33–45. 46 Luman Reed to William Sidney Mount, November 23, 1835. The Museums at Stony Brook, New York. Reproduced in Ella Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Gallery, 39. On the large door, Durand painted Woman Churning Butter, Barn Builders, School Let Out, and Blind Man’s Bluff. On one of the small doors, he painted Woman Milking a Cow, Man Reading at a Table, The Woodchopper, Haying Scene, and Boy Riding a Horse. On another door, which had narrower panels than the other, was Boys Playing Marbles. Boy Chasing a Pig, which is 26 inches long and a little over 8 inches high, seems to have taken up two panels at the top of one of the small doors. 47 Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Gallery, 67. 48 Unfortunately, not all of the panels were preserved, and so there are some relationships that must be left incomplete. 49 “Farmers eating dinner under a tree” was described by Reed in a letter to Cole in February 1836. Luman Reed to Thomas Cole, February 17, 1836, quoted in Parry, “Thomas Cole’s Ideas for Mr. Reed’s Doors,” 43. 50 J, “The Culture of Imagination,” Arcturus, a Journal of Books and Opinion 1 (March 1841): 237. 51 Ross Barrett, “Violent Prophecies: Thomas Cole, Republican Aesthetics, and the Political Jeremiad,” American Art 27, no. 1 (2013): 26. 52 On luxury in the early nineteenth century, see Alan Wallach, “Luxury and the Downfall of Civilization in Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire,” in Global Trade and Visual Arts in Federal New England, eds. Patricia Johnston and Caroline Frank (Lebanon, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2014), 304–318. See also Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” Arts Magazine 56 (November 1981): 94–106. A shortened version of this article was reprinted in Reading American Art, ed. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 79–108. 53 Thomas Cole, journal entry, May 30, 1841, in Louis Legrand Noble, The Life and Works of Thomas Cole, ed. Elliott S. Vesell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 220. 54 Thomas Cole to Robert Gilmor, December 25, 1826. NYSL. 55 Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” Arts Magazine 56 (November 1981): 100. 56 “The Titan’s Goblet,” American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 1: A Catalogue of Works by Artists Born by 1815, eds. John Caldwell, Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque and Dale T. Johnson (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1994), 466. 57 Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, “The Exaltation of American Landscape Painting,” in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, ed. John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 24. 58 Hsuan L. Hsu has argued that Titan’s Goblet engages with “the Republican ideal of modest agrarian settlements,” although she contrasts this with the vastness of a geographical scale that was brought on by territorial and commercial expansion by the United States in this period. Hsu, Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1. On Titan’s Goblet and liminality in literary culture, see Ina Bergmann, “‘I Have Heard Many Stranger Stories Than This, in the Villages Along the Hudson’: Magic Realism in Upstate New York,” in Liminality and the Short Story: Boundary Crossings in American, Canadian, and British Writing, eds. Jochen Achilles and Ina Bermann (London: Routledge, 2015), 164–166. 59 Joseph Hopkinson, “Lecture upon the Principles of Commercial Integrity,” quoted in Zakim and Kornblith, “Introduction,” Capitalism Takes Command, 4. 60 Luman Reed; Reminiscence by [George Barker], 46. 61 Dell Upton, Another City: Urban Life and Urban Spaces in the New American Republic (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Pres, 2008), 20. New York’s population stood at 123,706 in 1820; 202,589 in 1830; 312,710 in 1840; and, 515,547 in 1850.

