The Medicine of Art: Disease and the Aesthetic Object in Gilded Age America 9781501346873, 9781501346903

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Naming and Framing Disease
Chapter 2: The “Picturesque Unfitness” of Robert Louis Stevenson
Chapter 3: Therapeutic Living in Dublin
Chapter 4: Chasing a Cure in Cornish
Chapter 5: Collecting as Cure
Epilogue
Select Bibliography
Index
Plates

Citation preview

The Medicine of Art

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The Medicine of Art Disease and the Aesthetic Object in Gilded Age America Elizabeth L. Lee

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Elizabeth L. Lee, 2022 Elizabeth L. Lee has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Abbott Handerson Thayer / Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1893.11a-b All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-4687-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013 4689-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-4688-0 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

For Sunil and Mira

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

viii xii

1 Naming and Framing Disease 1 2 The “Picturesque Unfitness” of Robert Louis Stevenson 41 3 Therapeutic Living in Dublin 83 4 Chasing a Cure in Cornish 121 5 Collecting as Cure 157 Epilogue 197 Select Bibliography Index

201 219

Illustrations

Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

John Singer Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, 1885 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Stevenson Memorial, 1903 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Monadnock in Winter, 1904 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Angel, 1887 Abbott Handerson Thayer, A Virgin, 1892–3 Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Paris Studio, 1898 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Phillips Brooks Monument, Copley Square, Boston, 1893–1910 Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Lang Freer, 1909

Figures 1.1 John White Alexander, Repose, 1895 1.2 Heidelberg belt advertisement, The New Voice, November 26, 1903 1.3 “The Sympathetic Nervous System,” frontispiece for William S. Sadler, Worry and Nervousness (Chicago: McClurg & Co.) 1914 1.4 Thomas Eakins, Cowboy with dark neckerchief, on dappled horse, 1887 1.5 Thomas Eakins, Miss Amelia van Buren, c. 1891 1.6 Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Lady in White (No. 2), c. 1910 1.7 Dwight Tryon, Apple Blossoms, 1895 1.8 James McNeil Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Battersea Reach, 1870–5 1.9 George Inness, The Home of the Heron, 1891 1.10 Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871 1.11 Thomas Eakins, Arcadia, c. 1883

2 4 6 10 11 12 13 14 16 18 19

Illustrations

1.12 Thomas Eakins, [Standing Male Nude with Pipes], 1880s 1.13 Raymond Duncan, Isadora Duncan at the Parthenon Theater, 1904 2.1 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial, 1891 2.2 Fanny Stevenson, sketch of Skerryvore drawing-room wall, 1886 2.3 John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882 2.4 John and Emily Sargent, c. 1867 2.5 Mary Sargent with Emily, c. 1862 2.6 Katharine Loring, Alice James in London, 1891 2.7 Henry James and his father 2.8 John Singer Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887 2.9 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–70 2.10 Ferdinand Hodler, The Consecrated One, 1893–4 2.11 Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858 2.12. Patients “taking the cure” at Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, Saranac Lake, New York 2.13 National Printing & Engraving Co., Chicago, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1880s 2.14 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Louis Stevenson, modeled 1887, cast 1899 2.15 Jean-Frédéric Bazille, Improvised Hospital Bed: Painter Claude Monet injured at the Hotel du Lion d'Or in Chailly-en-Biere, 1865 2.16 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887–8 2.17 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Louis Stevenson (third version), St. Giles Memorial, 1899–1903 2.18 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Winged Figure Seated on a Rock, 1914 2.19 Abbott Handerson Thayer, My Children (Mary, Gerald, and Gladys Thayer), c. 1897 3.1 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Mother and Child, 1886 3.2 Abbott Handerson Thayer’s house in Dublin, New Hampshire, c. 1880 3.3 Mt. Monadnock, New Hampshire, c. 1905 3.4 George de Forest Brush, The Weaver, 1889 3.5 George de Forest Brush, The Moose Chase, 1888 3.6 Trade card, Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills, c. 1910

ix 20 21 44 45 46 48 48 49 50 52 56 57 58 60 62 63

64 65 66 71 73 84 85 87 91 92 93

x

Illustrations

3.7 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sant-Victoire, c. 1902–6 3.8 Abbott Thayer, Below Mount Monadnock, c. 1913 3.9 Gladys Thayer in her sleeping hut, c. 1900 3.10 Lean-to for eight patients at the Loomis Sanatorium near Liberty, New York, n.d. 3.11 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Virgin Enthroned, 1891 3.12 Abbott Handerson Thayer, Woman in Grecian Gown, c. 1894 3.13 The female ribcage, uncorseted and corseted, n.d. 3.14 Clara May and Elise Pumpelly posing as Parthenon “Fates” in Abbott Handerson Thayer’s studio, 1893 4.1 Contemporary view of Saint-Gaudens’s home (“Aspet”) with view of Mt. Ascutney and gardens, Cornish, New Hampshire 4.2 Inside Pergola, Little Studio, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire 4.3 A Masque of ‘Ours’: The Gods and the Golden Bowl cast dress rehearsal, 1905 4.4 Toboggan Run outside of Saint-Gaudens’s Studio 4.5 Benjamin Falk, Eugen Sandow as The Dying Gaul, c. 1894 4.6 Art Students League Class, c. 1890  4.7 Phillips Brooks, D.D. 4.8 Christ’s head, detail of Brooks Memorial 4.9 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, c. 1905  5.1 James McNeil Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl, 1894–1903 5.2 James McNeil Whistler, The Siesta, 1896 5.3 Artist unknown, Moored Boat and Misty Mountains, Ming dynasty, second half of sixteenth century 5.4 Freer with Frederick S. Church, Catskill Mountains, July 1889 5.5 Dwight Tryon, Daybreak: May, 1897–8 5.6 Dwight Tryon, Night: A Harbor, 1894 5.7 Thomas Dewing, Four Sylvan Sounds (two of four panels), 1896–7 5.8 Charles Lang Freer house in Detroit, n.d. 5.9 Primary syphilis—chancres, photogravure 5.10 Secondary syphilis, color chromolithograph 5.11 Edvard Munch, The Inheritance, 1897–9

97 98 102 103 106 107 109 110 129 129 130 131 132 133 139 142 144 158 159 160 162 165 166 167 168 171 172 175

Illustrations

5.12 Thomas Dewing, Portrait in Blue, 1898 5.13 Thomas Dewing, The Pearl, c. 1894 5.14 James McNeil Whistler, Venus Rising from the Sea, c. 1869–70 5.15 Edward Steichen, Charles Lang Freer, c. 1915–16

xi 178 179 181 184

Acknowledgments This project took root as I was completing my dissertation—on the intersection of filth and female purity in Gilded Age art—when the historian JoAnne Brown pointed to what she saw as an embedded disease narrative in the painted angels and virgins at the center of my research. I soon learned she was right. A faculty writing group led by Brown, then associate dean at Dickinson, provided a context for developing my first article on the subject, which was published in American Art. The contours of the book-length project developed only several years later with my first sabbatical, which was aided by several research awards. As a joint fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Freer Gallery of Art, I benefitted from conversations with thoughtful mentors, stimulating colleagues, and exceptional resources. I particularly want to thank the late Cindy Mills for her kind support, along with Lee Glazer, Susan Hobbs, Bill Truettner, and Katherine Ott, the last for a memorable trip into the NMAH vault to view nineteenth-century medical devices. I am grateful to have worked in the SAAM fellows office alongside Maggie Cao, Kate Lemay, Elizabeth McGoey, Lacey Baradel, Prue Ahrens, Hélène Valance, Meredith Brown, and Austin Porter. Robert Louis Stevenson made an unexpected entry into the project during a fellowship at the Huntington Library that same year. Thanks to Barry Menikoff and Glenda Norquay for an introduction into all things Stevenson. I benefitted from conversations with fellow Huntington scholars Helen Horowitz and Jennifer Greenhill as well. Thanks to a Wolfsonian-FIU fellowship in Miami Beach, I fell into the fascinating, if sometimes bizarre, world of late nineteenthcentury physical culture, which helped bring the study of health to my focus on disease. Finally, I am grateful to the College of Physicians in Philadelphia for a grant which gave me time that year to pore over dozens of rare medical texts on nineteenth-century illness. Since then, the Research and Development Committee at Dickinson has funded numerous archival trips to fill in research gaps, including visits to the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC; the Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas, Austin; the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site and Baker Library at Dartmouth College, both in New Hampshire; the Horace Fletcher Papers at Harvard University’s Houghton Library; and

Acknowledgments

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the Bakken Museum Library in Minneapolis. R&D also generously supported publication-related costs. In developing the manuscript over the last several years, I have benefitted greatly from the questions and comments of audience members who attended various presentations. Thanks to Kathy Foster and Mark Mitchell for inviting me to present at the Philadelphia Seminar in American Art; to Sarah Burns and Erika Doss for the Newberry Seminar in American Art and Visual Culture, and to Melody Deusner for her comments; to Justin McCann for the Lunder Consortium symposium on Whistler at Colby College; to Ramah McKay for the History and Sociology of Science workshop at the University of Pennsylvania, and to David Barnes and Beth Linker for their insights; to Marissa Golden and Alicia Walker at the Bryn Mawr Center for Visual Culture series; and to Amelia Goerlitz for the chance to share my work with a new cohort of fellows at the Smithsonian Lunchbag Seminars in American Art. I am also indebted to audiences who attended conference talks at the College Art Association, the Association of Historians of American Art, Nineteenth Century Studies Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the Southeastern College Art Conference. I particularly want to thank Robin Veder for encouraging my work on Saint-Gaudens on a panel we co-chaired at CAA. The history of medicine is a small area within the study of American art, and I have relied upon truly innovative colleagues to guide my work: most especially, Sarah Burns, who was my PhD advisor, and who has done so much to open up unorthodox topics like disease within the field of American art. The depth and sensitivity of her research continue to amaze me. Many thanks to Tanya Sheehan, for her support, and, especially for her brilliant book, Doctored. Likewise, Susan Sidlauskas and Rachael de Lue have provided provocative models of how to put disease and nineteenth-century art in conversation. I am also indebted to the art historians Amy Werbel, Robin Veder, Sharon Hirsh, Kathleen Spies, and Naomi Slipp for taking up the history of medicine in such thoughtful ways. In the final months of this project, I have benefitted from regular discussions with Tanya Sheehan, Allison Moorehead, Julia Rosenbaum, Pat Berman, and Suzanne Hudson on art and the medical humanities. I look forward to our continued work now that a pandemic has brought new awareness and interest to this subject. At Bloomsbury, it has been a pleasure working with April Peake, Yvonne Thouroude, and Barbara Cohen Bastos. For various forms of support, I owe thanks to the following friends and colleagues: Alexis Boylan, Elizabeth Huey, Deirdre Murphy, Emily Shapiro, Kathleen Spies, Erika Doss, Julia Rosenbaum, David Ball, Victoria Sams, Lauren Lessing, Keri Watson, Emily Burns, Christine

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Acknowledgments

Filippone, Maura Coughlin, Emily Gephart, Ellery Foutch, Erica Hirshler, Ana López-Sánchez, and Akela Reason. You have all been an inspiration. Thanks as well to Les Tremblays, Gillette Conner, Kshama Harpanaker, Alexandra Parfitt, Ann Wellborn, Mariann Paolantonio, Rachael Hunter, Rebecca Saline, Kristin Page, and, especially, Scott and Nancy McBride. Despite all the hits which higher education has taken in recent years, Dickinson remains a special place and has always been my academic home. I have been fortunate to work with wonderful colleagues. In Art and Art History, I am grateful to Melinda Schlitt, Lisa Dorrill, Wei Ren, Phillip Earenfight, Heather Flaherty, Anthony Cervino, Todd Arsenault, Rachel Eng, and Andy Bale. Thanks to Ward Davenny and the late Barbara Diduk as well. I am grateful to Jennifer Kniesch for her sleuthing skills in tracking down image rights. Sharon O’Brien felt like my guardian angel early on in the project. Shawn Bender, Amy Farrell, Katie Oliviero, Margaret Frohlich, Sarah McGaughey, Claire Seiler, Jerry Philogene, Elise Bartosik-Velez, and Tom Reed offered helpful insight at various points. Thanks to Nitsa Kann, Adrienne Su, Ebru Kongar, Antje Pfannkuchen, Sarah Skaggs, and Amy Steinbugler for their friendship. The library staff, especially Interlibrary Loan, provided regular and generous support. Thanks to MaryAlice Bitts and Christine Baksi for helping to promote my work beyond Dickinson’s proverbial limestone walls. My family has provided a steady source of support over many years. I am especially grateful to Buck Heartwell and my late maternal grandmother, Lucille Dorgan Heartwell, who I always felt was an art historian at heart. My parents, Jim and Lucy Lee, have cheered me on through so much. They deserve thanks for my education more broadly, including a transformative college semester in London, where my love for art history took off. I am also grateful to my sister, Lucy Hartley, for her ongoing support, and for hosting me during many DC summer research trips. This book is dedicated to Sunil and Mira, who have brought unfathomable love and joy to my life. They are my everything: the wind in my sail, the ground beneath my feet.

1

Naming and Framing Disease

In 1901, James McNeil Whistler, then sixty-six years old, discovered the restorative power of rest while vacationing on the island of Corsica. In a letter to his sister-in-law, Rosalind Philip, he claimed to have been suffering from a lack of play, having “made myself my own treadmill and turned upon it in mad earnestness until I dared not stop.” Continuing, he complained that he had become “dull” from overwork, and that “in this wild pursuit of work the machine, this beautiful and sensitive machine”—by which he meant his own body—had become “cruelly overwrought.”1 In response to a London doctor, who advised him not to take any medicine but to “go away and rest,” Whistler had undergone a transformation in health.2 He noted in his journal the power of “doing nothing” in Corsica: as he put it, “No more sketch books, no more etching plates. I just sat in the sun and slept. I was cured.”3 Abbott Thayer struggled with fatigue throughout his career. As he once wrote to his patron, Charles Freer, his life had “always been different from that of most of the other men. St. Gaudens and Dewing and Tryon, for instance, know no particular limit to their bodily strength. . . . Whereas I have always been too tired to work over four hours a day and my life has been one steady fight to be fresh enough for continued labor.”4 In addition to fatigue, Thayer complained of poor eyesight and nervous exhaustion, once explaining that he had inherited “two kinds of nervousness, irritability from father’s and oceans of hypochondria” from his mother’s line, making his health an ongoing concern.5 John White Alexander experienced similar limitations on his energy and strength. His wife explained that the artist restricted his studio practice to three or four hours a day because he “never worked when he was fatigued or merely for the sake of working.”6 Fatigue is a theme that is hard to avoid when viewing his recumbent female figures, though for Alexander these languorous women may signal an awareness of subtle interior physiological states to which the painter was well attuned (Figure 1.1). According to a journalist for the New York Evening

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The Medicine of Art

Figure 1.1  John White Alexander, Repose, 1895. Oil on canvas, 52 1/4 × 63 5/8 in. (132.7 × 161.6 cm), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Anonymous gift, 1980.

Mail, Alexander believed that “one’s conception of beauty depends largely upon one’s mood, the condition of one’s nerves, one’s circulation and digestion, and incidentally upon one’s environment or surroundings.”7 Beauty, in other words, was not defined solely by outward appearance, but through a finely calibrated balance between the body’s internal and external states. These three examples succinctly illustrate a widely held truth around the body in the late nineteenth century: that it had a finite supply of energy and a limited capacity for work. This was a phenomenon scientists had studied and could now explain. With the first law of thermodynamics, Hermann von Helmholtz demonstrated in 1847 that the forces of nature exist in a closed yet vast system of universal energy incorporating human and non-human forms alike. The sense of possibility opened up by this law helps account for the sublime experience Henry Adams described at the 1900 Paris Exposition, where the brute power of the dynamos on display coalesced with a degree of moral force, culminating in what he called a “symbol of infinity.”8 But if energy could now be harnessed in seemingly infinite forms, it was also true, as noted by Rudolf Clausius in the

Naming and Framing Disease

3

second law of thermodynamics, that the loss of heat from the transfer of energy from one form to another resulted in the necessary dissipation of force in what was known as entropy. In other words, the forces within this vast universal system were invariably moving toward a state of gradual decline. The historian Anson Rabinbach explains in The Human Motor how these related discoveries in physics helped articulate one of modernity’s central challenges: as he puts it, the discovery of energy conservation and entropy brought with it “the endemic disorder of fatigue—the most evident and persistent reminder of the body’s intractable resistance to unlimited progress and productivity,” what might be called industrial modernity’s “permanent nemesis.”9 The “problem” of fatigue was heightened by the fact that the body now had a new competitive standard: mechanized labor, which could easily outpace and outperform the work of any human. This put pressure on the need to understand how and why the body became fatigued as well as how energy could be restored. In their famous time-motion studies, the industrial engineers Frank and Lillian Gilbreth drew on Étienne-Jules Marey’s innovations in chronophotography to show how the laboring body could be scientifically “managed” to minimize wasted workplace effort.10 Likewise, in the burgeoning field of psychology, William James analyzed fatigue through the phenomenon of the “second wind.” In “The Energies of Men,” he observed that we possess “amounts of ease and power that we never dreamed ourselves to own, sources of strength habitually not taxed at all” since we typically end an activity at the first sign of fatigue.11 James believed that energy was stored in syncretic layers in the body and that the presence of fatigue merely indicated the initial layer had been exhausted. A deeper reservoir of untapped energy remained for those attuned to its presence. Taking another point of view, the physical culture guru Bernarr Macfadden believed that increased energy came through exercise, without which many people are only “half alive.” In Vitality Supreme, Macfadden explained, “When the muscles are exercised the vital organs are energized and the activity of the entire functional system greatly increased” so that these organs radiate energy throughout the body.12 Toward the end of the nineteenth century, electricity came into focus as a newly harnessed energy source, illuminating city streets, parks, and buildings and transforming America’s urban landscape into a glittering pageant of light. American studies scholar Carolyn de la Peña explains that electricity was seen as “a spiritual triumph of mysterious power with unlimited potential,” including the potential to cure the body’s ills.13 For decades, physicians had experimented with the application of small doses of faradic currents as a nerve tonic or general stimulant, and galvanic currents to stimulate digestion and evaluation or to

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The Medicine of Art

Figure 1.2  Heidelberg belt advertisement, The New Voice, November 26, 1903, p. 15. Collections of The Bakken Museum, Minneapolis.

remove ulcers and tumors.14 By the 1880s, many physicians believed electricity could alleviate a wide range of health problems and they promoted the benefits of this “mysterious power” in revitalizing the human body.15 An array of energyenhancing commercial products—from vitalizing elixirs and tonics to electric belts and brushes—were marketed with bold claims for their curative powers. The advertising copy for an electric belt from the Heidelberg Medical Institute, for instance, was pitched at men, promising to cure rheumatism, lumbago, lame back, nervous exhaustion “and many other ailments” and to restore users of the belt “to vim, vigor and perfect manhood” (Figure 1.2). Such products were at the center of a late nineteenth-century health and fitness industry that included organized sports, new exercise regimens, and diet advice—all aimed at building up the body’s energy and strength. This effort was fueled not simply by a desire for better health but by an understanding that weakness and fatigue were often indicators of disease. Early definitions of “disease”—also spelled “dis-ease”—emphasize the absence of ease and comfort. In the thirteenth century, disease meant being disturbed, annoyed,

Naming and Framing Disease

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or troubled: it was understood as a “condition of being (more or less seriously) out of health,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In other words, the focus was less on disease itself than on the fact that the body’s equilibrium and balance were out of sync. The notion that sickness and health were intimately connected and mutually defining was developed in the ancient practices of Hippocrates and later systemized by Galen. It was a relationship that continued into the early modern era, exerting an influence throughout the nineteenth century. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Health and sickness are not essentially different. . . . In fact, there are only differences in degree between these two kinds of existence: the exaggeration, the disproportion, the nonharmony of the normal phenomena constitute the pathological state.”16 Building from this observation, health and illness operate in tandem throughout this study. My discussion of illness begins with nervous exhaustion, or neurasthenia, which is a natural starting point in an era consumed with the body’s supply and management of energy. Anyone familiar with the Gilded Age knows that this catchall disorder with its broad array of symptoms became a preoccupation— an affectation, even—of an elite professional class, one which included artists. However, beyond an introductory discussion, The Medicine of Art is focused on other illnesses which unsettled Gilded Age health—tuberculosis, cancer, and syphilis—and which also shaped the production and consumption of art. Naming these illnesses in relationship to the cultural figures featured in this study is itself a significant move. In the case of Robert Louis Stevenson, the subject of Chapter 2, tuberculosis was an integral part of the writer’s identity and became part of the romantic myth surrounding him. However, in subsequent chapters, featuring Abbott Thayer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and the collector Charles Freer, the connection to disease has at least been partially buried in archival sources, making the act of bringing it to light an important part of the story.17 Most importantly, my aim is to show how major Gilded Age works of art can be understood in novel ways through the perspective of medicine. I argue that health and illness play a central role in the story of late nineteenth-century American art, one that is more pervasive and culturally entrenched than scholars have previously assumed.

A Nation of Nerves [T]he typical American is a nervous being. We are developing a hurried, sensitive, anxious race, and we need more rest, more play, to distract our minds. —Julia McNair Wright (1882)18

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Embedded in the late nineteenth-century preoccupation with energy was an understanding of nerves as the comprehensive distribution system through which the body received its life force (Figure 1.3). The electric belt ad shown earlier assumed that electricity would move through the torso, chest, neck, and head and then down the arms and legs, carrying energy across a dense network of nerves throughout the body. However, this was a relatively new way of understanding nerves. Through much of the nineteenth century, the brain enjoyed preeminence as the primary site for even basic motor functioning. Yet it eventually became hard to ignore that nerves had a life of their own: long seen as messengers secondary to the brain, they appeared to have their own internal network manifest through nerve fibers—what the emerging field of neurology was beginning to understand as a set of discrete but interconnected communication systems.19 Emphasis thus moved from the brain as the body’s central operating system to a model of the body as “nervous in its entirety.”20

Figure 1.3  “The Sympathetic Nervous System,” frontispiece for William S. Sadler, Worry and Nervousness (Chicago: McClurg & Co.) 1914.

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This shift in understanding did not quietly unfold within the disciplinary boundaries of medical science alone. As the scholars Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail have shown, it was “complexly co-generated” within the context of an urban, industrial environment.21 By this, they mean that nerves became synonymous with a modern sense of self and that this self was defined by a physical immersion in the city. To make their point, Salisbury and Shail recall Charles Baudelaire’s canonical essay, “The Painter of Modern Life,” in which the poet describes moving through an urban crowd “as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity” with its “energies more vivid than life itself, always inconstant and fleeting.” As they see it, Baudelaire “translates the sensations of the world into a body that vibrates and responds in sympathy with it, according to a model of nervous force.”22 In other words, nerves were not simply a system through which modern experience was filtered; they constituted the ground upon which it was sensed and known, giving rise to a new language of being— what psychologists understood as modern consciousness. Helmholtz suggested as much when he took measurements of human nervous impulse, recording between 35 and 45 meters per second, as if to say that nerves were now the unit of measure for calculating experience in the modern world.23 The neurologist George Beard likewise built his understanding of modernity around the “problem” of nerves. Following the laws of thermodynamics, Beard regarded the body’s energy as finite and in a state of constant dissipation.24 He believed each individual was born with a fixed supply of energy and that the demands of modern living imposed an unprecedented drain on those supplies. In American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (1881), he identified the rise of steam power, the printing press, the telegraph, women’s education, and the sciences as primary factors of modern life that excessively taxed the body’s energy, leaving the nervous system bankrupt and exhausted. While these same factors existed in other industrialized countries, Beard believed that combined with other traits, including climate and national character, neurasthenia was a particularly American disease. Within medicine, Beard has been credited with giving neurasthenia legitimacy as a disease. As the medical historian Charles Rosenberg explains, he tied together a loose and varied set of symptoms into a “common etiology” that “helped remove the social disapproval attached to such ailments” by taking seriously what today we would call mental illness.25 Beard’s one-and-a-half page list of neurasthenic symptoms ranged from the relatively banal (sensitiveness to changes in the weather, ticklishness) to the extreme (fear of fears, explosions in the brain at the back of the neck), while at the same time combining different

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types of symptoms, including the emotional (hopelessness), psychological (bad dreams, mental irritability), and somatic (dryness of the skins, tenderness of the teeth and gums). In doing so, he stretched the limits of what a single disease might entail to the point that neurasthenia could seem to be nothing in particular at all. That is, many of its symptoms were so general they could be signs of any illness, making it difficult to say for sure whether an individual was suffering from what Beard described. As a result, he was regarded by some of his colleagues as a charlatan, and many believed neurasthenia was nothing more than a “fashionable self-indulgence.”26 Still, by giving neurasthenia a “serviceable pathology,” Rosenberg writes, Beard’s framing of neurasthenia marked a decisive move away from the ancient Galenic model in which disease was defined in even broader terms by an imbalance of humors in the body.27 Of even greater impact, however, was the sociological nature of Beard’s observations: he cast a cacophonous welter of symptoms into a national narrative on nerves, arguing for a direct causal link between modern life and an epidemic of nervous exhaustion in America.28 As the literary critic Tom Lutz observes, neurasthenia at once became a medical specialty and “a central new cultural articulation of psychological, moral, physical, social, and economic understandings, especially understandings of psychological, social, and economic change.”29 Beard insisted that “no age, no country, and no form of civilization, not Greece, nor Rome, nor Spain, nor the Netherlands, in the days of their glory, possessed such maladies” as late nineteenth-century northeast America.30 This was not only on account of America’s concentration of modern technology and industrialization, but also because of what he described as “dryness of the air, extremes of heat and cold, civil and religious liberty, and the great mental activity made necessary and possible in a new and productive country.”31 The widespread presence of neurasthenia was not entirely a bad thing, however; in fact, Beard considered it proof that America was setting a new benchmark for civilization. In an ironic twist, nervous exhaustion was not a sign of individual weakness but an undesirable, if unavoidable, outcome of achievement and national progress. As such, neurasthenia became a marker of class distinction. F. S. Gosling argues that while more than half of the diagnosed cases in America were from the skilled and semiskilled laboring classes, neurasthenia was culturally understood as a white-collar, brain worker’s disease.32 This was the class most associated with America’s growing economic prosperity; it was also predominantly Protestant and white. From an evolutionary perspective, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer explained, it was not the fittest who were most likely to survive, but those who could fruitfully adapt to a modern technological environment by managing

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their energy and nerves. In his 1882 tour of the American northeast, Spencer preached the “gospel of relaxation,” emphasizing the need for cultivating balance between body and mind through self-culture and an attitude of “repose.”33 It was a message aimed at an overworked “leisure class” with the means to relax, pursue hobbies, and take vacations—in short, a Protestant elite. Neurasthenic discourse also codified late nineteenth-century ideas surrounding gender. Men became neurasthenic from overtaxing themselves at work and were typically prescribed outdoor physical activity aimed at revitalizing male virility. Women, on the other hand, believed to be naturally weak and debilitated, were prescribed treatments which tended more toward docility, as with S. Weir Mitchell’s infamous “rest cure,” known for its punishing silence and inactivity.34 Given the pronounced social disparities in how the disease played out, Lutz argues that late nineteenth-century neurasthenic discourse had less to do with medical science than with the need to “negotiate the large-scale changes in culture and structure which radically changed the face of social life in America.”35 It provided a medicalized space through which broader differences across nation, class, race, and gender were expressed, and it did so in a manner which reproduced many of the same power structures and social inequities which then dominated American life. * * * As part of a broader interest in the culture of the body and medicine, a number of art historians in recent years have demonstrated how neurasthenic discourse informed Gilded Age art.36 Several examples will be discussed here, but no late nineteenth-century American artist marks a better starting point than Thomas Eakins, whose example offers a reference point throughout this introductory chapter. Eakins himself suffered from a neurasthenic breakdown in 1886 following his dismissal as director of instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Appearing “sick, run down, out of sorts,” as Walt Whitman described him, the artist set out for a ten-week therapeutic “camp cure” in Dakota Territory.37 By the mid-1880s, Teddy Roosevelt and Owen Wister had helped popularize the idea that men could rejuvenate themselves by “roughing it” in the West.38 Wister had ventured West on the advice of physician S. Weir Mitchell, who was also friends with Eakins. In Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked, first published in 1871, Weir lamented the lack of play among white-collar workers and with it the “overtaxing and misusing the organs of thought.”39 (Another Philadelphia disease specialist and friend, Dr. Horatio Wood, likely helped organize the artist’s travels to the B-T Ranch.) Eakins readily adapted to life on

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the range: in letters home to his wife, Susan, he described working alongside cowboys, participating in a roundup, and witnessing the capture of a horse thief (Figure 1.4). Despite not sleeping on a bed, Eakins found himself in “the best of health.”40 When the artist returned to Philadelphia, Whitman remarked how he had “built up miraculously.” As the poet put it, Eakins had needed “the converting, confirming, uncompromising touch of the plains.”41 Signs of “wear and tear” show up in many of Eakins’s painted subjects. The art historian Kathleen Spies observes that a number of his female sitters “are shown in a state of complete inactivity with slouched, tired postures, heavy limbs, and tear-filled eyes,” indicating “a state of depression, physical exhaustion, and a tendency to cry, the three most commonly noted symptoms of neurasthenia in both medical and popular literature.”42 Spies shows that this was not an occasional mode that appears in Eakins’s work but a recurring pattern particular to his portraits of women.43 It even applied to his wife, Susan Macdowell Eakins, a reportedly energetic woman, who appears so weak

Figure 1.4  Thomas Eakins, Cowboy with dark neckerchief, on dappled horse, 1887. Dry plate negative, 4 × 5 in. (10.16 × 12.7 cm), Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection, purchased with the partial support of the Pew Memorial Trust, 1985.68.2.1082.

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and weary in Portrait of a Lady with a Setter Dog (c. 1885) that even holding a book appears taxing.44 The discourse of neurasthenia also informs Annette Stott’s interpretation of Eakins’s Miss Amelia van Buren (c. 1891) (Figure 1.5). Van Buren studied with Eakins at the Academy from the fall of 1884 through the winter of 1885, only to find herself at the center of the artist’s inner circle when his unorthodox teaching practices led to his forced resignation by the Board of Directors. On account of illness, either brought on or exacerbated by the scandal, van Buren left the Academy, retreating to a seaside resort in New Jersey. Six years later, Eakins painted her portrait, showing van Buren leaning in a classic pose associated with melancholy, appearing tired and somewhat despondent.45 Eakins was not alone in bringing the culture of nervous exhaustion to the Gilded Age “woman-in-interior” motif, though other artists approached the subject differently. The art historian Zachary Ross explains that by the turn of the century “oppressive measures such as Mitchell’s rest cure gave way to more

Figure 1.5  Thomas Eakins, Miss Amelia van Buren, c. 1891. Oil on canvas, 45 × 32 in. (114.3 × 81.28 cm), the Phillips Collection, Acquired 1927.

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positive, self-directed remedies in the form of ‘New Thought,’ or what William James called the ‘mind-cure movement.’”46 In art, this meant a move away from sitters with visible signs of nervous exhaustion in favor of women absorbed in what Ross describes as “an oceanic, spiritual ether, a realm of mental calm and tranquility.”47 Paintings of women in interiors by Thomas Wilmer Dewing exemplify this trend. In Lady in White (No. 2) (c. 1910), for example, Dewing portrays his sitter relaxed in a sparsely decorated monochromatic room with little to detract from her quiet meditative state (Figure 1.6). Like Eakins’s female subjects, she lacks energy and volition, yet unlike his women, she appears selfpossessed and intentionally restful. In keeping with the Protestant ethos of mind-cure, with its emphasis on “right thinking” and moral virtue, Dewing’s subject demonstrates the ability to control her own emotions, directing them toward a “higher” plane of consciousness associated with mental repose: her calm introspection serves as a model of how the stress of modern living could be alleviated within the tranquil environment of the home, while also signaling her

Figure 1.6  Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Lady in White (No. 2), c. 1910. Oil on canvas, 22 3/8 × 21 1/4 in. (56.7 × 54.1 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.30.

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intellectual refinement and elevated social standing.48 Moreover, Ross explains, it is not just that a painting such as Lady in White depicts physical and mental relaxation in a tranquil setting; it also “functioned phenomenologically to help induce a state of inward repose, a key therapeutic ideal eagerly sought by both male and female viewers.”49 That is, Dewing responds to the epidemic of neurasthenia among Gilded Age elites by picturing women in interiors modeling a “message of healthful rest” as though to guide viewers into a similar state of quietude and relaxation.50 Landscape paintings were known to have similar effects. Critics celebrated the atmospheric landscapes of Dwight Tryon with their soothing monochromatic palettes and “delicate planes melting into one another,” absent of jarring elements such as “rumbling waterfalls” and “steep mountain tops,” the art historian Sarah Burns writes.51 Tryon’s hazy outlines drew viewers into what she describes as an environment of “aimless, distant, unfocused looking” that felt like “an eye-bath or balm of soothing green tone in which the ocular muscles could simply immerse themselves and transmit messages of sensuous relaxation to the mind,” resulting in “exquisite psychological release” (Figure 1.7).52

Figure 1.7  Dwight Tryon, Apple Blossoms, 1895. Oil on canvas, 21 5/6 × 28 ¾ in. (54.2 × 73 cm), Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. George Langdon Jewett in memory of her husband, 17.40. Photo: Brooklyn Museum.

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Burns explains how a new emphasis on perception and the notion of vision as embodied in physiological and psychological experience helped redirect attention away from a narrative impulse in painting, represented in earlier landscape painting by the Hudson River School, toward a model of art as the expression of sensation. This tendency was exemplified in the work of Whistler, whose delicate, finely spun depictions of the Thames spoke less of London’s famous river than the experience of vision itself. In a work such as Nocturne in Blue and Silver: Battersea Reach (c. 1872–8), the eye moves through vaporous bands of almost imperceptible shifts in tone (Figure 1.8). No longer a “seeing machine,” tasked with transcribing the visible world into painted form, the artist now tapped into an interior spiritual realm, one embedded in the body of the artist, Burns writes, “residing in eyes and nerves, soul and emotions coursing through mental pathways.”53 Whistler, in particular, was credited for his capacity to have “unlocked a new and secret chamber of the soul” with his “sensitive, nervous fingers,” according to the critic Christian Brinton, as he played “directly upon the nerves, the chief possession, or affliction, of these restless modern days.”54

Figure 1.8 James McNeil Whistler, Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Battersea Reach, 1870–5. Oil on canvas, 19 5/8 × 28 7/16 in. (49.9 × 72.3 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1902.97a-b.

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The landscapes of George Inness were viewed in similar terms. Like Whistler, Burns explains, Inness represented a new vision of the artist as a “professional seer” on account of his mystical sensibilities and status as an art-world holy man.55 His paintings, inspired by the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and William James, investigated the inchoate realms of the spirit and consciousness, engaging fundamental questions on the nature and limits of perception.56 His soft, ethereal paintings of lush green landscapes obscured the personality of an artist who was given to violent mood swings and known to be “frenzied” and “nervous.”57 Nothing suggests an artist who considered himself “sick during the whole of early life” to the point that his health “very much impaired my ability to bear the painstaking in my studies which I would have wished.”58 According to the art historian Nicolai Cikovsky, Inness suffered from epilepsy, which the artist referred to as “a fearful nervous disease.”59 From a young age, Inness’s family lived outside of cities on account of his health, setting a pattern the artist would maintain throughout his career.60 Because he also suffered at various points from alcoholism, depression, rheumatism, and dyspepsia, Inness chose to live in semirural locations with abundant fresh air and easy access to nature, which he found more conducive to health than crowded urban settings. This included Montclair, New Jersey, where he moved permanently in 1884 to escape the noise and pollution of Manhattan, a mere fifteen miles away.61 In 1890, Inness took up part-time residence in a resort community near Tampa, Florida, at a time when the state’s warm, mild climate was being promoted as a healthy escape for those suffering from ailments such as rheumatism, gout, and consumption.62 Noting the therapeutic quality of Inness’s Florida landscapes, the art historian Leo Mazow writes that The Home of the Heron (1893) “straddle[s] a line between ‘rest cure’ and ‘vapor cure,’” creating the type of peaceful environment sought out by Mitchell’s neurasthenic patients as well as the misty atmosphere of a home vapor bath, a treatment recommended by physicians starting in the mid-1880s for a wide range of ailments (Figure 1.9).63 Yet, for as much as these gauzy landscapes invite “a view of the world with eyes half closed,” in Mazow’s words, they had a different kind of effect on observers who focused on the painter’s use of strong bright color. Critics found works such as Inness’s Sunset in the Old Orchard, Montclair (1894) invigorating, Sarah Burns explains, seeing excitement in the luminescent charge of his color combinations. William Howe Downes admired Inness’s canvases for their “intense vitality” and “rich pulsing life,” which he attributed to the artist’s “exuberant spirit” in the work.64 Regardless of what viewers drew from Inness’s landscapes, they provided

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Figure 1.9  George Inness, The Home of the Heron, 1891. Oil on canvas, 42 1/8 × 37 in. (107 × 94 cm), Princeton University Art Museum, Gift of Victor Stephen Harris, Class of 1940, and David Harris, Class of 1944, in memory of their father, Victor Harris. Photo credit : Princeton University Art Museum/Art Resource, New York.

what Mazow calls “a sort of modern therapy by way of paint.”65 This notion of art’s therapeutic effect is a central theme in this book as I try to show how Gilded Age painting and sculpture functioned as a kind of medicine for viewers.66 * * * Before moving on, I want to briefly return to Eakins in an effort to underscore another major theme in this study regarding the relationship between illness and health as “not essentially different,” in Nietzsche’s words. As already discussed, scholars have demonstrated how neurasthenia affected Eakins’s personal life and influenced his female portraits. His relationship to disease also comes through in his connections to the Philadelphia medical community, where he was a well-known figure among physicians at Jefferson Medical College and the University of Pennsylvania. His immersion in the anatomical teachings, clinical practices, and surgical discoveries of his colleagues meant that Eakins developed

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an essentially medical understanding of the body. In fact, the art historian Amy Werbel argues that his unflinching treatment of the body—what she calls his “anatomist’s eye”—is what caused Eakins to run afoul of the leadership of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with his teachings and a public that found his work unpalatable, even offensive.67 It explains why his paintings were more easily accepted within the context of medicine than they were within the realm of fine arts.68 At the same time, Eakins was closely aligned with the culture of health and physical fitness. Described as a robust, athletic figure, he enjoyed sports from an early age.69 Eakins’s Mount Vernon home was a short walk from the Schuylkill River, where he and his family rowed on a regular basis. By the late 1860s, rowing had achieved widespread popularity as a form of exercise and a mass spectator event.70 One of the first modern sports, rowing offered many benefits. As one observer noted, “no recreation, no method of exercise, no outdoor sport, offer[ed] less temptations and more advantages than rowing. [. . .] Regular habits, constant exercise, open-air life, and plain food, are essential to every man who aspires to endurance, skill, and rowing fame.”71 Good digestion, respiration, muscle development, and glowing skin were among the perks that even recreational enthusiasts enjoyed.72 Rowing also engaged the mind, requiring mental focus and discipline, an aspect which appealed to Eakins, who found the subject a natural fit with his taut compositions and carefully measured perspectival grids. Eakins enthusiastically followed Philadelphia rowing, including his childhood friend, Max Schmitt, who won a championship against Austin Street, a fellow Pennsylvania Barge Club member. Eakins created dozens of paintings, drawings, and watercolors of rowers, distinguishing his approach from other artists of the period with his emphasis on the rowers as opposed to the crowds who gathered to watch them (Figure 1.10). In the course of his career, Eakins also painted baseball players, boxers, hunters, fishermen, swimmers, and sailors, demonstrating what was arguably an unrivaled interest in sports among Gilded Age artists. His interest in health was also reflected in scenes of nature inspired by classical antiquity. In the course of a single year, Eakins created several works that explicitly drew upon ancient Greece, including Arcadia (c. 1883), An Arcadian (c. 1883), and the plaster relief Arcadia (1883), as well as a series of related photographs depicting members of his inner circle (Figure 1.11). The photograph of his student, John Laurie Wallace, playing a pipe is modestly amended for the painted standing figure in Arcadia (Figure 1.12). Likewise, the photograph of his nephew, Ben Crowell, shown in a recumbent pose, is

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Figure 1.10  Thomas Eakins, The Champion Single Sculls (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull), 1871. Oil on canvas, 32 ¼ × 46 ¼ in. (81.9 × 117.5 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment Fund and George D. Pratt Gift, 1934.

barely altered on canvas. The back-turned female figure in both Arcadia and An Arcadian is probably Susan Macdowell, who at the time was engaged to Eakins. Similar figures inhabit the sculptural relief, called either Arcadia or Pastoral, depicting (from left to right) a nude youth, an old man, two women, a maiden, and a dog who face a nude piper seated on a rock beneath a tree. Scholars have struggled to interpret these Arcadian works, some of which appear unfinished, and which in their poetic sensibilities are uncharacteristic of an artist known for his empirical “realist” approach.73 Yet these Arcadian scenes are not as limited to a remote idyllic world as they might at first seem. In the late nineteenth century, the region of central Greece known as Arcadia—which since Virgil’s time had been a literary subject symbolizing an ideal state of lost happiness and harmonious living in nature— was reinvented for modern times.74 Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes helped revive this trope by showing how a fecund, exotic paradise could become a refuge from the devastating effects of the artist’s failed marriage and the financial ruin he experienced in modern Paris. A similar sense of retreat informs Matisse’s Joy of Life (1905–6), a painting that is at once rife with references to a long-standing

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Figure 1.11  Thomas Eakins, Arcadia, c. 1883. Oil on canvas, 38 5/8 × 45 in. (98.1 × 114.3 cm), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967.

pastoral and specifically French artistic tradition, but which also resonates with contemporary debates on the role of the environment in health and the benefits of an open-air immersion in nature.75 The art historian Barbara Larson observes that Matisse’s fluid, arabesque lines formally link his human figures to the organic world of trees and that the two coexist in a sylvan setting celebrating “health through nature.”76 The ecstatic dancer in the painting’s background also calls up the influential American dancer Isadora Duncan, who brought classical purity together with the energy of raw primal nature. In a 1903 interview with the New York Sunday World, Duncan explained, “My idea of dancing is to leave my body free to the sunshine, to feel my sandaled feet on the earth, to be near and love the olive trees of Greece” (Figure 1.13).77 Although Eakins’s Arcadian works are earlier than these examples and represent a more traditional academic style based on his study of classical antiquity at the École des Beaux-Arts, he shares their predilection for art and

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Figure 1.12  Thomas Eakins, [Standing Male Nude with Pipes], 1880s. Platinum print, 9 × 6 13/16 in. (22.9 × 17.3 cm), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, David Hunter McAlpin Fund, 1943.

nature as a therapeutic refuge from modernity. His Arcadia was a real place— Avondale, Pennsylvania—located thirty-five miles southwest of Philadelphia. It was where Eakins’s brother-in-law, Will Crowell, moved from his home in the city when he was diagnosed with a heart condition that required him to relocate to a more tranquil rural environment. With Eakins’s sister, Frances, and their three children, Crowell settled on a farm that soon became a retreat for friends and family in Philadelphia. Eakins was one of their most frequent guests, and the Crowells built a studio on their property so the artist could work while there. Although it is not clear whether Eakins painted and sculpted his Arcadian images in Avondale or in his Philadelphia studio, works in this group were at least conceived at the Crowell farm, where he also took the photographs of John Laurie Wallace, Ben Crowell, and Susan Macdowell, discussed earlier.78 Eakins took advantage of Avondale’s many recreational opportunities, including swimming, hunting, and horseback. Writing on the artist’s time on the farm, William Innes Homer notes that Eakins created “his own Arcadia, paying

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Figure 1.13 Raymond Duncan, Isadora Duncan at the Parthenon Theater, 1904. Photographic print, 4 ¼ × 3 ¼ in. (11 × 8 cm), Jerome Robbins Dance Division, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

homage to the harmonious environment in which he felt fulfilled and at peace.”79 Scholars have tended to read these Arcadian scenes as outliers in Eakins’s oeuvre—a nostalgic turn away from his otherwise steady focus on modern life themes—yet like the artist’s interest in rowing and other sporting subjects, the healthy body in nature serves as a connecting theme. It reflects the artist’s French academic training with its emphasis on anatomy and classical sculpture as well as his immersion in a late nineteenth-century twinned discourse on health and disease.