180

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

62 For water lots, see Ann L. Buttenwieser, Manhattan Water-Bound: Planning and Developing Manhattan’s Waterfront from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 1987), 42–43. The best and most concise source on New York’s volatile social and urban topography is Dell Upton, “The Urban Ecology of Art in Antebellum New York,” Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860 (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 49–66. 63 Cole to Reed, September 7, 1835, Thomas Cole Papers, New York State Library, Albany. 64 Abijah Reed to Theodore Allen, February 26, 1844, 3. 65 For “bold,” see Scoville 48. For “suicidal,” see 1795–1895: One Hundred Years of American Commerce, vol. 2, ed. Chauncey M. Depew (New York: D. O. Haynes & Co., 1895), 597. 66 Typescript of Russell Bastedo, “Luman Reed (1786–1836), New York City Merchant and Patron of American Artists.” 67 These two incidents are also noted by Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery, 25. For “disaster capitalism,” see Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Toronto, 2007. For the contents of the schooner, see Barker manuscript, 69. 68 See, for instance, the photograph and discussion in Alice Morse Earle, Home Life in Colonial Days: Illustrated by Photographs, Gathered by the Author, of Real Things, Works, and Happenings of Olden Times (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1898), 155. 69 See, for example, National Advocate (New York, NY), October 14, 1825, 1 which records a shipment of “50 casks prime Goshen Cheese, 23 frkins Lard, just rec’d and for sale by REED & LEE, 125 Front St.” 70 Luman Reed to Thomas Cole, February 17, 1836, quoted in Parry, “Thomas Cole’s Ideas for Mr. Reed’s Doors,” 43. 71 Pamela H. Simpson, Cheap, Quick, and Easy: Imitative Architectural Materials, 1870– 1930 (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 132–133. 72 T, “Original Communication: Thanksgiving,” Christian Register (Boston) 5 (November 25, 1826): 2. 73 The half-open door had been a standard convention of Dutch seventeenth-century painting, a doorkijkje or “see-through door,” used by artists like Pieter de Hooch, Vermeer, and Samuel von Hoogstraten. For more on the doorkijkje, see John Malcolm Nash, Vermeer (London: Scala Books, 1991). See also Victor Stoichita’s discussion of the door and its uses in The Self-Aware Image, 44–53. 74 “Gambling,” Boyhood in America, an Encyclopedia, ed. Priscilla Ferguson Clement and Jacqueline S. Reinier 1 (Santa Monica, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2001), 298. 75 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966). 76 Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art (London: Reaktion Books, 1992, repr. 2013), 9. 77 Barker manuscript, 77. 78 Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1958), 104. 79 Sir T. Charles and Lady [Sydney] Morgan, The Book Without a Name (London: Baudry, 1841), 261–262. 80 See James Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807– 1855 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 11–29. 81 Mary Alice Mackay, “Sketch Club Drawings for Byron’s ‘Darkness’ and Scott’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’,” Master Drawings 35, no. 2 (1997): 142. For more on the Sketching Society, see Richard Redgrave and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of British Painters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1866/1981), 197. 82 Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 251. 83 John Durand, Prehistoric Notes of the Century Club (No place of publication listed: No publisher listed, 1882), 19. 84 Durand, Prehistoric Notes of the Century Club, 10–11. 85 Callow, Kindred Spirits, 14–15. The meeting occurred on March 27. No meetings were called between this one and the next, on December 17, 1830. This was an evergreen

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

86 87 88 89

90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

181

concern. The Century Club that succeeded the Sketch Club, “with its fve or six hundred members all its sumptuous apartments and appointments!” was disdained by the Hon. Robert C. Winthrop of Boston’s Wednesday Evening Club who deemed it “a comparatively modern creation of the wealth and culture of the great Commercial Metropolis of our country.” The Centennial Celebration of the Wednesday Evening Club (Boston, MA: J. Wilson, 1878), 119–120. Hillhouse lived at Sachems Wood, which had formerly been called Highwood, and was designed by Andrew Jackson Davis. Ithiel Town’s villa, with its large collection of architectural and engineering books, was nearby. Patrick Pinnell, The Campus Guide: Yale University (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) 129. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design, 111; see also Durand, Prehistoric Notes of the Century Club, 16. Minutes for January 21, 1830 in the Sketch Club Archives, typescript, 49. Century Association, New York. The frst instance occurred at the February 20, 1829 meeting, and is cited in Callow, 18. The second is recorded in the minutes for November 15, 1832 in the Sketch Club Archives typescript, 82–84. Minutes for March 29, 1832 in the Sketch Club Archives typescript, 65–66. On a similar rhetoric of burlesque humor in post-Civil War art, see Jennifer Greenhill, Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012), 77–107. Callow, Kindred Spirits: Knickerbocker Writers and American Artists, 1807–1855 (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1967), 26. Sketch Club Archives typescript, 72. Temperance advocates often lumped the harmful effects of rich or stimulating foods together with excessive drinking, and so, although his proper subject is excessive drinking, Guy Jordan’s dissertation is a valuable resource on these issues, particularly his chapter “The Drunkard’s Progress and The Course of Empire: Temperance, Temperature, and Time.” See Jordan, The Aesthetics of Intoxication. On Romanticism and its medical aesthetics, see, for example, Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Jennifer Ford, Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism and the Medical Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Proma Tagore, “Keats in an Age of Consumption: The ‘Ode to a Nightingale’,” Keats-Shelley Journal 49 (2000): 67–84. Youngquist, Monstrosities, xi. Amicus, “Diet and Regimen,” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 7, no. 7 (September 26, 1832): 108. “Force of Imagination,” Minerva 2, no. 4 (October 30, 1824): 54; “Power of Imagination,” Monitor; Designed to Improve the Taste, the Understanding, & the Heart 2, no. 2 (February 1824): 69. “Infuence of the Imagination on Health,” Minerva 2, no. 26 (October 4, 1823): 206. William Cullen Bryant to Susan Renner, September 7, 1835, in The Letters of William Cullen Bryant, 458. “Intemperance in Eating,” Journal of Health, Conducted by an Association of Physicians 4, no. 4 (December 1832): 97. Harvey Levenstein has called constipation the “national curse of the frst four or fve decades of the nineteenth century in America,” Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 5. Sylvester Graham, A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making (Boston, MA: Light & Stearns, 1837), 53. See my Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 65–67. Daniel Huntington, “Introduction,” A General View of the Fine Arts: Critical and Historical, With an Introduction (New York: A. S. Barnes & Col., 1858, 5th ed.), 11. Daniel Huntington, “Preface,” Catalogue of the Paintings, by Daniel Huntington, N.A. Exhibiting at the Art Union Buildings, 497 Broadway (New York: Snowden, 1850), 6. George Washington Bethune, The Prospects of Art in the United States: An Address Before the Artists’ Fund Society of Philadelphia, at the Opening of their Exhibition, May, 1840 (Philadelphia, PA: Printed for the Artists’ Fund Society, by J. C. Clark, 1840), 24–26. My

182

105

106

107 108

109 110 111

112 113 114

115 116 117 118 119 120

121 122 123 124 125

Culturing the Embodied Imagination thanks to Bryan Narendorf for handily locating the source of this reference. On the story, see Thomas J. Figueira, “The Strange Death of Draco on Aegina,” Nomodeiktes: Greek Studies in Honor of Martin Ostwald, eds. Ralph M. Rosen and Joseph Farrell (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 299–300. January 28, 1830, Sketch Club Minutes Typescript, 53. Century Association Archives. Eric Lott, “Love and Theft: The Racial Unconscious of Blackface Minstrelsy,” Representations 39 (Summer 1992): 37. See also Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). On the rich afterlife of Thomson’s “The Seasons” in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century transatlantic visual and material culture, see Sandro Jung, “Print Culture, HighCultural Consumption, and Thomson’s ‘The Seasons’ 1780–1797,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 44, no. 4 (2011): 495–514. November 15, 1832, Sketch Club Archives Typescript, 82. See Brian W. Thomas and Larissa Thomas, “Gender and the Presentation of Self: An Example from the Hermitage,” in Engendering African American Archaeology: A Southern Perspective, eds. Jillian E. Galle and Amy L. Young (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 2004), 107–108 for a discussion of “yellow” as a racial characteristic in the antebellum era through the early twentieth century. “Mr. Mason’s Poem,” Sketch Club Archives typescript, 68. My summary in this paragraph relies on Mary Alice Mackay, ”Sketch Club Drawings for Byron’s “Darkness” and Scott’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’,” Master Drawings 35, no. 2 (1997): 142–154. Alan Wallach, ‘Thomas Cole and Transatlantic Romanticism,’ in Transatlantic Romanticism: American Art and Literature, 1790–1860, eds. Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach (Amherst, MA, 2015), 207–208; Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole and the Aristocracy,” in Reading American Art, eds. Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 79–108. Durand, Prehistoric Notes of the Century Club, 6. Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand, 19. D. O’C. Townley, “Living American Artists,” Scribner’s Monthly 2, no. 1 (May 1871): 42. See also O’Townley “Living American Artists,” 42 for the quote regarding Asher’s engraving of the local gentry’s silver. Details of the Durand homestead are found in Durand, The Life and Times of A. B. Durand, 3. Frederick Sturges to Alexander E. Orr, Esq., Nov. 7, 1895. Reproduced in Thirty-Eighth Annual Report of the Corporation of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York For the Year 1895–96 (New York: Press of the Chamber of Commerce, 1896), 35–36. W. F., “Old Times in Front Street,” The Evening Post (New York), January 9, 1875. Thomas Bender, New York Intellect: A History of Intellectual Life in New York City, from 1750 to the Beginnings of Our Own Time (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), 130. Bender, New York Intellect, 133. Luman Reed to Asher B. Durand, 16 February 1836; Asher B. Durand to Luman Reed, 22 June 1835, Luman Reed Papers, NYHS. George Templeton Strong, quoted in Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 63. As Beckert points out, merchants like Reed were seen as socially superior to industrialists who actually manufactured things. James Fenimore Cooper to Horatio Greenough, June 14, 1836, in Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper, 1 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922), 358–359. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design, 110. “The Century Association Homepage,” https://www.thecentury.org/club/scripts/section/se ction.asp?NS=HP. Accessed July 9, 2018. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 81. Jay Shockley, “Robert and Anne Dickey House Designation Report,” Landmarks Preservation Commission, June 28, 2005, Designation List 365, LP-2166. Retrieved from http://www.nyc.gov/html/lpc/downloads/pdf/reports/dickeyhouse.pdf. Accessed January 28, 2018. My knowledge that Reed’s house was opposite Millionaire’s Row comes from Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery, 34–35.