The Medicine of Art This project is partly inspired by Jackson Lears’s landmark study, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-

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1920 (1983), which maps the emergence of a “therapeutic world view” among white northeastern elites during a time when values that once underwrote a self-reliant Protestant culture were moving toward an ethos of evasive banality, Lears explains. He sees the neurasthenia epidemic as the embodiment of this crisis because in his view it exemplifies the breakdown of familiar markers of cultural and moral authority. As Lears writes, nervous exhaustion was symptomatic of the moment and “led numerous troubled Americans to seek solace not from ministers, but from mind-curists and mental hygienists whose cures for nervousness frequently lacked a supernatural dimension. References to salvation dropped from view; psychological well-being became . . . an entirely secular project.”80 “Antimodernism” is the umbrella term describing the range of responses brought about by this “helpless feeling” of weightless disorientation. It was driven by a demographic that wished “to rekindle possibilities for authentic experience, physical or spiritual—possibilities they felt had existed once before, long ago,” Lears explains.81 Some antimodernists “preached regeneration through preindustrial craftsmanship and a pastoral ‘simple life,’ or posed the violent lives of medieval warriors,” while others turned to “the joys and terrors of medieval or Oriental religious belief ” to escape the blandness of modern culture.82 Aesthetic experience was another facet of antimodern revitalization, though the emphasis now was on psychological effect over an earlier model of moral didacticism. “Americans began to appreciate art not because it stirred them to heroic thoughts and deeds,” Lears observes, “but because it calmed them, provided them with respite from the constant demands of the modern superego.”83 Henri Matisse explicitly acknowledged this therapeutic potential in Notes of a Painter (1908) when he described “an art which might be for every mental worker, be he businessman or writer, like an appeasing influence, like a mental soother, something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue,” a sentiment in keeping with the Arcadian theme previously noted in Joy of Life.84 The Medicine of Art builds on Lears’s model to argue that art not only soothed the nerves of tired “brain workers” but also acted as a salve for individuals making and collecting art who suffered from other illnesses—specifically, tuberculosis, cancer, and syphilis.85 By focusing on these diseases, the present study makes a categorical move away from neurasthenia, the primary illness art historians have thus far examined in connection with late nineteenth-century American art.86 Medically speaking, neurasthenia is considered a non-organic—or functional— disease, whose symptoms are present but cannot be scientifically measured or

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known. That is, despite the many symptoms articulated by Beard, neurasthenia could not be “found” in the body through the presence of a microorganism, lesion, or other medically observable sign. Its amorphous nature, its mix of physical, emotional, and psychological symptoms, along with its associated social and economic privilege, gave neurasthenia a somewhat nebulous status within the context of scientific medicine, though its unquestionable influence as a cultural discourse has made it a logical starting point for scholars interested in the relationship between American art and health.87 However, as organic diseases, tuberculosis, cancer, and syphilis have a different status within medicine. By definition, organic disease involves observable and measurable changes within the cells, tissues, or organs and refers to any disease with an identifiable presence within the body, whether that presence is localized or systemic. At a time when scientific medicine was quickly expanding its capacity to name and diagnose illness, cellular disease—especially epidemic disease—occupied the attention of physicians to a much greater degree than neurasthenia.88 Despite this, I have given neurasthenia a leading role in this opening chapter for two reasons. First, because the nervous system was central to late nineteenth-century understandings of the body, many forms of illness were articulated through the language of nerves, even when the cause of suffering was ultimately found to be something else. In fact, symptoms associated with nervous exhaustion were often the first sign of illness. For instance, as discussed in Chapter 4, Augustus Saint-Gaudens blamed his nerves for a protracted period of failing health starting in 1897. Doctors only realized three years later that his unresolved symptoms had a much more insidious cause when he was diagnosed with rectal cancer. Even with this diagnosis, however, Saint-Gaudens continued to refer to his poor health in correspondences with friends as an issue of nerves to avoid the stigma then associated with cancer. This is the second reason why neurasthenia is important to a study of organic disease. Tuberculosis, cancer, and syphilis were all taboo subjects which were studiously avoided or referred to only in oblique or euphemistic terms, as explained further in the chapters ahead. On the other hand, as already seen, neurasthenia was understood as an illness of distinction and reflected in a positive manner on an individual’s evolutionary place within a late nineteenth-century social hierarchy. It therefore functioned as a convenient “cover” for diseases which at the time were more menacingly seen as marks against an individual’s moral character and a sign of personal failure. * * *

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Looking ahead, Chapter 2, “The ‘Picturesque Unfitness’ of Robert Louis Stevenson,” demonstrates through a case study focused on depictions of Stevenson in art how disease in the nineteenth century came to be enshrined in metaphor. When Stevenson’s future wife, Fanny Osbourne, first met the writer, she assumed from his appearance that he was dying from tuberculosis. Even as the physicians who examined him found no evidence of the disease, Stevenson’s image became synonymous with tuberculosis in the eyes of many of his family members, friends, and admirers. It dovetailed with his romantic persona as an exiled bohemian writer and thus became an indistinguishable part of how he viewed and presented himself. Through close examination of works by John Singer Sargent, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Abbott Thayer, this chapter shows how each artist negotiated Stevenson’s health and translated illness into art. In Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife (1885), for instance, Sargent dramatically transformed the ornamented drawing room of Stevenson’s home in Bournemouth, England, into a hollowed-out chamber haunted by death. Likewise, Thayer’s Stevenson Memorial (1903) at first reads innocently as a seated commemorative angel until we learn from x-ray photographs that the artist’s three children—who lost their mother to tuberculosis—are rendered in an earlier version that hovers like a ghost beneath the completed canvas. Chapter 3, “Therapeutic Living in Dublin,” pivots around the loss of Abbott Thayer’s beloved wife, Kate Bloede, in 1891. Scholars have long attributed her death to melancholia and “a pulmonary complication,” though in fact the primary cause of death was tuberculosis. I argue that following her diagnosis, Thayer sought to protect himself and his three young children from the fear that they would also succumb to illness by retreating to rural Dublin, New Hampshire, where they adopted a therapeutic, outdoors-oriented life—emphasizing exercise, pure mountain air, a healthy diet, and hygienic clothing—similar to the freshair routine then prescribed to sanatorium patients suffering from tuberculosis. Paintings by Thayer of his children with bare feet, ruddy cheeks, and “healthy” loose-fitting gowns attest to the family’s commitment to wholesome living in a therapeutic setting. Taking up the subject of his wife’s death, Thayer remakes her story of illness through paint and canvas into a narrative of redemption and health. Chapter 4, “Chasing a Cure in Cornish,” focuses on the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 1900 and died in 1907. In the intervening seven years, the sculptor experimented with a dizzying array of medical cures and therapies. Believing exercise was crucial, he transformed his summer home in Cornish, New Hampshire, into a year-round recreational

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haven. He received electric shock therapy, ate Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and followed the advice of Horace Fletcher, known to late nineteenth-century audiences as “The Great Masticator.” At the same time, doctors operated on his tumor and administered the experimental Trypsin cure for cancer. Throughout, Saint-Gaudens labored over his long-standing monumental sculpture dedicated to Phillips Brooks, the Boston preacher, who enjoyed a cultlike status among the dying. In the process, the Phillips Brooks Monument, with its accompanying protective figure of Christ, assumed an almost-talismanic presence in the sculptor’s life. Saint-Gaudens maintained close physical contact with the monument until his death, bringing Brooks to life by working and reworking the preacher’s gesture, clothing, and stance, even as the sculptor’s own fragile body was consumed by cancer. Chapter 5, “Collecting as Cure,” focuses on the industrialist Charles Lang Freer, who amassed a fortune from the manufacture of railroad cars and investments in the pharmaceutical industry. He poured his profits into East Asian artifacts—including Korean pottery, Japanese folding screens, and Chinese scroll painting—along with the work of several late nineteenthcentury American painters. Freer’s death certificate states that he died from complications associated with syphilis, but scholars have been reluctant to consider how living with the illness might have affected his collecting practices and tastes. Photographs of Freer sitting and kneeling on the floor of his Detroit home with works of art he owned suggest that the intimate, tactile pleasures of collecting served as a compensatory activity for the lifelong bachelor. As his own body was ravaged by a disfiguring disease, Freer reveled in the breathy, vaporous hazes of Whistler’s paintings, the translucent glazes of ancient Islamic ceramics, and the cool, smooth surfaces of handheld Chinese jades. Through collecting, Freer gained corporeal integrity—if not unity—through an alternative body (of art) that functioned as a surrogate self. It was a body he famously sought to keep coherent and whole after his death by controlling how the collection could be expanded, circulated, and shown. Throughout, The Medicine of Art hews narrowly to painting and sculpture, though photography and print culture play an important supporting role. This study also admittedly takes up a limited group of subjects—predominantly white middle- or upper-middle-class men in the Northeast—who by no means capture the range of artists working in late nineteenth-century America. They were part of a turn-of-the-century demographic Lears defines as the “moral and intellectual leaders of the American WASP bourgeoisie” whose presence, while never organized, coherent, or even consciously articulated, nonetheless

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“exercised crucial cultural power” for they served as educated “point men” within a new modern secular society.89 The particular case studies addressed here have been chosen on the basis of what they teach us on the relationship between art and medicine: that is, they are the best examples I have found to foreground the presence of disease in Gilded Age art. Their “fit” with the discourse of medicine undoubtedly reflects the fact these artists were part of the same socioeconomic strata as the intellectual and cultural elite who comprised the field of medicine.90 Since their work was embedded in patterns of white power and privilege, it comes as little surprise that their art illuminates hegemonic ideas from a history of medicine centered on the white male body and its health. The Medicine of Art thus investigates works of art that speak to a dominant class that defined the norms around white privilege at the time. The artists (and one collector) featured in this study also form a relatively coherent group themselves due to their overlapping professional and social networks. John Singer Sargent, Abbott Thayer, George de Forest Brush, Thomas Dewing, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and James McNeil Whistler belonged to a generation of American artists for whom training in Europe was essential. They all formally studied the academic tradition in Paris, albeit with different results. Although there is no single artistic philosophy or style which binds these artists together, each developed an approach which helped move a relatively provincial American art scene toward a more modern, cosmopolitan aesthetic. In addition, the men in this group were valued friends and colleagues. For example, SaintGaudens was the founding member of the Cornish, New Hampshire, artist colony and lived there permanently the last seven years of his life. He was joined early on by the families of Thomas Dewing and George de Forest Brush. Brush and his family found a deeper affinity with the nature-loving Thayer clan in nearby Dublin, New Hampshire, and eventually settled there. One of Thayer’s main patrons was Charles Lang Freer, who also supported Dewing and Whistler, and became one of Whistler’s most significant patrons as well as an intimate friend. These connections could be further elaborated, but perhaps make clear enough that the men in this cohort were closely connected by their social and professional ties. While I have focused on established Gilded Age figures, my hope is that rather than simply reassert their status within a familiar art historical narrative, this analysis will challenge what we know, complicating how we understand these artists and their work when viewed through a medical lens. For instance, John Singer Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife appears even more

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haunting when we know that it was painted during a low point in the writer’s health, when his family and close friends believed he was near the end of his life. Likewise, it becomes harder to view Thayer’s large-scale figurative works as idealized portraits of his children once we recognize the references to health and acknowledge they were painted on the heels of the diagnosis and death of his wife from tuberculosis. My goal in interpreting such examples is to show how a focus on disease illuminates previously unrecognized aspects of well-known works of art, significantly altering how we interpret them. These examples bring up another point regarding methodology. The Medicine of Art is more concerned with introducing a new perspective to works not explicitly about disease than in analyzing works—like Eakins’s The Gross Clinic—in which illness is an avowed theme. (A substantive bibliography of illustrated books already exists on the history of medicine as depicted in works of art.91) In other words, many of the examples in this study do not appear to have anything to do with disease and may be connected to medical discourse only through oblique references or buried archival sources. For instance, my reading of Thayer’s paintings through the lens of tuberculosis hinges on a passage from his father’s diary in which Dr. Thayer writes about Kate’s illness.92 There is otherwise no “smoking gun” or obvious link to disease in the work itself. As Rachael DeLue eloquently explains, the historical record does not always yield clear, solid evidence in support of an idea, yet this does not necessarily invalidate an interpretation. She argues that scholars can still build a case around “the assumptions that lay behind those articulations [of what has already been said and] the ideas that lay behind those assumptions.”93 In other words, there is reason to consider what could have been said within the context of a source, even if it is not directly spelled out as such. This is a particularly relevant point when talking about disease, since so many illnesses in the Gilded Age were shrouded in taboo and were therefore rarely articulated explicitly. I should add that this project has also involved plunging into the private lives of my subjects through diaries, personal correspondences, memoirs, and medical records. This type of archival digging, with its emphasis on biography and the intimate details of artist’s lives, departs from the tendency in art history today to favor context and cultural environment over an individual’s life story. However, unlike an older, more myopic version of art historical research in which the artist’s biography provided the primary analytic lens, I try to show how biographical detail can provide a starting point which expands well beyond the realm of the personal. In short, I utilize select information from the lives of artists to connect with larger cultural narratives on illness and health.

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Finally, while the history of medicine informs each of these chapters, it is never true that works of art simply “mirror” what is happening in the realm of medicine, as previous authors have sometimes assumed. The cultural historian Sander Gilman makes this point by showing how the nineteenth-century representation of mental illness, for example, is just that—a socially embedded construction—in which the image must be seen as a projection of the period’s ideas about mental illness rather than a reflection of scientific “truth.”94 Gilman suggests that to avoid the trap of a reflection-based model of analysis, it is helpful to think of illness functioning in a theatrical realm, as both the actor and the frame of action, and to consider what assumptions are being performed instead of taking anything at face value.95 This point has been underscored in analyses of fiction in which disease is a theme. As the literary scholar Athena Vrettos observes in her study of illness and Victorian culture, “nineteenth-century representations of illness reveal a persistent sense of disjunction between individual experience and the cultural discourses through which that experience was shaped or defined.”96 That is, the individual experience of disease is never equivalent to the clinical understanding of that disease as presented by medical science. This disjunction evokes the classic distinction between the terms “illness” and “disease”: as the sociologist Arthur Frank explains, disease is concerned with scientific measures such as the body’s temperature, the circulation of blood, and the presence or absence of infection, whereas illness involves the individual’s lived experience and suffering.97 As Frank suggests, the physician and the patient essentially inhabit parallel worlds with different perspectives and needs. The literary theorist Miriam Bailin takes up this divide when she writes that despite the rising status of professional medicine and advances in medical science during the nineteenth century, these changes had “relatively little impact” on the lives of the characters in novels.98 The gap between these two discursive realms plays out in the chapters ahead. As The Medicine of Art shows, painting and sculpture are by no means ignorant of what is happening in medicine, but through art disease is translated into another language—a visual language. It moves into a space of embodiment and feeling, becoming something else.

Notes 1 James McNeill Whistler to Rosalind Birnie Philip, April 6, 1901(record # 04843). “The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler,” University of Glasgow, https://

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3 4 5 6

7 8 9

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www​.whistler​.arts​.gla​.ac​.uk (accessed August 1, 2019). The artist’s biographer, Daniel Sutherland, sees Whistler’s self-pitying outburst in this letter as a gross exaggeration reflecting his advanced age more than his work ethic. He also notes that Whistler’s treadmill reference may come from Oscar Wilde’s time in prison, when he damaged his health on such an exercise machine. Daniel E. Sutherland, Whistler: A Life for Art’s Sake (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 326. On Whistler’s health in the weeks leading up to this trip, see also Stanley Weintraub, Whistler: A Biography (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1974), 449–51. James McNeill Whistler to Charles Lang Freer, April 1901(record #1521). “The Correspondence of James McNeill Whistler,” University of Glasgow, https://www​ .whistler​.arts​.gla​.ac​.uk (accessed August 1, 2019). E. R. and J. Pennell, The Whistler Journal (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1921), 208–9. Abbott Thayer to Charles Freer, May 20, 1893, Thomas Brumbaugh Papers, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA), Smithsonian Institution. Abbott Thayer to Emma Beach, c. 1887, Reel D199, Frame 118, Nelson and Henry C. White research material, c. 1851–1961, AAA. Julie Anne Springer, “Art and the Feminine Muse: Women in Interiors by John White Alexander,” Woman’s Art Journal 6, no. 2 (Autumn 1985–Winter 1986): 3. Springer notes that critics frequently picked up on Alexander’s weak health and physical delicacy, though these qualities also made him subject to the late nineteenth-century stereotype of a rarefied aesthete. On this stereotype and the threat of degeneracy it posed for Gilded Age male artists, see Sarah Burns, “Fighting Infection: Aestheticism, Degeneration and the Regulation of Artistic Masculinity,” in Inventing the Modern Artist: Art & Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). On Alexander, see also Sarah J. Moore, John White Alexander and the Construction of National Identity: Cosmopolitan American Art, 1880–1915 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003), and Mary Anne Goley, John White Alexander: An American Artist in the Gilded Age (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2018). Goley writes that Alexander suffered through most of his career from manifestations of a “persistent indelicate constitution,” which was never adequately diagnosed (36). Alexander experienced early episodes of this illness—in which he grew faint and lost consciousness—while visiting Robert Louis Stevenson at his home in Bournemouth, England, where the writer was also quite ill, as discussed in Chapter 2 (36). Cited in Springer, 2, quoted in “Need Good Digestion to Appreciate Beauty,” New York Evening Mail, December 10, 1910. Henry Adams, “The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900),” in The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918), 304. Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

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10 See Rabinbach, Ch. 4; Sharon Corwin, “Picturing Efficiency: Precisionism, Scientific Management, and the Effacement of Labor,” Representations 84, no. 1 (2003): 139–65; and Elspeth H. Brown, The Corporate Eye: Photography and the Rationalization of American Commercial Culture, 1884–1929 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 11 Henry James, “The Energies of Men (1907),” in The Essential William James, ed. John R. Shook (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2011), 310. 12 Bernarr Macfadden, Vitality Supreme (New York: Physical Culture Publishing Co, 1915), 82. 13 Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 105–6. 14 Ibid., 95. 15 Ibid. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 29. 17 I describe Thayer’s buried story in “Diagnosing the Archive,” Archives of American Art Journal 58, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 70–7. 18 Mrs. Julia McNair Wright, Practical Life; or, Ways and Means for Developing Character and Resources (Philadelphia: JC McCurdy & Co., 1882), 77. 19 Laura Salisbury and Andrew Shail, eds., Neurology and Modernity: A Cultural History of Nervous Systems, 1800–1950 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 18. 20 Ibid., 23. 21 Ibid., 1. 22 Ibid., 1, 2, quoted in Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” Selected Writings on Art and Artists, trans. P. E. Chavert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 400. On the role of modernity and neurology in generating new forms of subjectivity, see Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). On the interplay between modern physiology and aesthetics, see Robin Veder, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (Hanover, New Hampshire: Dartmouth College Press, 2015); Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower, eds., Vibratory Modernism (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); and Robert Michael Brain, The Pulse of Modernism: Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). 23 Cited in Salisbury and Shail, Neurology and Modernity, 30, quoted in John Gray McKendrick, A Review of Recent Researches on the Physiology of the Nervous System (London, 1874), 7 and Claude Debru, “Helmholtz and the Psychophysiology of Time,” Science in Context 14, no. 3 (2001): 471. 24 de la Peña, Body Electric, 4.

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25 George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881). Reprinted with an introduction by Charles E. Rosenberg (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1972), intro. iv–v. 26 Ibid., intro. vii. 27 Ibid., intro v. Salisbury and Shail, Neurology and Modernity, 30. 28 David G. Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation: America’s Search for Health, Happiness, and Comfort, 1869–1920 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 16. Charles Rosenberg sees Beard’s analysis as part of a larger historical pattern in which disease is treated as both an indication and the result of significant social change. See Charles E. Rosenberg, “Pathologies of Progress: The Idea of Civilization as Risk,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 72, no. 4 (Winter 1998): 714–30. 29 Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 19. Likewise, the historian Janet Oppenheim writes of nineteenth-century Britain, “Just as nerves pervaded the physical body, so did they permeate the images with which the Victorians evoked their society.” Questions of success and failure, order and chaos, and masculinity and femininity were “interlaced” with nerves and nervous disease. See Janet Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves”: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3. 30 Beard, American Nervousness, vii–viii. 31 Ibid., vii. 32 F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 31–2. 33 Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), 27. 34 The feminist writer and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman narrated the story of her own mental breakdown from Mitchell’s rest cure in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” first published in The New England Magazine in 1892. According to Gilman, Mitchell’s prescription of enforced isolation and a complete ban on mental stimulation exacerbated her depression, leaving her in a worsened state of mad desperation. For a more recent discussion of Gilman’s mental illness and treatment by Mitchell, see Helen Horowitz, Wild Unrest: Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the Making of “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). On the subject of gender and neurasthenia, see also Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation, Ch. 4, and Katherine Williams, Zachary Ross, Kathleen Spies, Amanda Glesmann, and Claire Perry, Women on the Verge: The Culture of Neurasthenia in Nineteenth-Century America (Stanford, CA: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, 2004). 35 Lutz, American Nervousness, 27. 36 Evidence of this broader tendency in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art includes Veder, The Living Line; Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist;

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Tanya Sheehan, Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Amy Werbel, Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Susan Sidlauskas, “Painting Skin: John Singer Sargent’s ‘Madame X’” American Art 15, no. 3 (2001): 9–33. Rachael Ziady DeLue, “Diagnosing Pictures: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Science of Seeing, ca. 1900,” American Art 21, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 42–69; Adrienne Baxter Bell, “BodyNature-Paint: Embodying Experience in Gilded Age American Landscape Painting,” in The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting, ed. Nany Siegel (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press, 2011); Naomi Slipp, “‘The Secret Figure’: Artistic Anatomy and the Medical Body in Nineteenth-Century American Culture” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2015); and Erin R. CorralesDiaz, “Remembering the Veteran: Disability, Trauma, and the American Civil War, 1861–1915” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2016). Related studies on European art from the same period include the following: Sharon L. Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Anthea Callen, Looking at Men: Art, Anatomy and the Modern Male Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Mary Hunter, The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in Late NineteenthCentury Paris (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016); Tania Anne Woloshyn, Soaking up the Rays: Light Therapy and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1890–1940 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017) and “Aesthetic and Therapeutic Imprints: Artists and Invalids on the Côte d’Azur, ca. 1890–1910,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 1 (Spring 2012), https​:/​/ww​​w​.19t​​hc​-ar​​ tworl​​dwide​​.org/​​sprin​​g12​/a​​esthe​​tic​-a​​nd​-th​​erape​​utic-​​impri​​nts​-a​​rtist​​s​-and​​-inva​​ lids-​​on​-t​h​​e​-cot​​e​-daz​​ur​-c-​​18901​​910 (accessed August 2, 2019); Gemma Blackshaw, “The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategizing in Egon Schiele’s Self-Portraiture,” Oxford Art Journal 30, no. 3 (2007): 377–401; Marni Reva Kessler, “Ocular Anxiety and the Pink Tea Cup: Edgar Degas’s Woman with Bandage,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 5, no. 2 (Autumn 2006), https​:/​/ww​​w​.19t​​hc​-ar​​tworl​​dwide​​.org/​​49​-au​​ tumn0​​6​/aut​​umn06​​artic​​le​/16​​0​-ocu​​lar​-a​​nxiet​​y​-and​​-the-​​pink-​​tea​-c​​up​-ed​​ga​r​-d​​egass​​ -woma​​n​-wit​​h​-ban​​dage (accessed August 2, 2019). 37 Cited in Alan C. Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Culture of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California, 2009), 151, quoted in Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden, January 21–April 7, 1889 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 135. On Eakins’s trip, see Cheryl Leibold, “Thomas Eakins in the Badlands,” Archives of American Art Journal 28 (1988): 2–15, and Cheryl Leibold and Kathleen A. Foster, “‘A Little Trip to the West,’” in Thomas Eakins Rediscovered: Charles Bregler’s Thomas Eakins Collection at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine

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38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

46

47 48 49 50

51

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Arts, ed. Kathleen A. Foster (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 189–197. Leibold and Foster, “‘A Little Trip to the West,’” 190. S. Weir Mitchell, Wear and Tear, or, Hints for the Overworked (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1971), 8. Leibold and Foster, “‘A Little Trip to the West,’” 190. Braddock, Thomas Eakins and the Culture of Modernity, 151–2. Kathleen Spies, “Figuring the Neurasthenic: Thomas Eakins, Nervous Illness, and Gender in Victorian America,” in Women on the Verge, 39. Although these symptoms mainly show up in his portraits of women, Eakins’s male subjects occasionally exhibit signs of neurasthenia, too. See Spies, “Figuring the Neurasthenic,” 44–5. Ibid., 39. Annette Stott, “Neurasthenia and the New Woman: Thomas Eakins’s Portrait of Amelia van Buren,” in In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom, ed. Laurinda S. Dixon (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 128. For Stott, however, Eakins’s depiction of van Buren also reflects the social challenges ambitious New Women posed in an environment where men, including Horatio Wood and S. Weir Mitchell, questioned their capacities for professional achievement (130). While Eakins sometimes also contributed to this limiting environment for women artists, Stott notes that he also advocated for women at the Academy to have the same opportunities as men (140). Zachary Ross, “Rest for the Weary: American Nervousness and the Aesthetics of Repose,” in Women on the Verge, 25. See Chapter 4 for more on William James and New Thought. Ibid., 21. Kathleen Pyne shows how evolutionary thinking allowed for mind-cure, Dewing’s women, and social class to be linked together in Ch. 4, Art and the Higher Life. Ross, “Rest for the Weary,” 21. Ross, “Rest for the Weary,” 30. Ross gives further meaning to the possibility that painting could be therapeutic for a patron in an essay on the relationship between Albert Pynkham Rider and Dr. Albert T. Sanden. Sanden became Ryder’s patron, financial supporter, and close friend starting in the late 1890s, while he was also owner of the Sanden Electric Company, which produced the Sanden Electric Belt as a cure for nervousness. Although there is no evidence that Ryder, who suffered from a variety of nerve-related ailments, used one of Sanden’s belts for his own therapeutic needs, it is clear from surviving correspondences that the relationship between the two men developed around their shared interests in health. Zachary Ross, “Linked by Nervousness: Albert Pinkham Ryder and Dr. Albert T. Sanden, American Art 17, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 86–96. Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 148.

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52 Ibid., 147, 148, 149. 53 Ibid., 132, 133. 54 Christian Brinton, Modern Artists (New York: The Baker & Taylor Company, 1908), 113, 112. 55 Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 114, 115. 56 For monographs on Inness, see Rachael Ziady DeLue, George Inness and the Science of Landscape (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2004) and Adrienne Baxter Bell, George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (New York: George Braziller, 2003). 57 Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 114; Leo G. Mazow, “George Inness, Softness, and the Vapor Barrier,” in Life Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly, ed. Marc Simpson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 60. 58 Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “The Life and Work of George Inness” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1965), 5. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 6. 61 Mazow, “George Inness,” 61. 62 Mazow, “George Inness,” 61–2. See also George M. Barbour, Florida for Tourists, Invalids, and Settlers [. . .] (New York: D Appleton and Co, 1882). 63 Mazow, “George Inness,” 64. 64 Cited in Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 151, quoted in William Howe Downes, “The Fine Arts,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 8, 1894. 65 Mazow, “George Inness,” 62. Viewers of Winslow Homer’s work had surprisingly similar responses. In contrast to Inness’s soft, poetic landscapes, Homer confronted Gilded Age audiences with stormy seascapes and crashing waves in depictions of the coastline of Maine, but viewers were invigorated by their primal energy and said they blew “city smoke out of the lungs,” Sarah Burns writes (26). As such, Homer’s seascapes helped to reinvent Maine as a “place for health,” where exhausted brainworkers could find invigoration in a rugged—and clearly masculinized— version of nature (27). See Sarah Burns, “Revitalizing the ‘Painted-Out’ North: Winslow Homer, Manly Health, and New England Regionalism in Turn-of-theCentury America,” American Art 9, no. 2 (Summer 1995): 21–37. 66 Thinking of nineteenth-century art in therapeutic terms is different from what we know today as “art therapy,” a professional field that emerged from psychiatry in the mid-twentieth century. The American Art Therapy Association describes their work as “an integrative mental health and human services profession that enriches the lives of individuals, families, and communities through active art-making, creative process, applied psychological theory, and human experience within a psychotherapeutic relationship.” Its stated goals are “to improve cognitive and sensory-motor functions, foster selfesteem and self-awareness, cultivate emotional resilience, promote insight, enhance

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67 68

69 70 71

72 73

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social skills, reduce and resolve conflicts and distress, and advance societal and ecological change.” https​:/​/ww​​w​.art​​thera​​py​.or​​g​/upl​​oad​/2​​017​_D​​efini​​tiono​​fPro​f​​essio​​ n​.pdf​, updated June 2017, accessed June 27, 2019. In both Gilded Age art and art therapy today, art plays a healing role; however, beyond this, the commonalities are hard to find. In my chapters on Abbott Thayer (Chapter 2) and Augustus SaintGaudens (Chapter 4), for instance, I focus on lifelong professional artists for whom art takes on a therapeutic role in response to a family or personal health crisis at a certain point in their careers. Each of them found redemption in art-making incidentally while working as professional artists, they did not choose to become artists on account of illness. With art therapy, on the other hand, art is typically taken up by an individual in response to a specific psychological incident or condition as part of a broader healthcare plan. It is employed intentionally and with a designated purpose to aid in an individual’s well-being and recovery. This is one way of articulating the difference between these two fields, although such distinctions are starting to be challenged and reimagined as in the 2021 College Art Association panel, “Modern Art and/as Therapy,” organized by Tanya Sheehan and Suzanne Hudson. See Werbel, Thomas Eakins, Chapter 2. This was certainly true with The Gross Clinic (1875) and The Agnew Clinic (1889), both of which were received with shock and horror when publicly exhibited—at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and Chicago World’s Fair, respectively— yet were not only accepted but also praised within the medical communities they depict. Werbel, Thomas Eakins, 35. William Inness Homer, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Art (New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1992), 20. Helen Cooper, Thomas Eakins: The Rowing Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery; Yale University Press, 1996), 24–5. Cooper, The Rowing Pictures, 28, quoted in Charles A. Peverelly, The Book of American Pastimes, 2nd ed. (New York: The American News Company, 1868), 116–17. Elizabeth Johns, Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 28. On Eakins’s Arcadian works, see Akela Reason, Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), Chapter 3; Marc Simpson, “Thomas Eakins and His Arcadian Works,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 1, no. 2 (Autumn 1987): 70–95; and John G. Lamb, Jr., “Eakins and the Arcadian Themes,” Eakins at Avondale and Thomas Eakins: A Personal Collection (Chadds Ford, PA: Brandywine River Museum; University of Delaware, 1980), 18–20. For a comparative use of Arcadia in photography, see Patricia Berman, “F. Holland Day and his ‘Classical’ Models), History of Photography 18, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 348–67. Lamb, “Eakins and the Arcadian Themes,” 18.

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75 Barbara Larson, “Curing Degeneration: Health and the Neoclassical Body in Early Twentieth-Century France,” in In Sickness and in Health: Disease as Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom, 181. 76 Ibid., 181, 182. 77 Quoted in Ann Daly, Done into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 101. 78 William Innes Homer, “Eakins, the Crowells, and the Avondale Experience,” Eakins at Avondale, 11. 79 Ibid. Eakins’s time at Avondale ended abruptly in 1897 when Frances’s daughter, Ella, committed suicide and the family assumed her relationship with Eakins was to blame. At that point, the artist was permanently banned from the farm. With insights from the Charles Bregler papers, recent biographers have taken up the details of this ousting, including Frank Stephens’s accusations of incest and bestiality against his brother-in-law. See Henry Adams, Eakins Revealed: The Secret Life of an American Artist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, The Revenge of Thomas Eakins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). On the question of Eakins and mental health, see also Sarah Burns, “Ordering the Artist’s Body: Thomas Eakins’s Act of Self-Portrayal,” American Art 19, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 82–107. 80 T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 54–5. The generally secular orientation of this period—and my project—is worth underscoring here, though secularism blurs in surprising ways with Gilded Age religion and spirituality. That said, there is a history which has yet to be written on the therapeutic role of art in different religious and spiritual contexts: it would include much of the history of art as we know it with artifacts such as a fertility goddess from ancient Mesopotamia; a statue of Juara, the Hindu goddess of malaria; a painting of Saint Roch, whose name among Catholics is invoked against the plague; and medicinal Navajo sand painting, among hundreds of thousands of objects over many centuries that are associated with healing or health. 81 Ibid., 57. 82 Ibid., 56–7. 83 Ibid., 191. 84 Lears, 191, quoted in Artists on Art, trans. and ed. Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves, 3rd ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 413. 85 By focusing on organic disease, this study avoids the fraught relationship between artistic creativity and mental illness. The notion that artists are by nature predisposed to depressive mood swings and melancholic temperaments has existed since ancient times, as chronicled in the classic study by Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn; the Character and Conduct of Artists: A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution (New York: Random

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House, 1963). The romantic image of the artist as a brilliant but tormented soul persists in the popular imagination through biopics of painters such as Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock and in the field of psychology through texts such as Kay Redfied Jamison’s Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1994). Scholarship in art history continues to be constrained by this tradition. A recent exhibition catalog on Edvard Munch affirms that he is still seen “as a lonely, angst-ridden artist” and the “dominant discourse has struggled to avoid the pitfall of the dual cliché of the artist’s Nordic origins and a psychologizing approach to his work” (13). See Angela Lampe and Clément Chéroux, “Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye,” in Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, eds. Angela Lampe and Clément Chéroux (London: Tate Publishing, 2011). The heavy-handed tactics of psychobiography have understandably made art historians wary of taking up art and mental illness, though there are models of how the subject can be handled sensitively and well. See, for instance, Dorinda Evans, Gilbert Stuart and the Impact of Manic Depression (Farnham, Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013). Neither do I build on the important connection which previous art historians have established between the shared institutional histories of medicine and the study and practice of anatomy among artists in the late nineteenth century. Anthea Callen has recently reminded us how the artist’s gaze and the medical gaze come together at this time, starting with the studies of hysteria by Jean-Martin Charcot in which careful viewing, aided by technologies of the photograph and the lantern slide, ushered in a new mode of observation that allows for seeing, power, and knowledge to converge. This late nineteenth-century alliance comes from Foucault, and has exercised considerable influence on art history. See, for instance, Bridget Goodbody, “‘The Present Opprobrium of Surgery’: The Agnew Clinic and Nineteenth-Century Representations of Cancerous Female Breasts.” American Art 8, no. 1 (1994): 33–51; Amy Werbel, Thomas Eakins, Chapters 2 and 3; Callen, Chapter 3. 86 A few historians of nineteenth-century European art have gone beyond neurasthenia to offer compelling examples of what it means to foreground disease as a lens of analysis. Sharon Hirsh shows in her study of Symbolist art that the threat of contagion and epidemic disease was an unavoidable aspect of urban life that was built into the fabric of the modern metropolis. Referring to such artists as James Ensor, Ferdinand Hodler, and Edvard Munch, Hirsh explains that most artists “had grown up with exhaustive family sickness and death common at the time; as young artists surviving into their twenties and thirties, they had evaded several of their own health crises but were haunted by their memories” (107). Their memories and experience of diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera, and syphilis ultimately appear as “visual codes” in their art (120). See Chapter 4 in Sharon L. Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society, 2004. Tania Woloshyn shows how illness occupies a central place in the work of the chronically arthritic painter Henri-Edmond Cross, whose health “necessitated a permanent move south to the Côte d’Azur, various therapies

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88

89 90

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The Medicine of Art (including electrotherapy, climatotherapy, medication and massage) and therefore ongoing self-regimentation and treatment.” She argues, “these were informed choices made by Cross which had a significant impact on his life and career, as significant as the aesthetic choices he made as a methodical neo-impressionist painter.” Woloshyn, “Aesthetic and Therapeutic Imprints,” 2012. See also recent work on the impact of ocular disease on Edgar Degas’s work: Richard Kendall, “Degas and the Contingency of Vision,” The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1020 (March 1988): 180–97, and Kessler, “Ocular Anxiety,” 2006. As Janet Oppenheim points out, neurasthenia is particularly illustrative of the place of medicine in the late nineteenth century with its “ill-defined physiological contours” and its significant sociological aspect. Yet, she also notes, recent historians of medicine “have emphasized the extent to which any form of illness is the product of interaction between biological reality and shifting cultural perspectives.” After all, the public perception of disease is shaped by “systems of values, ethical codes, religious beliefs, and all manner of preconceived opinion” that affect physicians, medical scientists, and patients alike. “Science and medicine,” she continues, “are interpretive endeavors into which the surrounding social context constantly intrudes.” This is particularly true with psychiatric disorders—and illnesses with a significant psychological component—for “cultural imperatives still play a paramount defining role in the absence of any sure knowledge of causation.” Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves,” 4. For a critique of the very process by which modern disease entities become classified and named, see Robert Aronowitz, Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Similar medical mysteries in our own day include chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, both of which have a significant cultural presence, but which lack agreed-upon medical explanations as well as effective diagnostic tests and treatments. See Katherine Williams, “American Women and ‘Nervousness’: Neurasthenia Then and Now,” in Women on the Verge, 16–17. Williams also notes that viewed from the lens of contemporary medicine, nineteenth-century neurasthenia included what we would now treat as major depression, bipolar affective disorder, and anxiety disorders (13–17). On the decline of neurasthenia and its twenty-first-century legacy, see Schuster, Neurasthenic Nation, Chapter 6 and Epilogue. Lears, xvi–xvii. Among the connections: Sargent’s father was a physician; Whistler’s brother and Thayer’s father were both physicians and Civil War surgeons; and the daughter of George de Forest Brush married the son of Henry Pickering Bowditch, who was a physician, physiologist, and dean of the Harvard Medical School. For illustrated histories of medicine in art and visual culture, see Susan Wheeler, Five Hundred Years of Medicine in Art: An Illustrated Catalogue of Prints and

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Drawings from the Clements C. Fry Collection in the Harvey Cushing / John Hay Whitney Medical Library at Yale University (Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2001); Sherwin B. Nuland, Medicine: The Art of Healing (New York: Hugh Lauter Levin Associates, Inc.; MacMillan Publishing Company, 1992); Giorgio Bordin and Laura Polo D’Ambrosio, Medicine in Art, trans. Jay Hyams (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010); Julie Hanson, Suzanne Porter, and Martin Kemp, The Physician’s Art: Representations of Art and Medicine (Durham, NC: Duke University Medical Center Library; Duke University Museum of Art, 1999); and Alan E. H. Emery and Marcia L. H. Emery, Medicine and Art (London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, Ltd.; Royal College of Physicians, 2003). For American art specifically, see William H. Gerdts, The Art of Healing: Medicine and Science in American Art (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Museum of Art, 1981). 92 See Lee, “Diagnosing the Archive,” Archives of American Art Journal. 93 De Lue, George Inness, 5. 94 Sander L. Gilman, Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 16. Stated differently, the art historian Suzannah Biernoff writes that “images are cultural and epistemological artefacts. [. . .] Paintings, sculpture, medical illustration and photography never simply represent or record pain or injury (as Darwin thought); they make it meaningful and useful; they prescribe and they normalize, but they also have the potential (as in abject art) to reimagine and resist.” Suzannah Biernoff, “Picturing Pain,” in The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities, eds. Anne Whitehead and Angela Woods, Sarah J. Atkinson, Jane Macnaughton, and Jennifer Richards (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 181. Carin Berkowitz notes that the “mirror” model of analysis of medical images still has not run its course in “Introduction: Beyond Illustrations,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 89, no. 2 (2015): 165–70. There is an extensive literature on the visual culture of medicine relevant to the nineteenth century. In addition to work by Sander Gilman, see L. J. Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright and Constance Penley, The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Jose Van Dijck, The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005); and Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007).

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95 Gilman, Picturing Health, 18. Anthea Callen goes even further to say that the “regulatory frameworks” produced by medicine at this time gave visual artists “the most potent means to construct, circulate and normalize—or disrupt—these ideals.” Callen, Looking at Men, 25. In other words, by working within the domain of the visual, artists enjoyed a certain agency in responding to the norms of medicine given the range of possible interpretations at their disposal. 96 Athena Vrettos, Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 5. The field of narrative medicine today works to close this gap by privileging the individual stories of illness from the perspective of both patients and physicians. It operates within and across “a series of complex narrative situations, including the situations between the physician and the patient, the physician and himself or herself, the physician and colleague, and physicians and society,” Rita Charon explains. See Rita Charon, “Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession and Trust,” Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) 286, no. 15 (October 2001), https://envoy​.dickinson​.edu​:6428​/journals​/ jama​/fullarticle​/194300 (accessed August 6, 2019). 97 Arthur Frank, At the Will of the Body: Reflections on Illness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1991), 12, 13. While this distinction may be useful, it is also limiting. As Janet Oppenheim reminds us, there is no way to easily separate a scientific understanding of disease from the lived experience of patients; moreover, there is considerable overlap between the two. She writes, “Public perceptions of disease are never merely reactions to discoveries of microbes, toxins, or genes; they are molded, too, by systems of values, ethical codes, religious beliefs, and all manner of preconceived opinion. Scientists and medical doctors, belonging integrally to the public thus affected, share many of its biases and expectations.” Oppenheim, “Shattered Nerves,” 3. 98 Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 3.

2

The “Picturesque Unfitness” of Robert Louis Stevenson

Ill as he was, Stevenson has been reading and writing—and smoking, as St. Gaudens shows; and in fact, I call him an invalid chiefly because, as I remember him, the term had such a picturesque unfitness. —M. G. Van Rensselaer (1895)1 In 1885, John Singer Sargent painted Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, an image which draws together a series of illness narratives that coalesce on a single canvas (Plate 1). First among these is the narrative around Stevenson, who was assumed in the nineteenth century to suffer from tuberculosis—or consumption, as it was commonly referred to at the time. Sargent depicts the Scottish writer midstride walking across a darkened room of his home in Bournemouth, England. Stevenson peers directly out at the viewer, twisting his mustache with one hand, while the other appears clawlike, hanging from the edge of his pocket. His wife, Fanny, is seated quietly along the right-hand edge of the painting. Their house— named “Skerryvore,” after a lighthouse designed by Stevenson’s uncle—had been purchased as a wedding present by the writer’s father for the couple with the intent of giving the couple a more permanent place to live. However, Stevenson was never well there. In the first six months at Skerryvore, when Sargent painted Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, the writer described himself in “a devil of decayed state,” which he called “a strange condition of collapse when it was impossible to do any work and difficult (more difficult than you would suppose) to write the merest note.” Suffering from hemorrhages that left him bedridden for days at a time, no one could deny that Stevenson was seriously ill. The painter Will Low noted the irony that “at no time in his life was he more near to death than during the time he had a roof of his own for the first time and, ceasing to move, had settled down to live.”2

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Throughout his life, Stevenson experienced dozens of illnesses and countless episodes of poor health. Biographer Jenni Calder writes that illness “was the dominant feature of Louis’s early childhood,” most of it involving the respiratory system, including “nine concentrated years of fevers and feverish imaginings, of sleepless nights, of entertainment by his own thoughts and by the stories told to him by his nurse and by his father, of games limited by confinement to bed, of interrupted schooling, of parental worry.” When his future wife, Fanny Osborne, first met Stevenson in the mid-1870s, her immediate impression was that he was “dying of consumption.” By the end of the decade, when he experienced the first of the bloody hemorrhages that would continue returning for years, Stevenson finally had proof of the disease he had long anticipated. At his marriage to Fanny in 1880, he described himself as a “mere complication of cough and bones, much fitter for an emblem of mortality than a bridegroom.” The following year Stevenson traveled to the sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, later made famous by Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, where he had his most thorough physical examination to date. The esteemed Dr. Karl Ruedi diagnosed the writer with “chronic pneumonia, infiltration and a bronchitic tendency”—but not tuberculosis. In 1887, when the writer traveled to the Adirondacks to be seen by Dr. Edward Trudeau, the doctor “thumped” Stevenson’s chest and analyzed his sputum, concluding that he did not have an active case of consumption—and was “not really ill.” Stevenson biographer Claire Harman has suggested that he may have instead had an acute case of bronchiectasis or the genetic disorder OslerWeber-Rendu syndrome, either of which could explain his chronic respiratory complaints and recurring pulmonary hemorrhages.3 Although doctors failed to find evidence of tuberculosis, Stevenson nonetheless took refuge in the disease, using the narrative of consumption to cultivate his self-image as a suffering bohemian writer. In addition to playing the role of a consumptive, he was seen as one by his peers, as I will argue with Sargent’s painting and with works featuring Stevenson by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Abbott Thayer. Each of these three artists helped promote his image as a consumptive writer. Each also broke with the conventions of portraiture in depicting the sickly writer, even challenging the conventions within their own bodies of work. Moreover, these artists willingly took up Stevenson as a subject: that is, none of the featured works in this chapter were commissioned by patrons, although in choosing to portray Stevenson, these artists were certainly aware of the interest such a celebrated author would attract.4 Finally, Sargent, Saint-Gaudens, and Thayer all either struggled with their own health or lived in families in which disease had a significant presence,

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or both (as we will see in subsequent chapters on Thayer and Saint-Gaudens), thus suggesting a connection around illness as a shared theme between these artists and Stevenson.

Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife When Henry James first visited Skerryvore, he referred to Stevenson in a letter to William Dean Howells as “an interesting, charming creature [who was] more or less dying here.” Sargent depicts the writer “badly put together” in a manner similar to the way Stevenson was once described: as “a slithering, loose flail of a fellow, all joints, elbows, exposed spindle shanks . . . who was so like a scarecrow that one almost expected him to creak in the wind.” His stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, recalled Stevenson at Skerryvore immobilized in bed and subject to repeated hemorrhages that threatened to resume with the “slightest movement.” It was a place, Osbourne predicted, the writer would only leave “in his coffin.” Sargent underscores this assumption in his alignment of the door behind Stevenson, which opens onto a darkened, shadowy vestibule and staircase. The tall, narrow proportions of the doorframe mirror the writer’s own, much like a tomb, as though Sargent has literally imagined this passageway in Stevenson’s home as the site of his internment.5 Fanny also reads as a figure of death—“looking like a ghost”—as Stevenson described her appearance in the painting.6 She is at once eye-catching in her glittery exoticism and also difficult to see as a partially cropped figure at the edge of the canvas immersed in loosely painted clothing with barely legible features. In contrast to her husband, who animates the foreground of the painting with his movement, gesture, and gaze, Fanny sits motionless in her chair, staring vacantly beyond the frame. With her sari drawn up like a shroud, she resembles contemporary figures of mourning, almost anticipating Saint-Gaudens’s Adams Memorial (1891), and thus adding to an interpretation of the painting as haunted by Stevenson’s death (Figure 2.1). The room in which Stevenson appears further contributes to this reading. Sargent portrays the couple in their drawing room, typically a room from which guests arrive and depart, though the name originally derives from “withdrawing room,” as in a room where the owner could “withdraw” from guests. The Stevensons used their drawing room as an entranceway, but it was also used to display their prized personal possessions, though this is far from clear given the way Sargent has altered the room on canvas. The literary critic William Archer

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Figure 2.1  Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adams Memorial, 1891. Bronze, 5 ft. 10 in. (1.79 m) high (statue only), Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, DC. Photograph by Dan Vera, Wikimedia Commons.

notes that the drawing room at Skerryvore was visibly marked with “Stevensonian individuality.” As Archer explains, unlike many Victorian drawing rooms, it was “not encumbered with superfluous furniture, tables heaped with ‘drawing room books,’ or whatnots burdened with Japaneseries.” Instead, it included a select collection of furnishings—a low-lying yellow silk divan, a scattering of mainly wicker lounge chairs, an upright piano, a fireplace—and an eclectic art collection: a plaster sculpture group by Rodin illustrating a Victor Hugo poem, a pair of Burmese deities, an antique Catholic image, an equine landscape by Arthur Lemon, photographic portraits, the copy of a portrait of Chatterton, flower embroidery, a landscape painting, some woodcuts by Stevenson, a riverscape by his cousin, Bob, a charcoal portrait of the writer’s stepson, and two medallion portraits—to which Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife was added, once the painting was completed.7 The density of the wall display is further confirmed by an 1886 letter from Fanny to Henry James in which she includes a sketch of the drawing room, highlighting the mirror James had recently given the Stevensons as a gift (Figure 2.2).

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Figure 2.2  Fanny Stevenson, sketch of Skerryvore drawing-room wall, 1886. From Janet Adam Smith, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948), 109.

As rendered by Sargent, however, the room is all but emptied out. Two framed works of art are partially shown at right, while the walls in the left half of the canvas are blank with nothing more than a piece of furniture, perhaps the piano, dimly visible at the far-left edge. The shadowy void that defines the left rear corner of the room is carried through the open door into an even darker, shadowy entranceway that comes as close as anything to defining the painting’s compositional center. While this back exit through the painting points to other signs of escape—a staircase and dimly illuminated entranceway—it also extends and expands the drawing’s room use of shadow and negative space as well as its dark psychological tenor. Such spaces are not uncommon in Sargent’s work from the early 1880s, which was influenced by the Baroque masters Velasquez and Vermeer. Like Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) is haunted by a dark passageway that expands the room’s back wall, casting the two oldest daughters, Florence and Jane, in shadow as they stand at a threshold (Figure 2.3). Here, too, Sargent seems to have purposefully transformed an existing interior into a mysterious, hollowed-out void. The art

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Figure 2.3  John Singer Sargent, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, 1882. Oil on canvas, 87 3/8 × 87 5/8 in. (221.93 × 222.57 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mary Louisa Boit, Julia Overing Boit, Jane Hubbard Boit, and Florence D. Boit in memory of their father, Edward Darley Boit.

historian Erica Hirshler observes, Sargent “severely edited” the setting, turning Boit’s well-appointed, luxury apartment into a somber, austere environment. It is unlikely this treatment was chosen by Mr. Boit. The art historian Susan Sidlauskas writes, Boit was known to prefer highly ornamented interiors and “disliked bare floors and unadorned surfaces in general.” She adds that he was also “positively depressed by dark spaces” and complained of gloomy settings in his journals. It was Sargent, then, who projected this dark mood onto the apartment, so at odds with the sun-drenched scenes of his Impressionist contemporaries who were painting elsewhere in Paris at the time. Similar to Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, the heaviness and unease of Sargent’s scene in Boit’s apartment is transferred onto the figures at a moment when health was associated with sunlight and air and germs were synonymous with darkness.8 With their ominous moods, both paintings call into question the nineteenthcentury notion of the bourgeois home as a refuge of sanctity and health.

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Sargent was well aware of these associations as he grew up in a family whose lives were defined by illness and the pursuit of health. His background brings a second disease perspective to the painting, one which complements the Stevensons’s narrative. Mary Singer Sargent and her husband, FitzWilliam, a physician, left Philadelphia when their first child died at the age of two. Mary insisted she could only recover from the loss in Europe. With five subsequent pregnancies, there was always a reason why she, or one of the children, was not well enough for the family to return to America—and so they never did. Instead, the Sargents maintained a constant pattern of travel through Europe with little more than a vague need to avoid extremes in weather: they spent summers in the mountains and winters in the sun, moving with the seasons, as Sargent’s biographer Stanley Olson writes, or “to recover from the slight ailments contracted at the previous spa.” Hence, Olson explains, they “rotat[ed] in a merciless orbit, passing through illness and death and back again. . . . Everywhere they went they were surrounded by illness, by people waiting to die or struggling to recover.”9 John Sargent was born in Florence in 1856. Although he had his share of childhood illnesses, he was one of the healthiest Sargent children. His sister, Minnie, died of pleurisy before she turned four. His brother, FitzWilliam, who was named after his father, died in 1869, while still an infant. Two other siblings survived childhood: Emily, born in 1857, twelve months after John, and Violet, born in 1870, who was fourteen years his junior (Figure 2.4). Emily suffered a spinal deformity apparently caused by a nurse, though it may also have been the result of disease. In any event, much of the family’s movement around Europe was devoted to her care (Figure 2.5).10 The Sargents took Emily to Nice in 1861 to spend the winter where it was warm, to Switzerland later that year for tonic baths, to London in 1862 to consult with a surgeon about the bones of her spine and surrounding muscles, and to Lyon in 1863 because of a damaged tendon in her leg. John could not have escaped the suffering of his sister, especially one so close in age. She was bedridden for much of her childhood, learning to crawl at age five and to walk when she was six. Although she eventually recovered developmentally, her physical form and gait were permanently marked by disability.11 Dr. Sargent described her in a letter to his mother as “a good deal deformed” and “very sensitive to her deformity.”12 John was her constant companion, and their intimate emotional connection proved lifelong. It prepared him well for his friendship with a Scottish writer in Bournemouth living on the precipice of death. Another disease perspective enters the painting indirectly through the implied presence of Henry James, a frequent visitor to Skerryvore starting in the spring of 1885, when James’s sister, Alice, moved to Bournemouth for her

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Figure 2.4  John and Emily Sargent, c. 1867. Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986).

Figure 2.5  Mary Sargent with Emily, c. 1862. John Singer Sargent archive, Richard Ormond collection, Box 9, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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Figure 2.6  Katharine Loring, Alice James in London, 1891. James family papers, MS Am 1094.5 (Box 1: 52), Houghton Library, Harvard University.

health (Figure 2.6). A lifelong invalid, Alice had a complex history of somatic and psychosomatic illness, though a doctor in the mid-1880s attributed most of her suffering to a “gouty diathesis” and “sensitive nervous organization.” Alice thought it was easier to be sick in London than in Boston, where she felt the stigma of “shame and degradation at being ill.” Yet, wherever Alice lived, her life centered on her health. Following an electrotherapy treatment for a headache in London, Alice had a severe reaction and experienced symptoms similar to a paralytic stroke. Unable to use her legs, she was taken to Bournemouth to recover.13 Like Sargent, Henry James was an American expatriate whose upbringing was marked by traumatic illness and disability. When his father, Henry James, Sr., was thirteen, his leg caught fire in a barn and was subsequently amputated above the knee and replaced with a prosthetic leg (Figure 2.7). This accident would have resonated with Henry as he waited in Bournemouth for Alice to regain her mobility. Like his sister, Henry struggled with gout and depression. He also had a recurring and debilitating case of constipation for which he visited

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Figure 2.7  Henry James and his father, Prints and Photographs: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, https​:/​/di​​ gital​​colle​​ction​​s​.nyp​​l​.org​​/item​​s​/510​​d47d9​​-bc4c​​-a3d9​​-e040​​​-e00a​​18064​​a99.

his first health spa in his twenties. He later took up “Fletcherism” with its promise of efficient digestion and elimination through mastication. According to the literary scholar Anne Golomb Hoffman, this mix of bodily suffering combined with intense intellectualism in the James family resulted in an “economy of wounding, embodiment, and writing” that found expression in Henry’s work through his “novelistic efforts to render the subtle movements of consciousness and to recognize the troubling realm of bodily sensation and desire.” It seems to have also conditioned his understanding of Stevenson’s writing “not only [as] the work of an invalid” but also as work that was written largely “in bed, in dreary ‘health-resorts,’ [and] in the intervals of sharp attacks”—contexts with which James was intimately familiar.14 It may have also contributed to his close relationship with Sargent. The lifelong friendship between James and Sargent began in 1884. James’s biographer, Leon Edel, describes the two men as “mirror-images” of one another: they shared a Continental upbringing, an aristocratic bearing, the

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ability to socialize amid the beau monde, and a dedication as well as immense talent for their respective mediums.15 In 1885, Sargent moved into Whistler’s former studio in London, the same year Stevenson and Alice James moved to Bournemouth. Skerryvore became the meeting place where Stevenson, Sargent, and James gathered. The chair occupied by Fanny in Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife references the relationship among the three men: once owned by Stevenson’s grandfather, the blue leather seat became known as “James’s chair” in honor of his frequent visits to Skerryvore. Stevenson and James also enjoyed a close relationship. Despite the differences in style and content between the adventure tale writer and the drawing-room novelist, they shared a love of make-believe, the novel, and the craft of writing. Stevenson penned poems about James—whom he called the “Prince of Men”— and James, in turn, wrote admiringly of Stevenson in his 1894 book of Partial Portraits, published just before Stevenson’s death. Describing their friendship, the literary scholar Janet Smith observes that James had compassion for what she calls Stevenson’s “whole situation,” understanding him as a novelist “who had to spur his talent to earn more and more money to pay for the life of action that kept him alive” and whose existence hung together by a “beautiful golden thread.” Even after Stevenson sailed for Samoa, never again to return to Europe, James confessed the mere thought of his friend mattered more to him than most of the company he kept in London.16 Once completed, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife hung in Stevenson’s drawing room at Skerryvore and later at his home in Samoa. It was publicly displayed only once during Stevenson’s lifetime: at the New English Art Club in 1887, when it was described by a writer for the Art Journal as “almost grotesque as portraiture.” Even the Stevensons found it alarming. As Fanny explained, Sargent’s painting was “lovely, but has a rather insane appearance.” Her husband called it “excellent,” but felt it “too eccentric to be exhibited.” As he put it, “I am at one extreme corner; my wife, in this wild dress and looking like a ghost, is at the extreme other end.” While the painting was being varnished and framed, Sargent quipped in a letter to Stevenson that it was perhaps “unlucky that I did not cut it down to a single figure.” Had he done so, the painting would have looked more like a conventional portrait of Stevenson, not unlike Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson (1887), albeit with a striding figure (Figure 2.8). As such, the painting would have probably appeared less “insane” and “eccentric,” but it would have also offered less insight into Stevenson and his illness. In the end, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife is far more than a genre scene or portrait of the writer: it binds suffering in unexpected ways to the lives of three noted late

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Figure 2.8  John Singer Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887. Oil on canvas, 20 1/16 × 24 5/16 in. (50.9 × 61.8 cm), Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, Ohio. Tony Walsh Photography.

nineteenth-century cultural figures, treating illness as a theme that is woven through the image.17

The “Angel of Death” Although the terms “tuberculosis” and “consumption” were and are often used interchangeably, in the late nineteenth century, “tuberculosis” designated the lung fibers, known as tubercles, that were coughed up when the disease was concentrated in the lungs. “Consumption,” on the other hand, was a more general term: as the medical historian Katherine Ott explains, it was defined “by a fluid group of behaviors” and referred to a variety of wasting illnesses whose symptoms included weight loss, fever, and coughing. Following Robert Koch’s 1882 discovery of the specific germ that causes the disease, “tuberculosis” was increasingly used as a biomedical term denoting an illness with a specific diagnosis, trajectory, treatment, and, eventually (with the development of streptomycin

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in the 1940s), a cure. However, a more precise scientific understanding of the disease did not necessarily displace widely held and entrenched cultural ideas about consumption, even as modern medicine challenged these beliefs.18 Consumption is a particularly historic disease, dating back to ancient Egypt, though it reached its peak following the Industrial Revolution, when it was known in Europe as the Great White Plague. It is a difficult disease to track since it often went unreported and because it referred to a variety of wasting diseases in the nineteenth century. However, one historian estimates that in America during the 1880s it was the cause of one in seven deaths.19 Tuberculosis typically unfolded in stages. The first stage often included general symptoms such as the common cough, a poor appetite, and night sweats; the second stage typically involved a more intense wet cough and fever with alternating periods of a ruddy and then deathly pale complexion, though, again, these symptoms were general and not necessarily signs of TB; a third and final stage was marked by emaciation, morbidly bright eyes, a hacking, sometimes bloody cough, and an overall sickly appearance. Doctors could not easily predict how quickly the disease would progress: some patients died quickly following the onset of symptoms, while others lived for years. Moreover, tuberculosis was known to be both chronic and intermittent, writes historian Thomas Dormandy, “with seemingly miraculous remissions and startling improvements followed by terrible relapses.”20 In the nineteenth century, there was no effective cure for tuberculosis, but physicians prescribed a healthful environment and daily routine—focused on climate, exercise, diet, and rest—designed to correct the bodily imbalance which allowed illness to develop in the first place. At the time, disease was understood as a breakdown between the body and its surroundings, and the key to health was having this equilibrium restored. Treatment with this model was based on the “principle of specificity,” the medical historian John Harley Warner explains, and was “matched to the idiosyncratic characteristics of individual patients and to the physical, social, and epidemiological peculiarities of their environments.” Roy Porter observes that sickness was thus “largely seen as personal, internal, and brought on by faulty lifestyle.”21 Foul air played a vital role in this equation as disease was still assumed to spread through miasmic vapors. In 1869, the Boston physician Henry Bowditch wrote an influential series of articles on the spread of consumption for The Atlantic in which he argued that living in a home on damp or poorly drained soil was the driving factor in the spread of tuberculosis. Poorly ventilated houses and apartments were therefore a target of concern as recirculated air was believed to contain toxins that could only be destroyed with an influx of fresh air.22

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By the end of the nineteenth century, the threat of foul air had more to do with germs—specifically the bacterium that causes TB, mycobacterium tuberculosis, which Robert Koch identified in 1882. His discovery, coupled with a growing awareness that diseases spread not through miasmas but communicable microorganisms, meant that tuberculosis was understood as a social disease transmitted through human contact. It seemed to spread most easily in crowded cities, where polluted streets, unsanitary factories, and unplumbed tenement homes contributed to its reputation as a “disease of the masses.” Although tuberculosis could develop among any socioeconomic class, it disproportionately affected the poor, who often had little means of controlling the availability of ventilation, clean water, and sanitary waste removal in their homes. As a result, the rates of infant mortality were as much as three to five times higher in impoverished neighborhoods. The sanitary reformer Harriette Plunkett noted with dismay how quickly disease crossed class boundaries within this new economy of germs: “A man may live on the splendid ‘avenue,’ in a mansion plumbed in the latest and costliest style,” she wrote, “but if, half a mile away, in range with his open window, there is a ‘slum,’ or even a neglected tenement house, the zephyrs will come along and pick up the disease germs and bear them onward, distributing them to whomsoever it meets, whether he be a millionaire or a shillingaire.” Summing up the horror and fear surrounding tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century, the historians René and Jean Dubos describe it as “a blot on society, the symbol of all that was rotten in the industrial world.”23 While physicians and a growing network of public health officials promoted a TB narrative focused on urban contamination and the spread of germs, this rhetoric of contagion did little to displace the romantic myth that linked consumption to heightened creativity, emotion, and spiritual elevation. For writers, especially, the image of an ennobling disease with a “beautiful” death continued without interruption. In their 1889 novel, Madame Gervaisais, the Goncourt brothers insisted on the distinction between “the crude, baser organs of the body which clog and soil the mind” and tuberculosis as in “illness of the lofty and noble parts of the human being” that calls forth “a state of elevation, tenderness and love, a new urge to see the good, the beautiful and the ideal in everything, a state of human sublimity which seems almost not to be of this earth.”24 This literary version of tuberculosis continued alongside the dominant etiology promoted through medical discourse and social reform not out of ignorance but because narratives aimed at public health did little to give meaning and purpose to suffering. Fiction “has the power to share and filter human

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experience,” writes the literary historian Athena Vrettos; it provides “categories through which people came to understand themselves and the structures of social interaction.” Works of literature make the abstract phenomenon of suffering more concrete through stories that highlight individual experiences of disease, even though the characters themselves are not “real.” Through narrative, Vrettos observes, fiction can help navigate the messy, chaotic realm of disease by opening up new experiences of embodiment and being.25 Susan Sontag takes this concept further, arguing that tuberculosis, in particular, made new states of subjectivity possible in the nineteenth century. Through “the images that collected around the disease one can see emerging a modern idea of individuality,” she explains. Tuberculosis, in other words, functioned as a concentrated site of feeling through which particular modes of identity could surface. The literary scholar Miriam Bailin observes that this process began in the eighteenth century with the emphasis on the nervous system in medical science, creating “a vocabulary for the embodiment of an ethical consciousness, a morality based on personal sensibilities which, more often than not, issued in and was certified by physical symptoms.” “Illness,” she explains, “became linked to desirable states of delicacy, sensibility, and personal distinction. Tuberculosis in particular was viewed as a sign of specialness, or consuming passion, genius, or beauty.”26 Through most of the nineteenth century, the presence of consumption was recognized less through what we understand today as medical diagnosis than what Katherine Ott calls a “consumptive ‘look,’ constitution, or diathesis.” This meant that family inheritance and individual disposition typically played a greater role in identifying disease than the limited tools available at the time for medical testing. For some, there were distinct advantages to being perceived as consumptive: for men in literature and the arts, it was an ennobling condition that carried connotations of creative genius, especially for young artists approaching the height of their careers. As Susan Sontag observes, tuberculosis in the nineteenth century marked the start of a new chapter in the “long career of the ancient idea of melancholy,” one that had been associated with artistic temperament since the Greeks. It functioned as a shorthand for a type of inspired, passionate person and was purportedly accompanied by heightened consciousness, intellectual acuity, and spiritual insight. With the possible exception of cancer, Sontag writes, there is no disease that has been more thoroughly translated into metaphor than tuberculosis. As Edgar Allen Poe put it in his 1863 short story, “Metzengerstein,” consumption is “a path I have prayed to follow. How glorious! To depart in the hey-day of the young blood—the heart

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all passion—the imagination all fire—amid the remembrances of happier days— in the fall of the year—and so buried up forever in the gorgeous autumn leaves.”27 For women, a pale, wan look enjoyed a certain glamor as seen with the corpselike ideal perfected in Pre-Raphaelite paintings such as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix (Figure 2.9). Gustave Moreau, Ferdinand Hodler, and Fernand Khnopff are among the later nineteenthcentury European artists who painted women in this mode of ethereal beauty. According to musician Camille Saint-Saëns, “It was fashionable to be pale and drained; Princess Belgiojoso strolled along the boulevards . . . pale as death in person.” The use of cosmetics, including white face powder, helped otherwise healthy women achieve this desired appearance: some even drank lemon juice and vinegar to suppress their appetites in an effort to look emaciated and weak.28 The combination of a pale expression with a tall, fragile appearance and, for women, bright eyes, silky hair, and translucent skin constitutes what the art historian Sharon Hirsh calls a “visual code” for tuberculosis in the late

Figure 2.9  Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Beata Beatrix, 1864–70. Oil on canvas, 28 ½ × 21 ½ ft (864 × 660 cm). Tate, presented by Georgiana, Baroness Mount-Temple in memory of her husband, Francis, Baron Mount-Temple 1889. Photo © Tate.

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nineteenth century. We see it embodied in Ferdinand Hodler’s The Consecrated One (1893–4), where six svelte floating angels surround a small frail child in the foreground (Figure 2.10). “Already pale,” Hirsh writes, “these rising women are so bathed in light that the guide figure seems to be ‘fading away’—a common platitude for the final wasting stage of tuberculosis.” The “code of consumption,” she explains, had been invented through earlier images such as Henry Peach Robinson’s photograph, Fading Away (1858), in which the ghostly white, emaciated patient is “framed by a window leading to ‘another world’”—a “higher life,” her presumed destiny (Figure 2.11). Accordingly, blood-stained pillows and painful, wracking coughs, constituting the “uglier, often disturbing signs of consumption,” are displaced by peaceful scenes of transcendence in depictions that tell us less about tuberculosis as a disease than about the cultural (mis) conceptions that surround it. As Hirsh explains, these visible markers represent “not the presence of disease but rather the empyreal character that was believed to have caused it.” This was exactly the issue for Stevenson: with his wiry frame, sunken chest, and pale, hollow cheeks, he embodied the consumptive “look”— an image which was solidified in the public eye not by medical professionals

Figure 2.10  Ferdinand Hodler, The Consecrated One, 1893–4. Oil and tempera on canvas, 86¼ in × 116½ in. (219 × 296 cm). Kunstmuseum Bern, bequest of Gottfried Keller-Stiftung.

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Figure 2.11 Henry Peach Robinson, Fading Away, 1858. Albumen silver print, 9 5/8 × 15 ½ in (24.4 × 39.3 cm). George Eastman Museum, gift of Alden Scott Boyer, 1976.0116.0001.

familiar with Stevenson’s health but by artists, who insistently pictured him through the lens of the disease.29

Stevenson and the Narrative of Consumptive In the 1990s, the physician Richard Woodhead set out to get a more conclusive picture of Stevenson’s health while researching his book, The Strange Case of R. L. Stevenson. However, he quickly realized “that it would be impossible to prove or disprove a diagnosis of tuberculosis and that . . . the exact diagnosis was less important than the way the illness was perceived by Stevenson, by his family, and by the many doctors who treated him.” As already noted, medical opinion often mattered less than one’s physical constitution and appearance in determining whether an individual was considered tuberculous. Woodhead found this was true with Stevenson, whose family and friends assumed he had the disease “based on his appearance (the scrawny body, the narrow chest, the brilliant eyes) and the opinion of his wife Fanny, who had a strong interest in medical matters, dating back to the death of her young son Hervey, from consumption, a few months before she met Stevenson.” Indeed, as mentioned earlier, when they met in rural France, Fanny’s first impression of Stevenson was

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that he was “dying of consumption.” His illness became a running theme in their relationship and shaped the dynamic between them: Fanny, a decade older than Stevenson, served as his caregiver—and protector. She was not shy about letting his closest friends know the extent of his fragile health. In 1886, Fanny appended a note to her husband’s letter to Will Low, commenting on a summer trip Low had proposed. As she put it: I fear I should add that you must not count too much upon the Rhone expedition with Louis. He is so hopeful and cheerful that it is hard to realize how very ill he is, but a cold, or a hemorrhage may cause his death at any time in a few hours. He is literally kept alive by force. He talks about a “mysterious ailment,” but there cannot be the shadow of a doubt that the “ailment” is consumption, though like all in his case, he cannot believe it.30

Illness was also a theme in Stevenson’s writing, and several of his essays are devoted to the culture of invalidism in settings that were dedicated to recovery and health. The earliest dates to his stay in southern France, where Stevenson was sent as a law student at Edinburgh University to recover from nervous exhaustion.31 In his 1874 essay, “Ordered South,” he describes how “a degree of nervous prostration” was “enough to overthrow for him the whole fabric of his life, to take, except at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life.” He described a numbness settling in, dulling his passions and his senses, as though “he seem[ed] to touch things with muffled hands, and to see them through a veil.” Despite being in the prime of life, Stevenson was exhausted by routine activities such as reading a novel or playing billiards and could not recognize his “phlegmatic and unimpressionable body.” To a friend, he confided he was not sure he “would recover at all,” that “his system [did] seem extraordinarily played out.”32 Several years later, in 1880, Stevenson experienced the first of the bloody hemorrhages that sent him to the sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, a highly reputed facility for consumptives.33 The goal of the sanatorium stay, Dr. Edward Trudeau once explained, was to “improve the patient’s nutrition and increase his resistance to the disease, by placing him under the most favorable environment obtainable,” including “an invigorating climate, an open-air life, rest, coupled with the careful regulation of the daily habits and an abundant supply of nutritious food (Figure 2.12).” Patients had to work to get well, following a rigorous daily regime of wholesome living intended to restore the body’s natural recuperative power. Stevenson believed such a strict routine

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Figure 2.12  Patients “taking the cure” at Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium, Saranac Lake, New York. Photograph courtesy of Trudeau Institute.

had a negative effect on his morale and did nothing to alter his condition. In his 1881 essay, “Health and Mountains,” the writer commented bitingly on the medical opinion which dictated that recovery should take place in a “lodge on wintry Alps” where “the demon of cold is no longer to be fled from, but bearded in his den.” During the same stay, he noted with irony in an essay, “The Stimulation of the Alps,” that in “the rare air, clear, cold, and blinding light of Alpine winters, a man takes a certain troubled delight in his existence which can nowhere else be paralleled. He is perhaps no happier, but he is stingingly alive.” Stevenson found it odd that a setting devoted to reinvigorating life was characterized by a “sterile joylessness of spirits” in which the very act of living was a burden almost too great to bear.34 Nevertheless, this suffering almost seemed to inspire Stevenson’s best writing. His early critics, especially, insisted that illness enhanced his talent. In 1906, the biographer Alexander Harvey described Stevenson’s poems in “Underwoods” as “the work of an invalid, a dying man in some flashes of inspiration [who was

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writing] under sentence of death. His health did not improve although his work has never been more brilliant.” In the same year, Dr. John Besser Huber wrote that “the toxins evolved in the body by the bacillus” affect the “quality of genius” in men like Stevenson through the presence of what he calls “literary pathology” that contributes to some of the writer’s most memorable characters. A turning point in the Bottle Imp, Huber observed, takes place when one of the men “uncorked the bottle [and] his face grew ashen and from that moment he was a sick and stricken man.” Likewise, he describes the moment when the benign face of Jekyll in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde turned into “the hideous face of his devil nature” as resonant with the kind of transformation the writer experienced through acute suffering and pain.35 Illness, it seems, heightened the stakes of Stevenson’s writing and the richness of his characters. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a case in point. It was written while his health was at a low point, in Bournemouth. Utilizing a language of deformity, Stevenson describes Hyde as “pale and dwarfish,” noting there is “something abnormal and misbegotten in the very essence of the creature.” We learn that he cries out “for some sort of medicine” and is “barely human.” Although most of the novella circles around the seeming impossibility that Mr. Hyde is a chemically-transformed version of Dr. Jekyll, we are told at the end that “man is not truly one, but truly two,” that he possesses a double-sided nature. A poster from the 1880s advertising a theatrical version of Stevenson’s story depicts the two characters embodied in a single person—a robust Dr. Jekyll with his hunched and decrepit alter-ego, Mr. Hyde (Figure 2.13). There are many ways to read Stevenson’s statement on humanity’s dual nature, and I am not suggesting that his twinned characters can or should be thought to signify health and illness. However, this concept of a dual nature has been useful in conceptualizing how a person can inhabit such radically different corporeal realms: what Sontag calls “dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and the kingdom of the sick.” Returning for a moment to Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, which was painted by Sargent as Stevenson was writing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, we might imagine that the “almost grotesque” appearance of the painting had to do with the way Sargent captured Stevenson in a liminal state—“stingingly alive” (to recall his phrase from “The Stimulation of the Alps”) as he nervously paced the drawing-room floor, ill and surrounded by references to death. Perhaps it was “too eccentric” for public display in Stevenson’s mind because it showed the writer in a manner not unlike the pale, contorted creature of his famous tale—with too much Mr. Hyde, in other words, and not enough Dr. Jekyll.36

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Figure 2.13  National Printing & Engraving Co., Chicago, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1880s. Color lithograph, 72 × 107 cm, Theatrical poster collection, Library of Congress. https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/2014635954.

Saint-Gaudens’s Stevenson With the death of Stevenson’s father in 1887, the writer was free to leave England, and, thanks to his inheritance, had the financial means to do so. After years of illness in Bournemouth, Louis and Fanny eagerly abandoned domestic life and returned to their peripatetic ways. They set sail for America, where they had been advised by Stevenson’s doctors to find a hot, dry climate, perhaps in Colorado or New Mexico. Although the voyage to New York on the Ludgate Hill was filled with dangerous weather and physical discomfort, Stevenson reported that his “heart literally sang” from the freedom of being on the water. Commenting on the writer’s later retreat to Samoa, the biographer Philip Callow notes that Stevenson was “happiest at sea . . . he loved being afloat, adrift, on that huge expanse of water, the Pacific, the largest of oceans, letting everything go, his cramped, nagging past, the misery of hemmed-in modern life, the grind of fiction writing which kept his ménage fed.”37 Stevenson arrived in New York City in September 1887 and was greeted as a celebrity by reporters. His recently published The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was an instant hit on both sides of the Atlantic, selling 40,000 copies in Great Britain and almost six times that many—250,000 legal and pirated

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Figure 2.14  Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Louis Stevenson, modeled 1887, cast 1899. Bronze relief mounted on wood, 10 7/8 x 17 ½ × 7/8 in. (27.7 × 44.5 × 2.2 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Olin Dows.

copies—in America. As Stevenson’s earliest biographer, Graham Balfour, described the novella’s impact, “It was read by those who never read fiction, it was quoted in pulpits, and made the subject of leading articles in religious newspapers.” Augustus Saint-Gaudens had been a fan of Stevenson’s since reading New Arabian Nights (1882), a book which “set me aflame,” as the sculptor put it. He was not disappointed when he met the writer at the Hotel Albert in New York, where Stevenson was recovering from his transatlantic voyage. SaintGaudens later described this initial session in which Stevenson modeled for the relief as “one of the events of my life . . . I’m in that beatific state.”38 The first version of Saint-Gaudens’s subsequent bronze portrait relief of Stevenson shows the writer in a full-length rectangular profile, seated in bed against pillows and covered by a blanket (Figure 2.14). Stevenson’s knees are bent, supporting the papers in his left hand, though he looks contemplatively out beyond them, holding a cigarette in his right hand. The unusual pose was true to the sculptor’s experience. Saint-Gaudens recalled that he found Stevenson at the hotel “as was his custom, lay in bed propped up with pillows, and either read or was read to by Mrs. Stevenson.” Others who visited Stevenson also reported he was propped up in bed.39 While the image of a bedridden figure is unique among the artist’s dozens of portrait reliefs, it is a motif that appears elsewhere in late nineteenth-century art. A number of European artists took up the sickbed as a theme, though women or children are usually the ones shown ill.40 Rare examples of men confined to bed include Charles Carolus-Duran’s painting of an ill artist asleep in The Convalescent (c. 1860) and Jean-Frédéric Bazille’s

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Figure 2.15 Jean-Frédéric Bazille, Improvised Hospital Bed: Painter Claude Monet injured at the Hotel du Lion d'Or in Chailly-en-Biere, 1865. Oil on canvas, 47 × 62 cm, Musée d’Orsay. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York.

depiction of Claude Monet recovering from a leg injury in The Improvised Field Hospital (1865) (Figure 2.15). However, the depiction of Stevenson stands apart insofar as he is working in bed. Saint-Gaudens’s approach to the relief was generative, leading to numerous replicas in different sizes and with varied details, including a second version in a circular format (1887–8) and a third monumental version (1899–1903), known as the St. Giles Memorial (Figures 2.16 and 2.17). Each of these, in turn, was the basis for its own series of reductions. It is not clear how many of the Stevenson reliefs the sculptor sold. However, according to curator John Dryfhout, they were “by far the most popular” of the works Saint-Gaudens produced as multiples, beating out reductions of Diana and the Standing Lincoln. Interest in the Stevenson reliefs was renewed with the writer’s death in 1894, and they were produced through the 1920s by Saint-Gaudens’s widow, Augusta. The smallest among them was twelve inches tall; some featured nothing more than the writer’s head and shoulders and looked like a large coin with his face in profile. Despite these variations, Saint-Gaudens’s original concept—of an ill but industrious writer—remained constant, cementing Stevenson’s public image with disease.41

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Figure 2.16  Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Louis Stevenson, 1887–8. Bronze, 17¾ × 17 5/16 × 3/8 in. (45.09 × 43.97 × .95 cm), Colby College Museum of Art, the Lunder Collection 2013.253.

Reflecting on the sculptor’s conception, the critic Maria van Rensselaer wrote that this image of the writer “backed by his pillows and covered by his blankets” seemed “to many American friends the Stevenson whom they knew the best.” It not only captured Stevenson’s likeness but it explicitly and unambiguously depicted the author as he was understood by his peers—as a dedicated writer incapacitated by poor health. However, this impression is at odds with the accounts of those who visited Stevenson at his hotel. The publisher S. S. McClure noted that while the author “was in bed, [he] did not seem ill; he looked frail but not sick.” Saint-Gaudens concurred, recalling Stevenson looked “astonishingly young, not a bit like an invalid, and a bully fellow.” Accordingly, the sculptor does not show him lounging about wearily, but reading and writing from his makeshift study in bed.42 In the nineteenth century, the sickbed was understood as a “material site through which people comprehended” consumption, writes Katherine Ott; it was where “illness took form.” In her analysis of Victorian fiction, Miriam Bailin

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Figure 2.17  Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Louis Stevenson (third version), St. Giles Memorial, 1899–1903. Bronze relief (shown here in plaster), 7 ft., 7 in. by 9 ft., 1 in. (2.31 by 2.77 m), the Church of St. Giles, Edinburgh. Wikimedia Commons.

shows how the sickroom (and presumably the sickbed at its center) assumed a special place in the nineteenth-century home as a realm not only separate from but in contrast to routine domesticity. A haven of care, the sickroom freed its inhabitants from the pressures and expectations of the world beyond its protected walls. Though signs of illness were required for entry, the comforts provided made it desirable for some, Bailin explains, “to be sick or to remain sick in order to have access to its benefits.” Bailin writes that the Anglo-Irish writer Maria Edgeworth remarked in 1843 following a long illness, “I thank God not only for my recovery but for my illness . . . my illness was a source of more pleasure than pain to me, and that I would willingly go through all the fever and weakness to have the delight of the feelings of warm affection and the consequent unspeakable sensations of gratitude.” In the sickroom, patients received focused attention and loving care. Perhaps what Edgeworth also sensed in these moments was that the sickroom served “as a kind of forcing ground of self,” Bailin writes, one that allowed different forms of subjectivity to emerge. This was partly due to the freedom of the sickroom from period gender norms.

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Women were relieved of their usual household duties while confined to the sickroom, while men could retreat from the expectation to appear independent and strong. As Bailin puts it, the sickroom allowed for “a less prescriptive assignment of gender attributes and a less punitive prescription in general of the nature of the self ’s desires.”43 Even so, by the late nineteenth century, the figure of the bedridden invalid was essentially gendered female. As the doctrine of the separate spheres took shape in the Victorian era, women were understood to be inherently emotional, physically frail, and meant to serve their families in the domestic realm. Women thus defined were not uncommonly “ill,” and the sickroom provided a place where they could recover without leaving home. At the same time, men were expected to demonstrate independence and virility in the public sphere as exemplified by figures such as Teddy Roosevelt, whose “strenuous life” philosophy argued for a model of individual and national success based on the ambition and physical capacities of strong, virile men. As a British male, Stevenson was not held to these same standards of masculinity. In fact, from an American point of view, European artists in the late nineteenth century were deeply embedded in a narrative of degeneracy, characterized by corruption, immorality, and disease—perhaps best exemplified by the fall of Oscar Wilde.44 Claire Harman suggests Stevenson is perhaps best understood as a “professional sickest,” someone for whom lying in bed was key to performing what was essentially a permanent state of illness.45 He took refuge in disease, finding in it a means of cultivating his self-image as a nomadic bohemian writer. As Sontag writes, “The TB sufferer was a dropout, a wanderer in endless search of the healthy place [becoming] a new reason for exile, for a life that was mainly traveling.” Stevenson was exceptional in this respect. He is known to have visited forty-six English towns (nineteen more than once), fifty Scottish towns (twenty-three more than once), seventy-four French towns (thirty-one more than once), and forty other European towns (sixteen more than once)—all before 1886. None of them served as a permanent home, and he showed little interest in staying anywhere for long, eventually landing in a place of permanent exile in the remote South Seas island of Samoa. Wandering across continents and countries in search of better health was the privilege of a class of individuals in the nineteenth century (including the families of John Singer Sargent and Henry James) for whom the pursuit of a healthier climate was considered essential—and unending. For some, the narrative of illness, and of tuberculosis in particular, allowed for a life of perpetual motion.46

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This might be why Harman suggests Stevenson seemed to “enjoy the symptoms” of his illness and made little effort to improve his health. Although he satirized the environment at the Davos sanatorium in his 1881 essay, “The Stimulation of the Alps,” she notes the pleasure he took in the culture of invalidism, becoming preoccupied with his symptoms, his fragile nature, and the prospect of an early death.47 The English writer John Addington Symonds was in Davos at the same time as Stevenson, and observed that his fellow writer seemed incapable of following Dr. Ruedi’s regimen: he took out his toboggan when he was supposed to rest and sat in bed writing when he should have been outdoors breathing fresh air. Symonds’s friend, Horatio Brown, agreed, noting in his frequent visits to Davos, that Stevenson “never did any systematic openair cure, or systematic anything. He had a far from invalid life, except when he broke down and retired in bed.” It seems that what appealed to Stevenson was the romantic myth of tuberculosis, not the fresh air and sunshine, the regular hearty meals, and the large quantities of milk patients were expected to consume during their sanatorium stay. In fact, Harman writes, Stevenson rejected such routine on principle, given the “degree of conformity and co-operation” it required. Instead, he drew on a romantic stereotype. As the local Swiss press described him, Stevenson was “a great deal of the Shelley type, in his loose boyish figure, and restless radiant eyes, with a tincture in manner and conversation of French bohemianism.” Years later, Dr. Trudeau made a similar observation while Stevenson was in residence at Saranac Lake, noting that his patient lived “in an ideal world painted and peopled by his own vivid imagination.” According to Trudeau, the writer “shrank from the cruel and inexorable facts of life—disease, suffering and death,” making him a difficult patient—but an interesting man.48 Perhaps nothing signals the extent to which Stevenson’s romantic sensibilities took priority over his therapeutic needs as much as his habitual smoking, referenced in Saint-Gaudens’s relief through the cigarette in the writer’s right hand. Stevenson had smoked at least since the mid-1870s, when he began spending summers with his cousin, Bob, in rural France. Although weak lungs had compromised Stevenson’s health since childhood, and remained the single greatest source of his suffering as an adult, he persisted in his habit. According to Will Low, the cigarette was so fundamental to Stevenson’s daily life, it “served as a punctuation mark to the talk of R.L.S., or the pause in the research of the phrase as he wrote.” Although smoking was banned at Davos—“a horrific prospect for the chain-smoking” writer, Harman observes—Stevenson at least cut back while there, limiting himself to three pipes per day. Stevenson also struggled with his addiction at Saranac Lake as indicated in a letter to Will Low

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in which he describes an agonizing window of eighteen hours without cigarettes as a “famine” that left him searching his pockets for the merest trace of tobacco. Cigarette stains still visible in the cottage where Stevenson lived during his treatment at Saranac Lake further suggest that his addiction may have been tempered, though not eliminated, during his stay.49 In addition to his long hair and unconventional clothing, cigarettes were important to Stevenson’s persona as a bohemian writer. According to the historian Cassandra Tate, smoking in the late nineteenth century was associated with a marginal social status and included “working-class, single men; self-assertive youth; women of the demimonde; and members of the avant-garde of both sexes.” Within the avant-garde, the cigarette carried associations of decadence and moral lassitude.50 Although the case against nicotine was not yet firmly established by science, it was known to be addictive and dangerous: cigarettes were referred to as “coffin nails” and “little white devils,” believed to impair basic bodily functions and the brain’s capacity to reason.51 The cigarette in SaintGaudens’s relief thus further underscores the artist’s romantic rendering of the writer as determined to continue working, even while knowingly undermining his health. In 1894, shortly after the writer’s death, Saint-Gaudens designed a memorial to Stevenson for the Church of St. Giles in Edinburgh. He based it on his original relief of Stevenson reclining in bed, though he replaced the cigarette in his right hand with a quill pen to avoid the taboo associated with smoking. Moreover, in the memorial plaque, Stevenson no longer sits in bed, but on a couch. This change in seating implies a change in setting, taking Stevenson out of the intimate sphere of the sickroom (technically a hotel room in his case) into a presumably more public realm. These revisions might seem to deflate the romanticism surrounding the original rectangular version since the couch is less suggestive of an ill-fated consumptive artist. However, at the memorial’s dedication in 1904, Stevenson’s close friend, Sidney Colvin, who worked with Saint-Gaudens on the project, directed viewers toward such a reading with his emphasis on the writer’s strength in suffering. As Colvin spoke in his address, “To some of you it may have occurred that the memory of Stevenson with his active tastes, his habits of energy and activity, so long as life lasted, might have been perpetuated in some other likeness than that of a sick man reclining on a couch.” Yet, Colvin insisted, “at the time these sittings were given he was in one of his worst phases of physical frailty,” which we know was not the case based on reports of visitors to the Hotel Albert. Turning Stevenson’s vulnerability into a moment of triumph for the writer, Colvin explained, “the memorial is

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the very image of his attitude, of his likeness as he was accustomed then to sit, invalided, but indefatigably working.” In short, this Edinburgh relief becomes yet another iteration of Stevenson’s “picturesque unfitness” and his ability to not only withstand but also transcend the conditions of his suffering as a writer presumably dying from consumption.52

Thayer’s Stevenson In 1903, Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921) completed the Stevenson Memorial, marking the end of a decade-long process to create his tribute to the Scottish writer (Plate 2).53 Unlike Sargent and Saint-Gaudens, who enjoyed personal relationships with the writer, Thayer and Stevenson probably never met.54 Moreover, of the three major works of art devoted to Stevenson in this chapter, Thayer’s is the only one in which the writer himself is not depicted: in fact, there is no immediately apparent link to the writer other than the title. Of these three works, it is also the last to have been completed: Sargent finished his painting in 1885, Saint-Gaudens’s initial relief dates to 1887–8, while Thayer completed the Stevenson Memorial in 1903, almost a decade after Stevenson’s death. Moreover, each work references a different locale: Stevenson’s home in Bournemouth, the Hotel Albert in New York, and, lastly, Samoa, where Stevenson died and was buried. Also, as previously noted, all three works were initiated by the artists who created them, rather than being produced on commission for a patron (even though Saint-Gaudens’s relief later became the basis for a commission at St. Giles). In Thayer’s case, what prompted him to take up Stevenson as a subject is not entirely clear other than a general interest in the writer and his fiction. However, the Stevenson Memorial proved to be a definitive work in his oeuvre, one which is keyed to several other works and to the illness narrative which structured much of Thayer’s life and career. The Stevenson Memorial features a winged angel seated on a rock with her right knee clasped between her hands. The dark rock and background provide a sharp contrast to the angel’s billowing white gown and obscure the setting, except for two details: the word “VAEA” inscribed on the rock, and a palm tree at a distance beneath the angel’s left wing. Both situate the painting in the South Sea tropics of Samoa, with VAEA referring to the mountain on the island where Stevenson was buried. Thayer painted his first winged angel several years earlier, in 1887, though it was the Stevenson Memorial that became a prototype for

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several subsequent large-scale canvases in which white-robed seated or standing angels appear on rocks or mountain tops. Among these is Winged Figure Seated on a Rock (1916), which bears a striking resemblance to the Stevenson Memorial, though the two were painted more than a decade apart with different models and in different settings (Figure 2.18). However, Winged Figure Seated upon a Rock was begun in 1903, the same year the Stevenson Memorial was completed, probably initially as a copy of the Stevenson painting while it was in progress, until it was then picked up again years later by the artist. Starting around 1900, Thayer hired assistants to copy his major paintings as a way of keeping track of changes as he experimented on a canvas. As he once explained to his patron, Charles Lang Freer, “It has become my method, as it plainly was that of many renaissance masters, to try at the thing with some variations on several canvases, just as a composer or sculptor or a writer can, and thus save instead of risking any specially good parts of variations in the scheme.”55

Figure 2.18  Abbott Handerson Thayer, Winged Figure Seated on a Rock, 1914. Oil on canvas, 84 1/16 × 60 ¼ in. (213.5 × 153 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1915.67a–b.