Culturing the Embodied Imagination

183

126 Cindy R. Lobel, Urban Appetites, Food, and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 47. 127 Scoville, The Old Merchants of New York, vol. 4, 47. As shown by economic historian Martin Bruegel, Mid-Hudson Valley household budgets allocated 7.8% to merchandise/ groceries in 1815–1816 versus 19% to the same category in 1846–1847. Bruegel, Table 22, Farm, Shop, Landing: The Rise of a Market Society in the Hudson Valley, 1780–1860 (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 179. 128 On Schroon Lake as a pendant to Dream of Arcadia, see Ellwood Parry III, The Art of Thomas Cole: Ambition and Imagination (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 203. 129 Asher B. Durand to Thomas Cole, New York, 25 December 1837, Asher B. Durand Papers, reel N19, frames 1141–1142, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter “Durand Papers.”) Jennifer Roberts discusses this dream in terms of what she has called “non-conducting image,” a concept that has particular relevance to the materiality of the artisan class from which Durand came. See Roberts, Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America, 117–160. 130 Thomas Cole to Asher B. Durand, 20 March 1838, quoted in Louis L. Noble, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and Other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A. (New York: Cornish, Lamport, & Co., 1853), 190. 131 Asher B. Durand to Thomas Cole, New York, 30 March 1838, reel N19, frame 1165, Durand Papers. 132 John Milton, The Paradise Lost, by John Milton. With Notes Explanatory and Critical, ed. James A. Boyd, New York., 1867, lines 621–625. 133 Thomas Cole to Asher B. Durand, May 28, 1838, Thomas Cole Papers, NYSL. 134 Asher B. Durand to Thomas Cole, New York, 30 March 1838, reel N19, frame 1165, Durand Papers. 135 Michael J. Pfeifer has recovered lynching’s earlier history and it is from him that I learned of Lincoln’s speech and its relevance to lynching in the late antebellum period. See Pfeifer, The Roots of Rough Justice: Origins of American Lynching (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 12–31. 136 See Carla L. Peterson, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in NineteenthCentury New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press2011), 99–102. 137 Tavia Amolo Ochieng’ Nyong’o, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Pres, 2009), 29. 138 I am grateful to Jennifer Roberts for this observation. 139 Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 93. 140 The classic essay on derision faced by the Hudson River School after the Civil War is Doreen Bolger Burke and Catherine Voorsanger, “The Hudson River School in Eclipse,” in American Paradise: The World of the Hudson River School, eds. Kevin J. Avery, John K. Howat, Oswaldo Rodriguez Roque, et al. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987), 71–90. For a history of the movement and its major painters, see Kevin J. Avery, “A Historiography of the Hudson River School,” in American Paradise, 3–11. This argument that the Hudson River School was inherently nationalist is articulated in multiple places, most forcefully in Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865 (Washington, DC and London, 1991). Miller’s analysis is more nuanced, however. As she noted, “The symbolic and nationalistic agenda of the frst New York school was challenged from within by the associative play and visual complexities of the works themselves, qualities that revealed contradictions within the ideology of nationalism and ultimately compromised the assumed unity of their visual program.” Miller, Empire of the Eye, 105. 141 Asher B. Durand, “Letter II,” frst published in Crayon 1, no. 3 (January 17, 1855): 34–35, reprinted in Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, ed. Linda K. Ferber (New York and London: Brooklyn Museum in association with D Giles Limited, 2007), 235. 142 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 26–27. 143 H. T. Tuckerman, “A Day Among Artists,” Sargent’s New Monthly Magazine, of Literature, Fashion, and the Fine Arts (1843–1843) 1, no. 5: 209. Another review published around

184

144 145 146 147

Culturing the Embodied Imagination the same time, possibly by Tuckerman as well, referred to Durand as having “long borne the enviable reputation of being our best engraver of the human fgure.” “A Landscape Painter,” The New World; a Weekly Family Journal of Popular Literature, Science, Art and News (1840–1845), 8, no. 6 (February 10, 1844): 185. Huntington, A Memorial Address, 46–47. “The Artists of America,” The Crayon 7, no. 2 (February 1, 1860): 44. On John Durand’s role in The Crayon, see Roger Stein, 102, 106. Huntington, A Memorial Address, 24. Bell, “Body-Nature-Paint: Embodying Experience in Gilded Age American Landscape Painting,” in The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting, Nancy Siegel, ed. (Durham, NH: University Press of New Hampshire, 2011), 266.

Index

Adams, John 118 aesthetics 2, 14, 20–21, 26–28, 62; and continental eighteenth-century philosophers 84–85; and eighteenthcentury eroticization of 20–21, 83–84; and poststructuralist antipathy towards 3–4, 14, 63; and slave capitalism 119–120; and wine-drinking 114–115 Africanist presence 15, 16, 125, 146 Allston, Washington 13, 79; Beatrice 76–78, 96; Belshazzar’s Feast 95; Evening Hymn 78; Lady Reading a Valentine 77; A Roman Lady 78; Rosalie 82–83; Spanish Girl in Reverie 78, 95, 99–100, 110n111; and Titian’s dirt 99; A Tuscan Girl 78; and Unitarianism 102; and veiling 95–96 Apollo Belvedere see whiteness artists’ daughters, e.g. Mary Inman, Susan Walker Morse, and Rosalie Kemble Sully see named entries artists’ materials and techniques 14, 89, 92–94; and Thomas Sully 93–94; and Washington Allston 89 associationism 6, 9–10, 13; and intoxication 112, 118; in King, Vanity of the Artist’s Dream 126; and paintings of young women in reverie 63, 75 Bakhtin, Mikhail 147, 160, 174 Bann, Stephen 45, 61 Barrett, Ross 154 Bellion, Wendy 27, 39–40 Benjamin, Walter 62 Bingham, George Caleb, The Dull Story 81 Bjelajac, David 95–96 Bluebeard 15, 129 Born, Wolfgang 132 Brewer, John 11 Brewster, Sir David 26 Bryant, William Cullen 163, 164, 166, 168; see also theories of the imagination Bulfnch, Charles 114 burlesque 16, 128, 131–132, 166, 181n89

Burns, Sarah 5, 95 Burton, Robert, Anatomy of Melancholy 129 Byron, “Darkness” 166 Cahill, Edward 2 Caldwell, Charles 164, 165 camera obscura 22, 23, 53, 60, 62 Carey, Edward L. 81 Catholicism, as encouraging the imagination 50; xenophobia toward 39, 49–50, 118–119 Centennial Exhibition 86, 88, 107n61 Channing, Ann 77 Cheney, John, Donna Isabella, or Florentine Girl 96; Mary Inman 82 Cheyne, George 127 Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, copies by Borthwick and Darley, Bowman, and Cooke 46 Civil War, and shift in American art 85–86, 176 class dynamics 51, 63–66, 167–170 Claude glass 22, 24, 25, 60 Cole, Thomas 16; attitudes towards the imagination 154–156; Course of Empire 154, 155–156; and discourse of hybridity or miscegenation 172–173; and door panels for Reed’s gallery 149; Falls of Kaaterskill 155; and friendship with Asher B. Durand 170–173; The Pastoral or Arcadian State 155; Titan’s Goblet 155–156 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 4, 164; and Kantian aesthetic 5, 30n24, 84; and “Remorse” or “Osorio” as source for Spanish Girl in Reverie 110n111 Common Sense school 4–6, 7, 8; American eighteenth- and nineteenth-century curriculum and 2; juxtaposed with Kantian aesthetic 5; relativism of 5–6 Constable, John 89 Cooper, James Fenimore 28; and The Lunch 168–169