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While it may have begun as a copy of Thayer’s tribute to Stevenson, Winged Figure Seated upon a Rock quickly became its own work of art, and it tellingly reflects on the Stevenson Memorial. While the model in Winged Figure Seated upon a Rock is Thayer’s daughter, Gladys, it was the artist’s Irish maidservant, Bessie Price, who posed for the Stevenson Memorial, as she had for Portrait of Bessie Price (1897) and Young Woman (1898). The setting has changed as well. No longer in the exotic realm of Samoa, the later painting, with its lichencovered rock, references another mountain, Monadnock, near the artist’s home in Dublin, New Hampshire. Notably, however, the paintings share a common purpose in that both function as memorials: Winged Figure Seated upon a Rock bears a Latin inscription that reads, “Oh, mother of my daughter! To you this monument,” making it a tribute to Thayer’s wife, Kate Bloede. Kate had entered an asylum in 1888 with an acute case of melancholia, but while under treatment, she was diagnosed with tuberculosis. She passed away in a Massachusetts sanatorium in 1891. Thayer returned to the template he used for the Stevenson Memorial, but personalized his tribute to Kate by featuring his daughter as the model and by linking it geographically to rural New Hampshire, which became the family’s permanent home following his wife’s death. Although Kate died three years before Stevenson, Thayer painted his memorial to the writer first and only later commemorated his wife. It was a loaded reference, connecting the famous writer to his wife through a disease they were assumed to share.56 The Stevenson Memorial connects to Thayer’s personal narrative in other unexpected ways as well. X-ray photographs reveal that beneath the finished painting is a far different tribute to Stevenson, one similar to another painting, My Children (1897), depicting the artist’s three children—Mary, Gerald, and Gladys (Figure 2.19). At least two other paintings share this same subject and composition, suggesting that My Children was another canvas for which Thayer’s assistants made copies as the painting developed. In the most complete version of My Children, which is owned by the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Thayer’s oldest child, Mary, stands at the center, flanked on the left by Gladys and Gerald at right. The painting echoes Thayer’s earlier Virgin Enthroned (1891) and A Virgin (1893) to the point that together the paintings might be seen as an interrelated group devoted to the artist’s progeny in the wake of his wife’s death. Thayer utilizes Renaissance Marian imagery in these works—with the aptly named Mary Thayer standing in for the Virgin Mary—lending them a sacred quality and treating them as his own holy trinity following Kate’s death.57 At the same time, the painting points directly to Stevenson. Its title, My Children, evokes Stevenson’s famous volume, A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885).

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Figure 2.19 Abbott Handerson Thayer, My Children (Mary, Gerald, and Gladys Thayer), c. 1897. Oil on canvas, 86 ¼ × 61 1/8 in. (219.1 × 155.1 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.

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Thayer made the connection explicit in a letter to Freer, when he referred to the painting as his “half-done Stevenson group.” He initially designed the painting with Mary holding a plaque (or possibly a coat of arms) with Stevenson’s initials, though later changed it to a laurel wreath, an ancient symbol of fame. (The Stevenson Memorial also originally included a family crest—presumably for the Stevensons—which appeared in the upper left corner of the painting. A line of embossed block lettering spelling out Stevenson’s name also appeared across the top of the canvas. For unknown reasons, both were later painted over.) In this conception, Thayer’s children seem to have functioned allegorically, honoring the writer through a symbolic language redolent of classical tradition. Perhaps it was in an effort to craft a more contemporary language for the Victorian writer that the painter opted for a seated angel instead. In any event, a painting that at first reads as an homage to one of the nineteenth century’s best-known authors turns out to have a place in Thayer’s own highly personal story of illness and death.58 The next chapter takes up Thayer’s relationship to tuberculosis in greater detail, showing how his family life—and painting—shifted in the wake of Kate’s death from the disease. But already it is clear from Stevenson’s example that despite the differences among Sargent, Saint-Gaudens, and Thayer, the narrative of consumption surrounding the writer had a power all its own, one that could be put to use even in the absence of the disease. As we’ve seen, a lack of medical evidence did little to diffuse its appeal, which depended more on the perception of illness than the facts of diagnosis. While the three major works of art examined here are all informed by the narrative of consumption, none neatly or narrowly illustrates the romantic literary trope. Sargent embeds Stevenson in a scene haunted by disease, one that expands beyond the image of the sickly writer to incorporate place—the writer’s home in Bournemouth—as well as a culture of expatriate health seekers, including the families of Sargent and James. While Sargent’s painting was barely seen in public during the writer’s lifetime, Saint-Gaudens’s relief—through its many versions and reductions—circulated widely, becoming one of his most popular works. The sculptor pictured Stevenson not as he found him but in a manner the writer and his inner circle wanted Stevenson to be seen. The resulting likeness of “picturesque unfitness” blurred with the writer’s public image, thus coming the closest of these three works to the romantic version of the consumptive. Unlike Sargent and Saint-Gaudens, Thayer avoided directly picturing the writer, bypassing the implicit challenge of an overdetermined image by eliminating his physical presence from the canvas.

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Instead, we see an angel which only obliquely conjures up the writer’s place of death. In doing so, it maps Thayer’s own life story onto the memory of Stevenson, making it rich with personal meaning but less about the writer as a celebrated public figure.

Notes 1 M. G. Van Rensselaer, “Robert Louis Stevenson and his Writing,” in Robert Louis Stevenson: Interviews and Recollections, ed. R. C. Terry (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 119. 2 Claire Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 265, 266. Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. Ernest Mehew, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 289. Ian Bell, Dreams of Exile: Robert Louis Stevenson, A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1992), 166. Will H. Low handwritten note, Robert Louis Stevenson Collection—Low Box, Folder HM 8923, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 3 Jenni Calder, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Life Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 29–30. Fanny and RLS quoted in Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 149, 195, 206. In his autobiography, Trudeau recalls that because Stevenson was “not really ill” at Saranac Lake, he made few professional calls on the writer, mainly remembering him for their long conversations before the fireplace at Baker Cottage, where Stevenson stayed. Edward Livingston Trudeau, M.D., An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company, 1936), 225. Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 332. Frank McLynn discusses other possible explanations for the hemorrhages, such as a lung stone or fibroid or fibronous bronchitis. See Frank McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: Hutchinson, 1993), 171–2. Further complicating Stevenson’s health were Fanny’s almost-constant bouts of illness, which were often at their worst when her husband was relatively well. She suffered from “brain fever,” her term for the mental illness that presumably caused the erratic and moody behavior for which she was known. During their second winter in Davos, when her husband’s health had improved, she had a stomach disorder, sore throat, and heart trouble and then was told she may have a gall bladder infection or an ulceration of the bowels, perhaps even cancer. Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 233. 4 Later works picturing Stevenson were commissioned by two of these artists: Charles Fairchild commissioned Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson (1887, Taft Museum, Cincinnati) and Saint-Gaudens completed the St. Giles Memorial in 1903 for a committee headed by Lord Roseberry and Sidney Colvin.

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5 James quoted in Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 281. Leslie Furth, “John Singer Sargent and Robert Louis Stevenson,” Magazine Antiques (November 2004), 163. Osbourne quoted in Bell, Dreams of Exile, 166. 6 Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: The Early Portraits (New Haven: Yale University Press with The Paul Mellon Centre, 1998), 168. 7 William Archer, “Robert Louis Stevenson at ‘Skerryvore,’” The Critic: A Weekly Review of Literature and the Arts 8, no. 201 (November 5, 1887): 225. 8 Erica E. Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2009), 66. Susan Sidlauskas, Body, Place, and Self in NineteenthCentury Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72, 73. Sidlauskas uses Anthony Vidler’s “spatial phenomenology of darkness” to account for the haunted, disturbing quality of the interior space in Sargent’s painting of the Boit children. Vidler points to the ways in which dark spaces are able to obscure objects “that have returned with such insistency to haunt the imagination of those who have tried to stake out spaces to protect their health and happiness” and therefore undermine one of the underlying assumptions of the nineteenth-century bourgeois home (73–4). 9 Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 1, 3, 2. Stanley Olson, “On the Question of Sargent’s Nationality,” in John Singer Sargent, ed. Patricia Hills (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art with Harry N. Abrams, 1987), 14, 15. 10 Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait, 10–11. Olson, “On the Question of Sargent’s Nationality,” 14. Olson writes in his biography (24) that family tradition blames a nurse for Emily’s condition, though Dr. Sargent makes vague reference to an unspecified disease in his letters home, but does not use his expertise as a physician to offer any insight into the underlying cause for her ailment. Olson speculates she may have had spinal rheumatism. 11 Letters from Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent to his family dated February 16, 1861; September 16, 1861; July 3, 1862; May 12, 1863; January 17, 1865. F. W. Sargent papers, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA), Smithsonian Institution. 12 F. W. Sargent to his father, May 20, 1871, F. W. Sargent papers, AAA. Dr. Sargent goes on to say, “we often think that it would have been better for her, in view of this sensitiveness, had she been taken to heaven when she was a mere child, and been spared a great deal of unhappiness. But she seems to have a great fund of happiness within herself, is of a pious turn of mind, and is an uncommonly sensible and good child.” 13 Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), 237, 233, 235. The London gout specialist Dr. Garrod blamed the paralysis on Alice’s own misapplication of a galvanic current to the back of her neck, while Alice believed the condition came about as a reaction to hemp pills Dr. Garrod had prescribed. The incident is representative of the kind of interaction Alice had with

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15 16 17

18

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her doctors in which treatment was as much an issue as the condition for which she was being seen. On James and Fletcherism, see Tim Armstrong, “Disciplining the Corpus: Henry James and Fletcherism,” in American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique, ed. Tim Armstrong (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 101–18. Anne Golomb Hoffman, “Writing Siblings: Alice James and Her Brothers,” Psychoanalytic Review 102, no. 1 (February 2015): 6. Henry James, Partial Portraits (London: MacMillan, 1894), 156. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 301. Janet Adam Smith, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948), 20, 21, 18. Marc Simpson, Uncanny Spectacle (New Haven: Yale University Press with Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1997), 147. Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, 167, 168. On the tricky question of genre and Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, see Elizabeth Doe Stone, “Mobility and the Matter of Memory: John Singer Sargent’s Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife,” Art History 42, no. 3 (June 2019): 553, 565 (n. 69). Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 9. While there are many useful histories of tuberculosis (several are cited in the following text), Ott takes a particularly nuanced approach to the layers of meaning—cultural, scientific, political, economic—at play in the history of disease, acknowledging how challenging it can be to understand disease retrospectively, once the context surrounding it has changed. Susan Sontag writes in 1977 that tuberculosis “retained most of its romantic attributes . . . through the end of the [nineteenth] century and well into ours.” Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Anchor Books, 1977), 34. Dormandy notes (xiv) that consumption was considered a “white” plague because it was often accompanied by anemia, but also on account of its associations with childhood, innocence, and spirituality. David L. Ellison, Healing Tuberculosis in the Woods: Medicine and Science at the End of the Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 1. The physician John Huber put the numbers even higher, estimating in his 1906 book that every third or fourth adult died from consumption. John Bessner Huber, Consumption: Its Relation to Man and his Civilization, Its Prevention and Cure (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1906), 18. The numbers get more complicated when race and class are taken into account. As Shelia Rothman reports, in 1890, the death rates on the Upper West Side in New York were 49 per 100,000, but in the tenements of Lower Manhattan the rates were exponentially higher—776 per 100,000 residents. Shelia M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 184.

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20 Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 16–17. Thomas Dormandy, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 22. Dormandy notes that the disease was fatal within a five- to fifteen-year window for about 80 percent of patients. 21 John Harley Warner, “From Specificity to Universalism in Medical Therapeutics: Transformation in the 19th-Century United States,” in Sickness and Health: Readings in the History of Medicine and Public Health, eds. Judith Walzer Leavitt and Ronald L. Numbers (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 87. Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003), 50. 22 Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 18. Ott, Fevered Lives, 39. 23 Edward Otis, M. D. The Great White Plague: Tuberculosis (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1909), 6. Dormandy, The White Death, 76. The German artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose husband was a physician in one of Berlin’s poorest districts, captures the inequities in Poverty (1893–4) in which a family of weavers “gathers” together amid dark cramped quarters in wrenching despair to witness the death of an infant from tuberculosis. Harriette Merrick Plunkett, Women, Plumbers and Doctors, or Household Sanitation (New York: D. Appleton, 1897), 203. René and Jean Dubos, The White Plague (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1952; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 66. 24 David Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease: Tuberculosis in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California, 1995), 49. The Goncourt Brothers quoted in Mark Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, 1862–1954 (New York: Atheneum, 1988), 23. 25 Barnes, The Making of a Social Disease, 50, 51. Athena Vrettos, Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3. 26 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 30. Miriam Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10. 27 Ott, Fevered Lives, 10, 14. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 32, 5. Poe quoted in Clark Lawlor, Consumption and Literature: The Making of the Romantic Disease (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 1. 28 Saint-Saëns quoted in Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 28. Dormandy, The White Death, 91. See also Carolyn A. Day, Consumptive Chic: A History of Beauty, Fashion, and Disease (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 29 Sharon L. Hirsh, Symbolism and Modern Urban Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 120, 121, 126, 127. 30 Richard Woodhead, The Strange Case of R. L. Stevenson (Edinburgh: Luath Press Limited, 2001), x. Richard Woodhead, “RLS and Bluidy Jack,” http:​/​/tex​​tuali​​ties.​​ net​/r​​ichar​​d​-woo​​dhead​​/rls-​​and​-b​​l​uidy​​-jack​/. Robert Louis Stevenson Collection, RLS to Will Hicok Low, March 1886, HM 8923, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. 31 As Stevenson wrote in a letter to his friend Edmund Gosse in 1880, “I have been very, very sick; on the verge of galloping consumption, cold sweats, prostrating

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32 33

34

35 36

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attacks of cough, sinking fits in which I lost the power of speech, fever, and all the ugliest circumstances of the disease.” Robert Louis Stevenson, The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson to His Family and Friends, v. 1 (New York: C. Scribner, 1905), 197. Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 96. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Ordered South,” Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (Project Gutenberg, 2006), 43, 40. Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 98. Although both “sanatorium” and “sanitarium” refer to similar kinds of health facilities, there are subtle distinctions in the terms: the “sanatorium” was specifically designed for individuals who were ill with tuberculosis, while the “sanitarium” was more of a health resort attached to a mineral spring or other natural resource and which catered to any number of ailments. However, these distinctions are not at all consistently applied in the primary and secondary literature. For instance, Trudeau’s institute for TB patients in the Adirondacks is regularly referred to as both a “sanatorium” and a “sanitarium.” In usage, then, the terms are interchangeable, though I have chosen “sanatorium” since I am referring here specifically to facilities focused on TB. Rochelle Leggett, “What is the difference between a sanatorium and a sanitarium?” last modified, July 27, 2017, https :/ /he althf ully. com /t ypes- stigm a -849 0 824. html. Quoted in Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death, 203. Trudeau came to understand the role that environment plays in managing tuberculosis through what became his famous rabbit experiment. In 1885, he inoculated five rabbits with the tubercle bacillus and put them on an island where they could run wild in the fresh air and sunshine with plenty of food. All but one of them recovered. Another five rabbits received the same inoculation but were placed in “the worst environment I could devise—a dark, damp place where the air was bad, confined in a small box and fed insufficiently.” Four of them died within three months. On Trudeau’s experiment, see Mark Caldwell, The Last Crusade, 73. Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 206. Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Travel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1905) 212, 222, 223. Alexander Harvey, A Child’s Garden of Verses; and, Underwood (New York: Cosmopolitan Magazine, 1906), 37. Huber, Consumption, 33. Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Project Gutenberg, 2011), 19, 76–77, 56, 19, 83, http:​/​/www​​.gute​​nberg​​.org/​​cache​​/epub​​/42​/p​​g42​-i​​ma​ges​​ .html​. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 3. McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson, 277. Quoted in Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 327. Philip Callow, Louis: A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2001), x. On the theme of movement in Stevenson’s writing, see Richard J. Hill, “Robert Louis Stevenson and the Great Affair,” in Robert Louis Stevenson and the Great Affair: Movement, Memory, and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Hill (London and New York, 2017), 2. For the artist’s own preoccupation with motion and transnational travel, see Stone, “Mobility and the Matter of Memory.”

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38 On Stevenson’s magnetic appeal, see Alexis L. Boylan, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Erotics of Illness,” American Art 30, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 14–31. Graham Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), v. 1, 17, 17–18. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, v. 1 (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 373, 384. 39 Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 374. In addition to Rensselaer, the publisher S. S. McClure also met Stevenson in his bed at the Hotel Albert. As he wrote in his autobiography, “Mrs. McClure and I called upon Stevenson, accordingly, and were taken to his room, where he received us in bed, very much in the attitude of the St. Gaudens medallion, for which he was then posing.” Note that McClure’s memory of Stevenson is recalled through SaintGaudens’s iconic image. See S. S. McClure, My Autobiography (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), 184. 40 See, for example, Santiago Rusiñol, Morphine (1894), Sitges, Museu Cau Ferrat; Edvard Munch, The Sick Child (1885–6) and The Day After (1894–5), both Oslo, Nasjonagalleriet; Angelo Morbelli, The Sick Daughter, late nineteenth century, private collection; Luigi Nono, Convalescence, 1889, private collection and other examples in Giorgio Bordin and Laura Polo D’Ambrosio, Medicine in Art (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2010). 41 John Dryfhout, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907),” in Metamorphoses in Nineteenth Century Sculpture, ed. Jeanne Wasserman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press with Fogg Art Museum, 1975), 186. On the subject of SaintGaudens and replicas, see Cynthia J. Mills, “Casting Shadows: The Adams Memorial and its Doubles,” American Art 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 3–25. Henry J. Duffy and John H. Dryfhout, Augustus Saint-Gaudens: American Sculptor of the Gilded Age (Washington, DC: Trust for Museum Exhibitions, 2003), 65. John Dryfhout, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907),” 198. Despite the many changes in format, scale, and stylistic detail, the writer’s face remains essentially unaltered across these variations. For a far less flattering rendering of Stevenson working in bed, see Henry Furniss, “Robert Lewis Stevenson,” undated, National Portrait Gallery, London. 42 Van Rensselaer, “Robert Louis Stevenson and His Writing,” 119. McClure, My Autobiography, 184. Quoted in John Dryfhout, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848– 1907),” 187. 43 Ott, Fevered Lives, 13. Bailin, The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction, 6, 7–8, 10, 40. Bailin departs from the approach of many Victorian literature scholars who focus on women and illness to consider male invalids, too, making her study relevant to Stevenson. On the culture of illness, see also Maria H. Frawley, Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 44 See Chapter 3 of Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art & Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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45 Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 207. 46 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 33. Dormandy, The White Death, 114–115; Balfour, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, 150. Janet Adam Smith, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, 191. 47 Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 206, 207. Harman notes that the same was true with Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain (1927). Although the generation satirized in Thomas Mann’s novel was a generation after Stevenson’s, the “consumptive mindset” was much the same. 48 McLynn, Robert Louis Stevenson, 205. Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 207. Davos as Health-Resort (Davos, Switzerland: Davos Printing Company, Ltd., 1907), 73. Edward Livingston Trudeau, M. D., An Autobiography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran & Company with the National Tuberculosis Association, 1936), 229. 49 Will H. Low, Stevenson and Margarita (New Rochelle, NY: Mayflower Press, 1922), 14, 20. Low, Stevenson and Margarita, 16–17. Harman, Myself and the Other Fellow, 207. 50 Cassandra Tate, Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of “The Little White Slaver” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6. Ashes to Ashes: The History of Smoking and Health, eds. S. Lock, L. A. Reynolds and E. M. Tansey (Atlanta: Rodopi, 1998), 106. Lord Wooten in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray was a notable chainsmoker, as was Wilde himself. On American aesthetics, smoking, and the tobacco industry, see Ross Barrett, “Harnett’s Habit: Still Life Painting and Smoking Culture in the Gilded Age,” American Art 33, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 62–83. 51 Tate, Cigarette Wars, 13; Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes: America’s Hundred-Year Cigarette War, the Public Health, and the Unabashed Triumph of Philip Morris (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 16. 52 Quoted in Betty Harcourt, “The Unveiling of the Robert Louis Stevenson Memorial,” Overland Monthly 45 (March 1905): 237. For the St. Giles Memorial, Stevenson’s poetic lines on artistic beauty and lost youth were replaced with an inscription from his pious “Prayer,” followed by the epitaph, “Under the wide and starry sky / dig the grave and let me lie . . ..” The text was dictated by church authorities who commissioned the work. Saint-Gaudens found it “deplorable.” Low also lamented the change, explaining that the original verses “more perfectly reflect the man who wrote them, his belief in his art, the tendency of his work, and the philosophy of his life” than the prayer, which, “however beautiful, [is] an expression of only a single phase of his character, and is to this degree misleading— that, throughout life his faith was shown indeed rather than in supplication.” Will Low, A Chronicle of Friendship (New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1898), 391–2. 53 In 1893, Thayer wrote to his patron Charles Freer, “I am at two big things one to be a Memorial to Stevenson the other the Elise Pumpelly thing grown finished.” Abbott Handerson Thayer to Charles Lang Freer, 8 September 1893, Charles Lang Freer papers, Freer Gallery of Art (hereafter FGA), Smithsonian Institution.

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54 Richard Murray notes that while there is no evidence that Thayer and Stevenson met, they likely crossed paths either among the community of American artists studying in Paris or, perhaps, on Stevenson’s visit to New York in 1887. Murray also notes that Thayer was a particular fan of the Master of Ballantrae and that his family read Stevenson’s letters when they were published in 1889. Richard Murray, “Abbott Thayer’s Stevenson Memorial,” American Art 13, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 12. Thayer’s biographer, Nelson White, offers a different explanation: “Although they never met, the story of Stevenson’s death in distant Samoa appealed to Thayer’s dramatic sense, and his love for Stevenson’s writing inspired him with the desire to paint a picture as a memorial” (71). White also notes, through recollections of Thayer’s daughter, Gladys, that the artist was passionate about Stevenson’s poetry and prose (195). Nelson C. White, Abbott H. Thayer, Painter and Naturalist (n.p.: Connecticut Printers, 1951). 55 Linda Merrill, “Report on student copy of Stevenson Memorial,” February 9, 1998, Richard Murray research materials regarding Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1948–2004, AAA. At least one such copy of The Stevenson Memorial survives. As Merrill writes in her report, it was found rolled up in storage at the Freer Gallery, unfinished and signed by Thayer, with bright-orange lettering that reads, “This is the only student copy of the picture I sold to J. J. Albright,” who originally purchased The Stevenson Memorial. Abbott Handerson Thayer to Charles Freer, October 19, 1908, Charles Lang Freer Papers, FGA. 56 Murray, “Abbott Thayer’s Stevenson Memorial,” 21, 22. In fact, Stevenson died of a stroke, a point that scholars have highlighted in questioning whether he actually suffered from TB. Kate’s death from TB is further taken up in Chapter 3. 57 Murray, “Abbott Thayer’s Stevenson Memorial,” 17. One version of My Children is at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and bears the inscription, “Painted by Me/ Abbott H. Thayer/ about 1900/ Finished Dec. 1, 1910/ or rather touched again.” Susan Hobbs, curatorial file on the Stevenson Memorial, 1978, Smithsonian American Art Museum. 58 Abbott Handerson Thayer to Charles Lang Freer, March 3, 1896, Charles Lang Freer Papers, FGA. Murray, “Abbott Thayer’s Stevenson Memorial,” 18.

3

Therapeutic Living in Dublin

Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. —Ralph Waldo Emerson (“Nature” 1836)1 Dublin Pond was not quite another Walden, but spiritually it bore a resemblance. —Mary Katherine Fuertes2 Like Stevenson, Kate Thayer’s death was attributed to tuberculosis, but unlike Stevenson, there is medical evidence confirming the disease in her case (Figure 3.1). Kate’s health began to deteriorate with the care of her ailing father, who died in 1888, and her daughter, Mary, who became sick with scarlet fever. She was diagnosed with melancholia, which at the time was defined as a form of depression “induced by grief,” and admitted to Bloomingdale Asylum in Morningside Heights, New York.3 Kate had experienced a similar depressive episode in 1870 with her mother’s death, followed by inflammatory rheumatism. Reflecting on her more recent episode, Kate’s father-in-law, Dr. Thayer, explained, it “reduced her whole system, and resulted in a condition of mind and body much resembling the one in which she finally ended her life.”4 While Kate improved during the year and a half she spent at the Bloomingdale Asylum, she was moved to the McLean Asylum in Somerville, Massachusetts, in March 1890 “to try a change of place.”5 In 1891, Dr. Thayer wrote in his diary that she needed to be moved once again because “for some months there had been evidence of tubercles to a very limited extent in her lungs, and the only chance of restoration seemed to be in having her in a drier atmosphere or inland elevation—a step that would have been taken earlier but for the complication of her mental disease.”6 The change to a healthier climate did not come soon enough. By the time she arrived at a Baldwinsville, Massachusetts, sanitorium in March 1891, Dr. Thayer notes that “her pulmonary disease had rapidly increased

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Figure 3.1  Abbott Handerson Thayer, Mother and Child, 1886. Oil on canvas, 28 × 36 in. (71.1 × 91.4 cm), Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Jesse Metcalf Fund and Special Gift Fund 24.032. Photograph courtesy of the RISD.

in the month before leaving Somerville” to the point that “she never left her room [. . .] but declined steadily, and died May 3.”7 Abbott Thayer pursued what amounted to climate therapy for himself and his three young children during Kate’s illness and after her death. In 1888, the same year that Kate was institutionalized, Thayer’s student, Mary Armory Greene, gave the artist three acres of land on her property in Dublin, New Hampshire, and built a summer house and studio for the artist and his family (Figure 3.2). Located in southern New Hampshire, in the foothills of Mount Monadnock, the area around Dublin was familiar to Thayer, who spent much of his youth in nearby Keene, where his mother was born and raised. At first, he regarded Dublin as a summer retreat, though with Kate’s death in 1891, his seasonal home soon became a refuge. As Dr. Thayer notes, Abbott retreated there with his children less than two weeks after her death “to paint no more portraits this summer, and to take no pupils— but to rest in landscapes,” painting only on rainy days.8 In 1901, Dublin became the family’s year-round home. Thayer remained there until his death in 1921.

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Figure 3.2  Abbott Handerson Thayer’s house in Dublin, New Hampshire, c. 1880. Miscellaneous photographs collection, c. 1845–1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 5302.

If Stevenson found redemption in the romantic narrative of consumption, Thayer understood tuberculosis in more starkly scientific terms as a disease transmitted by germs. His father, William Henry Thayer, was a physician who served as a surgeon during the Civil War and ran the Cholera Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Abbott, his oldest child and only son, was born in 1849, which Dr. Thayer refers to in his diary as “the cholera year,” thus linking Abbott’s life from the start with contagion and epidemic disease.9 In response to Kate’s illness, Thayer sought to protect himself and his family from tuberculosis by adopting a therapeutic, outdoors-oriented life based on the principles followed at sanatoria. Unlike Stevenson, however, who knew these principles firsthand but purposefully defied them, Thayer and his children proactively adopted the sanatoria regimen out of fear they would succumb to tuberculosis and, in doing so, became models of healthy living. In the shadow of Mount Monadnock, they continued a tradition begun by Emerson and Thoreau in which the mountain served as a symbol of uncontaminated nature and a monument to “simple

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living.” Their example also illustrates how summer colonies in the late nineteenth century could function for artists in the context of epidemic disease.

Dublin as Place Once Thayer came to Dublin in the late 1880s, other artists and interested students followed, turning this rural New Hampshire town into one of the period’s many artist colonies. Loosely modeled on French prototypes familiar to American artists in Thayer’s generation who had studied abroad in Paris, these colonies spread widely in New England at the end of the nineteenth century. The French examples of Fontainebleau and Giverny set the stage for these sites in which artists gathered to paint en plein air in the warm summer months, though working in a close-knit rural environment with like-minded artists brought other advantages as well. First among them was the fact that colonies took shape outside of major cities, where property was relatively cheap. Artists could build or buy larger homes and studios than they could ever afford in an urban setting. They shared models and supplies as well, adding to the economic advantages of colony living. Best of all, perhaps, colonies provided a creative community in which painters and sculptors could pursue their art while enjoying the professional support and camaraderie of friends and colleagues with similar aesthetic sensibilities. They were productive and often playful settings in which artists (and typically their families) could enjoy a few months away from the pressures of urban living. Life in the country was healthier, too.10 Fresh air was abundant, and the slower pace of life left time for rest and relaxation, which professional urbanites urgently needed, according to George Beard and Herbert Spencer. It is not coincidental that the growth of artist colonies coincided with the development of American suburbs and country homes: two parallel phenomena that were also motivated by the desire to find refuge from the pollution, noise, and crowds of the city.11 The American Impressionist Willard Metcalf, who participated in colonies in Old Lyme, Connecticut, and Cornish, New Hampshire, concluded that urban living was “impossible” and akin to a “rushing anthill”; he turned instead to fishing trips—which he referred to as “fine medicine”—to restore his vitality and health.12 As the playwright Percy Mackaye, also a Cornish summer resident, wrote from New York City to his wife, “How glad I shall be to wake and to sleep again in the medicinal quiet of the dear Cornish hills. I’m nearly done in by the strain here.”13 Likewise, as noted in Chapter 1, George Inness found

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refuge in a New Jersey “country town,” which at least seemed worlds away from Manhattan’s polluted skies.14 The colony that developed around Thayer south of Mount Monadnock in Dublin, New Hampshire, was unusual in that it functioned as a refuge prior to the late nineteenth-century drive toward suburban development.15 As early as the 1830s, Dublin attracted literary figures from the Boston area: most famously, the transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who immersed themselves in the natural beauty of Mount Monadnock to escape what they saw as an increasingly commercial environment (Figure 3.3).16 A “monadnock,” in geological terms, is a mountain of bedrock that stands above its surroundings.17 Composed of quartzite or volcanic rock, it resists erosion, refusing to break down under the impact of natural forces across time.18 It was this unyielding quality which drew writers to the mountain, which witnessed the passing years like a wise prophet or sage—weathered, perhaps, but essentially unchanged.

Figure 3.3  Mt. Monadnock, New Hampshire, c. 1905. Dry plate negative, Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division https​:/​/ ww​​w​.loc​​.gov/​​pictu​​res​/i​​tem​/2​​016​80​​4574/​.

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In 1845, Emerson began his rhyming couplet poem, “Monadnoc,” from the mountain’s summit. He underscored its status as a refuge: Man in these crags a fastness find To fight pollution of the mind; In the wide thaw and ooze of wrong, Adhere like this foundation strong, The insanity of towns to stem With simpleness for stratagem.

The notion of Monadnock as a cleansing antidote to the “insanity of towns” comes through clearly in these few lines. Elsewhere in the poem, Emerson treats the mountain as a microcosm that condenses “all the vintage of the earth.” Speaking in the first person as the voice of Monadnock, he writes: There’s fruit upon my barren soil Costlier far than wine or oil; There’s a berry blue and gold,— Autumn-ripe its juices hold Sparta’s stoutness, Bethlehem’s heart, Asia's rancor, Athens’ art, Slowsure Britain’s secular might, And the German’s inward sight;

Emerson reveled in the mountain’s majesty through metaphors which expand well beyond its geographic boundaries. Ultimately, however, he delighted in Monadnock’s proximity to his home in Concord, where it is “Seen happy from afar,” standing as a monument to “the stable good / For which we all our lifetime grope” as “towns and races grow and fall.” Unlike Emerson, for whom nature was a sublime experience that he famously compared to a “transparent eye-ball [that was] part or particle of God,” nature unfolded in more physical terms for Thoreau.19 In his excursions to Monadnock, Thoreau approached the mountain in a granular fashion, filling more than seventy pages in his journal on the details of its surfaces and textures, recounting his experience “almost foothold by foothold.”20 Equipped with spy glasses and a microscope, Thoreau explored the mountain’s plants and wildlife, documenting not only the visible world but also what he could taste, feel, smell, and hear, treating Monadnock as a multisensory experience—and a means of selfdiscovery. As Thoreau wrote to his fellow poet, William Blake, “You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body.”21

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Like Emerson, Thoreau viewed these excursions in nature as an antidote to the contaminating effects of urban life. In particular, he considered walking a “natural remedy” for the toxic effects of the city.22 In his 1862 essay, “Walking,” Thoreau insisted he could only maintain his health by “sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements” for at least four hours a day.23 These routine forays into nature might explain why Thoreau survived more than twenty years of periodic attacks from what was probably tuberculosis.24 His ability to withstand disease was attributed to his immersion in outdoor life, and he was considered a model patient by proponents of the fresh air routine, including Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau. Long before Stevenson came under Trudeau’s care, Thoreau’s example helped confirm the importance of maximizing exposure to fresh air in treating the disease (even though it eventually caused his death at the age of forty-eight).25 In their desire to find refuge in nature and escape an expanding commercial culture, Emerson and Thoreau embody what historian David E. Shi calls “transcendental simplicity.” In his book, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture, Shi traces the shifting currents of “simple living” in its various forms since colonial times, noting that the shared tendency among proponents of this way of life has been a desire to privilege ideals— whether intellectual, spiritual, or communal—over and above material gain.26 The transcendentalists, including Emerson and Thoreau, Shi explains, “literally sought to transcend the limitations of Lockean rationalism and penetrate the inner recesses of the self.”27 Since they viewed life as “too precious to waste on the mere pursuit and enjoyment of things, their common goal was to develop modes of living that reduced their material and institutional needs to a minimum so that they could more easily pursue spiritual truths, moral ideals and aesthetic impulses,” which they found primarily through the natural world.28 For both Emerson and Thoreau, Monadnock played a defining role in the pursuit of a soulful connection to nature.

Simple Living in Dublin When Thayer came to Dublin, a generation after Emerson and Thoreau, he could have hardly found the message of his transcendentalist forbearers more relevant: the “insanity of towns” Emerson observed in the 1840s had ballooned into bustling, crowded cities by the late 1880s. The same was true for the painter George de Forest Brush, who came to Dublin in 1895, at Thayer’s request, and

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bought a permanent home and 325 acres of land for his family in 1901.29 Brush considered himself a socialist: he supported the progressive causes of Senator Albert Beveridge’s campaign to end child labor and the single tax plan of the economist Henry George.30 “Simple living” became an expression of Brush’s antagonism toward industrial capitalism, a system he believed elevated a few at the expense of the rest and required radical and immediate economic reform. Brush had a lifelong aversion to material possessions and personal wealth: his friend, Charles Burlingham, recalled that on a trip from Florence to New York, “George got to reading Emerson. And Emerson said ‘Things are of the snake.’ So he threw one of the trunks overboard!”31 The Brushes lived a spare existence. Describing their temporary home in Florence, the artist’s wife, Mittie, recalled they had nothing more than a bed, a fire, and food.32 At their home in Dublin, Brush routinely undertook what his daughter, Nancy, described as a “grand house cleaning” in which he burned the family’s machine-made furnishings in an incinerator for the sole reason that they were mass produced. As Nancy put it, “Papa might suddenly grab away some chair, which may have been an ugly machine-made thing, but at least could save one from having to sit on the floor. [W]hen the objects were going to be replaced was unknown, and we feared being bereft of a bureau or ugly bed which, admittedly unaesthetic, nevertheless was needed.”33 Edwark Bok, the longtime editor of the Ladies Home Journal, whose philosophy was inspired by Emerson’s creed of plain living and high thinking, made the magazine a vehicle for teaching readers—more than a million of them at the turn of the twentieth century—how to minimize their material needs.34 Writers for the magazine dispensed practical advice in articles titled “How to Live Cheaply” and “A Spartan Mother.” A column on “Good Taste and Bad Taste in Tables” from 1906 emphasized the importance of solid construction and skilled workmanship through “good” examples illustrated in a series of comparisons. For example, readers were advised that the carving on older furniture was “a thing of real beauty and expressed the individuality of skillful designers,” whereas contemporary furniture was typically “done by machinery, and is so bad in design that it actually offends the eye.”35 Bok’s crusade for aesthetic simplicity had much in common with the British Arts and Crafts movement with its interest in craft, whether through the craftsman as a type of laborer or in the form of a finely-crafted object. Brush promoted these values through his paintings of American Indians living as hunters and crafters in a premodern culture, which addressed his need for an art rooted in a handmade world in which there was “purpose in every

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stroke,” as he once put it.36 For late nineteenth-century audiences, indigenous American culture stood for what was authenic and “real,” the American studies scholar Philip Deloria writes, as opposed to the artificial, unhealthy environment that characterized urban modernity.37 Several of Brush’s paintings depict Indians in the process of making or admiring handmade artifacts.38 The Weaver (1889), for instance, depicts an Indian, probably a Pueblo, fully engaged in crafting a textile on his loom (Figure 3.4). Although the painting is completely misleading—by the 1880s, the art historian Emily Shapiro explains, the American Southwest supported a “booming market for indigenous handicrafts,” like the textile shown here—from Brush’s romanticized point of view, the Indian exists entirely outside of modern consumer culture, modeling a pre-industrial understanding of his craft.39 Brush was not alone in championing the American Indian as an exemplar of simple living: the popular lecturer George Wharton James believed that the white race with its “pseudo-civilized, artificial and over-refined life” had plenty to learn

Figure 3.4  George de Forest Brush, The Weaver, 1889. Oil on canvas, 12 × 15 in. (30.5 × 38.1 cm), Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1988.23.

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from what he called the “simple, healthful and natural life” of Native Americans prior to Spanish colonization.40 For Brush, this history came to life in the Dublin landscape as former Indian sacred ground. According to his daughter, he “took long walks into the woods just to look at the ancient hemlocks that still stood on his land and gazed with pleasure at some of the great remains of old trees that had fallen years before and lay covered with moss and ferns. To him they spoke of the days before the white man came.”41 He also admired what he imagined to be the lives of indigenous people with “their constant light exercise, frequent steam-baths, and freedom from overwork,” which gave them a physique and degree of health unrivaled since the Greeks.42 Like many of his late nineteenth-century colleagues, for whom classical sculpture was the common reference point for a strong and healthy form, Brush depicted Indians in works such as The Moose Chase (1888) in the manner of ancient athletes (Figure 3.5).43 Here a native huntsman rises up out of the canoe with a figure likely inspired by such antique works as the Doryphoros and the Discobolus, sculptures Brush would have known firsthand from his training at the Ècole des Beaux Arts. The upper bodies of the huntsman and accompanying oarsmen also reflect an understanding of an athlete’s musculature and anatomy that resonates with contemporary discourse on exercise and health.

Figure 3.5  George de Forest Brush, The Moose Chase, 1888. Oil on canvas, 37 3/8 × 57 3/8 in. (94.8 × 145.7 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.9.

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The patent medicine industry made regular use of Indians to proffer health in its advertisements. A trade card for Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills, for instance, features a scene that echoes The Moose Chase in its depiction of an Indian canoeing on the water, while at the same time underscoring the links between Native Americans, nature, and health (Figure 3.6). Ironically, while European disease had devastated indigenous groups since colonial times, there was still a romantic view of native life as harmoniously attuned to a pre-industrial version of nature—a view to which Brush clearly subscribed. Thayer’s retreat to Dublin, which was motivated by the desire to immerse himself and his children in a healthy environment, also picks up on a mode of simple living informed by transcendentalist thought. As a child, Thayer’s parents had exposed him to Emerson’s work, initiating a lifelong love for the philosopher.44 Thayer owned a carte de visite of the writer and kept a copy of his portrait bust outside his Dublin home, putting Emerson on par, as he put it, with “all the eternal quiet things, the stars, the sky, the drops of water, all things”.45 He even named a son after Emerson, although the child died in infancy. Part of the poet’s appeal for Thayer was his understanding of the world in visual terms: Emerson considered the eye “the best of artists” and acknowledged the power of this single sense to find beauty in natural forms and their aesthetic

Figure 3.6  Trade card, Dr. Morse’s Indian Root Pills, c. 1910. Offset color lithograph, Comstock Company, Morristown, New York, publisher. The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida, Gift of William H. Helfand, XC2009.07.12.1.

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values.46 For Emerson, nature itself was an artist. The sunrise over his house, he explained, has “long slender bars of cloud like fishes in the sea of crimson light,” capable of evoking “emotions which an angel might share.”47 Emerson underscored the beauty of nature as nothing out of the ordinary; it could be experienced anytime and anywhere. “To the attentive eye,” he wrote, “each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again. The heavens change every moment, and reflect their glory or gloom on the plains beneath.”48 Although nature was the constant reference point for Emerson, his observations are never entirely secular: it is the presence of the spiritual that makes the perfection of nature possible. In Emerson’s words, “Beauty is the mark God sets upon virtue.”49 A belief in nature as embedded within the Divine is also a theme with Thayer’s angels and madonnas, as later discussed in this chapter. Like Emerson, Thayer also believed in the idea that “nature is medicinal” and restores one’s health. He shared Emerson’s appreciation for Monadnock on account of its distance from the “insanity of towns,” though Thayer’s writings cite the mountain’s untamed wilderness as its most attractive feature. The historian Roderick Nash explains, wild nature functioned in the nineteenth century as an “antipode of civilization, of cities, and of machines,” embodying “the virtues these entities lacked.” According to Nash, in such settings “many Americans detected the qualities of innocence, purity, cleanliness, and morality which seemed on the verge of succumbing to utilitarianism and the surge of progress.”50 These were the qualities that drew Thayer to Monadnock, though they were not necessarily shared by visitors and other residents at the time. In a letter to Dublin’s selectmen, Thayer complained about the presence of trash on the mountain and the issue of the “proper disposal of rubbish,” which he described as a “peremptory need if the rural which all seek here is to last unimpaired.”51 According to his daughter, Gladys, Thayer “never failed to pick up bits of paper or any disfiguring rubbish left about” during the family’s regular treks up the mountain. As she recalled, “we enjoyed many rainy road walks with this special mission of gathering up and burning stray papers.”52 From Thayer’s perspective, any sign of a human presence threatened to destroy the mountain’s pristine beauty; garbage was only one source of desecration. A greater threat lay in what he described as “the sudden burst into existence of the ‘modern conveniences,’ one miracle succeeding another at breath-stopping speed—steam and then electricity, with all its revolutionings.” According to Thayer, modern American culture was destined to become one “glorious

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electric-lighted pavement, with no beauty anywhere except such as may be able to consist with ‘modern enterprise.’” Even the hiking paths up the mountain represented an unnecessary incursion that threatened to ruin Monadnock’s exquisite “surface, untrampled by man.” As Thayer put it, “This artificializing and facilitating of the climbers’ ascent, by the methods used on the plains below” blurred the boundary between the mountain as a refuge of undisturbed nature and “the very things you left below you in the suburbs, the pavements and the garish printed signs.” As he explained in an impassioned letter to The Dublin News, every time we intervene by cutting down or burning trees or otherwise cultivating the land, we undermine the very power of nature. For Thayer, the forest was defined by living and dead trees, by the fragrant ferns and mosses that take root over time. It was only through this dense layering that the forest becomes one of the “elemental things wherein man may bathe his jaded soul,” he explained. Thayer considered the need “to contemplate something that we can’t monkey with” as akin to religion, and Monadnock as a site which could be worshipped as a “monument of antiquity,” but only as long as its primeval qualities were intact.53 The desire for “pure” nature was widely shared in the late nineteenth century. T. J. Jackson Lears notes that the metaphor of virgin nature dates to colonial America, when “virginity typified a continent to be ravished, exploited, made to bear abundant fruit.” By the Gilded Age, virgin nature “signified something fragile, delicate, and modest to be preserved, something residing in the mere vestiges of a vanishing ‘unspoiled’ landscape.”54 As the frontier expanded and the American wilderness was domesticated, fears that the fledgling nation lacked civilization were replaced by anxieties that an increasingly urban, industrial country was now overly cultivated. In his famous 1893 speech, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner raised the question of what form American identity would take without the enabling force of the frontier. The fear of losing what remained of America’s untapped wilderness, understood as a physical place emblematic of the nation’s character, prompted a wave of preservation efforts from the 1890s into the early years of the twentieth century. While key sites such as Yellowstone National Park had been secured as early as the 1870s, Nash explains that it was the park’s natural “curiosities,” including geysers, hot springs, and waterfalls, as well as its contribution to the water supply—not its wilderness—that first motivated efforts to protect it as public property. It was only in the 1890s that interest in the park shifted to its “primeval nature, simple and pure” due to the sense of loss around “virgin

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nature” and the growing need for nature as a refuge from the stress of urban life.55 In “Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” the environmentalist John Muir explained, “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”56 These ideas were embedded in the transcendental writings of Emerson and Thoreau, but it was not until Muir’s generation that they garnered enough interest to attract figures such as Theodore Roosevelt with his emphasis on “fundamental frontier virtues.”57 By 1890, Frederick Law Olmstead was so convinced by the role of wild nature in reinvigorating body and soul, he thought that whenever a wilderness preserve was under threat, the public should respond as with “any crisis threatening a national treasure of art.”58 Thayer shared this view and looked at Monadnock as an endangered national gem. He referred to it as an outdoor museum featuring “a sample of primeval wild nature purity” that belonged most appropriately to those able to “make the highest use of it.”59 Desecrating the mountain with the development of roads was analogous in his view to buying a painting by Fra Angelico and writing one’s name boldly across it.60 Thayer took aim at Dublin’s wealthiest property owners, who had introduced electric lights and roads to Monadnock, for destroying what he regarded as its “primitive” nature. Quoting Emerson in a letter to Mary Armory Greene and Reverend George Weld, he insisted that “what the world needs is . . . some proof that man can see without taking.”61 In other words, fewer individuals with material investments in the mountain and more, like Thayer, who looked to Monadnock “to feed their souls.”62 On canvas, the artist gives Monadnock its due as a totemic form. Like Thoreau, he knew the mountain’s topography in detail, though typically painted it from the perspective of his home, looking from its base to the top of the mountain (Plate 3).63 Although Thayer painted landscapes from the start of his career, his paintings of Monadnock were a focus from 1904 until his death in 1921. In roughly a dozen iterations across nearly two decades, the mountain is most often depicted capped with snow in winter, the harshest but also the most invigorating season as far as Thayer was concerned.64 Like Monet’s serial renderings of Rouen Cathedral, he took interest in how the same view of a static monumental form varied across time and under changing atmospheric conditions, which he captured through subtle shifts in color, light, and tone. However, his paintings of Monadnock perhaps have even more in common with

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Cézanne’s late depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire in which the mountain itself appears secondary to the artist’s experiments with the architectonic possibilities of paint (Figure 3.7). Indeed, Thayer’s brushwork can vary widely from one canvas to the next in his renderings of the mountain. In Monadnock in Winter (1904), for instance, the tip of the mountain’s snowy peak and the snow-covered foreground appear with relative clarity, though most of the rest of the painting is enveloped in an atmospheric haze with loose, indistinct brushwork applied to the middle ground and pine trees. In Below Mount Monadnock (c. 1913), Thayer eliminates the foreground entirely, thrusting the viewer into the grove of pines at the base of the mountain (Figure 3.8). Here the intersection between figure and ground blurs completely. Forgetting for a moment about the mountain itself, the bottom two-thirds of the canvas reads as an abstract form in which violent, expressive brushwork takes over the subject matter, bringing a tactile physicality to the canvas. As the art historian Adrienne Baxter Bell points out, Thayer used a palette knife to apply paint to his renderings of Monadnock and was known to add detritus to his paints, giving them a greater sense of “body” and weight.65 In terms of the picture plane, Thayer tends to collapse three-dimensional

Figure 3.7  Paul Cézanne, Mont Sant-Victoire, c. 1902–6. Oil on canvas, 22 1/2 × 38 1/4 in. (57.2 × 97.2 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg Collection, Gift of Walter H. and Leonore Annenberg, 1994, Bequest of Walter H. Annenberg, 2002.

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Figure 3.8  Abbott Thayer, Below Mount Monadnock, c. 1913. Oil on canvas, 8 15/16 × 7 1/4 in. (22.7 × 18.4 cm), Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College: Purchased through gifts from the Class of 1955 and the Lathrop Fellows.

space in favor of flatness and the elimination of half tones in his paintings of the mountain partially due to the influence of Japanese prints.66 The flatness of his late Monadnock paintings may also reflect his understanding of camouflage as a means of representation that uses paint “to enact forms of erasure” at the conjunction of the object and the environment, resulting in deflated twodimensional forms, as the art historian Maggie Cao has argued.67 Despite loose passages of calligraphic brushwork, Thayer insisted that Monadnock’s outline should remain “sharp as steel.” As he put it, “Many painters soften such outlines for the sake of ‘atmosphere’ but I can’t make this one sharp enough.”68 Its peak represents the point of greatest clarity and is rendered with precision. At the same time, Thayer obscures any sign of a path the visitor might use to ascend the mountain as though to underscore its unaltered “natural” state. It is as if the trees at Monadnock’s base form a physical barrier that inhibits unwanted company. In later works, such as Below Monadnock, the collapse of a foreground and middle ground and the

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flattening out of space make it difficult to even identify a point of entry. Thayer instead presents the mountain with a dark, unwelcoming quality, depicting it as he wanted it to be seen: as a monument to wilderness preservation meant for those who could “see without taking.”69 In short, he insisted on seeing Monadnock, true to its name, as a beacon of resistance against a backdrop of rapid modernization.

Dublin as Sanatorium, the Fresh Air Routine Abbott’s children have been well and hearty these two years—thanks to his judicious management and their free outdoor life. —Dr. Thayer’s diary (1890)70 The cure for consumption is not a drug, or an operation, or a magic method of any sort. It is a life that must be lived twenty-three hours and sixty minutes out of the twenty-four and seventy years out of your threescore and ten. You cannot learn it properly by being told about it, or lectured about it, or advised about it every so wisely—you must live it. —Woods Hutchinson (1910)71 Well suited to the antimodern needs of both Brush and Thayer, Dublin also specifically provided Thayer and his children with a healthy, sanatorium-like environment through Kate’s illness and following her death. Months before she died in 1891, Dr. Thayer reported in his diary that the artist and his children had made a home for themselves in Dublin and that thanks to his son’s “judicious management and their free outdoor life” the children had been “well and hearty.”72 A family friend recalled that Abbott had taken Mary, Gerald, and Gladys to Dublin to “build up their physical strength, which had not been too robust to start with.”73 This was the best advice at a time when contagious disease was still widely assumed to pass through family bloodlines. Even though germ theory began taking root in the late 1880s as a new paradigm of disease transmission, hereditary disposition seemed to be the only plausible explanation for why successive generations contracted the same disease.74 Ralph Waldo Emerson famously exemplified this phenomenon, having lost his father, two brothers, and his first wife to tuberculosis, which the writer himself contracted in college and apparently passed on to his children and grandchildren.75 According to Dr. Edward Otis, children with family members who suffered from tuberculosis

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were advised “to build up their strength and health and increase their resisting power to disease,” which Emerson accomplished partially through his treks up Mount Monadnock.76 Tuberculosis was so widespread in the late nineteenth century that it was assumed virtually everyone—96 percent of the population, by one estimate— harbored the TB germ and was “a little bit consumptive.”77 The critical question was whether conditions within the body were favorable for the disease to develop. Advocates for prevention insisted that tuberculosis was “always conquerable” in its early stages once the symptoms were acknowledged and addressed with a therapeutic routine. While the details of specific routines varied, they shared certain common aspects: the need for ample rest, wholesome food, moderate exercise, and an immersion in fresh air, which one writer called “nature’s disinfectant.”78 Private sanatoria began emerging in the 1870s, often built on sites with mineral springs or other geographic features with therapeutic appeal; by the turn of the twentieth century, there were public facilities across the country.79 The sanatoria setting allowed individuals with symptoms of the disease to focus fully on their health in a supervised setting with around-the-clock regulated care. As the physician Edward Otis put it, “the discipline maintained in these institutions is impossible in a home.” At the sanatorium, the individual is “constantly under medical supervision; his diet, mode of living, exercise, and his employment, if any, is constantly being regulated for him . . . leaving him to do nothing but simply obey orders.”80 While the sanatorium provided discipline and structure, it was not necessarily successful in treating tuberculosis. Recovery rates were low, though the presence of a shared community and a sense of order at least offered psychological relief for a disease with no effective cure until the arrival of streptomycin in the 1940s.81 The vast majority of Americans who suffered from tuberculosis in the late nineteenth century lacked the resources to take a three- to nine-month stay in a sanatorium and had little choice but to try and treat the illness at home.82 In The How to Get Well Book, Francis DeWitt offered this encouraging advice: whether an individual with tuberculosis “stays home or goes to a health resort” matters less than “if he goes at it right and is faithful to the few simple lessons he has learned on caring for himself properly.”83 Dr. F. W. Burton-Fanning took an even more direct approach, insisting that “fresh air is our most effective remedial agent against consumption” and that the “conditions which are absolutely necessary for the satisfactory adoption of the open-air system are to be found

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most everywhere outside our cities” and by no means exclusively at facilities dedicated to the tuberculous.84 Similar to our own twenty-first-century crisis with Covid-19, there was a great deal of emphasis on fresh air in mitigating exposure to—and the spread— of tuberculosis. As a writer for Health-Culture argued, in a twenty-four-hour period an individual breathes between 48,000 and 72,000 cubic feet of air and consumes less than one cubic foot of food and drink, meaning that “more than ninety-nine per cent of our existence comes from the air we breathe.”85 At this rate, it was easy to see how the air of a polluted city, or even an unventilated room, quickly became toxic. The goal was not only to avoid contaminated air but also to fill the lungs with as much clean air as possible. According to the health writer Ella Adelia Fletcher, “breath is life, and . . . the more air you breathe in the highest state of purity, the deeper your hold upon life will be and the more radiant your health.”86 Mountain air was widely considered one of the best types of air, since a higher elevation all but guaranteed its purity. The physician Alfred Loomis attributed his recovery from tuberculosis to the air of the Adirondacks, citing its “specially vitalized and purified atmosphere, free from germs and impurities of any kind, and laden with the resinous exhalations of myriads of evergreens.”87 This sense of a purified atmosphere comes through in Thayer’s paintings of Monadnock with the dense presence of evergreens and the emphasis on winter, a season when the mountain was free of disease-bearing mosquitoes and covered with fresh white snow. The artist and his family not only admired Monadnock from their Dublin property; they immersed themselves in its therapeutic environment. Thayer’s nephew and student, Barry Faulkner, recalled that on a typical day the artist spent his morning painting, then “climbed the mountain,” or took long trail walks with his family. With his son, Gerald, especially, Thayer “prowled [Monadnock’s] peaks and precipices, its naked spine, and knew well the mysteries of the mountain brook and its groves of spruce and hemlock” in a manner not unlike Thoreau. Indeed, the family viewed Monadnock as “their totem, their fetish, the object of their adoration. They surrendered themselves to the sorcery of its primitive being,” Faulkner observed.88 It functioned as their family shrine. Much like the patients at a sanatorium, the Thayers further increased their exposure to Monadnock’s healthful mountain air by sleeping outside year round. According to Faulkner, Thayer believed “all-out exposure to fresh air” was necessary for his children, “whom he feared were subject to tuberculosis.”89

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Figure 3.9  Gladys Thayer in her sleeping hut, c. 1900. Nancy Douglas Bowditch and Brush family papers, c. 1860–1985. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 16418.

Faulkner reports that the family read aloud around a fire inside the house at night before bundling up and heading out to their individualized lean-tos, where they were then lulled to sleep by a classical violinist (Figure 3.9).90 The lean-to was developed from the rustic three-sided structure originally used as a protective outdoor shelter and was adapted for use at the sanatorium so that patients could have round-the-clock exposure to fresh air (Figure 3.10). As one sanatorium physician attested, the lean-to “met the requirements for open-air cure more completely and satisfactorily than most others.”91 Thayer further enhanced its benefits by inventing a breath catcher, a mask worn around the nose and mouth, which was intended to prevent the body’s noxious exhalations from freezing onto bedding at night.92 (He also wore a special kind of wool underwear marketed for its protective qualities against disease.93) Guests were apparently spared from taking part in this nighttime outdoor ritual, though the windows in the family home were kept open throughout the year, Faulkner observes, “except during blizzards and thunderstorms.”94 The benefits of outdoor sleeping for children, in particular, were extolled in a 1905 poem in the Journal of Outdoor Life. The first two stanzas read:

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For I’m a child of Nature, ma, And the “outdoor life” for me— Away from the germs of the fireside, And out in the wild wood free. I cannot rest in my pink boudoir, With its bed of downy white, But give me a bunk on the outside porch, And I’ll sleep like a top tonight.

Sleeping outdoors was not only advisable to avoid tuberculosis, as the poem reminds us, with its emphasis on nature as a purifying, redemptive agent, it was also linked to the discourse of simple living. The choice between a porch bunk and a white bed in a pink boudoir conjures up a common tension in this rhetoric between the rustic authenticity of outdoor living and the ornamented artifice that characterized many Victorian homes. Embedded in this distinction was also the difference between life in a rural or small-town setting and Gilded Age cosmopolitan culture. While Brush and Thayer maintained professional ties to New York City throughout their careers, both ultimately found the immersion in Dublin’s natural environment ideal for their personal and

Figure 3.10  Lean-to for eight patients at the Loomis Sanatorium near Liberty, New York, n.d. From John Bessner Huber, Consumption: Its Relation to Man and His Civilization (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1906), 260.

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artistic agendas. Despite their different interests, the two artists, like Emerson and Thoreau before them, were aligned in their antimodernist philosophies and the compulsion to live “simply” in nature, apart from a materialist urban environment.

Painted Angels and Madonnas Thayer’s paintings of Monadnock might not appear to have much in common with the ideal women which populate his canvases beginning in the late 1880s, but they were connected through a shared investment in healthy living. In the same way Thayer sought to protect Monadnock from the contaminating effects of modern industry, he also worked to shelter his children from the urban environment and, especially, from the threat of disease. The artist had “utterly worshipped” his wife, Kate, and considered her “more God-like than anybody else.” In response to her illness and death, he channeled his grief into renderings of his children, whom he transformed into sacred figures. The earliest of these, Angel (c. 1887–9), represents Mary, Thayer’s first daughter and eldest child (Plate 4).95 While wings resonate with the artist’s interest in nature and the study of animal camouflage, he once explained, “primarily I have put on wings probably more to symbolize an exalted atmosphere (above the realm of genre painting) where one need not explain the action of the figures.” In painting Mary as an angel, Thayer symbolically creates an image of transcendence, with its reference to the afterlife, through the daughter whose embodiment marks Kate’s absence and eventual death.96 The painting also resonates with the phrase “angel of death,” which was used in the nineteenth century to describe the sublime passing associated with death from tuberculosis. It also resonates more generally with the presence of winged figures in Gilded Age cemeteries who appeared as “guiding souls” and were shown “guarding graves,” the art historian Cynthia Mills has observed.97 Thayer began the painting several months before Kate was admitted to the Bloomingdale Hospital, in May 1888, but he continued to work on it through the long and distressing months of her illness. Perhaps not by chance, Mary’s pale, chalky skin, emphasized by the whiteness of her wings and robe, her delicate stature, and disembodied gaze all resonate with the fragile appearance associated with the consumptive “look” found in later nineteenth-century European art as discussed in Chapter 2. At the same time, Thayer’s eleven-year-old daughter is

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clearly a younger, less sexualized version of this type, whose complexion and clothing read as purity and innocence, linking her symbolically to the Virgin Mary, whose name she shares. Early viewers noticed Thayer’s emphasis on pale white clothing and flesh. John Singer Sargent commented in response to Angel that “no artist has painted white more beautifully.”98 A critic at the 1888 exhibition of the Society of the American Artists also singled out Thayer’s canvas for its use of “chalky coloring, the opaque treatment of shadows [and] the overabundant use of lead white.”99 Analysis of the painting using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) technology confirms Thayer’s use of lead white—a material notable in this context for its presence in the lead-based cosmetics women in the nineteenth century used to achieve the pale complexion associated with middle-class female beauty and the vogue for a consumptive pallor.100 By the late nineteenth century, these same lead-based cosmetics were considered toxic for their users.101 Such connotations inform the tension that exists in Thayer’s painting between his daughter, Mary, and her mother, Kate, in Angel, a canvas which binds together in a single winged figure the promise of wholesome youth and the horror of bodily disintegration. A few years later, all three children appear in Virgin Enthroned, which was completed in 1891, the year of Kate’s death (Figure 3.11). Using a format adopted from Italian Renaissance art, Thayer portrayed Mary as the seated central figure, assuming the role of her Christian namesake, while at the same time stepping in as a substitute for her mother, who had appeared before her illness as the Virgin Mary (with Gerald) in Mother and Child. Both works speak to correlations between the Madonna and Anglo-American domesticity familiar to late nineteenth-century audiences, when middle-class women were elevated by bourgeois ideology to the role of “angel in the house.” Thayer’s Marian imagery models this notion of elevated womanhood while at the same time encouraging individuals to have their own personal experience with the Divine, as the art historian Kristin Schwain observes.102 For a grieving artist who had recently lost his wife, Thayer’s children—Mary, Gerald, and Gladys— also provided the artist with what might be considered his own sacred trinity, while serving as a reminder of Kate, the continued silent reference in all these works.103 In A Virgin (1892–3), Thayer repeated his earlier format, albeit transferred to an outdoor setting and with all three figures standing (Plate 5). Clouds emerge from Mary’s shoulders like wings, alluding to Thayer’s earlier depiction of her in Angel, and thus again to her role as a stand-in for Kate. After the painting

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Figure 3.11  Abbott Handerson Thayer, Virgin Enthroned, 1891. Oil on canvas, 72 ½ × 52 ½ in. (184.3 × 133.2 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.131.

was completed in 1893, Thayer wrote to Freer, who had purchased the painting, that he wanted “to show you a photo of your picture with the clouds changed to wings. I want to ask Dewing about it too. It seems to me to make the picture. I shan’t rest until that bleak surrounding is somehow sweetened in that canvas.”104 The photograph he refers to in this letter is one of the artist’s student copies of a work in progress. It suggests that earlier versions of The Virgin did not have clouds in the shape of wings.105 However, in later works, such as Monadnock Angel (1920–1), in which Gladys is depicted atop Monadnock, Thayer clearly returned to the theme that was begun with Angel more than thirty years earlier of turning one of his daughters into an angelic winged figure. Although Thayer remarried four months after Kate’s death, his second wife, Emma Beach, a longtime family friend, never appears in paint as one of these ideal women. Instead, in addition to his children, the artist turned to his Dublin neighbors. Clara May, the model for Winged Figure (1889), was the daughter of a Brooklyn businessman. She graduated from Radcliffe College and married

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an Episcopalian minister. Responding to her plans to leave the area, Thayer wrote that she was “the very symbol of all the joys and healths Dublin had given us.” And he asked, “Why, why, why are the Mays breaking up the dear Dublin life for all of us?”106 Another neighbor, Elise Pumpelly, who appears in Caritas (1894–5) and Woman in Grecian Gown (1894) (Figure 3.12), was the daughter of Harvard geologist Raphael Pumpelly, one of Dublin’s first summer residents. Pumpelly significantly contributed to the area’s sanitary health by establishing a bacteriological and clinical laboratory to safeguard local milk supplies. He also worked to drain farmland in the area of stagnant pools of water in an effort to minimize the presence of mosquitoes. Appropriately enough, his daughter appears in Thayer’s painting wearing loose clothing that was prized as a model of hygiene and health. Indeed, like other artists of the day who depicted ideal women, Thayer draped his figures in classicizing dress. A late nineteenth-century classical revival, which included the staging of civic pageants and a nostalgia for colonial

Figure 3.12  Abbott Handerson Thayer, Woman in Grecian Gown, c. 1894. Oil and resin, 54 × 38 in. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, Gift of anonymous donor.

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America, helps account for the widespread use of Greek gowns in painting from this period. Yet in Thayer’s case, as for other artists at the time, this reference to the Greeks was once again largely driven by an interest in health. The physician Charles Wesley Emerson was convinced the flowering of Greek culture, which produced so many distinguished orators, poets, sculptors, and philosophers, was made possible by exercise and health. Physical culture, as Emerson put it, was “the secret of their success,” and it had been “revived” with the birth of the modern gymnasium, culminating with the first modern-day Olympics in 1896.107 Throughout the nineteenth century, medical professionals, women’s rights supporters, and physical culture advocates had challenged conventional wisdom on the subject of women’s dress. According to health enthusiast Bernarr Macfadden in The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood, the contorted, “caged-in” look of modern-day fashion could be blamed for the “physical ugliness, weakness and sickness” which plagued American women. More than any other garment, the corset, Macfadden explained, “crushed, maltreated and distorted” the female form from an early age, leaving women physically disabled as adults.108 In the words of one reformer, the tight-laced corset “hugs like a bear—crushing in the ribs, injuring the lungs and heart, the stomach, and many other internal organs.” “Before” and “after” drawings in books on women’s health dramatized the difference over time between the body’s natural contours and a tightly corseted waist (Figure 3.13).109 As a corrective, women were advised to rethink modern notions of beauty through the study of ancient Greek art. As described by Frances Steele and Elizabeth Adams in Beauty of Form and Grace of Vesture, ancient Greece represented “the period of the highest physical cultivation of the race known to history.”110 In the words of another beauty writer, “the study of beautiful dress for women necessarily involves the admiration of classical standards; not an acquiescence in their fitness for sculpture, not a tolerance of them in famous pictures, but a love for them, a conviction in their rightness, a persuasion of their sweetness and majesty.”111 Among ancient works recommended for aesthetic contemplation, none received more praise than the Venus de Milo, celebrated as the embodiment of beauty defined by health. Born of a culture with respect for the body and an interest in physical fitness, the sculpture represented an aesthetic for modern-day women to embrace. For reformers like Macfadden, the Venus de Milo was the perfect model to promote a life of “good food with plenty of exercise, less art with more nature, less toilet artificialities with more

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Figure 3.13  The female ribcage, uncorseted and corseted, n.d. From Gustave Joseph Witkowski, Tetoniana (Paris: A. Maloine, 1898), as reproduced in Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 69.

robustness, less study with more play, less paint with more oxygen, and less fashionableness with more womanliness.”112 This vision of beauty directly informs Thayer’s idealized figures. The artist knew the Venus de Milo well from his studies in Paris, where it had recently been added to the collections at the Louvre. He created an oil study of the sculpture and took pride in owning a fragment of a reproduction. In a letter to Everton Sainsbury early in his career, Thayer stated that he “owned nothing, except a cookingstove, the head of the Venus de Milo, Michaelangelo’s ‘Prisoner’s Head,’ a great many [of his own paintings] and a few clothes and warm hearts.”113 Photographs of Thayer’s models suggest an uncanny correspondence between his practice as an artist and the advice of contemporary beauty writers (Figure 3.14). Just as writers Frances Steele and Elizabeth Adams encouraged women “to make pictures of themselves” by studying ancient statues and experimenting with classical dress, Thayer used paintbrush and canvas to turn his models into visions that were inspired by ancient example. In both cases, the Greek chiton enjoyed a privileged status.

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Figure 3.14  Clara May and Elise Pumpelly posing as Parthenon “Fates” in Abbott Handerson Thayer’s studio, 1893. Contact print from a series of glass plate negatives, each 8 × 5 in., by Henry D. Allison showing views of Thayer’s studio. Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Elliott S. Allison.

Though perhaps impractical as a form of modern dress, women were nonetheless encouraged to study its design, which “in no way contradicted the natural form, and probably interfered with healthful activity less than any other apparel ever worn.”114 For Thayer, like Steele and Adams, the chiton appealed as an alternative to the highly controlled and contorted look promoted by current fashion. For his models, including his children, it became another means of practicing health. The poem cited earlier from the Journal of Outdoor Life on the advantages of sleeping in the outdoors—instead of a pink boudoir—concludes with another analogy pitting nature against artifice, this time in terms of dress: O take away my Worth gowns, ma, Bestrip me from head to toe— For Nature ne’er planned the Gibson girl, But the Venus de Milo.

The poem suggests that even a child could recognize the advantages of the Venus de Milo’s “natural” figure as compared to the contrived confections of a haute couture Worth gown or the Gibson Girl’s athletic attire. Such distinctions would not have been lost on Mary, Gerald, and Gladys.

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Tutored at home on account of their father’s “morbid fear of germs,” they were immersed in a fresh air environment.115 In A Virgin, they are depicted in loose-fitting classical clothing walking barefoot through nature, perhaps on one of their daily mountain walks.116 Under their father’s watchful eye, they pursued their own version of sanatorium routine in a setting known for decades as a refuge from the stress and strain of urban living. Though it was never as far removed from the “insanity of towns” as Thayer might have wished, Dublin provided a redemptive path of health for the artist and his children in the wake of Kate’s illness and death.117 Thayer’s colleague Augustus Saint-Gaudens pursued a similar regimen in the nearby colony of Cornish, New Hampshire, though in his case it was prompted by a crisis in the sculptor’s own health.

Notes Portions of this chapter first appeared as “Therapeutic Beauty: Abbott Thayer, Antimodernism, and the Fear of Disease,” American Art 18, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 32–51 and as “Therapeutic Beauty: Abbott Thayer, Tuberculosis and Angels of Art,” Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities 2, no. 3 (October 2010), published online at www​.h​​ektoe​​ninte​​rnati​​onal.​​org​/t​​herap​​eutic​​beaut​​y​.htm​​l. 1 Emerson’s Nature—Origin, Growth, Meaning, ed., Merton M. Sealts, Jr. and Alfred R. Ferguson (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, Inc., 1969), 12. 2 Mary Katherine Fuertes, unpublished manuscript on Louis Fuertes, n.d., Abbott Thayer papers, Dublin Historical Society, Dublin, New Hampshire. 3 James Mortimer Keniston, Melancholia, Periodical Depression, and Other Depressions: With Differential Diagnosis (Middletown, CT: 1920), 1. See also Clark Lawlor, From Melancholia to Prozac: A History of Depression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4 William Henry Thayer Family Record, Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer family papers, Reel 48, Frame 107, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA), Smithsonian Institution. 5 Ibid, Frame 90. 6 Ibid, Frame 105. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, Frame 91. 9 Elizabeth Lee, “Diagnosing the Archive,” Archives of American Art Journal 58, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 72. 10 The notion of the artist colony as a relaxing, healthy place is a recurring thread in the scholarly literature on colony life, though to my knowledge the present study is the first to suggest health played such an important role. Health references can

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be found in Michael Jacobs, The Good and Simple Life: Artist Colonies in Europe and America (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1985); Kathleen Pyne, “John Twatchtman and the Therapeutic Landscape,” in John Twachtman: Connecticut Landscapes, eds. Deborah Chotner, Lisa N. Peters, and Kathleen Pyne (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989), 49–65; Barbara J. MacAdam, Winter’s Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1909– 1920 (Hanover, NH: Hood Museum of Art and Dartmouth College, 1999); Leo G. Mazow, “George Inness, Softness, and the Vapor Barrier,” in Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness and the Art of Painting Softly, ed. Marc Simpson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 52–71; Thomas Denenberg, Amy Kurtz Lansing, and Susan Danly, Call of the Coast: Art Colonies of New England (Portland, Maine: Portland Museum of Art; Old Lyme, CT: Florence Griswold Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 11 Importantly, these colonies were not too far removed from the conveniences and resources of the city. Most colonies—including Provincetown, Massachusetts, Woodstock, New York, and Old Lyme, Connecticut, as well as Dublin and Cornish in New Hampshire—were within a few hours by train from Boston or New York, making it relatively easy to travel between the urban and rural. On the links between American artist colonies and the broader retreat from urban life at the turn of the twentieth century, see Lisa N. Peters, “Cultivated Wildness and Remote Accessibility: American Impressionist Views of the Home and its Grounds,” in Visions of Home: American Impressionist Images of Suburban Leisure and Country Comfort, eds. Lisa N. Peters and Peter M. Lukehart (Carlisle, PA: The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, 1997). 12 MacAdam, Winter’s Promise, 28–9. 13 Christine Ermenc, “Farmers and Aesthetes: A Social History of the Cornish Art Colony and Its Relationship to the Town of Cornish, New Hampshire, 1885–1930,” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1981), 18. 14 Mazow, “George Inness,” 61. 15 Edie Clark, “Inspired by God: The Artists of Mount Monadnock, 1888–1950,” Monadnock Art: Friends of the Dublin Art Colony, http://www​.monadnockart​.org​ /artists​-past (accessed March 11, 2017). 16 On Monadnock’s literary heritage, see The Grand Monadnock: A Literary, Artistic, and Social History (Concord, NH: Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests; Keene, NH: Keene State College with Louise E. Thorne Art Gallery, 1974). 17 “Mount Monadnock: Mountain Hiking and Climbing,” Monadnock Travel Council of Southwest New Hampshire, http:​/​/www​​.mona​​dnock​​trave​​l​.com​​/moun​​tain-​​hikin​​ g​-cli​​mbing​​-mt​-m​​​onadn​​ock​.h​​tml (accessed March 11, 2017). Mount Monadnock is sometimes called the Grand Monadnock since it is the mountain for which this geological formation was named. It is also the largest monadnock in the area.

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18 Ibid. 19 In context, this line reads: “Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Emerson’s Nature, 8. 20 Gerri L. Herrick, “To Mount Monadnock with Henry Thoreau,” in The Grand Monadnock, 14. 21 Ibid, 17. 22 Michael P. Branch and Jessica Pierce, “‘Another Name for Health’: Thoreau and Modern Medicine,” Literature and Medicine 15, no. 1 (1996): 137. 23 Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Walden and Other Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Random House, 1937), 599. 24 Walter Harding, “Thoreau and Tuberculosis,” The Thoreau Society Bulletin 186 (Winter 1989): 2. 25 Thoreau embodied the romantic myth of tuberculosis, according to Mark Caldwell. Despite his often cranky temperament and ability to scandalize Concord, the writer’s death from tuberculosis brought him distinction and refinement, making him a lionized spiritual figure. See Mark Caldwell, The Last Crusade: The War on Consumption, 1862–1954 (New York: Atheneum, 1988), 15–19. 26 David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 3–4. 27 Ibid, 126. 28 Ibid, 127–8. 29 In addition to Brush, other painters who summered in Dublin include Frank Benson and Joseph Lindon Smith. Benson spent several summers in Dublin, though little is known of his stay. Smith is best remembered for the entertainment he provided at “Teatro Bambino,” his backyard theater. Several students also came to Dublin to study with Thayer, including Barry Faulkner, Alexander James, Rockwell Kent, Richard Meryman, and John Sharman. On the history of the colony, see Barbara Ball Bluff, “The Dublin Colony,” in A Circle of Friends: Art Colonies of Cornish and Dublin (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire with Thorne-Sagedorph Art Gallery, Keene State College, 1985), 9–31. 30 See Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth (1879; reprint, New York: Robert Schalkenbach Foundation, 1932). Brush made a small sketch of George in 1888 and an oil portrait in 1893, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For George’s influence on another late nineteenth-century American artist, see Leo Mazow, “George Inness, Henry George, the Single Tax, and the Future Poet,” American Art 18, no. 1 (2004): 58–77. 31 This incident is described in a letter from Nelson White to Nancy Douglas Bowditch, September 21, 1965, Bowditch Papers, Reel 2829, AAA. According

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to Barry Faulkner, Brush “bought no stocks or bonds” and “the only investment his theories would allow him was the farm in Dublin.” Faulkner manuscript, Bowditch Papers, Reel 2830, AAA. The artist was apparently so disinterested in his own financial gain that he was “too busy” when a judge summoned him to collect a family inheritance of an undisclosed amount. As the artist’s daughter recalled, “We never learned how much money there was, or who had remembered our father. To this day it remains a mystery, tantalizing the family with thoughts of what might have been!” Nancy Douglas Bowditch, George de Forest Brush: Recollections of a Joyous Painter (Peterborough, NH: Noone House, 1970), 230. 32 Faulkner manuscript, Bowditch Papers, Reel 2830, AAA. 33 Bowditch, Recollections of a Joyous Painter, 131. 34 Shi, The Simple Life, 185. 35 “Good Taste and Bad Taste in Tables,” Ladies Home Journal 23, no. 5 (April 1906): 37. 36 Letter from Elizabeth P. Jencks to Nancy Douglas Bowditch, September 5, 1947, Bowditch Papers, Reel 2829, AAA. 37 Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 7. 38 Harold McCracken, Great Painters and Illustrators of the Old West (New York: Dover Publications, 1988; reprinted, Portrait of the Old West: With a Biographical Check List of Western Artists (New York: Mc-Graw Hill, 1952), 174. 39 Emily D. Shapiro, catalogue entry for The Weaver, in Nancy K. Anderson, George de Forest Brush: The Indian Paintings (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2008), 172. 40 George Wharton James, The Indians’ Secret of Health or What the White Race May Learn from the Indian, rev. ed. (1908; repr. Pasadena, CA: The Radiant Life Press, 1917), 11–12. 41 Bowditch, Recollections of a Joyous Painter, 118. 42 James C. Boyles, “Brush and the Academic Tradition,” in Anderson, George de Forest Brush, 50. Brush’s interest in Indians developed through his Western travels, where he came into contact with the Arapahos and Shoshone in Wyoming and the Crow in Montana, though what he took from his experience ultimately had less to do with the tribes themselves than with his own agenda. As the curator Nancy Anderson observes, his Indian paintings by the late 1880s were products of the studio, “remotely related, if at all, to the realities of Indian life.” Instead, they were taken up with thinly veiled “stinging criticism of a rapidly industrializing America that Brush found increasingly disturbing.” Anderson, George de Forest Brush, 2. 43 James Boyles points out that the classicizing aspects of The Moose Chase are most visible in sketches for the painting. Early on, he writes, Brush conceived a figure “Apollonian in physique with a beautiful, European face,” yet the finished painting “with its sober-faced Indian “indicates that the artist ultimately relied more on his model in this painting than the ancient ideal. James C. Boyles, “Brush and the Academic Tradition,” in Anderson, George de Forest Brush, 51.

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44 Nelson White notes that Thayer’s family home “reflected the intellectual life of Boston in that day when Emerson and his contemporaries were at the peak of their literary activities.” Nelson White, Abbott H. Thayer: Painter and Naturalist (Hartford: Connecticut Printers, 1951), 12. 45 Nelson and Henry C. White Research Material, c. 1851–1961, Reel D201, Frame 550, AAA. 46 Emerson’s Nature, 11. 47 Ibid., 11. 48 Ibid., 12. 49 Ibid. 50 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 157. 51 Undated letter, Nelson and Henry C. White research materials, c. 1851–1961, Reel D201, Frame 760, AAA. 52 Gladys Thayer, “Family Life,” 7, Nelson White papers, AAA. On the same page, Thayer’s daughter, Gladys, writes that “when he was [a] small boy, if, on some pleasant ramble through woods or along the brooks, he chanced upon an ugly dump of rubbish, all the rest of his day would seem clouded or depressed.” 53 Abbot [sic] H. Thayer, “Monadnock,” The Dublin News, July 14, 1908, 4. 54 American Victorians in Virgin Nature, ed. T. J. Jackson Lears (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2002), ix. 55 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 108, 116. 56 John Muir, “Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” in Nature Writings: The Story of My Boyhood and Youth; My First Summer in the Sierra; The Mountains of California; Stickeen; Selected Essays (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1997), 721. 57 Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 150. 58 Ibid., 106, 157–8. 59 Abbott Thayer to Edward Emerson, “On Wildlife Preservation,” c. 1900–c. 1918, Box 3, Folder 42, Nelson and Henry C. White research material, AAA. 60 Ibid. In Thayer’s estimation, this was only one example of how a work of art could be ruined. In “Restoration: the Doom of Works of Art” (reprinted as Appendix A in White, 243–52), he addressed what he saw as the desecration of art by restorers, whose every touch, Thayer believed, was turning the world’s art treasures “into dross at a fearful rate” (252). Acknowledging that “dogs, earthquakes [and] babies” might “partially destroy a work of art,” he felt their damage would never cause any “true harm” (244–5). However, “no touch whatever that any subsequent man can put upon a masterpiece [other than the artist] is anything but disease and destruction” (252). 61 Undated letter to Mrs. William Armory and Reverend George F. Weld, Dublin Historical Society, Dublin, New Hampshire. On the same topic,

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see Thayer’s undated letter to Edward Emerson, the poet’s grandson, and another to Philip Ayres, August 17, 1915, both in Thomas B. Brumbaugh research material on Abbott Handerson Thayer and other artists, 1876–1994, (bulk 1960s–94), AAA. 62 Ibid. 63 Ross Anderson, Abbott Handerson Thayer (Syracuse, NY: Everson Museum, 1982), 103. An exception is Forest Interior, c. 1900. 64 Anderson observes that nearly all of Thayer’s landscapes after 1901 depict Dublin in the winter, a season that Emerson also found pleasurable, considering it as genial as summer. Anderson, 103. It is worth noting that after his death, Thayer’s ashes were spread across the mountain. 65 Adrienne Baxter Bell, “Body-Nature-Paint: Embodying Experience in Gilded Age American Landscape Painting,” in The Cultured Canvas: New Perspectives on American Landscape Painting, ed. Nancy Siegel (Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire, 2011), 256. 66 In a 1917 letter to Brush, Thayer wrote that he longed to return to his “old theme, winter dawn over our mountain” depicted “as flat and as free of half tints as the scene itself or many a Jap print.” Anderson, 108. 67 Maggie M. Cao, “Abbott Thayer and the Invention of Camouflage,” Art History 39, no. 3 (June 2016): 503, 490. Thayer’s fascination with animal camouflage absorbed much of his energy and time. Despite considerable opposition, he was intent on proving that animals appeared invisible in the wild on account of their protective coloring, which he and Gerald demonstrated in their illustrated book, Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, published in 1909. According to Thayer, animals were colored darkest in areas that were most exposed to light and were light in those areas that remained in shadow, thereby creating a pattern of countershading which allowed for a natural disguise. Theodore Roosevelt, who had evolved his own theories of camouflage based on his experiences in the African wild, dismissed Thayer as a fanatic, though engaged him in a series of heated letters on the subject. (See Nelson White papers, Reel 201, AAA.) More than once, Thayer traveled to Washington, DC, to demonstrate his ideas and promote their military applications. While he was initially unsuccessful in convincing the Navy to paint their ships according to his camouflage principles, by the Second World War, years after Thayer’s death, some of his ideas were adopted. For more on Thayer and camouflage, see Kevin M. Murphy, “Not Theories but Revelations”: The Art and Science of Abbott Handerson Thayer (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 2016); Alexander Nemerov, “Vanishing Americans: Abbott Thayer, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Attraction of Camouflage,” American Art 11, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 51–81; and Roy R. Behrens, who has written widely on the topic, including False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage (Dysart, IA: Bobolink

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Books, 2002) and “The Theories of Abbott H. Thayer: Father of Camouflage,” Leonardo 21, no. 3: 291–6. 68 Reminiscences of William James, Nelson White papers, Reel D202, Frame 674, AAA. 69 These aspects of Thayer’s approach to Monadnock come through clearly when compared to contemporaneous New England winter scenes by John Henry Twatchman, for example, which were also influenced by Japanese prints, yet still allow the viewer to move with fluidity and ease through the landscape. 70 William Henry Thayer Family Record, Frame 91, AAA. 71 Woods Hutchinson, The Conquest of Consumption (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1910), 70. 72 Abbott struggled to make the same claims for himself. As noted in Chapter 1, he once explained that he had inherited “two kinds of nervousness, irritability from father’s and oceans of hypochondria” from his mother’s line (Thayer papers, Reel D199, Frame 118, AAA). Thayer was known for his emotional highs and lows, which he characterized as “the Abbott pendulum.” Richard S. Meryman, Jr., “Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849–1921),” 2006, Monadnock Art, monadnockart​ .or​g (accessed April 12, 2017). He struggled to find the energy he needed to paint. As referenced in Chapter 1, he once wrote to his patron, Charles Freer, that his life had “always been different from that of most of the other men. St. Gaudens and Dewing and Tryon for instance know no particular limit to their bodily strength. . . . Whereas I have always been too tired to work over four hours a day and my life has been one steady fight to be fresh enough for continued labor” (Abbott Thayer to Charles Freer, May 20, 1893, Thomas Brumbaugh Papers, AAA). 73 Mary Katherine Fuertes, Abbott Thayer papers, Dublin Historical Society. 74 John E. Bauer, The Health Seekers of Southern California, 1870–1900 (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1959), xvii. 75 Ibid. 76 Edward Otis, The Great White Plague: Tuberculosis (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1909), 50–1. 77 Francis DeWitt, The How to Get Well Book, by a Former Patient of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium (Saranac Lake, NY: Riverside Publishing Company, 1906), 11. 78 John Bessner Huber, Consumption: Its Relation to Man and His Civilization (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1906), 185. 79 Katherine Ott, Fevered Lives: Tuberculosis in American Culture since 1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 147–8. 80 Huber, Consumption, 301. Katherine Ott points out that with their “strict rules and daily regimens,” the early sanatoria were not unlike prisons, insane asylums, and charity hospitals. In fact, she explains, “in states without proper facilities,

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consumptives were housed in state asylums and penitentiaries” (Ott, Fevered Lives, 148). 81 Ott, Fevered Lives, 149-150. Evidence for recovery rates is sparse in this period, but Ott writes that many patients were periodically readmitted over several years before their death. “Follow-up studies,” she notes, “reported high death and continued debility rates for patients after their release” (149). 82 Ibid., 148–9. 83 DeWitt, The How to Get Well Book, 32–3. 84 F. W. Burton-Fanning, The Open-Air Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis (Chicago: W. T. Keener & Co., 1905), ix. 85 S. J. Cobb, “Atmospheric Air and What It Has to Do with Our Life,” Health-Culture 5, no. 4 (September 1899): 176. 86 Ella Adelia Fletcher, The Woman Beautiful : A Practical Treatise on the Development and Preservation of Woman’s Health and Beauty (New York: Brentano’s, 1901), 109. 87 Shelia M. Rothman, Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1994), 159. 88 Barry Faulkner, Barry Faulkner: Sketches from an Artist’s Life (Dublin, NH: William L. Bauhan, 1973), 27–8, 23–4. 89 Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist’s Life, 20. 90 For other accounts of the family’s routine, see Mary Katherine Fuertes manuscript and Cecilia Beaux, Background with Figures: Autobiography of Cecilia Beaux (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930), 214–16. 91 Huber, Consumption, 221–2. While lean-tos were ideal, by the turn of the century, there were options for obtaining fresh air in almost any architectural environment. Verandas and sleeping porches became a common feature in many homes, but even a small apartment could be outfitted with a tent and awning construction around a window that allowed the head and shoulders to be exposed to outdoor air during the night. By 1908, the benefits of sleeping outdoors were so well established that even those in perfect health were encouraged to try it out for increased “efficiency” and “joy in living.” Thomas McAdam, “Outdoor Sleeping and Living,” Country Life in America 13 (January 1908): 334. On the industry for fresh air tents and other commodities for the tuberculous, see Ott, Fevered Lives, 87–99. 92 On the breath catcher, see White, Abbott H. Thayer, 104. 93 Thayer wore Jaeger underwear year-round (Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist’s Life, 19). Physician Gustav Jaeger was famous in the Victorian era for his “100% pure, undyed wool underwear.” He claimed that it “prevented the retention of ‘noxious exhalations’ of the body, retained the salutary emanations of the body which induce a sense of vigor and sound health and ensured warmth and ventilation.”