186

Index

Cooper, Susan Fenimore 27 copies, attitudes towards 47, 48–49 Copley, John Singleton, and portraits of the Sargent family 124 Crary, Jonathan 26, 30n18 critical race studies see racial difference cultural nationalism and American art 14, 52–54, 88–89 Daguerre, Jacques-Louis Mande 55, 61, 64 Darwin, Charles 101 Darwin, Erasmus 21 Dasch, Rowena Houghton 46, 131 Daston, Lorraine and Katherine Park 24 Davis, Alexander Jackson 143 Davis, John 39, 40, 45–46, 49 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 31n30 della Porta, Giambattista 23, 25 de Loutherbourg, Philippe Jacques 24 de Piles, Roger 85 Descartes, René 23 dioramas 12, 40, 55–67; Gustavus Grunewald, The Cathedral of Upper-Wesel and the Old Castle of Schonberg on the Rhine, By Moonlight 56; by Henry and William Hanington 63–66; Hippolyte Sébron, after David Roberts, Departure of the Israelites 56, 58; Hippolyte Sébron, Interior of Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral 55, 59; Hugh Reinagle after John Martin, Belshazzar’s Feast 56, 61; Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri Cathedral of Reims 12, 55, 58, 62, 66; Robert Jones after William Guy Wall, Hudson River Diorama 56–57, 60 Durand, Asher B. 1, 13, 16; Ariadne 91, 165; The Beeches 174–175; Boy Chasing a Pig 138–139; The Capture of Major Andre 148; and class origins 167–168; and commitment to struggle with material world 101; as “Dean” of the Hudson River School 173–174; and door panels for Luman Reed 150–154; Il Pappagallo 86, 88, 107n61; In the Woods 175; as lacking imagination 1, 174; The Pedler 145–146; Rip van Winkle’s Introduction to the Crew of Hendrick Hudson 173; Woman Churning Butter 157–158; The Wrath of Peter Stuyvesant 146–147 Durand, John, as clerk for Luman Reed 144 Dürer, Albrecht 25, 35n93 embodiment as an African American trait 15, 16, 166; as Catholic trait 15, 50, 118; effacement of in the art of Asher B. Durand 174–176; as feminine trait 13, 15, 94; and

the history of the imagination 17–21; as sinful 94 embryology 21 Engell, James 3, 48 fancy 9–10, 13, 108n73 fancy piece genre 13, 75–76; commercial nature of 13, 82; as infuenced by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo 13, 76, 80, 86–88, 106–107n54, 107n57; as infuenced by Watteau 13, 86; as sentimental 85–86 Fisher, Alvan 1, 12 Flagg, George Whiting: Falstaff Playing King 149; The Match Girl 79, 89; Portrait of a Lady Sleeping 80, 91 Fragonard, and fgure de fantaisie 5, 75 Freudian psychoanalysis 6, 14, 88 Friedberg, Anne 12, 13, 43 Gainsborough, Thomas 2, 76, 88 Gerdts, William 85, 105–106n46 Gilpin, William 22 Gothic 95, 107n97 Graham, Sylvester 101, 164–165 Grand Manner 2, 92, 126 Granet, François-Marius 2, 40, 46, 61; Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome 12–15; 39–49, 61 Gunning, Tom 25 Harris, Neil 25, 36–37n105 Hazlitt, William 76, 78 Hillhouse, James Abraham 162–163 Hudson River School 174 Hume, David 6; see also imagination, materialist attitudes towards Huntington, Daniel 13, 166, 174; and anxieties about sensuality 165; Florentine Girl 79; Italy 89–91; Mary Inman 74, 81–82, 86; Portrait of Asher Brown Durand 175–176; Roman Girl 80; A Sibyl 79, 94–95; Venetian Girl 79 illusionistic strategies of display 43, 58 imagination: and absence 9, 62; as abyss 113, 115, 122–123, 129, 130; American attitudes towards as benefcial 10–11, 50, 152–153; and blackness 15–17, 120–121, 148; and Catholicism 50, 118; and contemporary scholarly disdain towards 3– 4, 14; and contemporary theory 4, 30n17; and “culturing” 16, 148; as dangerous to both body and body politic 1–2, 7–8, 11, 16, 20, 24–25, 50–51; 139; as dialectical 16, 96–99, 102, 154, 176; as digestion 112, 143, 163–164; in emblem books