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Jaeger sold his underwear based on the belief that wool protected against diseases such as cholera, typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis. See Gary M. Griffin, The History of Men’s Underwear (Los Angeles: Added Dimensions Publishing, 1991), 50. 94 Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist’s Life, 20. 95 The figure in Angel was inspired by Mary’s appearance as the Virgin in a tableau vivant at the Dublin Library. To create the painting, Thayer first nailed the wings to a board and carefully prepared the background and then asked Mary, dressed in a classical gown, to pose before it. The painting was begun in the summer of 1887 at the Stearns farm in West Keene, New Hampshire, where it was purchased “on the easel” by Arthur Astor Carey, one of Thayer’s students, though the artist continued working on it for another two years. Thayer originally showed Mary with the Christian symbols of the mandolin and lily, though their removal was among the changes made before the painting was completed. (White, Abbott H. Thayer, 51–2.) On angels in Gilded Age art, see Patricia M. Burnham, “Gender Issues in American Angels,” in The Shape of the Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Seventh International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, ed. Olena H. Saciuk (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), 117–33, and Bailey Van Hook, Angels of Art: Women and Art in American Society, 1876-1914 (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 96 In an essay on nineteenth-century artists and their young female models, Barbara Dayer Gallati suggests that there may be a similar form of projection taking place with Thomas Eakins, who depicts his sisters in Home Scene (c. 1871) in a disquieting canvas that perhaps registers the insanity and subsequent death of their mother in 1872. See “Family Matters: Artists and Their Model Girls,” in Angels and Tomboys: Girlhood in 19th-Century American Art (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communication; Newark, NJ: Newark Museum, 2012), 71–3. 97 Cynthia Mills, Beyond Grief: Sculpture and Wonder in the Gilded Age Cemetery (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2014), 104. 98 Susan Hobbs, curatorial file, Abbott Thayer, Angel, National Museum of American Art (now Smithsonian American Art Museum). 99 From a clipping cited in Elizabeth Walmsley, “A Preliminary Investigation into the Painting Techniques of Abbott Handerson Thayer,” Painting Conservation Department, National Museum of American Art (now Smithsonian American Art Museum), 13. 100 Ibid. 101 Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), 41. 102 Kristin Schwain, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 115, 125.

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103 According to Richard Murray, Thayer’s Virgin Enthroned was interpreted by a critic of the day as a painting of the Virgin Mary with the Christ Child and St. John the Baptist. See Murray, “Abbott Thayer’s Stevenson Memorial,” American Art 13 no. 2 (Summer 1999), 13. 104 Abbott Thayer to Charles Lang Freer, September, 1893, in Susan Hobbs, “Comments,” 1977, Richard Murray research material regarding Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1948–2004, AAA. 105 Ibid. 106 Thomas B. Brumbaugh, “An Artist and His Model: Abbott Thayer and Clara May,” American Art Journal (May 1978): 32. 107 Charles Wesley Emerson, Physical Culture of the Emerson College of Oratory, Boston, 7th ed. (Boston: Emerson College of Oratory Publishing, 1891), 2–3. 108 Bernarr Macfadden, The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood (New York: Physical Culture Publishing, 1901), 32–3. 109 Mary Eliza (Joy) Haweis, The Art of Beauty and The Art of Dress (1878 and 1879; repr., New York: Garland Publishing, 1979), 48–9. 110 Frances Mary Steele and Elizabeth Livingston Adams, Beauty of Form and Grace of Vesture (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1892), 57. 111 “Symposium on Women’s Dress,” Arena 6 (September 1892): 504. 112 Macfadden, The Power and Beauty of Superb Womanhood, 45. For a more recent discussion of the “natural woman,” see Lois Banner, American Beauty (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), chapters 6 and 10, in which she discusses this type of female beauty as a challenge to the earlier “steel engraving lady.” As applied to art, see Charles Colbert, A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 72–121, and Sarah Burns, “Winslow Homer and the Natural Woman,” in American Victorians and Virgin Nature, 16–38. 113 Abbott Thayer to Everton Sainsbury, January 27, 1884, Nelson White Papers, Reel 201, Frame 298, AAA. 114 Steele and Adams, Beauty of Form, 203. 115 Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist’s Life, 24. 116 Walking barefoot was another sign of health, as it strengthened and nourished the feet, helping with overall blood circulation. In an article on the health of the feet, the Reverend Kniepp noted that feet “are made to tread the earth and carry the human body, and that can only be done if they are hardy and well nourished.” Reverend Kneipp, “Going Bare-Foot,” The Kneipp Water Cure Monthly 2, no. 7 (July 1901): 177. 117 Faulkner, Sketches from an Artist’s Life, 24.

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Health—is the thing! That’s my conclusion. —Augusts Saint-Gaudens (1901)1

Diagnosis In October 1897, Augustus Saint-Gaudens left New York City for Paris, explaining he was “nervous and completely disaffected with America.” At the height of his career, and widely viewed as the nation’s most important sculptor, Saint-Gaudens had recently unveiled three major monuments—the Peter Cooper Monument (1897) in New York, the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (1896) in Boston, and the General John Logan Memorial (1897) in Chicago—and was exhausted. However, his exhaustion was not only due to overwork but also from the strain of an urban industrial environment. He complained of New York’s “infernal noise, dirt, and confusion,” especially outside his 36th Street studio, with its “maddening electric cars . . . the ambulance-wagons tearing by . . . and the occasional frantic fireengine racing through it all, with bells clanging, fire, smoke, hell, and cinders,” as he described it.2 These were the kinds of nerve-rattling conditions George Beard had in mind when he attributed the epidemic of neurasthenia to fastpaced living in late nineteenth-century America. Saint-Gaudens had lived in Paris from 1867 to 1870 as a student at the École des Beaux-Arts, and on a subsequent return less than a decade later when he worked on important early commissions, including the Farragut Monument (1879–80) and the unfinished Morgan tomb angels (1879–80, 1883). He returned in 1897 as a mature and accomplished artist with an international reputation, which did not go unappreciated in France.3 In 1899, the French government purchased Amor Caritas (Plate 6). The following year, he won Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle and became a corresponding member of the Société des

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Beaux Arts. In 1900, Saint-Gaudens was awarded a coveted cross of the French Legion of Honor, a sure sign of his success and a high point of his career. In addition, he had supportive friends and colleagues in Paris as well as first-rate bronze-casting foundries that allowed him to develop novel aspects of both his large and small-scale works.4 These professional accolades aside, the move from New York to Paris had little impact on the sculptor’s health. In a letter to his wife, Augusta, Saint-Gaudens complained that he still felt “depressed and blue,” admitting to what he called “a complete absence of ambition, a carelessness about all that I have cared so much about before,” and even a “desire to be ended with life.” He closed the letter despairing, “There is too much misery and unhappiness in the world, and all this struggle for beauty seems so vain and hopeless.”5 He tried lifting his spirits with a trip to Italy, revisiting some of his favorite haunts with his colleague and friend Alfred Garnier. They also traveled to the foothills of the Pyrenees, where Saint-Gaudens’s father was born. It was the sculptor’s first visit to the area, and when he arrived, he found “that singular sense of being at home where one has never been before,” which he attributed to “inherited memory” from his father.6 However, none of this brought about a substantial shift in health. The underlying cause of Saint-Gaudens’s continued suffering became clear in July 1900, when a French doctor delivered a diagnosis of rectal cancer.7 The sculptor was fifty-two years old. It was devastating news which left him contemplating suicide and, as he later recalled, running through the streets of Paris imagining a single word—Death—inscribed on every building.8 Yet this terrifying episode was followed by a moment of grace when “something happened,” as Saint-Gaudens described it, and “I saw everything again, and everything about me was unbelievably beautiful.”9 These emotional swings continued as he experienced various treatments and intermittent periods of recovery. Saint-Gaudens lived another seven years, until 1907, roughly twice as long as doctors at the time would have expected someone to survive rectal cancer.10 While the last phase of his life has been understood through a narrative of loss and decline—a “saddening of years,” as one biographer describes it—this chapter takes a new look at this period in Saint-Gaudens’s career, underscoring the sense of joie de vivre which unfolded in conjunction with his suffering and pain.11 Indeed, it was through his illness that the sculptor discovered a novel “manner of existence,” as he put it in a 1901 letter to the painter Will Low, one that led him to look upon his life for the past thirty years as that of a “damn fool.” He wrote to Low, I now “stop work at one o’clock and I devote the rest of the day

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to out-of-door things, golf, walking, driving, cutting trees, and all that makes one see there is something else in life besides the four walls of an ill-ventilated studio.” Convinced as he was by the power of outdoor recreation and play, SaintGaudens confessed in his letter to Low that he wanted to drag his colleagues “by the hair to where they would find other ‘jouissances’ that would not undermine their health. Health—is the thing! That’s my conclusion.”12 With this shift in outlook, Saint-Gaudens joined a lively culture of late nineteenth-century health seekers. As the British author Bruce Haley writes, “No topic more occupied the Victorian mind than Health—not religion, or politics, or Improvement, or Darwinism.” It was on account of health, he continues, that “Victorians flocked to the seaside, tramped about in the Alps or Cotswolds, dieted, took pills, sweated themselves in Turkish baths, adopted this ‘system’ of medicine or that.”13 While many of these therapies would be considered ineffective—even “quack”—medicine by today’s standards, a promise to alleviate suffering, whether proven or not, was all that was required at the time. In a pre-antibiotic period of American medicine when physicians had little to offer in the way of effective treatments or cures, there was plenty of room for experimentation with a seemingly limitless array of remedies, each of which offered its own dose of hope. By the turn of the twentieth century, the compulsion toward health was so pervasive that William James concluded in his Varieties of Religious Experience that “healthy-mindedness” could be considered a new religion in America.

Treatment In 1900, cancer was the eighth leading cause of death in the United States.14 Germ theory had recently transformed public understanding of communicable illnesses such as tuberculosis, but the cause of cancer—a chronic condition which did not appear to be transmitted by germs—was harder to discern. The increased presence of cancer at the turn of the twentieth century suggested that, like Beard’s neurasthenia, it was a by-product of Western modernity, since the disease was hardly known in unindustrialized parts of the world.15 As the centerpiece of the modern West, the city “was seen as itself a cancer—a place of abnormal, unnatural growth and extravagant, devouring, armored passions,” Susan Sontag observes.16 It became a metaphor for other types of unchecked growth, especially as population numbers soared. However, modern urban life was not the only cause singled out for the rising rates of cancer: other explanations

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pointed to the role of diet, the particularities of climate, too much wealth, and unfortunate inheritance. All combined, as the English surgeon Charles Childe concluded, there was no single widely accepted causal theory of cancer.17 In fact, doctors agreed on little more than a few basic facts about the disease. One thing was certain, though: the likelihood of cancer increased with age. Unlike tuberculosis, which disproportionately affected the young, cancer was a disease of middle age and beyond and was rarely found in individuals under the age of thirty-five. The oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee explains in his recent biography of cancer that as an age-related illness cancer could only be seen with any regularity once life expectancy increased and people lived long enough to contract the disease. Therefore, it was not necessarily true that modern life caused cancer, though this may have appeared to be the case; rather, it was only with a longer life span in modern times that cancer crossed a critical threshold of visibility.18 A second agreed-upon fact was that cancer appeared directly or indirectly in response to a local irritation or an “inciting cause.” Because this source of irritation was local in nature, cancer was thought to originate in a specific part of the body and therefore could not be blamed on an individual’s “constitution,” which had long been the understanding of how disease appeared in the body.19 Within days of his diagnosis, Saint-Gaudens returned home to pursue what was then the primary treatment for cancer—surgery. In the summer and fall of 1900, he had two operations to remove his tumor, first at Massachusetts General Hospital and then at St. Margaret’s Hospital, both in Boston. Decades earlier, cancer surgery was considered riskier to a patient’s well-being than the disease itself. However, the development of anesthesia and antisepsis in the midnineteenth century meant that patients could endure longer procedures on the operating table with a decreased risk of infection, thus expanding the odds for surgery as a viable treatment. Even so, progress remained slow: as Dr. Childe put it in The Control of a Scourge, or How Cancer is Curable, the number of cases cured by surgery was still “small compared to the number that die in spite of it.”20 By the 1880s, a variety of techniques for removing tumors from internal organs such as the stomach, colon, ovaries, and esophagus had been developed, making even invasive types of cancer surgeries possible. The challenge with many of these cancers was detection, since diagnosis was typically only possible at an advanced stage of illness. By then, it was often too late for surgery to be effective.21 With rectal surgery, in particular, the position of the tumor was key. If located high in the bowels, tumors were almost impossible to reach. Surgery was therefore advised only in cases when the tumor appeared within

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the first four inches of the anal canal. The age of the patient was also a factor in considering whether or not to operate: patients under forty-five were believed to have the greatest potential to benefit.22 These circumstances—the timing of the diagnosis, the location of the tumor, and the patient’s age—significantly limited the number of advisable surgeries. In On Diseases of the Rectum and Anus, Dr. Harrison Cripps estimated that surgery was appropriate for only 15–20 percent of rectal cancer patients. Moreover, among those who underwent surgery, only 10–15 percent could hope for a permanent cure, though the rest could expect a modest boost in life expectancy.23 In the course of Saint-Gaudens’s surgeries, doctors removed part of his colon. Such a procedure was typically undertaken only if the tumor could not be completely removed on account of its size or location, making it necessary to partially excise the surrounding colon. Once considered an “extreme measure,” and used only if a patient was “nearly bursting from distension,” by the turn of the century, a colostomy could be introduced when a patient was “beginning to suffer from incessant diarrhea, from profuse bleeding, or from great pain, which cannot be remedied by medicine,” according to the surgeon Herbert William Allingham.24 Nonetheless, the colostomy still had significant life-altering effects. A series of letters exchanged between Saint-Gaudens and his Boston surgeon, F. B. Harrington, address the impact of the surgery on the sculptor’s daily habits. In these letters, Harrington advised him on the details of loosening and tightening the truss Saint-Gaudens now wore around his groin for support; on applying cocaine around the edges of the anus to alleviate pain; on washing the rectum using a rubber catheter; and on the regularity and content of his bowel movements, samples of which the sculptor sent to Harrington for analysis.25 The colostomy thus introduced its own routine of careful monitoring and self-maintenance the sculptor had to manage. With characteristic humor, Saint-Gaudens wrote to his collaborator and close friend, Stanford White, about his new medical reality: “I am as full of holes as a ‘porous plas[ter],’” while at the same time acknowledging it is a “wonder I am alive.”26 Under the circumstances, the sculptor’s diet—what he consumed and passed through his digestive tract before it was eliminated through the excretory system—took on new significance. His doctors offered varied advice. A letter from Dr. Greene recommended in late 1902 that the artist “continue with a pretty strict diet some weeks longer and use laxative medicine rather freely.” Specifically, he recommended eating limited canned vegetables with baked potato and packaged biscuits.27 In 1904, Dr. Harrington advised the sculptor to cover his

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nerves with fat in order to reduce his neuralgic pain. To do this, he encouraged Saint-Gaudens to double his feedings by consuming large portions of bread, butter, eggs, and meat. “I am aware you will find it hard,” Harrington explained, and “you will be annoyed by increased odors and by larger evacuations, but if we can get you out of this pain any effort will be justified.”28 Dr. Henry Baldwin likewise encouraged the sculptor to gain weight, primarily using cream and butter and by “eating everything that comes along.” He laid out a particular diet, complete with six meals a day, and underscored the importance of his habits around mealtime. Dr. Baldwin explained, “you would gain in your digestive powers and feel much better if you could lie down for the purpose of resting half an hour or an hour before your noonday meal and before your evening meal.”29 Effective digestion was key. As Dr. Baldwin noted in a subsequent letter, “There is no question that indigestion makes you depressed and nervous, and it is also equally true that, because you are nervous, you digest less well.”30 However, Saint-Gaudens found his best advice in the physician Edward Hooker Dewey, who believed nature had the power to restore the body to health when it was temporarily relieved from the energy-draining process of digestion. Dewey developed his philosophy while serving in Sherman’s Civil War campaign, when he found the so-called cures of his physician colleagues in the army hospital dangerous, or at least less effective than supporting the body’s natural capacities. In particular, Dewey questioned the wisdom of curing sickness with food after realizing that the body has “a vast reserve of predigested food” available to the brain even during an extended illness.31 He believed that eating while ill was a waste of strength that could otherwise be utilized by the body to restore health.32 Based on this experience, Dewey developed his “No Breakfast Plan,” which advised against eating anything before noon to allow for an extended period of bodily repair through fasting between dinner and lunch the following day. In his advice to Saint-Gaudens, Dewey explained that by limiting the amount of food he consumed and by moving the bowels only two to three times a week, he could save enormous brain power.33 The sculptor was immediately won over. Although he reported to Dewey that he sometimes “staggered round the streets” from hunger, he wrote, in April 1903, that “nothing can repay you for the three or four weeks of better health” he had enjoyed since starting the no-breakfast plan.34 Five months later, Saint-Gaudens wrote to Dewey requesting more copies of The No Breakfast Plan, plus two of the author’s other books, and credited his writings with the sculptor’s continued “good spirits and health.”35

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It may have been Dewey who introduced Saint-Gaudens to Horace Fletcher, the Gilded Age health guru whose mastication technique created a cult following, including such luminaries as Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry James.36 Fletcher’s own health awakening came at age forty when his application for life insurance was declined. Overweight, dyspeptic, and lethargic, he began experimenting with his diet. Within a few months, Fletcher lost forty-two pounds and seven inches from his waist on the basis of a single principle—systematic mastication. In 1903, Saint-Gaudens initiated a personal correspondence with Fletcher, who visited the sculptor in Cornish on at least one occasion. As he wrote to Saint-Gaudens, “Nature is all right and means only well; and that if we get our ear close to the ground . . . and listen to her suggestions we can find out all about her normal perfection.”37 Fletcher believed that the body already had in place an effective process for swallowing, digesting, and absorbing food as well as knowing when the stomach was full. However, he believed that in the rush to eat quickly, Americans routinely bypassed this process and suffered a host of eating-related digestive ailments as a result. Food needed to be chewed to the point that it was liquid and all but swallowed itself, reaching the stomach in a state where “it practically drops into a digestive bath all prepared for it,” Fletcher wrote.38 Having given “full attention to the process in the mouth, and derive[d] all the taste from our food,” nature follows suit, he explained, taking what it wants and letting the body know when it “has received all that it needs of that particular food the appetite will cut off short, and we will experience complete satisfaction, with no desire for more of that food.”39 This process of signaling when the body was satiated is what allowed Fletcher to eat all that he wanted and still lose weight; the time he spent eating roughly doubled, but he consumed only half as much food. Limiting intake meant that the intestines had little work to do and the body could operate more efficiently, maximizing its productivity while minimizing waste.40 It was also healthier in light of his belief the intestines were akin to a human sewer full of “constantly decaying masses of refuse,” as one of Fletcher’s followers put it.41 The longer food remained in the intestines, the more likely it was to become a site of poisonous putrefaction, or what was called “auto-intoxication,” making it a seedbed for disease.

Health and Classical Culture at Cornish These realizations unfolded in an unlikely setting: the rural town of Cornish, New Hampshire, about sixty miles north of Dublin, where Thayer lived. In 1900,

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following his surgery, Saint-Gaudens closed his New York apartment and studio and moved permanently to western New Hampshire. At the invitation of the New York lawyer Charles Beaman, who owned multiple properties in the area, the sculptor began spending summers in Cornish in 1885. The following summer, Thomas Dewing joined in and Cornish soon became a thriving summer retreat for about forty sculptors, painters, architects, writers, and their families.42 SaintGaudens’s decision to live there year-round starting in 1900 marked a break with the “infernal noise, dirt, and confusion” of his 36th Street studio in New York in favor of what colony member Percy MacKaye called the “medicinal quiet of the dear Cornish hills.”43 It also marked a shift in the sculptor’s priorities with a renewed focus on health. The colony that took shape around Saint-Gaudens had an entirely different ethos than rustic Dublin. While Thayer was inspired by Emerson and a pantheistic reverence for nature, the common reference point at Cornish was classical antiquity—or, rather, a modern New England version of classical antiquity.44 The view of nearby Mount Ascutney, for instance, was favorably compared by colonists to Mount Etna and Mount Vesuvius in Italy. Likewise, Saint-Gaudens named his home “Aspet” for his father’s birthplace along the Pyrenees in southern France and added several classicizing features, including a porch with Ionic pillars and a grapevine trellis that he referred to as a “piazza” (Figure 4.1). He also planted Lombardy poplars around the corners of the house and built a small “Pan pool” in the garden. His nearby Little Studio was adorned with a classical portico featuring a partial replica of the Parthenon frieze (Figure 4.2). In 1905, Saint-Gaudens’s friends and fellow artists organized “The Masque of ‘Ours’: The Gods and the Golden Bowl” to commemorate the twenty-year anniversary of the colony’s founding and to recognize the artist at its center (Figure 4.3). Colonists dressed as ancient gods and goddesses, and satyrs and nymphs, in a performance devoted to selecting Jupiter’s successor as ruler of the gods—an honor bestowed upon the ailing sculptor by his friends. The performance ended with Saint-Gaudens and Augusta being carried away in a golden chariot, a scene which the artist later recalled as “a spectacle and a recall of Greece of which I have dreamed, but have never thought actually to see in Nature.”45 Perhaps no single event better captures the colony’s reputed Arcadian atmosphere and its “poetic” approach to living.46 George Beard would have approved of life at the Cornish colony given the value placed on classical antiquity as well as its balance between work and play. In explaining why ancient Athens served as a model of healthy living, Beard explained, “We [Americans] have our occasional holidays, and a picnic or other

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Figure 4.1 Contemporary view of Saint-Gaudens’s home (“Aspet”) with view of Mt. Ascutney and gardens, Cornish, New Hampshire. National Park Service, SaintGaudens National Historic Site.

Figure 4.2 Inside Pergola, Little Studio, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, https​ :/​/ww​​w​.loc​​.gov/​​pictu​​res​/i​​tem​/n​​h0129​​.phot​​os​​.10​​4641p​/.

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Figure 4.3  A Masque of ‘Ours’: The Gods and the Golden Bowl cast dress rehearsal, 1905, photograph by C. S. Sherman, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire, #7310, Gift of George Rublee.

pleasure party is cautiously allowed . . . but the Greek life was one long holiday, a perpetual picnic, a ceaseless anniversary,” or so it seemed. “What they called work, gymnastics, competition games, and conversations on art and letters,” Beard wrote in American Nervousness, was what Americans typically knew only as occasional recreation.47 In Beard’s view, this lack of recreation was what made so many middle-class Americans susceptible to neurasthenia and other kinds of disease. At Cornish, artists maintained active studios while also enjoying leisurely picnics, elaborate dinners, and spirited theatrical performances like the “Masque of ‘Ours.’” It was in Cornish that Saint-Gaudens realized, as previously quoted in his letter to Will Low, “there is something else in life besides the four walls of an ill-ventilated studio.” From his first winter at the colony, the sculptor found an “unexpected joyousness” in the “sleigh-riding, the skating, and what not. I was as happy as a child,” Saint-Gaudens reported.48 His son, Homer, recalled that his father built toboggan chutes and kept a patch of ice cleared for hockey parties. (Figure 4.4).49 In summer, he added to his recreational options by hiring workers to construct a golf course and rebuild the swimming pool.50 Saint-Gaudens’s late-life passion for athletics took shape within the larger context of a national interest in physical fitness. As the strongman Eugen Sandow

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Figure 4.4  Toboggan Run outside of Saint-Gaudens’s Studio, originally published in “Country Life in America” by Homer Saint-Gaudens (NY: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1908), pp. 312–13, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire, #2935.

observed, “physical training has gone beyond the parade-ground or barrackroom of the soldier. It has happily found its way into our schools and colleges . . . with results that have gone far to neutralize the physical deterioration” rampant in an industrial age of sedentary labor.51 Through much of the nineteenth century, exercise was promoted for its redemptive moral qualities, while sports were celebrated for teaching discipline, self-sacrifice, and determination.52 By the end of the century, there was the additional endorsement of the new “sciences of the body,” which included nutrition and physiology.53 Health was no longer defined simply by the absence of disease, but by “a state of vitality, that is, of activity, growth, and responsiveness,” the scholar Bruce Haley writes.54 In 1895, the Scottish intellectual John Stuart Blackie insisted, “The growth and vigorous condition of every member of the body . . . depends on EXERCISE.” A body in “harmonious working order,” he believed, is a healthy body and a healthy body is a strong one. Blackie reasoned, “A man may be healthy without being strong; but all health tends, more or less, towards strength, and disease is weakness.”55 William Manning, a former world lightweight champion, agreed. As he put it, “more diseases are attributable to lack of proper exercise than any other cause.” He criticized Gilded Age elites for investing more in the care of their horses than in their own health. In his words, “One-tenth of the amount

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expended on pets by the millionaires, spent in grooming their own bodies, would add a decade to their lives and cause them to enjoy life all the more.”56 Sandow modeled this promise of a commitment to exercise and healthful living. Once a scrawny, sickly youth, he became famous for his superhuman feats, and in 1893 was deemed “the Most Perfectly Developed specimen of a man that has ever been seen.”57 Sandow emphasized that health, not strength, was “the crying want of the time.” As he explained in Sandow on Physical Training: A Study in the Perfect Type of Human Form, the greatest need was for “stamina, and the power, in each of us, to do our daily work with the least friction and the greatest amount of comfort and ease.”58 For Sandow, like the physical culture movement more generally, classical antiquity was held up as the ultimate reference for healthy living.59 As he wrote, “Greek and Roman alike knew, in a high degree, the value of bodily exercise, and in their competitive games, as well as in their training for war, adopted a system of physical education which produced wonderful results.”60 (The ancients were also praised for their appreciation of fresh air, a balanced diet, and healthy dress, as discussed in Chapter 2 and further in this chapter.) Sandow made his public image nearly synonymous with classical sculpture by basing his poses on ancient

Figure 4.5  Benjamin Falk, Eugen Sandow as The Dying Gaul, c. 1894. Albumen silver print. Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://lccn​.loc​.gov​/90713111.

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works of art (Figure 4.5). As the art historian Ellery Foutch observes, Sandow managed to blend the heroic strength of Hercules with the grace, agility, and athleticism of Adonis or Apollo.61 Mimicking antique statuary, while dressed in a loin cloth and wearing powder to underscore the whiteness and purity of his skin, Sandow not only called upon classical references, he appeared as their living embodiment, blurring the boundaries between the ancient past and modern present, between popular culture and fine art.62 Saint-Gaudens had been steeped in classical antiquity since his early days of training as a sculptor in Rome. A photograph of him teaching at the Art Students League in New York serves as a reminder of the central role the classical male athletic body assumed in his career (Figure 4.6). The sculptor drew humorous sketches of himself as a Roman warrior, a kind of caricatured alter ego.63 As with Sandow, classical antiquity in these examples merges with the culture of health and physical fitness. Commenting on the reciprocal exchange between these two registers of experience—the tradition of classicism in the fine arts and the modern culture of physical fitness—the art historian Tamar Garb points out that not only did body builders assume the classical poses once associated

Figure 4.6  Art Students League Class, c. 1890, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park, Cornish, New Hampshire, #1651, Gift of Margaret Platt.

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with models for academic life classes but photographs of these body builders also appeared in the studios of artists.64 As she explains, physical culturalists “appropriate[d] the practices of the art school for the context of the gym.”65 By this, Garb means that the classical tradition gave “form, meaning and dignity to the modern physical culture movement while at the same time lending its high-minded allure to the processes and procedures of photography itself.”66 If Sandow exemplifies how the classical past was appropriated by physical culture enthusiasts posing in the guise of the Dying Gaul and Farnese Hercules, perhaps Saint-Gaudens—a sculptor whose practice was embedded in classical antiquity but who also embodied classical ideals as a late-life athlete—was his counterpart in art.

Metastasis Diet and exercise played an essential role in how the sculptor managed his illness, but eventually his tumor returned, requiring new kinds of intervention. In October 1906, Augusta wrote a confidential letter to the collector Charles Freer, letting him know about her husband’s tumor, and that doctors had also found he was suffering from intestinal tuberculosis. Meanwhile, she explained, the sculptor’s assistants were hard at work and required about a thousand dollars a week to keep the studio running. This resulted in “an almost overwhelming financial problem,” Augusta explained, and she wrote to Freer hoping he might offer some relief.67 She also shared some promising news about her husband’s health. The surgeon who found the recent tumor had recommended an experimental treatment known as the “Tripsyn Cure,” developed by Dr. John Beard of Edinboro, and based on the belief that the pancreatic enzyme, trypsin, could strengthen the body’s defense against cancer. Although Beard was a wellregarded scientist who subjected his theory to rigorous lab tests and eventually published a book on his results, the Tripsyn Cure was not a widely accepted therapy, and was only given to Saint-Gaudens as a “last resort,” as Augusta put it.68 However, it seemed to have brought about a miracle in only three months, she explained, as “the tumor has nearly disappeared” and had put her husband “on the road to recovery.” The Tripsyn Cure was not the only experimental therapy Saint-Gaudens pursued. Electricity and x-rays were among the other nonsurgical treatments applied to a wide range of ailments at this time. In his popular text, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (1880), George Beard described electrotherapy

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as a force similar to light or heat which moved through the body and caused molecular changes which stimulated the body’s natural capacities to relieve pain and build strength.69 While Beard cautioned against the galvanic belts then widely advertised in magazines, and illustrated in Chapter 1, he considered the application of faradic and galvanic currents used by physicians effective in the relief of neurasthenic symptoms.70 A number of medical practitioners saw the potential for electrical currents in treating cancer as well. Dr. Margaret Cleaves, founder of the Electro-Therapeutic Clinic, Laboratory and Dispensary in New York City, argued for electricity as an agent in cancer treatment that “will not only destroy the foci of disease visible macroscopically, but will reach the microscopical outlying cells as well,” since the metastasis so many patients experienced following surgery meant that surgery alone was not enough and “must be supplemented by other means, and in some instances be supplanted by them.”71 Cleaves was an advocate for the use of the Röntgen rays, or x-rays—which she understood as a concentrated form of the same electromagnetic frequency found in electric light bulbs—to at least temporarily destroy cancerous tissue beyond the surgeon’s reach. The same was true with electric currents, she believed, as they destroyed tissue and diffused a “powerful antiseptic and tissue altering chemical into the diseased mass,” though more research was needed to know whether these treatments would be effective against the growth and spread of cancerous tissue over the long term.72 While there was little hope for recovery once Saint-Gaudens’s cancer returned in 1906, his family was undeterred in seeking out additional treatments. Starting that June, Dr. Cleaves took the sculptor on as a patient in her New York office with electric shock therapy.73 She also assisted Dr. Beard by administering the Trypsin Cure to Saint-Gaudens. By November, Beard credited Cleaves with having “saved his life” in a letter to Augusta. While Beard had designed the treatment, it was a “deadly weapon in the hands of those who do not know how to use it,” he explained, and Cleaves was a proven skilled administrator. Beard admitted the sculptor’s case looked bleak when he first learned of it, but he was “perfectly astounded” at the results which had been achieved over the last few months under her care.74 However, Cleaves deserves even more credit. When Augusta wrote to Freer in October 1906, she explained that while the tumor was now in check, her husband’s nervous system was “a wreck and can only be saved by the greatest care and freedom from the slightest strain or thought for anything.” Saint-Gaudens had struggled with nervous exhaustion throughout his career, including the 1897 episode at the start of this chapter, which sent him to Paris to

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alleviate his depression and fatigue. Cleaves’s deep understanding of the nervous system, in addition to cancer, made her the perfect physician for him. She not only understood the effects of nervous exhaustion, but believed it had long been misunderstood by doctors and the public alike. Her interest in nerves was partly motivated by her own experience: in 1910, Cleaves published The Autobiography of a Neurasthene in an effort to distinguish between the more familiar—almost fashionable—version of nervous illness as a modern ailment, and what she had personally experienced as a chronic constitutional condition. Frustrated by the “hosts of men and women [who] cloak themselves in the panoply of the neurasthene,” she explained that “true neurasthenes” are born, not produced by their environment, as George Beard had claimed.75 Cleaves considered her own condition inherent, though said the stress of her medical career, along with other environmental factors, had exacerbated the symptoms. She distinguished her experience from that of the “long continued pose of the neurasthene who does not exhaust neuronic energy, but poisons it by his way of living.”76 In her case, as a lifelong, “essential neurasthene,” suffering was “as real as the pain from a fractured bone,” and did not disappear with a “rest cure” or any other short-term remedy.77 Cleaves found a kindred soul in Saint-Gaudens, whose capacities were similarly taxed by nervous strain. In fact, she believed overexertion had significantly contributed to his weakened state in the first place.78 Cleaves was known for her commitment to her patients, whom she referred to as “my family and my friends.”79 She spent days at a time with Saint-Gaudens at Cornish, exercising what the biographer Burke Wilkinson calls an “almost hypnotic influence” over him.80 When she was unable to tend to the sculptor directly, Cleaves asked his local doctor to provide “all the mental stimulus you can without exhausting him” by bringing in “a few congenial friends,” while also making sure to “forbid conversation about himself.” According to Cleaves, Saint-Gaudens had “sustained a severe shock to his nervous system” with the recent murder of his close friend, Stanford White, and needed to be protected from further news that would contribute to his “profound depression and introspection.”81 This included the news of his mounting financial setbacks as well as the fact that his cancer had returned. (Saint-Gaudens was told that his current treatments were for the intestinal tuberculosis. As Augusta explained in her letter to Freer, he “does not know the nature of his trouble and must never know it.”) In caring for Saint-Gaudens, Cleaves would have been sensitive to the longstanding relationship between nervous disorders and cancer. In ancient Rome, Galen believed that cancer resulted from an excess of the humor black bile,

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which congealed in the body as a solid mass over time.82 The presence of too much black bile was also associated with depression (melancholia draws upon the Greek melas, “black,” and khole, “bile”), giving these two illnesses a common source.83 As a result, Galen assumed that “melancholy women” were more prone than “sanguine women” to breast cancer, for instance.84 In the late nineteenth century, as notions of disease etiology developed, cancer began to have its own distinct set of observable features and was defined not as a disorder of liquid effluvia, but by cells which divided in an uncontrollable manner, invading organs and destroying healthy tissue. With the cellular model came the notion that cancer appeared as a localized mass of disrupted cells in a specific part of the body. Yet this understanding of cancer continued a special relationship with its former ken: as the physician Willard Parker hypothesized, distress in the nervous system prevented the adequate monitoring of epithelial cells, causing them to develop in an “abnormal direction.” From his study of 397 cases of breast cancer, Parker concluded that “great mental depression, particularly grief, induces a predisposition to such a disease as cancer, or becomes an exciting cause under circumstances where the predisposition had already been acquired.”85 We cannot easily determine what Saint-Gaudens’s nervous illness contributed to his cancer, but from the time of his diagnosis—when he was described as being in a “state of mental and physical prostration”—until its recurrence six years later, nervous exhaustion was a continued presence. It was also the part of his health he and his family were willing to publicly address. As we saw in Chapter 1, neurasthenia became a badge of social distinction for Gilded Age elites, reflecting a level of refinement and “progress” along the evolutionary scale. Cancer, on the other hand, was marked by social taboo, and the word itself was rarely uttered in public. (Ulysses S. Grant was the grand exception in nineteenth-century America.86 His doctors passed off his illness as a swollen tooth or inflamed tongue until the media reported that the former president had been diagnosed with inoperable mouth cancer.87) As a disease, cancer has been understood as a “ruthless, secret invasion” of the body, Susan Sontag explains, one that individuals and their families have made every effort to hide. This is both because, until recently, cancer was almost inevitably a terminal disease, and because it was a degenerative, out-of-control presence associated with middleclass affluence and indulgence, Sontag writes.88 This helps explain why even after his cancer diagnosis, Saint-Gaudens spoke of his illness in neurasthenic terms. He later described those final days in Paris following his diagnosis as “horrible mental suffering” without mentioning the cause of his pain.89 Similarly, in a 1904 letter to his colleague Frederick

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MacMonnies, he explained, “I have been suffering with great pain,” but reported he was “getting on at a great rate under x-ray treatment” for what he referred to in the letter as “neuritis.”90 Augusta was also complicit in keeping his cancer a secret—even from her husband—as we saw from her letter to Freer. So was her son, Homer, who edited his father’s two-volume memoir, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, posthumously published in 1913. In nearly 800 pages on the sculptor’s life, the word “cancer” never appears. Instead, Homer glosses quickly over six years of his father’s illness, admittedly wanting to “tell of this side of his life as briefly as possible, and only that it may be understood what he had to fight against during those last days,” thus treating his father’s suffering as a badge of his strength and character rather than naming a taboo disease.91

Phillips Brooks Memorial Throughout Saint-Gaudens’s illness, dozens of projects awaited completion in his studio. In his last seven years, the sculptor and his assistants finished such major works as the Sherman Monument as well as numerous portrait busts (James McMillan, Louise Adele Gould, John Hay) and reliefs.92 One of the major commissions which remained incomplete, but which he worked on during his illness and up until his death, was the Phillips Brooks Memorial for Boston’s Trinity Church (Plate 7). Using the memorial as a lens, we can see how the ongoing narrative of the sculptor’s health intersected with his studio practice: as is clear from his correspondences, Saint-Gaudens’s progress on the Brooks was intimately bound to the fluctuations of his own physical condition and capacity for work. He had received the commission in 1893, less than two months after Brooks’s death, though it was only unveiled in 1910—three years after the sculptor’s death, and seventeen years after it was commissioned—giving the Brooks the dubious distinction of being the longest-running project of SaintGaudens’s career. Phillips Brooks was a passionate and talented orator who was widely regarded as one of the great Christian thinkers of his day (Figure 4.7). He enjoyed an international reputation for his sermons and public lectures and attracted overflow crowds each Sunday, turning Trinity Church into one of Boston’s wealthiest and most powerful institutions. In 1891, Brooks left his position at Trinity to become the Bishop of Massachusetts, though his tenure was soon compromised by ill health: at age fifty-seven, he contracted diphtheria and soon thereafter died. Saint-Gaudens acknowledged the challenge of taking on the memorial of such

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Figure 4.7  Phillips Brooks, D.D., The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, New York Public Library Digital Collections, Accessed February 13, 2021. https​:/​/di​​gital​​colle​​ction​​s​.nyp​​l​.org​​/item​​s​/510​​d47dd​​-d629​​ -a3d9​​-e040​​​-e00a​​18064​​a99.

a celebrated subject, admitting in a letter to John LaFarge that the preacher was “terribly difficult to represent, considering what he is in the minds of his admirers.”93 Yet the greater challenge with this commission may have been the sculptor’s own health. In a letter dated October 10, 1903, Saint-Gaudens wrote to Reverend E. Winchester Donald, rector at Trinity Church and a member of the Citizens Committee tasked with overseeing the memorial, that he had been haunted for the past six years (since his arrival in Paris in 1897) by “a horrible vision of death.” The distress was paralyzing, and the sculptor confessed, “I have not done a stroke of work for three months.” Yet, he also explained this vision of death had recently “vanished,” and that as the result of what he referred to as “diet or something,” he was experiencing a “total change in mentality:” as he put it, a “new grip on life and health took possession of me.” It was “so extraordinary,” Saint-Gaudens explained, that he had “seized on it as a drowning man seizes on a rock.”94 This “new grip on life and health” due to “diet or something” roughly coincides with the period in which the sculptor was immersed in the writings of Edward Hooker Dewey and Horace Fletcher. A month after his letter

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crediting Dewey’s books with his continued “good spirits and health,” SaintGaudens described his “total change in mentality” to Donald along with his plans to “sail into” work on the Brooks. Saint-Gaudens shared the same revelation with John LaFarge, writing, “I suppose I am getting well, as I am able to work seriously for the first time in a year on the Brooks.”95 We can therefore see the monument as a barometer of the artist’s health: one that he turned to in moments of reinvigoration, and avoided when ill or preoccupied with death. The body of the artist and the sculpted body of Brooks thus echo one another in a syncopated exchange. This exchange took place at a tactile level of direct physical contact with the sculpture. In a telling passage from the Reminiscences, Homer writes there were few objects his “father ‘caressed’ as long as he did” the Brooks. Saint-Gaudens “shifted folds of the gown back and forth,” “juggled with the wrinkles of the trousers,” “moved the fingers and the tilt of the right hand,” and “raised and lowered the chin” in an effort to capture his subject, Homer explained.96 His sense of personal investment in the sculpture is conveyed in a 1904 letter to the memorial committee in which he blamed his slow progress on the fact that the Brooks was “so much at heart that I will not avail myself of my assistants in the slightest degree as I wish to do every inch of it with my hand.”97 This prolonged contact with the body of Brooks was perhaps partly a response to the preacher’s sheer physical presence. At almost six and a half feet, Brooks was a towering and commanding figure who embodied the nineteenth-century ideal of a “muscular Christian.” He was known to walk and eat quickly, and he delivered his sermons with a breathless rapidity at more than two hundred words per minute. As one parishioner described him at the lectern, Brooks spoke “with his head thrown back and eyes on high as piercing through the veil.” His words both “blaz[ed] with fire” and “molted in exquisite tenderness” as he “threw his arms wide open with [a] mighty gesture of loving invitation” while “his great figure would rise and dilate to its utmost majesty.”98 Saint-Gaudens understood the challenge of capturing such a kinetic figure, describing his desire to avoid “anything that resembles in the remotest degree academical oratory,” and laboring to make the figure “more alive,” even as the artist struggled with his own mortality.99 Apart from his physical presence, Brooks was also a commanding spiritual figure, celebrated for his ministry to the sick and dying. A young British cleric testified to the power of Brooks’s message when he thanked the preacher for seeing him “through a weary painful illness.” He explained, “The physician who comes to you as a stranger at the beginning of an illness ends by being a friend; I found the same thing with you.”100 As if to underscore this message of healing,

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Saint-Gaudens chose to depict the powerful orator accompanied by the figure of Christ. In his teachings, Brooks was known not for evoking “the conventional Christ,” but a deeply human one “who claimed no divine honors and disclaimed metaphysical entities, but went about [. . .] doing what good he could and preaching repentance and righteousness.”101 As Brooks wrote in his sermon, “The Safety and Helpfulness of Faith,” Christ was “the son of Man, the perfect man, the divine man,” and those who believe in him “are not men turned into something else than men by the mixture of a new and strange divine ingredient.” Rather, they were “men raised to the highest power.” It was important to Brooks that Christ was not seen by his followers as a savior waiting to save them from sickness and sin, but that his presence was felt through their own vital strength. Quoting the Bible, Brooks wrote, “Only by the fullness of life does safety come. Only by the power of contact with life are sick and helpless souls made whole.” In short, “the first thing which a man needs in order to live well, is to live.”102 It was a version of Christ with obvious appeal for a passionate sculptor with a terminal illness.103 Saint-Gaudens struggled with how to depict Christ in this memorial. Initially, he imagined Brooks with an angel, similar to his memorial to Shaw and his monument to Sherman, in which a celebrated military man is accompanied by a spiritual or allegorical figure. Later, however, he replaced the angel with a fulllength figure of Christ, though much of Christ’s body is obscured by the preacher’s left arm and lectern. The head underwent multiple revisions: in a marble study, we see a serene face of Christ with the lids of his eyes gently closed, while in the final sculpture they are slightly ajar (Figure 4.8). According to Homer in the Reminiscences, the closed-eye version of Christ appeared “too abstract and too remote” when positioned in relationship to Brooks. Saint-Gaudens also rejected this version as he wanted the head “draped and in shadow.”104 Perhaps the most unusual feature is the inclusion of a veil, which partially obscures Christ’s face and lends it an air of mystery. This rendering of Christ sparked controversy when the monument was unveiled in 1910. Many considered the sculpture sacrilegious as it relegated Christ to a secondary, subordinate position. “The note of unity is broken,” one critic explained, as we are left with a jarring experience of a man before the “Divine Teacher.”105 Another complained that the dwarfed figure of Christ was “not a man.” His head was disproportionate to his body, and, according to this viewer, his chest appeared “effeminate.”106 Further, the presence of Christ’s hand on Brooks’s shoulder was confusing. One reviewer quipped that the gesture looked as though the figure might be the preacher’s mother or, worse, a

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Figure 4.8  Christ’s head, detail of Brooks Memorial.

policeman pursuing an arrest.107 Several critics attributed the representation of Christ to the sculptor’s assistants who completed the sculpture upon his death. One commentator asserted that it was “not what [Saint-Gaudens] would have made it” had he finished it “in his own time and way.”108

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However, the significance of the Brooks Memorial may have more to do with the way it draws together human suffering, death, and mourning—for SaintGaudens as much as anyone else. The veiled figure of Christ recalls the sculptor’s earlier Adams Memorial (1886–91), which Henry Adams commissioned in response to his wife’s suicide (Figure 2.1). Saint-Gaudens experimented with both male and female forms in his studies for the Adams, though ultimately decided on a figure whose sex is somewhat indeterminate, a decision he apparently made in an effort to address the figure’s underlying humanity.109 It was successful in this respect, at least according to Mark Twain, who found “all human grief ” in Saint-Gaudens’s figure for the Adams.110 With the Brooks, the sculptor was perhaps more focused on creating a figure of death than a familiar rendering of Christ. Critics imagined a policeman making an arrest, though it is hard not to see the Grim Reaper in his depiction of Christ. A visitor to the sculptor’s studio several months before Saint-Gaudens’s death observed a haunting resemblance between the face of the dying artist and the “forward look of peaceful waiting” in the face of Christ, perhaps an autobiographical reference that further connects the artist with this work.111 Indeed, photographs of the sculptor near the end of his life carry more than a passing resemblance to the gaunt, bearded face of Christ as depicted in the Brooks (Figure 4.9). The correspondence between Saint-Gaudens and Christ also demonstrates what the art historian Kristin Schwain refers to as a modern conception of faith in which an “individual relationship with the divine” is emphasized over and above “a formal set of theological precepts.”112 Although raised Catholic, Saint-Gaudens had an ambivalent relationship to his faith. He may well have expressed an affinity for Christ in the Brooks, yet he seems to have also found spiritual solace in the nineteenth-century religious experimentation that spoke directly to the problem of health.113 For instance, the Maine reformer, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby inspired a number of philosophies associated with the New Thought movement, which promised healing through the cultivation of a positive outlook. Fascinated with the power of the mind, Quimby defined disease as deranged thought, a conclusion he reached following a near-fatal case of tuberculosis from which he recovered through spiritual insight and a shift in attitude toward his illness.114 For an artist who suffered from both physical and mental pain, this spiritual path, with its emphasis on how the mind could heal the body, was certainly compelling. William James carried this notion of mental therapeutics further in The Varieties of Religious Experience in observing that “healthy-mindedness” had become its own religion in America. Challenging Christianity’s traditional

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Figure 4.9  Augustus Saint-Gaudens, c. 1905, Saint-Gaudens National Historic Park, Cornish, New Hampshire, #1606, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Augustus Saint-Gaudens II.

emphasis on sacrifice, punishment, and sin, this new religious strain looked instead to goodness as what James described as an “essential and universal aspect of being.”115 James singled out Horace Fletcher for his work in questioning the “fearthought” which pervaded modern life and generated so much anxiety and nervous exhaustion.116 He pronounced the teachings of healthy-mindedness victorious over the “old hell-fire theology” for which the church was long known, noting the emergence of preachers who “ignore, or even deny, eternal punishment, and insist on the dignity rather than on the depravity of man.”117 This shift had less to do with theology than changes in the understanding of consciousness and the power of mental attitude, as Quimby had earlier tried to show. James offered scores of individual examples—including his own life story—in which health and healing had been restored through an openness to what he called “our oneness with this Infinite Life.”118 He explained, “The first underlying cause of all sickness, weakness, or depression is the human sense of separateness from the Divine Energy which we call God,” and in his sermons he highlighted stories of desperately ill friends who had exhausted

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all medical solutions only to find that physical recovery depended on a shift in mental outlook.119 Only when “you realize your oneness with the Infinite Spirit,” James explained, will you “exchange dis-ease for ease, inharmony for harmony, suffering and pain for abounding health and strength.”120 Throughout the nineteenth century, religious leaders had promoted healthy living as an expression of Christian duty. For the followers of the Seventh Day Adventist leader, Ellen G. White, the pursuit of health became a means of “practicing [r]eligion, a way to prepare for God’s impending rapture.” As she put it, “We have a duty to speak, to come out against intemperance of every kind— intemperance in working, in eating, in drinking, in drugging—and then point them to God’s great medicine: water, pure soft water, for diseases, for health, for cleanliness, for luxury.”121 Saint-Gaudens’s mentor, Edward Hooker Dewey, promoted the connections between health and religion by inviting the Reverend George Pentecost to introduce his 1894 book, The True Science of Living, which was subtitled The New Gospel of Health. An enthusiastic follower of Dewey’s “No Breakfast Plan,” Pentecost made explicit the connection between God’s “seventhday fast from exhausting and secular labor” on the Sabbath and Dewing’s call for a partial daily fast by eliminating breakfast.122 Pentecost believed that the vigor and freshness gained from starting the day with an empty stomach made it possible to serve God more effectively—or, perhaps, to live with greater vitality, as Brooks suggested in referencing Christ’s example. Saint-Gaudens had described his own revelation regarding diet and exercise when he renounced his life of more than thirty years within “the four walls of an ill-ventilated studio” in his 1901 letter to Low, declaring with the weight of religious conviction, “Health—is the thing!” The sculptor was confident when he wrote to Donald in 1903 that he would soon “sail into” the Brooks, although the memorial remained unfinished at his death in 1907. Even for an artist known for his perfectionist tendencies and time-consuming attention to detail, the Brooks occupies a unique place in the sculptor’s oeuvre as his longest-running project. Saint-Gaudens seems to have found with the Brooks a kind of reassuring constant companion, as it was present throughout his illness and the many ups-and-downs he experienced with his health. Homer reports in the Reminiscences that it was one of the last two works his father touched before his death.123 This physical contact on the sculptor’s part resonates with the healing hand of Christ, which rests gently on Brooks’s shoulder, while the preacher’s right arm gestures toward his followers, making touch a connecting theme in the memorial. We might also imagine that the preacher’s towering figure, so lovingly cared for and attended to by the sculptor, provided a refuge for the artist, who was

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desperate to control his own unruly body, as is evident from his many diets, exercises, and experimental cures. Indeed, the closed and powerful figure of Brooks was therapeutic for a sculptor who described his own cancerous body “as full of holes as a ‘porous plaster.’” Despite the “new grip on life” Saint-Gaudens reported in 1903, he struggled to find the energy and strength he needed to finally complete the monument: yet, perhaps he also realized what it would mean if he did. Once finished, the Brooks would leave the intimate realm of the studio for one of Boston’s busiest public squares, and Saint-Gaudens would lose physical contact with the monument he so poignantly “caressed” until his death. In all, the work can be said to function as a talismanic presence for the ailing sculptor, connecting him to a Christian promise of salvation and renewed vigor through the deeply empathetic and healing figure of Brooks. Perhaps it is not surprising that Saint-Gaudens refused to let it go.

Notes 1 Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, vol. 2, 86–7. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. Homer Saint-Gaudens, vol. 2 (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 86–7 2 Ibid. 3 Gregory C. Schwarz, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Later Years,” in Augustus SaintGaudens: A Master of American Sculpture (Toulouse: Musée des Augustins; Paris: Somogy, Éditions D’Art, 1999), 83. 4 E. Adina Gordon, “Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Lure of Paris,” in Augustus SaintGaudens: A Master of American Sculpture (Toulouse: Musée des Augustins; Paris: Somogy, Éditions D’Art, 1999), 91. 5 Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, vol. 2, 137. 6 Ibid., 138. The sculptor’s wife, Augusta (“Gussie”), also traveled regularly in search of better health, and was often away from her husband as a result. She underwent surgery for a dropped kidney in 1889. For years, she dealt with hearing loss and ringing in her ears. There were a variety of other ailments, including hypochondria. Following an 1892 visit to the famous French neurologist Dr. Jean-Marie Charcot, her friend, Mary MacMonnies, summed up his advice to Gussie: “In general, the cause of your trouble in the head is anemia, also your naturally nervous temperament is still suffering from the shock of the operations you have undergone.” Charcot stressed that her current complaints could not be linked to the kidneys or uterus and that it was “time to stop” with surgery. He also played down the noise in her head, encouraged her to use stimulants (“wine with your meals or whiskey in the water you drink”) and to get plenty of sleep,

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suggesting that these simple measures could restore her health. He believed “there is practically very little the matter with you,” as MacMonnies put it. Mary MacMonnies to Augusta Saint-Gaudens, August 16, 1892, Frederic William MacMonnies papers, Mary Smart Research Files, Box 3, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA), Smithsonian Institution. 7 It is difficult to know exactly where the symptoms of neurasthenia left off and the signs of rectal cancer began. John Bond, former curator of the Augustus SaintGaudens National Historic Site, suggests that as early as 1897 the sculptor may have been suffering from cancer. Bond assumes this based on lower-back pain SaintGaudens described that May as “lumbago, followed by sciatica.” John Bond, Augustus Saint-Gaudens: The Man and His Art (Washington, DC: National Park Service, Office of Archaeology and Historic Preservation, Division of History, 1967), 110. 8 James Fraser, “The Saint,” Reel 36, Frame 295, Papers of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 1848–1985, Dartmouth College (hereafter Dartmouth Papers), Rauner Special Collections Library. 9 Ibid. 10 Harrison Cripps, On Diseases of the Rectum and Anus, 2nd ed. (London: J&A Churchill, 1890), 369. With rectal cancer, Allingham found that patients lived about two years following diagnosis, though some for as little as two months and others for as long as four and a half years. William Allingham and Herbert W. Allingham, The Diagnosis and Treatment of Disease of the Rectum, 6th ed. (London: Baillieére, Tindall and Cox, 1896), 339. 11 “A Saddening of Years” is the title of part three of Burke Wilkinson’s biography, The Life and Works of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Javanovich, 1985). The artist and critic Kenyon Cox makes room for an alternate reading when he writes, “From the illness he brought back from Paris in 1900 Saint-Gaudens never recovered.” But the next sentence reads, “At times he showed something of his old vigor and was able not only to find work but to indulge more in out-of-door sports than he had ever done in his youth, while a growing love for nature and for literature made his life fuller, in some respects, than in the days when his own art more entirely absorbed him.” Kenyon Cox, Artist and Public and Other Essays on Art Subjects (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1914), 178–9. 12 Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, vol. 2, 237. In organizing his father’s memoir, Homer Saint-Gaudens excerpted or fully reproduced dozens of the letters his father received over the years, including this one from Low. 13 Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 3. 14 James T. Patterson, The Dread Disease: Cancer and Modern American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 32.

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15 According to the surgeon, Charles Childe, there was no question the rate of cancer had increased rapidly in modern times. In England and Wales, there were 712 cases per million during the years 1891–5. By 1899, the number had jumped to 829 per million. Over a fifty-year period, it had increased nearly fivefold. Charles P. Childe, The Control of a Scourge, or How Cancer Is Curable (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1907), 16–17. 16 Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 73. 17 Childe, The Control of a Scourge, 38. 18 As Mukherjee puts it, civilization did not cause cancer, it “unveiled” cancer. This was also because cancer was “submerged under the sea of other [more familiar] illnesses,” such as tuberculosis, cholera, and smallpox, and only becomes visible once other diseases were under control. Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (New York: Scribner, 2010), 44. 19 Childe, The Control of a Scourge, 43–4. 20 Ibid., vi. 21 The emphasis on early detection and the need to diagnose cancer at its beginning stages were already taking shape in the early twentieth century. See Childe, The Control of a Scourge, 5–6. For a historical perspective on the need for early diagnosis, see Robert Aronowitz, “‘Do Not Delay’: The War Against Time” in Unnatural History: Breast Cancer and American Society (Cambridge University Press, 2007): 144–62. 22 Allingham and Allingham, Diseases of the Rectum, 345. 23 Cripps, On Diseases of the Rectum and Anus, 423, 428. 24 Herbert W. Allingham, Colotomy, Inguinal, Lumbar, and Transverse (London: Baillieére, Tindall and Cox, 1892), 12–13. 25 F. B. Harrington to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, January 29, 1901; undated; September 18, 1905; and March 14, 1901. Reel 8, Frames 294–334, Dartmouth Papers. 26 Wilkinson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 312. Saint-Gaudens’s sense of humor around a serious and painful subject is a good reminder of the jovial relationship he shared with White, among other close friends. See Jennifer A. Greenhill, Playing It Straight: Art and Humor in the Gilded Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 108–38. 27 Edward M. Greene to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, December 30, 1902, Reel 8, Frame 36, Dartmouth Papers. For general histories that help put this advice into the context of late nineteenth-century diets, see Hillel Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat (New York: The Free Press, 1986) and Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

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28 F. B. Harrington to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, undated. Reel 8, Frame 320, Dartmouth Papers. 29 Henry C. Baldwin to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, December 28, 1905. Reel 1, Dartmouth Papers. 30 Henry C. Baldwin to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, January 22, 1906. Reel 1, Dartmouth Papers. 31 Edward Hooker Dewey, The No Breakfast Plan and Fasting Cure (Meadville, PA: self-published, 1900), 33. 32 Ibid., 80. 33 Edward Hooker Dewey to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, February 21, 1903. Reel 5, Frame 486, Dartmouth Papers. 34 Cited in Thomas B. Brumbaugh, “A Saint-Gaudens Correspondence,” Emory University Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1957): 242, 241. 35 Ibid., 243. 36 In the No Breakfast Plan, Dewey takes credit for starting Fletcher on his path as a health reformer by putting him on a special diet with only one meal a day. Through this diet, Fletcher began to realize the power of limiting his intake of food to improve digestion and overall health. Dewey, No Breakfast Plan, 106–7. The notion that Dewey may have recommended Fletcher to Saint-Gaudens is suggested in the postscript of a letter to Saint-Gaudens in which Fletcher refers to his “great respect and admiration” for Dewey. Horace Fletcher to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, May 25, 1903, Reel 6, Frame 561, Dartmouth Papers. See also Wilkinson, Augustus SaintGaudens, 355. On Fletcher and Henry James, see Tim Armstrong, “Disciplining the Corpus: Henry James and Fletcherism,” in American Bodies: Cultural Histories of the Physique, ed. Tim Armstrong (New York: New York University Press, 1996): 101–18. 37 Horace Fletcher to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, March 25, 1903. Reel 6, Frame 557, Dartmouth Papers. Fletcher began his career in the arts—as a painter, an art importer, and even the manager of an opera company—and was eager to serve Saint-Gaudens, whom he considered one of America’s most accomplished artists. Explaining the connection in their work, Fletcher wrote in his March 25, 1903, letter that “in learning the secret of a right and scientific nutrition . . . natural health and energy may be conserved” for the benefit of “artistic blossoming.” (Frame 556). 38 Horace Fletcher, “The First Three Inches of the Alimentary Canal,” Good Health 45, no. 3 (March 1910): 223. 39 Ibid. 40 Schwartz notes that Fletcher “verged on coprophilia” in his fascination with documenting and analyzing his feces. Schwartz, Never Satisfied, 127. 41 Elbert Hubbard, “The Gentle Art of Fletcherizing,” Cosmopolitan 46, no. 1 (1908): 49. 42 Initially, Cornish primarily attracted visual artists; beginning in the 1890s, however, a number of writers—including Herbert Croly, the playwright Louis

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Evan Shipman, and the novelist Winston Churchill—established themselves at the colony. By the early 1900s, a progressively-minded younger generation arrived, shifting the colony’s ethos yet again. On the history of the colony, see Virginia Reed Colby and James B. Atkinson, Footprints of the Past: Images of the Cornish, New Hampshire (Concord, NH: New Hampshire Historical Society, 1996); A Circle of Friends: Art Colonies of Cornish and Dublin (Durham, NH: University Art Galleries, University of New Hampshire, 1985); Marion Pressley and Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Cultural Landscape Report for Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site (Boston: National Park Service, 1993); Deborah Van Buren, “The Cornish Colony: Expressions of Attachment to Place” (PhD diss., George Washington University, 1987); and Christine Ermenc, “Farmers and Aesthetes: A Social History of the Cornish Art Colony and its Relationship to the Town of Cornish, New Hampshire, 1885–1930” (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1981). 43 Quoted in Ermenc, 18. Orig. from a letter dated November 22, 1905, Percy MacKaye Papers, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College. 44 Here I am thinking especially of the colonial revival in New England, with its interest in classically derived forms. For instance, see Roger B. Stein, William H. Truettner, and Thomas Andrew Denenberg, “The Discreet Charm of the Colonial,” in Picturing Old New England: Image and Memory, ed. William H. Truettner and Roger B. Stein (Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Akela Reason, Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Richard Guy Wilson, Shaun Eyring and Kenny Marotta, Re-Creating the American Past: Essays on the Colonial Revival (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006); and Alan Axelrod, The Colonial Revival in America (New York: Norton, 1985). 45 Saint Gaudens, Reminiscences, vol. 2, 352. 46 On the atmosphere at Cornish, see sources on the colony cited earlier as well as Adelaide Adams, “Aspet: The Home of Saint-Gaudens,” Art and Progress 6, no. 3 (March 1915) and the memoir of Mrs. Maude Howe Elliott, John Elliott: The Story of an Artist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1930). 47 George M. Beard, American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, A Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881), 136. 48 Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, vol. 2, 228. 49 Ibid., 244. 50 Ibid. For details on the recreational facilities, see Pressley and Zaitzevsky, Cultural Landscape Report, 27–32. While some of these facilities were already in place before the sculptor moved permanently to Cornish, it was only through his illness that he fully realized the possibilities of his rural New Hampshire home as a site of recreation and play.

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51 Eugen Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training, ed. G. Mercer Adam (Toronto: J. Selwin Tait & Sons, 1894), 4. Although his program was intended for a broad audience, Sandow boasted about the fact it was reportedly adopted in training the British Army, a point he raises repeatedly as though to lend legitimacy to his approach. 52 See Roberta J. Park, “Healthy, Moral, and Strong: Educational Views of Exercise and Athletics in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Fitness in American Culture: Images of Health, Sport, and the Body, 1830–1940, ed. Kathryn Grover (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press; Rochester: The Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, 1989): 123–68, and Ch. 8 in Green, Fit for America. 53 Donald J. Mrozek, “Sport in American Life: From National Health to Personal Fulfillment, 1890–1940,” in Fitness in American Culture, 19. 54 Haley, Healthy Body, 20. 55 John Stuart Blackie, On Self-Culture: Intellectual, Physical and Moral (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1874), 57. 56 William Manning, Sanicult: An Exposition of a New Method of Physical Culture and a Guide to Health, Happiness and Success in Life (San Francisco: n.p., 1895), 9, 10. 57 Ellery E. Foutch, “Embodying Perfection: The Petrification of Eugen Sandow,” in “Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale’s Butterflies, Heade’s Hummingbirds, Blaschka’s Flowers, and Sandow’s Body” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011), 181. The physical education pioneer, Dudley Sargent, was called in to verify Sandow’s claims with a series of tests designed to measure the strongman’s weight, muscle size, and breath capacity, among other qualities. At the conclusion, Sandow reports, Sargent found the strongman to be “everything he said he was, and that he had never before, in all his long experience with Harvard athletes, seen such a wonderfully developed specimen of manhood.” See Eugen Sandow, “Sandow as a Physiological Study,” in Sandow on Physical Training, ed. G. Mercer Adam (Toronto: J. Selwin Tait & Sons, 1894). For a more critical read on Sandow’s claims and the stakes of “perfection,” see Ellery Foutch dissertation. 58 Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training, 5. 59 This admiration for the ancients carried with it a thinly veiled valorization of racial whiteness at a time when immigrants were associated with the spread of epidemic disease and the fear of “race suicide” was rampant among Protestant elites. See Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Although Sandow’s pitch was seemingly aimed at the broadest possible audience—that is, anyone who wanted to see his shows and buy his books—he also clearly had an audience of white men in mind when appealing to readers of “our race” to awaken to the “imperfect growth and unsound constitution” all around us. Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training, 4. On Sandow’s whiteness, see Foutch, “Arresting

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Beauty” and John F. Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 60 Sandow, Sandow on Physical Training, 2. 61 Foutch, “Arresting Beauty,” 182. 62 In 1901, he was literally made into a statue when the British Museum of Natural History invited Sandow to pose for a plaster cast that would give permanent form to this “perfect” specimen of man. Foutch, “Arresting Beauty,” 253. He was also memorialized in the new technology of film. See Charles Musser, “‘A Personality So Marked’: Eugen Sandow and Visual Culture,” in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, 1880–1910, eds. Nancy Mowll Mathews, Charles Musser, and Marta Braun (Manchester, VT: Hudson Hills Press; Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 2005). 63 For published examples, see his self-caricature from c. 1903 in John H. Dryfhout, The Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 19; and Gordon, “The Lure of Paris,” 90. 64 Tamar Garb, “Modelling the Male Body: Physical Culture, Photography and the Classical Ideal,” in Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siècle France (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 74. Garb notes that photographs of body builders were reproduced in physical culture magazines, and could also be purchased through the mail. These magazines specifically advertised sets of images featuring “les photographes artistiques” representing hundreds of different poses (73). A page from La Culture Physique from August 1904 shows Sandow in his trademark leopard loin cloth in two dozen different poses, many of them inspired by classical works of art (74). 65 Ibid., 62. 66 Ibid., 74. 67 Augusta Saint-Gaudens to Charles Lang Freer, October 19, 1906, Reel 4726, Frame 1249, AAA. 68 Nicholas J. Gonzalez, “The Enzyme Treatment of Cancer and Its Scientific Basis,” New Spring Press, http://www​.newspringpress​.com​/beard​.html, accessed July 2, 2018. Dr. Childe described the Tripsyn cure as the “latest ‘boom’ in the treatment of cancer,” whose advocates claimed it alleviated pain, arrested cancerous growths, and improved nutrition overall. However, Childe cautioned, “it must be clearly understood that the remedy has been tried for far too short a time to speak the word ‘cure’ in connection with it,” and it certainly should not be taken up as a substitute for surgery. Childe, Control of a Scourge, 255, 256. 69 George M. Beard, A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion, 2nd and rev. ed. (New York: W. Wood & Co., 1880), 158. Beard was a pioneer in the early use of electricity as a medical therapy. See George M. Beard and Alphonse David Rockwell, A Practical Treatise on the Medical and Surgical Uses of Electricity (New York: W. Wood & Co., 1871).

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70 Ibid., 158–9. 71 M[argaret] Cleaves et al., “A Symposium on the Treatment of Cancer Röntgen Rays, Light, and Electricity,” The Journal of Physical Therapeutics 3, no. 2 (April 1902), 51. 72 Ibid. See Margaret A. Cleaves, “The Record of Two Years (1895–97) in an Exclusively Electro-Therapeutic Clinic” (New York, 1897). Between 1890 and 1908, Cleaves also wrote more than two dozen articles and a book, Light Energy (1904), on the therapeutic uses of electricity. Joyce Marie Butler Ray, “Women and Men in American Medicine, 1849–1925: Autobiographies as Evidence” (PhD diss. George Washington University, 1987), 262. 73 In January 1905, the sculptor’s local physician, Dr. Brewster, studied the use of x-rays as a medical treatment in New York and soon thereafter rented or bought an x-ray machine that Saint-Gaudens could use for treatment at home. Bond, Man and His Art, 198. The use of electrical and x-ray treatment was not fully accepted by the medical profession. While Childe conceded that x-rays “have accomplished and are capable of accomplishing more than any remedy hitherto discovered in the relief of this disease,” the significance of this treatment with cancer still paled compared to surgery, in Childe’s opinion. Skin cancer was the exception as x-rays were often effective as a form of treatment, 248–9. He had a similar assessment of the use of electric currents as a method for treating cancer (Childe, Control of a Scourge, 255–7). 74 John Beard to Augusta Saint-Gaudens, November 27, 1906. Reel 1, Frame 567, Dartmouth Papers. 75 Margaret Abigail Cleaves, The Autobiography of a Neurasthene as Told by One of Them (Boston: The Gorham Press, 1910), 18. For a nonautobiographical account of Cleaves’s nervous exhaustion, see Lilian R. Furst, “‘You Have Sprained Your Brain:’ Margaret A. Cleaves, Autobiography of a Neurasthene,” Victorian Prose 25, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 140–53. 76 Ibid., 7. 77 Ibid., 18. 78 See letter cited in Wilkinson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 365. Orig. Elizabeth Nichols to Dr. Arthur Nichols, October 13, 1906, Nichols-Shurtleff Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College. 79 Cleaves, Autobiography of a Neurasthene, 66–7. 80 Wilkinson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 364. 81 Margaret Cleaves to unknown, undated, Reel 1, Dartmouth Papers. 82 Mukherjee, Emperor of All Maladies, 48. 83 Ibid. 84 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 53. 85 Patterson, The Dread Disease, 25. 86 Ibid., 4.

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87 Ibid., 2–3. Patterson writes that no public figure received more media attention than Grant for cancer “until President Ronald Reagan developed a malignancy in his colon a century later (4).” When Saint-Gaudens died in August 1907, his New York Times obituary read, “Noted American Artist Expires at His Country Home from General Breakdown.” This “general breakdown” was “due in part to a form of nervous dyspepsia with which he had long been troubled,” although the obituary later notes that the sculptor suffered from a “treacherous disease, which was of a cancerous nature.” New York Times, August 4, 1907, 7. 88 Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, 13, 15. 89 Quoted in Wilkinson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 311. Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Gaetan Ardisson, July 17, 1900, Dartmouth Papers. 90 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Frederick MacMonnies, November 23, 1904, Reel 3042, Frederick Williams MacMonnies Papers, AAA. 91 Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, vol. 2, 246. This was essentially Homer’s position in private, too. He wrote to Dr. Cleaves that from the family’s point of view SaintGaudens’s cancer was “not an open secret,” especially “as my father is concerned,” and that his illness should be managed accordingly. Homer asked that Cleaves not “report this case in any medical magazine in an article giving either your own value or my father’s . . . during his life.” Homer Saint-Gaudens to Margaret Cleaves, September 27, 1906, Reel 1, Dartmouth Papers. For other instances of how Homer not only protected but essentially white-washed his father’s reputation in producing the Reminiscences, see Elizabeth Lightfoot Lee, “White Fantasies: Dirt, Desire and Art in Late-Nineteenth-Century America” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2002), 136–41. 92 For the recollections of one of Saint-Gaudens’s primary studio assistants during these years, see Frances Grimes, Reel 36, Frames 319–435, Dartmouth Papers. 93 Ibid., vol. 2, 318. 94 Ibid., vol. 2, 318, 321. 95 Ibid., vol. 2, 318. 96 Ibid., vol. 2, 322. 97 Augustus Saint-Gaudens to Colonel Higginson, August 13, 1904, ML-4, 3:23, Dartmouth Papers. 98 Alexander V. G. Allen, Life and Letters of Phillips Brooks (New York: E.P. Dutton), 1900, vol. 2, 814. 99 Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, vol. 2, 321. 100 Raymond W. Albright, Focus on Infinity: A Life of Phillips Brooks (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1961), 347. 101 “In Memory of Phillips Brooks,” undated newspaper clipping, Reel 35, Dartmouth Papers. 102 Phillips Brooks, Twenty Sermons (New York: Dutton, 1887), 337, 338.

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103 Michael P. Jones cites a conversation with Henry Duffy, the curator at the SaintGaudens National Historic Site, who describes the sculptor’s interest in Jesus as “personal.” “He hadn’t been a religious man,” Duffy explained, “but he knew Brooks and knew his writings. Brooks conceived of Jesus in a personal way, as a man, and this appealed to Saint Gaudens.” Michael P. Jones, “The Monument War: The Story of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ Memorial to Phillips Brooks” (2009), 34, Trinity Church Archives, Boston. 104 Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, vol. 2, 327. 105 “The Mistake of the Brooks Statue,” Boston Evening Transcript, 1910, Reel 35, Dartmouth Papers. 106 “Phillips Brooks Statue is Debated by Post Readers,” January 25, 1910, Reel 35, Dartmouth Papers. 107 Phillips Brooks Memorial, Newspaper clippings, Reel 35, Dartmouth Papers. 108 Boston Transcript, Reel 35, Dartmouth Papers. Homer suggests otherwise in the Reminscences, explaining that his father worked closely with his assistant, Frances Grimes, to modify the features of the veiled version of Christ “until at last he undoubtedly gained what he sought because, toward the end of the commission, and of his life, he said more than once: ‘There, it’s all right now; all right now! (327)’” 109 Wilkinson, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 239. 110 Ibid., 228. 111 Ibid., 367. 112 Kristin Schwain, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 2. 113 Ruth Clifford Engs, Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2000), 106. Specifically, Engs sees the period from 1890 to 1930 as being more experimental than the early Christian era given the influence of Eastern religions and a wide range of spiritual movements that took shape independently and in hybrid combinations with more traditional forms of Christianity. 114 On Quimby’s own health transformation and his method for “manufacturing health,” see Chapters 2 and 3 in Horatio W. Dresser, A History of the New Thought Movement (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1919). This and dozens of other resources by and about Quimby are available electronically through Ronald A. Hughes, “Phineas Parkhurst Quimby Resource Center,” https://www​.ppquimby​ .com​/index​.html (accessed August 26, 2019). 115 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Matthew Bradley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 74. 116 Ibid., 82. 117 Ibid., 76. On this shift in orientation, see also Heather Curtis, Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

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118 Ibid., 84. 119 Ibid. 120 Ibid. 121 Nicholas Bauch, A Geography of Digestion: Biotechnology and the Kellogg Cereal Enterprise (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017), 21, 22. White found the perfect representative for her cause in the Adventist physician John Harvey Kellogg, who combined scientific medicine with the occult forces of the body at the famous Battle Creek Sanitarium. Kellogg decided against calling his institute a “sanatorium,” given its associations with consumption, preferring the name “sanitarium,” which he pitched as a place not for the sickly but as a place of learning—a “university of health”—where one could “refine the practice of healthy living (37).” There is no evidence that Saint-Gaudens ever visited the Battle Creek Sanitarium, but we know he ate Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, a box of which appears today on the kitchen shelves of his former home at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, New Hampshire. We also know that C. J. Wistan wrote to John Harvey Kellogg on behalf of the sculptor, asking whether peanut butter could cause neurosis. Kellogg confirmed that the only possible side effect associated with peanut butter was indigestion, and that this could apparently be avoided by choosing peanut butter made with unroasted peanuts. J. H. Kellogg to C. J. Wistan, July 21, 1904, Reel 44, Dartmouth Papers. 122 Edward Hooker Dewey, The True Science of Living: The New Gospel of Health. Introduction by George Frederick Pentecost (Norwich, CT: The Henry Bill Publishing Company, 1895), 16. 123 Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, vol. 2, 327.

5

Collecting as Cure

In 1904, when Charles Lang Freer bequeathed his art collection to the Smithsonian, the fifty-year-old retired railroad industrialist had acquired thousands of objects from many parts of the globe. Although he began as a collector of modest means with a focus on European prints, Freer’s ambitions expanded as his fortunes grew and his knowledge of art developed. Almost immediately after seeing his first collection of prints by James McNeil Whistler in 1887, Freer set his sights on acquiring a comprehensive collection of the artist’s work in addition to a select group of American painters with similar sensibilities, including Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Dwight William Tryon, and Abbott Handerson Thayer. Around the same time, he also acquired a Japanese fan, marking the start of his East Asian collections. Between 1894 and 1911, during five Asian tours, he purchased artifacts from the Near and Far East, including Egyptian glass, Syrian Rakka ware, Indian miniature painting, Chinese porcelain, and Japanese screens, collections which he added to until his death in 1919. He insisted that this range of Asian objects, spanning nations and centuries, coupled with a small group of living American painters, comprised a “harmonious whole.” They “are not made up of isolated objects, each object having an individual merit only,” he explained, “but they constitute in a sense a connected series, each having a bearing upon the others that precede or that follow it in point of time.” By incorporating all within a single museum on the Washington, DC, Mall, Freer hoped “to unite modern work with masterpieces of certain periods of high civilization harmonious in spiritual suggestion.” In the words of his advisor, the art historian Ernest Fenollosa, Freer wished to bring “two great streams” of artistic practice in the East and West “together into a fertile and final union.”1 When Freer made his first visit to Whistler’s London home in 1890, he had already acquired more than a hundred of the artist’s prints by negotiating purchases through private collectors and dealers. His goal was not simply to acquire the best works by the artist but also to own a “specimen” of every print Whistler had produced. Ultimately, the curator David Park Curry

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observes, Freer’s bequest comprised more than 1,300 works by Whistler, which incorporated an extensive print collection, but also “major Whistler paintings, both early and late, including characteristic portraits, figure paintings, landscapes, seascapes, and genre scenes,” his “only surviving interior scheme,” as well as “watercolors and drawings [that] range from experimental efforts to finished exhibition pieces.”2 Through the buying and selling of art, a close personal relationship developed between the two men—one that was informed by disease and death. For example, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl (1894–1903) is a work Whistler painted in response to Freer’s request for a canvas “hinting at Spring” (Figure 5.1). Yet rather than depict a scene of spring, Whistler’s painting responds to the loss of his wife, Beatrix, while paying tribute to his friendship with Freer. Days after Beatrix’s death from cancer, Whistler explained to the collector that he was writing “many letters on your canvas” and imagined Freer would one day “read them all, as you sit before your picture.” The artist wanted

Figure 5.1  James McNeil Whistler, Harmony in Blue and Gold: The Little Blue Girl, 1894–1903. Oil on canvas, 29 7/16 × 19 7/8 in. (74.7 × 50.5 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1903.89.

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Figure 5.2  James McNeil Whistler, The Siesta, 1896. Lithograph on paper, H × W: 13.6 × 21 cm (5 3/8 × 8 1/4 in.), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1905.99.

his patron to see “my warm feeling of affectionate appreciation for the friendship that has shown itself to me, in my forlorn destruction—as it had done before, in our happiness [Whistler’s with Beatrix].” His appreciation for Freer’s friendship stemmed in part from the bird, a shama merle, which Freer had sent from India to keep Beatrix company during her illness. The bird sang memorably at her death. A second work Freer purchased and which commemorates this period in Whistler’s life is The Siesta, a lithograph picturing a visibly weakened Beatrix lying prostrate at the Savoy Hotel in London, further connecting Freer with the artist and his wife’s illness (Figure 5.2). Following her passing, Freer stepped in and cared for Whistler when he was ill. He remained a devoted presence until the artist’s death in 1903, after which his museum would pay homage to his friend. As the collector Agnes Meyer once observed, the Freer Gallery was “above all things a tribute to the contemporary artist whom Mr. Freer most loved and admired, and to whom he owed, more than to any other single influence, his artistic bent and education”—in short, Freer’s museum became a kind of memorial to the artist.3 Previous scholars have acknowledged that Freer’s interest in collecting Asian art took shape around what can loosely be described as a Whistlerian aesthetic. While direct influence is difficult to pinpoint, Curry suggests that

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Figure 5.3  Artist unknown, Moored Boat and Misty Mountains, Ming dynasty, second half of sixteenth century. Hanging scroll mounted on panel; ink on silk, 57 7/16 × 35 11/16 in. (145.8 × 90.6 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1916.522.

Whistler’s impact “can probably be best understood in terms of abstract aesthetic relationships formulated to compare the surfaces” of varied objects across media. The tonal gradations and subtle color nuances that characterize Whistler’s “Nocturnes,” for instance, easily find resonance with the atmospheric landscapes of a sixteenth-century Chinese scroll painting (Figures 1.8 and 5.3). Likewise, the art critic Leila Mechlin observes that some of Whistler’s paintings look as if they have been “dipped like a piece of pottery in translucent glaze,” offering an unmistakable resemblance to some of the vessels in Freer’s collection. As a result, the former Freer Gallery director Milo C. Beach once commented that Whistler’s presence can be “felt throughout the museum.”4 Much of what motivated Freer to develop his collection around Whistler and his aesthetic lies in a relatively unexplored narrative about the collector. It is a story that sits uncomfortably alongside a more familiar tale focused on Freer’s limited education and working-class roots, his hard work in the railroad

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industry, and the resulting fortune which allowed him to retire early and devote himself fully to travel and art collecting. In this chapter, I argue that this narrative of upward mobility must be leveraged against a parallel narrative of immobility featuring physical exhaustion, corporeal breakdown, and mental arrest from nervous prostration alongside what was referred to euphemistically as a “family inheritance” and was actually syphilis. From an early age, Freer expected that his life would be interrupted by protracted illness, and that he would die prematurely from the same horrific disease which had debilitated other men in his family. Through collecting, he was able to assemble an (alternate) body based on Whistlerian ideals. In doing so, he found redemption from his own unruly body by joining disparate objects across time and space which he viewed as a unified “harmonious” whole.

The Neurasthenic Collector Episodes of nervous exhaustion plagued Freer from early in his career. As a Gilded Age “brain worker” immersed in an aggressive and volatile marketplace, he was a prime candidate for nervous collapse, as defined by George Beard and discussed in Chapter 1. The art historian Kathleen Pyne suggests that Freer suffered twice from episodes of nervous exhaustion: first, in 1879, when he lost his job during a merger between the Eel and Wabash railroads, and, again, in 1898, during another merger involving the Michigan Peninsular Car Company, the company he created with his close friend and business partner Frank Hecker. Following the earlier episode, Pyne notes, Freer retreated to the Canadian woods to recuperate. With the second episode, Freer recorded in his diary that he was “too ill to work” from late February to early March, and, according to Pyne, he spent “the rest of the year restoring himself at a spa in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and in his Detroit home.”5 In the nearly twenty-year gap between these two episodes, Freer seems to have suffered from at least one other nervous breakdown brought on by the stress of work. In 1892, the railroad car company he had built with Hecker merged with its competitor to form the Michigan-Peninsular Car Company, but then nearly dissolved the following year during a national economic depression. Freer found temporary escape in the fall of 1892 during a hiking trip in the Catskills with the painter Frederick S. Church, writing to Hecker that he again found life worth living and in nature had discovered “peace, beauty and [a?] harmony of all the elements” (Figure 5.4). Following the 1893 economic

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Figure 5.4  Freer with Frederick S. Church, Catskill Mountains, July 1889. Charles Lang Freer Papers, FSA_A.01. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, Gift of the estate of Charles Lang Freer, FSA_A.01_12.01.3.01.

depression, Freer took a year off to travel in Europe and Asia, determined to “seek rest and pleasure in the old world,” as he explained. During his travels, he gained weight and reported feeling years younger. He told Hecker that it was the first time in his life he fully appreciated “the joy of being entirely out of the harness of business.” Six years later, in 1899, Freer retired early to focus on travel and collecting art.6 At the time, travel was considered one of the most effective therapies for neurasthenia. According to Dr. Shailer E. Lawton, president of the Vermont Medical Society, “Change is rest . . . and now and then it becomes absolutely necessary for the patient to be removed from the associations and environments under which the neurasthenic condition developed.” For Lawton, this might mean a “sojourn among the hills and mountains . . . or a visit to the seashore to those unfamiliar with marine attractions” for the sake of “healthful diversion.”