Index 76; embodied nature of 8, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15–21; and empiricism 18–21, 26–27, 101; and illness 24–25, 164; and imperialism 11, 118–121, 148; and intoxication 112, 114–115, 163; and Italy 28, 50, 89–91; Kantian 5, 3n24, 84–85; and lack of scholarship regarding American art and culture 3; as liberatory 3, 4, 58, 100–102; materialist attitudes towards 6, 7–8, 14, 18–21; 27, 92–94, 102; mobility of 10, 12, 42, 57–58, 60, 155; as performative 41, 62–63; proleptic response toward 12; 40, 41, 45, 58–59; and sympathy 10, 125; and the unconscious mind 6–7, 8; as virtual 9, 13, 16, 22–23, 96; and vision 4, 8–9, 26, 27–28, 109–110n104 Ingham, Charles Cromwell 80, 82, 87 Inman, Mary 13 Inness, George 176 Irving, Washington 131, 146; and membership in The Lunch 168 judgment 1, 7, 113 kaleidoscope 23, 25, 26 Kalf, Willem, Still Life with Chinese Sugarbowl and Nautilus, copy after 141 Kelly, Catherine 2 King, Charles Bird 79; and attitudes towards slavery 131–132; and Native American portraits 131–132; Rip van Winkle Returning from a Morning Lounge 131; Vanity of the Artist’s Dream 16, 112, 125–132, 139 Kitchiner, William, Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook’s Oracle 126 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 107n56, 126 Locke, John 18, 24 luxury 141–143, 161 lynching 172 Macvicar, John Gibson 26 Maelzel, Johann Nepomuk 12, 55 mahogany 123–124, 144 margins 16–17, 149, 160–161, 172 Martin, John Belshazzar’s Feast 56 mastic 93 materialism see imagination and McCalman, Iain 24 Merritt, Henry, Dirt and Pictures Separated 99 mesmerism 101 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair 46 microscope 23 Miller, Angela 4, 175, 183n140 Miller, David 4

187

Miller, Lillian B. 86, 106n48 Milton, John Paradise Lost 172 mimesis 78, 92–93, 159 Moby Dick 130 modernity and visual culture 12, 26, 40, 47, 60–63; mobile and virtual nature of 12, 62; neoclassical history painting as potential common source for 61 Morse, Samuel F. B. 1–2, 8, 13, 49; The Muse (Susan Walker Morse) 82, 102; Scene from Scott’s ‘Lay of the Last Minstrel’ 166; and Unitarianism 101–102; House of Representatives 39, 52–54 Mount, William Sidney 13, 138, 149, 167–168; Girl Asleep 81 multisensory reception of paintings: Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome (Granet) 47–49; Hudson River Diorama (Jones); 60; Interior of Trinity Chapel at Canterbury Cathedral (Sébron) 59–60; Italy (Huntington) 90; Spanish Girl in Reverie (Allston) 99–100 Munro Academy 161 mummy brown 93 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban see fancy piece genre and Nemerov, Alexander 5 New-York Gallery of Fine Arts see Reed gallery Novak, Barbara 3, 96 Old Master paintings 74, 93; in collections of American art 138; as model for Charles Bird King 132; as model for Washington Allston 77 optics see virtuality Othello 15, 16, 129, 131; see also racial difference Panini, Giovanni Paolo, Interior of St. Peter’s 58–59, 62 Patterson, Cynthia Lee 86 Peale, Charles Willson 42, 49, 51–52 Peale, Raphaelle 51; Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception 109n99 Peale, Rembrandt 78, 88, 86; Court of Death 51–52; Day Dreams 86; Erinna, a Greek Poetess 78; and “liquid fesh” encaustic technique 93; The Roman Daughter and connection to Murillo 107n57 perspective painting genre 11–12, 62, 125 phantasmagoria 24 photography 60, 62 physiology 24, 164–165; and the soul 21–22, 34n77

188

Index

Poinsett, Joel R., as patron of a second copy of Capuchin Church by Thomas Sully 46 Powers, Hiram, Greek Slave 110n106 Priddy, III, Sumpter T. 9 prolepsis see imagination, proleptic response toward racial difference 113–118, 120–121, 129– 133; and anxieties about miscegenation 120, 146, 166, 172–173; see also Bluebeard; Othello Raphael 77, 89 Reed, Luman: ambition of 156–157; and collaboration with Durand 157–158; and class origins 169–170; and move away from warehouse to east side 169–170; as patron of Flagg Portrait of a Lady Sleeping 79; and slavery 148 Reed and Sturges warehouse 140–141 Reed gallery: and door panels 149–152; and empire 144; in later manifestations 138; location of 139–140; materials used to construct and furnish 144–145; as opposite of Reed and Sturges warehouse 141 Reynolds, Joshua 76, 79, 86; see also theories of the imagination Ricoeur, Paul 63 Roberts, Jennifer 43, 183n129 Roberts, Robert, House Servants’ Directory 117, 148 Robinson, Etienne Gaspard see phantasmagoria Romanticism 3, 5, 18, 31n31, 61, 82, 85 Rubens, St. Cecilia 78 Ryder, Albert Blakeham 176 sandarac 93 Sargent, Henry: and access to Benjamin West’s art collections 124; The Dinner Party 15, 42–45, 112–117, 122–124; and economic ties to slavery 16, 123–124; The Tea Party 15, 42–45, 48, 116–117 Scott, Sir Walter, “Elfn Page” 166 sensibility 2, 76 sentimentalism 85–86, 106n47 Sheraton, Thomas 122 sister arts analogies 5, 92 Sketch Club (NY) 16, 139, 161–164; and consumption of alcohol 163; and obsession with eating 163–164; and performance of racial masquerade 166 slave economy 15, 16, 119; as beneftting Henry Sargent 16, 124; as beneftting Washington Allston 95, 124–125 social art history 14, 16, 85, 88 Soltis, Carol 75, 79, 86 Stoichita, Victor 17

Sturges, Jonathan 80 Sully, Rosalie Kemble 13, 82, 105n36 Sully, Thomas 13, 47; and artists’ materials 93–94; Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome, copy by 39, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 66; Gypsy Girl 81; Gypsy Mother and Child 88; A Love Letter 79, 81, 94; Mother and Child 79; as producer of fancy pieces 78–79; The Student 82 surface reading methodology 14–15, 107n67; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 14 sympathy 10, 125 Taste 15, 16, 18–19, 114–115, 120 tasting 16, 120, 126–127, 162–163, 164–165 Thayer, Abbott Handerson 176 theories of the imagination: Alexander Gerard 7, 113; Dugald Stewart 5, 8–9, 148, 162; F. J. W. Schiller 84; F. W. J. Schelling 6, 113; Gottfried Lessing 84; G. W. F. Hegel 5, 164; as an “imaginary” 4; Immanuel Kant 5, 6, 30n24; Jacques Lacan 4; John Locke 18; Joseph Addison 8, 10, 20, 22–23, 41, 65–66, 113; Mark Akenside 20–21, 22, 85, 126; Richard Payne Knight 112; Samuel F. B. Morse 1–2, 8; Samuel Taylor Coleridge 4, 84; Sir Joshua Reynolds 2, 78; and the Sublime 114; Thomas Reid 9, 143; Thomas Brown 10, 112; Thomas Hobbes 9, 18–20; Thomas Willis 18; William Cullen Bryant 7–8 Titian 74, 78, 86, 93; for “Titian’s dirt” see Allston, Washington Tompkins, Kyla Wazana 15 Tontine Crescent 114 touring picture circuit 12, 47, 55; in Albany 55; in Baltimore 12, 47; in Boston 46, 47, 48, 51, 57, 58; in Charleston 12, 43, 46, 47, 68n25, 69n30, 70n43; and connections to later forms of modern media 60–63; in Natchez, Mississippi 28, 39, 42, 43, 47; in Philadelphia 28, 40, 42, 44; in Portland, Maine 12, 47; in Portsmouth, New Hampshire 39, 46, 47; in New York 46, 47, 55, 64; in Providence, Rhode Island 46; in Raleigh, North Carolina 43; in Saratoga Springs, New York 44, 47, 48, in Savannah 12, 39, 47; in Washington, D.C. 44, 47 trompe l’oeil 16, 39, 158–160; and temptation 128; and race 129, 132 Trumbull, John 126; Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776 53–54 Unitarianism 40, 100–102 ut pictura poesis see sister arts analogies

Index van Hook, Bailey 85 vanitas tradition 132 veils 25, 35n93, 95–99, 108n72; and velatura technique 96 Verplanck, Gulian 1, 50, 163 virtuality 12–13, 16, 22–24, 40–45, 62–63; of Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome 41–45; of classical casts 62; and falsehood, incompatibility with 12–13, 44–45; and frames 25, 43; as “infernal” 24; and lenticular devices 22–26; and media archaeology 25, 26–27, 60–63; and optics 26; as a quality of the unconscious mind 7; in scholarship on early national America 27–28; and wonder 24–27 vitalism 24, 94, 164–165 Voltaire 84

189

Vose, Reuben: Despotism, Or the Last Days of the American Republic 118–119; Wealth of the Worlds Displayed 119 Wallach, Alan 154 Warburg Aby 62 Wednesday Evening Club 113–114 whiteness 118, 122–123, 129; and Apollo Belvedere as symbol of 129–130 Wiggin, Benjamin 40–41, 118–119 window shades, painted 66–67 wine drinking 112, 114–115, 121–122; and connections to slave economy 124–125 Wines, Enoch Cobb 65 Wolf, Bryan Jay 5, 105n41 wonder 24–27, 40 Zeuxis and Parrhasius 98