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There was little to distinguish such therapeutic travel from what might otherwise be called vacation, but in a culture fueled by a Protestant work ethic and uncomfortable with the idea of rest, travel was easier to justify when it was promoted by physicians as a benefit to health.7 Freer was an ambitious and frequent traveler throughout his career and designed his own adventures in response to his nervous breakdowns, including a trip to Asia in 1894 in which he climbed over 7,000 feet to reach a Buddhist holy site at Adam’s Peak in Ceylon. Sore and exhausted by the end of a hike he worried would “prove too much,” he retreated to a nearby sanitarium to recover. However, finding himself “in the pink of condition” a few days later, he departed Ceylon for the buried city of Anuradhapura, where he stayed in a rest house before venturing into the jungle, repeating a pattern on the trip in which physical challenges were interspersed with periods of recuperation and rest.8 Freer’s eleven-month trip—the first of his five Asian tours—marked a new phase in his relationship to collecting as it solidified his commitment to art from countries including China, India, Ceylon, and Japan. He was not the only Gilded Age neurasthenic who found collecting Asian art therapeutic. The cultural historian Jackson Lears puts Freer in the company of William Sturgis Bigelow and Isabel Stewart Gardner, for whom Asian art also had a “tranquilizing” effect, and was a means of relieving chronic anxiety. “All these collectors,” Lears writes, “used premodern art to create a realm of beauty where they could withdraw— however temporarily—from nervous strain.” This interest in Asian art was part of the broader shift discussed in Chapter 1 on the movement away from art as a moralizing influence and toward aesthetic contemplation as a form of psychological reprieve. Works of art now functioned as a salve, providing respite from an overstimulating modern world.9 In late nineteenth-century America, there was plenty to suggest that painting could function “like a good armchair,” as Henri Matisse had imagined in Notes of a Painter. In general, doctors advised neurasthenics to “obtain rest for the brain [by] diverting its activity into channels that will afford a pleasant or soothing reaction upon consciousness,” the physician Walter Pyle explained in his book on vigorous living. He specifically encouraged “healthful mental gymnastics” through pastimes such as collecting—whether art, stamps, old china, or furniture—as a path to “nervous salvation.” Likewise, the physician William Sadler encouraged neurasthenics to study “books on birds, trees, flowers, animals, bees, all phases of geology, biology, astronomy—anything in fact that will get the patient’s mind off himself and onto the great big world and the greater and bigger universe to which it is a part.”10

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It is not hard to imagine how art might distract neurasthenics from their inner thoughts toward “the greater and bigger universe,” but how did it lead to better health? Much of painting’s therapeutic promise lay in its appeal to fatigued eyes. The art historian Sarah Burns explains that vision was the most beleaguered of the senses in modern times as books, magazines, and newspapers made nearly constant demands on the eyes, making eyeglasses for many a requirement for daily life. The right kind of painting could provide the eyes with rest and at the same time calm the mind and nervous system. Landscapes that privileged mood and atmosphere over narrative subject matter were particularly effective in offering restoration. As noted in Chapter 1, few artists achieved this therapeutic aesthetic as well as Whistler, whose canvases were said to play “directly on the nerves, the chief possession, or affliction, of these restless modern days,” according to the critic Christian Brinton. Whistler’s “Nocturnes” relieved viewers of the need to construct a story around characters and a scene; instead, they invited the eyes to lose focus in a gauzy ether of color and light.11 Likewise, as we saw in Chapter 1, Dwight Tryon’s landscapes were admired for the sense of harmony they achieved with delicate “melting” scenes and the absence of jarring content. Freer owned several works by Tryon. When Daybreak: May (1897–8) arrived at his home, Freer spent much of the day moving the canvas from room to room, observing its effects under varying conditions (Figure 5.5). It looked best when lit from above, the collector decided, though it was also quite beautiful “in certain low lights, lights so dull that the pink in the sky would be merely suggested.” Freer also experimented with the variable of distance in viewing Tryon’s painting, at times coming so close that his nose pressed against the frame, as though direct contact with these atmospheric landscapes might enhance their therapeutic qualities. Such unmediated proximity to these landscapes evokes the earlier observation by Burns that these healing mists were akin to “an eye-bath or balm of soothing green tone in which the ocular muscles could simply immerse themselves and transmit messages of sensuous relaxation to the mind.” Indeed, Freer seems to have experienced Tryon’s work as a therapeutic vapor: after receiving The Sea: Evening (1907), the collector observed he had been “soaking it in” as if absorbing the painting through his pores.12 Tonalist painting has been described as “intimate,” and Tryon’s canvases are no exception. The artist considered them a form of communication between himself and his viewer, though he realized the audience for such a relationship would be limited. He prized a sensitive viewer like Freer, pointing out in a letter to his patron that “only through the sympathetic eyes of others can

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Figure 5.5  Dwight Tryon, Daybreak: May, 1897–8. Oil on wood panel, 42 × 48 in. (106.7 × 121.9 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. DC.: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.78°–b.

finer qualities [of art] be understood.” The connection between the two men developed through Freer’s visits to Tryon’s summer home in South Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where the artist lived nearly half the year. Tryon spent winters in his New York City studio during what he called “a season of sickness,” when he typically suffered from poor health. Otherwise, he immersed himself in the natural surroundings of his summer home, “penetrating the surface of things,” as he put it, and under the influence of transcendentalist writers, including Thoreau. Encouraging Freer to join him following a calamitous business year, Tryon wrote to the collector in 1894 that “a whiff of the salt air . . . will go far toward curing all ills of mind and body and make financial depression of small account.” Not long after making the trip to South Dartmouth that fall, Freer bought Tryon’s Night: A Harbor (1894) as a reminder of what he called “one of the rarest of days, one filled with beautiful impressions and sympathetic companionship” (Figure 5.6). The moonlit seascape with its subdued lighting and shimmering wash of silvery gray tones functioned as a memory of his time

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Figure 5.6  Dwight Tryon, Night: A Harbor, 1894. Pastel on brown paper, 7 9/16 × 11 1/2 in. (19.2 × 29.2 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.92a–b.

with Tryon, and as a physical reminder of a therapeutic place where both men enjoyed rest and recovery. 13 This redemptive understanding of nature only deepened as Freer learned more about Eastern philosophy through his travels. Following his Asia trip in 1894, the collector brought home nearly a dozen Japanese screens, which served as the inspiration for a painting commission, Four Sylvan Sounds: Falling Water and the Hermit Thrush (1896–7) (Figure 5.7), by Thomas Dewing. These screens were meant to evoke Freer’s experience of being immersed in nature in a manner similar to the forested Buddhist philosopher-sages familiar in Chinese and Japanese painting. At the same time, the screens reflect the lush scenery of Dewing’s summer home in Cornish, New Hampshire, where he completed the paintings. They also resonate with the latter-day transcendentalism in the work of popular writers such as Hamilton Wright Mabie, whose Essays on Nature (1896) Freer owned. According to Mabie, nature brought revitalization through “the healing waters of an illimitable ocean of vitality” and through “the song of the pines . . . in one’s ears and the rustle of leaves under one’s feet,” while sending insanity “out of one’s blood.” The writer even imagined “the silence of the wood heath” as an “invisible goddess,” using imagery which echoes the classically draped figures depicted on Dewing’s screens. While the notion of a

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Figure 5.7  Thomas Dewing, Four Sylvan Sounds (two of four panels), 1896–7. Oil on wood panels, 69 3/16 × 60 1/4 in. (175.7 × 153 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.72.

common ground between ancient Asian philosophy and New England nature writers might at first appear unlikely, these are the very “streams” Freer sought to bring together through his collection. Nor was he alone at the time in melding eclectic cultural influences. The collector William Sturgis Bigelow explained, “Buddhist philosophy is a sort of spiritual Pantheism—Emerson, almost exactly,” suggesting that these seemingly distinct traditions were complementary, at least for certain Gilded Age viewers.14 The curative power of such works was magnified for Freer by their presence in his Detroit home, which was carefully designed to serve as a restorative, serene environment (Figure 5.8). At a time when the public sphere of business and the private realm of home were conceived in oppositional terms—as aggressive, volatile, and physically exhausting, versus quiet, reflective, and revitalizing— domestic life became a refuge from the outside world, a protected inner zone. The goal of the late nineteenth-century home, the historian Keith Bresnahan explains, was to create “a space producing the illusion of individuality while protecting

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Figure 5.8 Charles Lang Freer house in Detroit, n.d. Charles Lang Freer Papers, FSA_A.01. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of the estate of Charles Lang Freer, FSA_A.01_12.04.06.

the inhabitants from the shocks of modern life” in an environment that allowed “subjective agency” to flourish. Further, Walter Benjamin writes, it was “the first time the living-space became distinguished from the place of work,” and this private realm was understood as a reflection of the individual owner. “Ornament was to such a house,” Benjamin explains, “what the signature is to a painting.” In other words, the domestic interior became a means for the expression of self. Hence, two meanings of interior come together in this articulation of home: the modern notion of the individual as an interior, psychological subject, and that of an interior space in which the domestic realm was considered a unique reflection of its owner.15 Within this protected environment, the businessman was the consummate subject. The Arts and Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott notes that while it might be too much for a weary businessman to “make the special mental effort involved in an inspection of his pictures” at the end of an exhausting day, “whatever decorative quality they express in conjunction with their surroundings will at once enfold him as in an atmosphere which soothes and charms like harmonious music.” This is the type of enveloping environment Freer had in

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mind in hiring the Philadelphia architect Philip Eyre to design his home on Ferry Avenue (now Street) in Detroit. A shingle-style house, modest in scale— as compared to the more flamboyant homes popular among Gilded Age elites, including Freer’s business partner and next-door neighbor, Frank J. Hecker—it embodies the Arts and Crafts design principles in its sense of proportion, simple broad massing, and compact planar forms. Eyre worked closely with Freer on the design and decoration of the house in collaboration with the New York decorator “W. C. Le Brocq” and the painters Dwight Tryon and Thomas Wilmer Dewing.16 Freer commissioned Tryon to paint seven paintings for the double-story central hall, which the artist had designed with Eyre to achieve an overall harmonic effect. In four of the paintings, representing the seasons, Tryon maintained a consistent horizon line so that the works appeared linked to one another as well as to their surroundings. (The frames, designed by Stanford White, also echoed the lines of the architectural setting.)17 Once the paintings were completed, Tryon experimented with a distinctive color scheme for the walls so that the individual works of art would appear seamlessly incorporated. When Freer rejected Tryon’s original plan to cover the walls with fabric, the artist treated them with squares of Dutch metal and imitation gold leaf, blended with brown and blue paint to create a rich, glowing color. “I think all who saw the room,” Tryon observed, “felt that, in a mysterious way, the pictures fitted and completed the whole thing.”18 Dewing had similar ambitions with the parlor, which included four of his paintings, The Piano (1891), After Sunset (1892), The Blue Dress (1892), and Early Portrait of the Artist’s Daughter (1894).19 For the walls, he cultivated what was later described by the artist and author, Henry C. White, as “an opalescent, shimmering dream of color and pattern, comparable to a peacock’s breast or the wings of a butterfly.” Dewing even brought one of his paintings, After Sunset, in a partly-finished state to Freer’s house to “tone” it to the setting until it “harmonized perfectly” with the walls.20 In sum, Freer conceived of his home as an aesthetic universe in which he could surround himself in an environment designed to serenade the senses as it minimized jarring experiences and thoughts. It functioned as an immersive site of physiologic release—a tonic for the nerves. Its “shadowed interiors,” Pyne writes, set up a “consoling environment that maintained his mental stability by providing the ideal ambience for his ritual of meditation on the mysterious visual image,” acting as a buffer against an overstimulating outside world.21

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A “Family Inheritance” Syphilis was limited as a metaphor because the disease itself was not regarded as mysterious; only awful. A tainted heredity (Ibsen’s Ghosts), the perils of sex (Charles-Louis Philippe’s Bubu de Montparnasse, Mann’s Doctor Faustus)— there was horror aplenty in syphilis. But no mystery. Syphilis was the grimmest of gifts, “transmitted” or “carried” by a sometimes ignorant sender to the unsuspecting receiver. —Susan Sontag22 In addition to neurasthenia, Freer suffered from syphilis, a far more physically damaging and socially toxic disease, although the effects of the two illnesses were often difficult to separate out. As the historian Lesley Hall writes, syphilis is most often fatal not because of syphilis itself, but on account of its long-term impact on the cardiovascular and nervous systems. As early as the 1890s, Freer refers in his correspondences to a “smash up of my nerves” and “excessive nervousness,” which may have been solely caused by his episodes of nervous exhaustion of the sort described by George Beard. Alternatively, as was the case with Saint-Gaudens, for whom neurasthenia was the prologue to his cancer diagnosis, Freer’s nervous episodes may have been early signs of something else. Known as the “great imitator” on account of its ability to mimic any number of illnesses, syphilis, with its multiple, progressive stages and a tendency to appear and disappear through active and latent phases, was easily read through other diseases—including neurasthenia—as symptoms changed across a patient’s lifetime. With Freer, like Saint-Gaudens, it becomes difficult to pinpoint where one illness ends and the other begins. As the author Deborah Hayden explains in Pox: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, nervousness was a common complaint among nineteenth-century syphilitics. At the same time, neurasthenia was also more appealing to claim—as a “brain worker’s” disease with its connotations of social refinement—than syphilis, a dreaded illness linked to prostitution and illicit sexuality.23 Although syphilis dates to the late fifteenth century in North America and Europe, it was only in 1837 that a French venereologist, Phillipe Ricord, recognized it as a distinct disease, separate from gonorrhea. Ricord was also one of the first to differentiate the three stages of infection (Figures 5.9 and 5.10). Syphilis typically begins as chancres on the skin, which then develop into a more virulent and systemic secondary stage involving lesions, rashes, enlarged glands, and

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Figure 5.9 Primary syphilis—chancres, photogravure. Byrom Bramwell, Atlas of Clinical Medicine, 1893. US National Library of Medicine, Digital Collections, http:// resource​.nlm​.nih​.gov​/101434102.

fever. This phase may or may not culminate in a tertiary stage, which can include paralysis, epileptic seizures, insanity, and death. The microorganism responsible for syphilis, spirochaeta pallida or treponema pallidum, was discovered in 1905. A year later, the Wassermann test was developed as a diagnostic tool for the disease. Although there were early twentieth-century “remedies” prescribed for syphilis—including mercury, the arsenical compound, Salvarsan, and the lesstoxic Neosalvarsan—it was not until the 1940s, when penicillin was discovered and used for syphilis, that the disease could be effectively treated. Through most of the nineteenth century, syphilis stood apart among communicable illnesses because it was transmitted through sex, making it a taboo “affliction of those who willfully violated the moral code, a punishment for sexual irresponsibility,” writes historian Allan Brandt.24 Syphilis was first blamed on working-class women, especially prostitutes, who were accused of infecting bourgeois men. The 1864 Contagious Diseases Act in Great Britain allowed the police to arrest prostitutes and subject them to

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Figure 5.10  Secondary syphilis, color chromolithograph. Byrom Bramwell, Atlas of Clinical Medicine, 1893. US National Library of Medicine, Digital Collections, http:// resource​.nlm​.nih​.gov​/101434103.

tests for venereal disease, confining them in hospitals, if necessary—a measure reflecting the widespread assumption that the prostitute was the disease, observes cultural historian Mary Sponberg. As ideas on the inheritance of acquired physical and mental characteristics took shape through evolutionary science, there was a greater understanding of what transpired at conception and how the fetus developed. By the mid-nineteenth century, doctors, citing healthy mothers who had given birth to syphilitic infants as evidence, argued that fathers also played a vital role in this period of early development. As the renowned syphilographer Alfred Fournier observed, “paternal heredity manifest itself in the child by so many resemblances of every kind,” so why not syphilis?25 Syphilis was to blame for high rates of miscarriage and stillbirth, making it a social issue as much as a medical one. This was especially the case in America, where rising immigration rates and Anglo-Saxon fears of “race suicide” brought issues of reproduction and childbirth into crisis. Within a single family,

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one doctor warned, the disease could produce “a whole series of successive abortions, or the death of children, to the number of 4, 6, 8, 10, and even more.” In Social Disease and Marriage, Prince Morrow even asserted that the nation’s declining birthrate was not due to women having fewer children, but to the fact that one in seven marriages proved sterile as a result of venereal disease. This was only part of what made the disease devastating for families, however. According to the physician, J. Hericourt, there were multiple points of danger: first, syphilis contaminated the wife at home (and any children); second, it broke down the marriage, resulting in separation and divorce; and, finally, it financially ruined the husband as he became incapacitated by disease.26 Even so, many doctors argued that syphilis should not necessarily condemn a man to a life of celibacy. Fournier believed that syphilis “should not be an insurmountable obstacle, a permanent, eternal, and absolute prohibition.” He had personally treated eighty-seven cases in which syphilitic individuals who had married produced 156 “absolutely healthy” children by avoiding conception when the disease was active and therefore communicable. The problem, according to the surgeon H. de Meric, was that most patients ended their treatment when the initial chancre or skin rash disappeared, and assumed they were healthy, without of realizing they had instead entered into a latent—and still dangerous—phase of the disease. He warned that a man’s “only chance of ever having healthy children, and of not contaminating with the disease the woman he marries” was to undergo continuous medical treatment for at least two years, even in the absence of visible symptoms. Several states were unwilling to leave such a high-stakes decision to individual discretion and passed laws requiring prospective grooms to be certified free of venereal disease before obtaining a marriage license. Michigan, where Freer lived, became the first state in 1899 to pass such a law, effectively making syphilis a bar to matrimony.27

The Syphilitic Collector Syphilis, then, is not only a malady with syphilitic symptoms. It is a disease of the whole being; it is a disease which creates a general trouble in the whole organism, which affects or may affect that which one calls usually “health,” which stirs up or may stir up very different morbid dispositions; in a word, it is a malady with multiple and polymorphous symptoms. —Alfred Fournier (1881)28

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It is difficult to track a disease that Freer never explicitly names in writing, though we can piece together clues of his illness based on symptoms he recorded in his diary.29 As early as 1893, he complained of numbness, weak muscles, pain in the groin, and an inability to walk, all classic signs of the secondary phase. According to Agnes Meyer, when Freer retired at the age of forty-six, it was “because of severe illness.” In May 1911, Freer suffered from a stroke, which may or may not have been related to his syphilis, but it left his right side partly paralyzed and limited his ability to walk. Following the stroke, Freer notes in his diary the use of a “rubber,” suggesting the application of mercury ointment, a treatment for syphilis. He partially recovered in the months and years ahead, but his nervous system remained fragile and vulnerable, meaning his days of adventurous travel were over. By 1917, Freer had become violent and ill tempered, showing clear signs of the kind of mental breakdown associated with the tertiary phase of the disease. He died from complications associated with syphilis on September 25, 1919. His death certificate cites cerebrospinal syphilis as a cause of death.30 Freer assumed he had inherited the disease from his father, Jacob, who became partially paralyzed by illness in 1871, and remained an invalid until his death in 1875. Freer explained in a letter to Frank Hecker that his illness ran “most persistently in my family on my father’s side” as both his father and grandfather and “one or two others” were affected by it.” By 1893, his youngest brother, Watson, showed signs of syphilis, suffering from “partial paralysis” and “nervous instability.” His brother, Richard, had died two years earlier. Within a decade his oldest brother, George, suffered from an unnamed serious illness and died several months later.31 Despite what Freer believed, it is highly unlikely he had congenital syphilis. Late nineteenth-century physicians noted that infants who survived birth but were born with obvious symptoms of syphilis often lived only a matter of weeks. Edward Munch’s The Inheritance (1897–9) pictures the familiar version of congenital syphilis with the emaciated body, skull-like head, and red sores on the chest and torso of an infant (Figure 5.11).32 Even when symptoms took longer to develop, about 75 percent of infected children died within the first three months of life. Those who survived were marked by the disease with a wizened “old man” appearance, underdeveloped organs, cranial deformities, and severe mental impairment, signaling what Dr. Hericourt called “the acme of degeneration.”33 Ricord was among those who believed hereditary syphilis could remain latent for at least a decade, surfacing at puberty, or even later. However, such cases were rare.34

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Figure 5.11  Edvard Munch, The Inheritance, 1897–9. Oil on canvas, 55 1/2 × 47 1/4 in. (141 × 120 cm), Munch Museum, Oslo. Photo: Munchmuseet, Rena Li.

Following Lamarkian ideas of inheritance, some nineteenth-century doctors believed that while disease might not be transmitted directly through family bloodlines, it could define an individual’s “constitution,” the tendency toward illness as well as general physical and mental makeup. Among lay audiences, especially, the notion that children bore a rough imprint of their parents’s character was compelling. As Henry Maudsley explained in The Physiology of Mind, “inherited dispositions” carry “so much weight in determining the character or temperament of the individual; what his forefathers have felt, thought and done, though he has never known them, assuredly has some influence upon what he will be inclined to feel, think and do.” It was only in this general sense of a tendency toward certain behaviors that Freer could have “inherited” syphilis from his father. Based on her conversations with Freer, the collector Agnes Meyer once referred to his family history “of what could only have been congenital syphilis.” Yet, as she continued, she described it as “another case of Ibsen’s Ghosts,” referring to a play which takes up the difference between congenital and acquired syphilis as a central theme.35

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Ghosts was first published in 1881, though no Scandinavian theater at the time was willing to produce it. Its first major English-language stage production took place in London a decade later in a single performance which critics described as “repulsive,” “loathsome,” and “putridly suggestive.” Although the word “syphilis” never appears in the play, the scholar Alexis Soloski writes that the disease “haunts every act of Ghosts”: it was clear to nineteenth-century audiences that syphilis was the cause of death for Mrs. Alving’s philandering husband, Captain Alving, and that she was determined to protect their son, Oswald, from the same fate. However, when Oswald returns home from Paris, he confesses to his mother that he is suffering from the “sins of the father(s).” He is also in love with the family’s maid, Regina Engstrand, who we learn is an illegitimate daughter of Captain Alving, and, therefore, Oswald’s half-sister. This revelation adds another layer to the deep-seated corruption and social hypocrisy in modern Norway that Ibsen sought to expose through the play.36 In wading through this moral morass, Ibsen considers the etiology of syphilis and offers multiple explanations for Oswald’s condition. Mrs. Alving tells her son, “Your father was a ravaged man before you were born,” indicating that Oswald was infected in utero. If this were true, Soloski points out, Oswald “would suffer disorders of his sight and hearing, of his skin and limbs,” yet does not. Later in the text, another potential etiology is presented when Oswald recalls being forced to smoke his father’s pipe, which could have carried disease germs from open sores in his father’s mouth at a time when it was widely believed syphilis could be transmitted through oral contact. Third, through stories of Oswald’s time in Paris, Ibsen also makes clear that he shares his father’s taste for alcohol and sexual adventure, suggesting his “inheritance” is actually his father’s disposition. This realization leads to one of the dramatic turning points in the play as Oswald is forced to admit that his illness has been brought upon by “the joyous happy life I have lived [in Paris] with my comrades,” even as his mother continues to insist that his father is to blame. The latter would be far easier, Oswald concedes, “if only it had been something I had inherited—something I could not help.” Yet he realizes, “That is the most horrible part of it. My whole life incurably ruined— just because of my own imprudence.” Ibsen ultimately attributes Oswald’s illness to his own behavior, for which only he can claim responsibility.37 When Meyer refers to Freer’s “congenital syphilis” as “another instance of Ibsen’s Ghosts,” she may or may not have consciously been using congenital syphilis as a euphemism for the disease in its acquired form, yet her reference essentially functions that way. Confusion between congenital and acquired forms of syphilis was not uncommon at the time. The historian Terra Ziporyn

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observes that “until about 1908 most laymen (and, particularly, laywomen) knew little or nothing about syphilis, and what they did learn came either from private discussions with openminded doctors or through moralistic books” written by “idiosyncratic crusaders” who were “concerned more with morality than with science.”38 In fact, as much as a quarter of the male population at the end of the nineteenth century was syphilitic, and in most cases—between 90 and 95 percent, according to one estimate—the disease was acquired sexually. Doctors and other public health advocates considered syphilis a social disease. As Dr. Hericourt put it, contracting syphilis was “voluntary” and, he believed, “the individual can perfectly well avoid it.”39 Freer was a lifelong bachelor and may have decided not to marry for fear of passing the disease on to a wife and children.40 However, this did not prevent him from engaging in what Meyer calls “numerous relationships with the opposite sex.” According to her, Freer lived a life “of constant, if selective, sexual gratification.” He was part of a New York circle of “men about town,” which included Thomas Dewing, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Stanford White—a group of married men who enjoyed secret affairs with workingclass artist models. Dewing, for example, was involved with Mollie Chatfield, his model for Portrait in Blue (1896), one of the works in Freer’s collection (Figure 5.12). While the tonal haze obscuring her features can be understood in the therapeutic terms discussed in the context of nervous exhaustion, it may have also functioned strategically to divert attention from the model’s identity and her relationship to the artist. There is evidence of this from changes made to the titles of Dewing’s paintings before they were shown in public. In a 1904 letter, for instance, Freer responded to a telegram from Dewing, agreeing that “the title to be used for the Portrait of Molly [sic] in the forthcoming Comparative Exhibition” was to be changed to Head of a Girl, thereby removing any direct reference to the model’s name. Chatfield’s address appears in Freer’s diaries over several years, suggesting they had a personal relationship. We know he hired her as a bookbinder and purchased hand-made books that she and her sister produced, though there may have been more to their relationship.41 Another artist model, Julia Baird, a Broadway showgirl, knew the collector personally and had posed for Dewing’s painting, The Carnation (1893). Freer owned the painting and similarly worked to obscure Baird’s identity: in his painting inventories, the title Dudie in White is crossed out and replaced with the depersonalized title, The Carnation. In a second example from the inventories, a pastel of a reclining nude once referred to as Girl Lying Down—

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Figure 5.12  Thomas Dewing, Portrait in Blue, 1898. Oil on canvas, 24 × 20 in. (61 × 50.8 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1906.70.

with “Dudie” scribbled next to it in parenthesis—has been changed to read The Pearl (Figure 5.13). The change of title does little to diffuse the eroticism of this recumbent female nude, who is depicted in a pose seductively angled toward the viewer. While we may not know the exact nature of Freer’s relationship with the women in these works, the curator Barbara Gallati suggests “the friendships that he formed with Dewing’s models coincided with his public behavior as a man about town [and] may have provided Freer with genteel souvenirs of his partaking in an area of life from which he was excluded (whether by fate or by choice)” on account of his health.42

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Figure 5.13 Thomas Dewing, The Pearl, c. 1894. Pastel on brown paper glued on composition board, 6 15/16 × 10 3/8 in. (17.6 × 26.4 cm), Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1894.20.

The scholarship on collecting addresses sexual desire as a motive for acquiring works of art in a manner relevant to Freer. The sociologist Russell Belk asserts the passionate, spontaneous behavior associated with collecting finds an analogy with falling in love: “Both romantic love and passionate collecting,” he explains, “are self-transcendent, dreamlike mystical rituals. The romantic lover and the passionate collector both abandon themselves to overwhelming emotions and close off attention to the world outside.” Freudian analysis takes this relationship a step further, suggesting that sexual desire can actually be transferred to the collector’s object. In this scenario, the psychiatrist Frederick Baekeland explains, “art objects are confused in the unconscious with ordinary sexual objects, an idea that gains traction from the fact that many collectors like to fondle or stroke the objects they own or to look at them over and over from every angle, both up close and at a distance, activities that are impossible in a museum.”43 A 1909 photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn of Freer in his Detroit home invites such an interpretation as the collector hovers on bent knee before Whistler’s Venus Rising from the Sea (c. 1869–70) (Plate 8). The photograph sets up a dynamic tension between the standing figure of the female nude in a framed canvas leaning against the wall and the fully clothed male collector who descends to the floor for a closer view. It is a remarkable photograph insofar

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as it renders the collector in close physical proximity to the Roman goddess of love, his body engaged with the image in a manner not possible in a gallery or a museum in which the viewer stands before a painting which hangs at eye level. By featuring Whistler’s canvas alongside a glazed Islamic vase, the photograph exemplifies the kind of cross-cultural connection important to Freer, yet his gaze is clearly fixed on a single work—Whistler’s nude—and thus would almost seem to illustrate Belk’s notion of falling in love. In this respect, Coburn’s photograph also resonates with the popular nineteenth-century myth of Pygmalion in which the sculptor falls in love with his beautiful creation and is rewarded by Venus, who magically transforms the sculpted marble figure into living human flesh. Looking at Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea (c. 1890), for instance, it is not hard to imagine a fantasy version of Coburn’s photograph in which Whistler’s beautiful nude steps out of the frame to embrace the collector. There is another dynamic between Whistler’s ideal nude in Venus Rising from the Sea and the diseased body of the collector that is worth exploring (Figure 5.14). The disability scholar Lennard Davis uses the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to analyze the female nude in relationship to corporeality. For Lacan, early childhood experience of the body is based not on the whole body but on the fragment—that is, as infants we understand our bodies primarily as separate parts or pieces, though in time we undergo a process of unification in which the body is configured through an illusion of wholeness. This identity, Lacan explains, is a false but reassuring psychic image the child forms through the “mirror stage” to protect itself against the chaos and disorder of the fragmented body. The disabled body, as Davis sees it, disturbs because it reenacts this early “repressed fragmentary body,” one that causes a “kind of hallucination of the mirror phase gone wrong,” through the horror of a body that is never made whole. It creates a level of cognitive dissonance that threatens to literally break up the structure of the moi, returning it once again to its partial state prior to the mirror stage. Davis argues that the female nude functions as a defense against such psychic dissimulation. In response to the repulsion and fear generated by the disabled body, he explains, the female nude in art becomes an emblem of “wholeness, normalcy, and unity.” “The Venus,” in particular, Davis writes, “neatly enclosed in its marmoreal skin, represents an unperforated body” that is classically contained and closed. These qualities cannot be ignored in the context of a collector with syphilis, a disease that affects the body through corrupted flesh marked by rashes, lesions, and sores. From this perspective, Coburn’s photograph reads as a staging of desire, not only as heterosexual romance, but also as a relationship that pivots

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Figure 5.14  James McNeil Whistler, Venus Rising from the Sea, c. 1869–70. Oil on canvas, (23 9/16 × 19 5/16 in. (59.8 × 49.1 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, 1903.174a-b.

around differences of able-bodiedness: the healthy, functional body contrasted with another compromised and disfigured by disease.44 Stepping back from the nude per se, it is also worth considering the collector’s relationship to material objects and their status as “things” in late nineteenthcentury America. The literary scholar, Bill Brown, points out that while the Gilded Age was defined by objects made possible by industrial production and an accumulation of wealth, “the human investment in the physical object world, and the mutual constitution of human subject and inanimate object, can hardly be reduced” to the study of commodities as a ubiquitous daily presence. The story of possession which interests Brown delves further into “the indeterminate ontology where things seem slightly human and the humans seem slightly thing-like.” Indeed, material culture scholars have challenged the notion that matter in the modern era is passive or inert; rather, as Alfred Gell argues, art objects have agency and actively participate within the social-relational matrices in which they are embedded. Likewise, personhood, as Gell understands it, is

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defined less by a discrete individual body than “a spread of biographical events, and a dispersed category of material objects, traces, and leavings, which can be attributed to a person.” Such thinking challenges the subject/object binary which typically underwrites modern experience, undermining the notion that individuals and their possessions inhabit separate realms.45 Building upon Walter Benjamin’s observation that “ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects,” Brown examines “why and how we use objects to make meaning, to make or re-make ourselves, to organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and shape our fantasies.” He takes Henry James’s The Spoils of Poynton as a case study, focusing on the character Adela Gereth, who, in accordance with English law, must abandon her home and the many possessions she accumulated with her late husband following his death. She must forsake her possessions even though they were “our religion,” Mrs. Gereth proclaims; “they were our life, they were us.” It is not simply that she identifies with the objects in her home, or that they are repositories of memory, although both of those things are true. Instead, Brown emphasizes that the world of domestic objects in this instance becomes “the ground for feeling as such.” It is through things that Gereth connects with a larger metaphysical truth, what the artist Candace Wheeler described in another context as “a mysterious charm, a nameless something, an attractive ghost of harmony and tranquility” that extends beyond the objects in the room. “They’re living things to me,” Mrs. Gereth tells her son, Owen, in explaining why her possessions matter so much; “they know me, they return the touch of my hand.” As James makes clear in describing her family relations, Gereth enjoys greater intimacy with her objects than she does with her own flesh and blood.46 It is a conceit that resonates with Freer as a lifelong bachelor surrounded by carefully selected works of art within the controlled aesthetic environment of his home. While Freer himself was rendered untouchable by a contagious, crippling disease, his collection became a site of “safe” tactility where the sense of touch could be freely explored. His close friend, the collector Louisine Havemeyer, described the physical pleasures of owning works of art in these terms: “There is exhilaration, an inspiration about being able to touch it, to examine it, to turn it to one side and then to the other, to put it in this light and then in that, looking for new beauties, talking it over with someone who ‘knows.’” As already noted, Freer enjoyed viewing works of art under different lighting conditions and “soaking it in” as he did with Tryon’s The Sea: Evening. With Havemeyer, he spent hours and days sharing their collections, examining each work with what she described as “exclamations of delight and clapping of hands.”

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Likewise, Agnes Meyer described what it was like to be in Freer’s company when a new shipment of Asian works of art arrived: As the owner unpacked his wares and hung them on a screen, our moods swung from intense excitement when an interesting new painting appeared, to depression over the more numerous mediocre ones. . . . I remember one occasion—the General [as she called him] and I were sitting on the floor when he turned a half somersault of delight over a really new revelation of supreme beauty.47

With Freer, looking at art was an immersive experience in which the body itself was fully engaged. His physical and emotional responses call to mind the late nineteenth-century interest in physiological aesthetics, focused on how the body registers and experiences art. As the art historian Robin Veder has shown, scientists at the time were interested in individual responses to art, whether there was movement in the body, how this movement might be measured, and where exactly it was felt. They also wanted to know how the internal response to a beautiful landscape differed from a more unsavory or even disturbing scene. Freer may not have been aware of these investigations, but he seems to have instinctively brought a kinesthetic, multisensory sensibility to the experience of looking at art.48 Among the senses, touch, in particular, was essential to Freer. Unlike the nose, eyes, ears, and mouth, which link sensory experience with a specific fixed organ, touch is activated through skin and extends across the entire surface of the body; it is in many ways what we mean when we refer to “the body.” In a certain respect, it is the most essential sense: “A human being can spend his life blind and deaf and completely lacking the sense of smell and taste,” the anthropologist Ashley Montagu notes, “but he cannot survive at all without the functions performed by the skin.” Skin insulates and protects the body’s organs; it acts as a storage container for its fluids, regulates temperature, and eliminates toxic waste. It marks the barrier between ourselves and the outside world. As the largest organ, it is also a primary site for registering a wide variety of sensations. Montagu observes, “our deepest sense of wellbeing depends on cutaneous rewards that may come anytime, anywhere: the coolness of a stone in the shade, the warmth of a coffee cup, the smoothness of a baby’s skin, the cuddling pressure of a heavy sweater.” Skin is also a site of pain, and, in the case of syphilis, it is where disease first makes its presence known.49 Perhaps it is not a surprise, then, that touch serves as a reference point which connects the “two streams” of Freer’s collection. As his dealer and agent Ernest

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Fenollosa observed, Freer had a “unique aesthetic penetration” that led him away from the “hard and obvious” toward the implicitly tactile realm of “softer and rougher grounds of pottery . . . more like the old, coarse tinted papers,” creating a “kinship between Whistler’s paintings and warmly glazed ceramics.” In Whistler’s “Nocturnes,” for instance, atmosphere is rendered with a weight and texture that appeals less to the eye than to touch and the surface of the skin; it is meant to be felt as much as seen. He allows the viewer “to feel the thickness of existence,” the art historian Marc Simpson writes, “to contemplate and savor the wonders of the stilled moment’s perfection.” Whistler himself described painting as akin to putting “breath on glass,” as though paint were expressed directly from the artist’s body onto canvas.50 Meyer shares a poignant story of the collector near the end of his life, which is roughly when this photograph was taken by Edward Steichen (Figure 5.15). Holding a pair of Chinese pottery hands,” she explains, “he sat quietly in his big armchair next to the window lovingly clasping these hands in his.” Finally, when

Figure 5.15  Edward Steichen, Charles Lang Freer, c. 1915–16. Gelatin silver print, 13 3/4 × 10 13/16 in. (35 × 27.4 cm), Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York. Bequest of Edward Steichen, 1979.2172.0001. Photograph courtesy of the George Eastman Museum.

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he was so ill that he “could no longer enjoy paintings, pottery, or even bronzes,” she observes, “he would cling to certain pieces of jade with deep satisfaction and with an almost religious faith in its comforting and restorative powers.” Though “too weak to so much as open his eyes,” Meyer writes, “he could still feel exquisite surfaces and he lay back, jade in hand, blissfully happy and fortified against the severest pain.”51 Freer offered his collection to the Regents of the Smithsonian Institution in 1904, a year after Whistler’s death. It was a philanthropic gesture that guaranteed his collection would be enjoyed by future generations in a prominent national setting. However, he expected it to remain his collection and famously stipulated that “nothing could be removed or added; nothing was to be lent for exhibition elsewhere; and nothing else was to be shown” in the gallery other than his collection. Although Freer later amended his will to allow a close circle of friends to make select additions, his conditions assured that the collection would ultimately remain true to his original vision.52 As Jean Baudrillard reminds us, the collector is always the “final term” in any collection; he or she completes and defines what the collection is. As he writes, “Here, indeed, lies the whole miracle of collecting. For it is invariably oneself that one collects.” Freer’s acquisitions developed not only around his friendship with Whistler but also through an aesthetic perhaps best described as tactile or haptic, one that resonated in Freer’s mind with a long history of Asian objects and the work of his American contemporaries. As the collector’s own body was plagued by neurasthenic breakdowns and a disfiguring “inherited” disease, Freer took refuge in a world of objects that promised sentient companionship and aesthetic pleasure. While he did not live to see an effective cure for his illness, Freer could at least acquire, organize, catalog, arrange, and otherwise care for a body of objects that memorialized his travels and intimate relationships. While he intended “to unite modern work with masterpieces of certain periods of high civilization harmonious is spiritual suggestion,” perhaps it was his own diseased body that indirectly gained coherency—if not unity—through his collecting. That is, the aesthetic harmony he sought through works of art ultimately reflects more upon his personal need for corporeal wholeness and integrity.53

Notes 1 Thomas Lawton and Linda Merrill, Freer: A Legacy of Art (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution; Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 186, 6–7. Steven

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The Medicine of Art Conn, “Where Is the East? Asian Objects in American Museums, from Nathan Dunn to Charles Freer,” Winterthur Portfolio 35, no. 2/3 (Summer–Autumn 2000): 171. Lawton and Merrill, A Legacy of Art, 42; David Park Curry, James McNeil Whistler at the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian Institution; W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), 13. Whistler describes the canvas as “many letters” to Freer in a letter to his patron from March 24(?), 1897. He also writes in effusive detail about the presence of the shama merle at Beatrix’s death: “the strange wild dainty creature stood uplifted on the topmost perch, and sang and sang—as it had never sung before!—A song of the Sun—and of joy—and of my despair!—Loud and ringing clear from the skies! and louder! [. . .] And suddenly it was made known to me that in this mysterious magpie waif from beyond the temples of India, the spirit of my beautiful Lady had lingered on its way—and the song was her song of love—and courage—and command that the work, in which she had taken her part, should be complete—and so was her farewell!” With Kindest Regards: The Correspondence of Charles Lang Freer and James McNeil Whistler, 1890–1903, ed. Linda Merrill (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution; Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 113, 13. Curry, James McNeil Whistler, 15. Lawton and Merrill, A Legacy of Art, 191. With Kindest Regards, 7. Kathleen Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector as an Agnostic: Charles Lang Freer and Connoisseurship.” The Art Bulletin 78, no. 1 (1996): 78.  Charles Lang Freer to Frank J. Hecker, October 1892, Charles Lang Freer selected papers, 1876–1931, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter AAA). Lawton and Merrill, A Legacy of Art, 59. Charles Lang Freer to Frank J. Hecker, October 1894, Freer papers, AAA. F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 133. Gosling writes that while travel ranked tenth among recommended treatments for neurasthenics in 1870, it had become a leading treatment (second only to rest) by 1900. This change reflects a shift in the understanding of neurasthenia as a psychological illness in which the mental aspects assumed greater emphasis. Travel was ideal when it combined rest with scenery that engaged but did not overly tax the mind. Charles Lang Freer to Frank J. Hecker, 20 December 1894, Freer papers, AAA. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 190–1. On the subject of ailing Gilded Age collectors, there is John Singer Sargent’s memorable watercolor portrait, Mrs. Gardner in White (1922), in which he portrays his patron swaddled head-to-toe in white fabric shortly after she suffered a debilitating stroke, two years before her death. It is a chilling depiction that takes the unusual view

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of a collector in an advanced stage of declining health, making visceral the need for aesthetic therapy. For an overview on collecting East Asian art during the Gilded Age, see Warren L. Cohen, East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), especially Chapter 2. Walter L. Pyle, A Manual of Personal Hygiene (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders & Co., 1900), 298, 300. Pitched to an audience of achievement-oriented “brain-workers,” Pyle warned that these pastimes should not be motivated by the desire “to become a shining light in the world of art or letters.” While the accomplishments may not seem significant, “the gain from the healthful mental gymnastics involved is often incalculable” (299). William S. Sadler, Worry and Nervousness, or, The Science of Self-Mastery (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1914), 445. Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art & Culture in the Gilded Age America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 139. The impact of this heightened print media environment had its effects on the vision of artists, too, sometimes prompting “a new method of expression,” as the critic Sadakichi Hartmann argued regarding the painter George Inness. Rachael Ziady DeLue, “Diagnosing Pictures: Sadakichi Hartmann and the Science of Seeing, circa 1900,” American Art 21, no. 2 (2007): 42–69. Christian Brinton, Modern Artists (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1908), 112. Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 148. Linda Merrill, An Ideal Country: Paintings by Dwight William Tryon in the Freer Gallery of Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), 130–1. Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 148–9. Quoted in Susan Hobbs, “A Connoisseur’s Vision: The American Collection of Charles Lang Freer,” American Art Review 4 (August 1977): 84. Merrill, An Ideal Country, 16, 67, 73, 67, 16, 123. Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector,” 89. Pyne argues that Freer saw himself as a Buddhist philosopher-sage and projected his own needs for quietist imagery onto these paintings in a manner “symptomatic of how contemporary agnostics living in the northeastern United States misread Zen Buddhism to reflect their own sense of loss” (89). In a separate essay on this pair of commissioned screens, she points out that the four elements (the four seasons, four sages, etc.) was a Japanese convention. See Kathleen Pyne, “Classical Figures: A Folding Screen by Thomas Dewing,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 59 (Spring 1981): 9. For Mabie quote, see Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector,” 90. Susan Hobbs suggests that the imagery for The Four Sylvan Sounds may have been specifically inspired by Emerson’s poem, “Woodnotes.” Susan Hobbs, “Thomas Dewing in Cornish, 1885–1905,” The American Art Journal 17, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 21. Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector,” 90. For a fuller discussion of Dewing’s work in the context of this East-West axis

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The Medicine of Art of late nineteenth-century agnosticism, see Chapter 4, Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), 134–219. On Bigelow’s views of Buddhism, see William Sturgis Bigelow, Buddhism and Immortality (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1908). Keith Bresnahan, “Housing Complexes: Neurasthenic Subjects and the Bourgeois Interior,” Space & Culture 6, no. 2 (May 2003): 173. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 8–9. On the notion of the house as a setting for the emergence of interior life, see also Kathy Mezel, The Domestic Space Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012) and Charles Rice, The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (New York: Routledge, 2007). See Joyce Henri Robinson, “‘Hi Honey, I’m Home’: Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 103. Betsy Fahlman, “Wilson Eyre in Detroit: The Charles Lang Freer House,” Winterthur Portfolio 15 (Autumn 1980): 260. According to Henry James and Edith Wharton, there was a direct correlation between the size of a home and its capacity for interior experience. Both preferred what Wharton referred to as the “depth and narratability” of a modest-scaled home to the Gilded Age mansions, like Biltmore, whose cold drafts “extinguish ‘social possibilities’ and stifle expression,” James believed. Sarah Luria, “The Architecture of Manners: Henry James, Edith Wharton and The Mount,” in Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenth-Century Interior, eds. Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 187. Freer would have agreed, his house was not designed for lavish entertainment, or as a showcase for his possessions, but for the cultivation and enjoyment of his collection in the intimate company of close friends. Thomas W. Brunk, “The House That Freer Built,” Dichotomy 3, no. 4 (Spring 1981): 13. Lawton and Merrill, A Legacy of Art, 25. On White’s frames, see Nina Gray, “Within Gilded Borders: The Frames of Stanford White,” in The Gilded Edge: The Art of the Frame, ed. Eli Wilner (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2000), 82–103. Brunk, “The House That Freer Built,” 13, 17. While the style of Dewing’s atmospheric painting was therapeutic for the nerves, the subject of his interior scenes featuring women in relaxed states of aesthetic contemplation have also been interpreted by Zachary Ross as antidotes to neurasthenia as they “embody the mind-cure ideal of renewed power through mental recreation” discussed in Chapter 1. Dewing’s women have also been seen to serve as “visual emblems of rest and calm” for neurasthenic businessmen in a manner similar to Puvis de Chavannes’s late nineteenth-century women, which

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appealed to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. According to Robinson, Puvis was the “one universally acclaimed artist who, it was believed, could provide the perfect thematic and formal recipe for the creation of a domestic pastoral decorative art” with his idyllic imagery far removed from urban life. See Robinson, “Hi Honey, I’m Home,” 108–110. Lawton and Merrill, A Legacy of Art, 25; Thomas W. Brunk, “The Charles L. Freer Residence: The Original Freer Gallery of Art,” Dichotomy 12 (Fall 1999): 49. Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector,” 80–1. That this was its primary purpose does not exclude the fact that Freer may have also hosted business colleagues in his home. See Melody Barnett Deusner, “A Network of Associations: Aesthetic Painting and its Patrons, 1870–1914,” (PhD diss.: University of Delaware, 2010), especially Chapter 4. Charlotte Perkins Gilman offers an important exception to the model of the domestic interior as a neurasthenic refuge as the walls of her summer home played an integral role in the mental breakdown she sustains under S. Weir Mitchell’s infamous “rest cure.” See Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (Boston: Small, Maynard, 1899). The historian Debora Silverman suggests that the meaning of the domestic interior in France changed significantly by the 1890s, no longer playing the part of a “soothing anaesthetizer of the citizen’s overwrought nerves” (79). For example, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1883 novel, A rebours, she explains, is built around the inner experience of the major character, Des Esseintes, whose aesthetic universe is transformed into “a subjectivist dream room” akin to a hypnotic inner vision, privileging nervous vibration over rest and relaxation (78). Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-De-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989). Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and its Metaphors (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 59–60. Lesley A. Hall, “‘The Great Scourge’: Syphilis as a Medical Problem and Moral Metaphor, 1880–1916,” May 23, 1998, Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, London, http://www​.lesleyahall​.net​/grtscrge​.htm. Hall points out that syphilis could affect the nervous system in the form of “locomotor ataxia or tabes dorsalis, a wasting disease of the spinal cord characterized by ‘lightning pains’ and effects on walking, or paresis”—symptoms which closely mirror what Freer experienced. Deborah Hayden, Pox: Genius, Madness, and Mysteries of Syphilis (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 100. With the composer Robert Schumann, nervous exhaustion was one of the many explanations doctors used to avoid naming syphilis as an underlying cause. His health history was complicated, however, and Hayden’s chapter on him makes clear how difficult it was to pinpoint syphilis in the nineteenth century. On Schumann’s syphilis, see also Eliot Slater, “Schumann’s Illness,” in Robert Schumann: The Man and His Music, ed. Alan Walker (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1972): 406–14.

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24 Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History of Venereal Disease in the United States since 1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. 25 Mary Sponberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Medical Discourse (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 6. Alfred Fournier, Syphilis and Marriage, trans. Alfred Lingard (London: David Bogue, 1881), 33. 26 Dr. J. Hericourt, The Social Diseases: Tuberculosis, Syphilis, Alcoholism, Sterility, trans. and with a final chapter, Bernard Miall (New York: EP Dutton, 1920), 76. Morrow cited in Sponberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease, 165. 27 Fournier, Syphilis and Marriage, 13, 14. H. de Meric, Syphilis and Other Venereal Diseases (New York: William Wood, 1901), 15. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 19. 28 Fournier, Syphilis and Marriage, 58. 29 Much of the literature on Freer perpetuates this silence by ignoring or glossing over the fact that on his death certificate, the collector’s stated cause of death was “cerebral haemorrhage and syphilis cerebro-spinal.” See Registrar’s Files, 1894– 1919, Detroit Institute of Arts. In the scholarship on Freer, Pyne acknowledges the collector believed he had inherited syphilis, but her references to the disease are relegated to background in an analysis otherwise focused on collecting as a form of agnosticism. Tomlinson acknowledges that Freer suffered from syphilis, though she admits, “How he contracted the dreaded disease and how long he lived with it we can only speculate.” Tomlinson, West Meets East, 227. The present study is the first to make Freer’s illness central to how we understand him as a collector. 30 Charles Lang Freer diary, 1893, Charles Lang Freer Papers, 1876–1931, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter FGA). Agnes E. Meyer, “The Charles Lang Freer Collection,” The Arts 13 (August 1927): 80. For reference to Freer’s mercury treatment, see Helen Nebeker Tomlinson, West Meets East: Charles L. Freer, Trailblazing Asian Art Collector (Herndon, VA: Mascot Books, 2019), 227. On Freer’s mental breakdown, see Agnes E. Meyer, Charles Lang Freer and His Gallery (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1970), 19–21. 31 Tomlinson, West Meets East, 9. Charles Freer to Frank Hecker, June 28, 1901, Reel 4723, Charles Lang Freer papers, AAA. Tomlinson, West Meets East, 74, 132. 32 As early as the 1850s, we see the trope of the syphilitic figure in art as a woman with a mask which barely conceals the skeletal horror lurking beneath her attractive external appearance. Hereditary syphilis, in particular, was associated with a grotesque deformity in which the bridge of the nose collapsed and the flesh around it rotted away, leaving a hollowed-out void in the middle of the face. Connecting the effects of syphilis to art, scholars have interpreted Pablo Picasso’s use of Iberian and African masks to cover the faces of the five prostitutes in Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) as his response to the bordello, where sex, disease, and death were closely intertwined. See Francis

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Frascina, “Realism and Ideology: An Introduction to Semiotics and Cubism,” in Primitivism, Cubism, Abstraction, eds. Charles Harrison et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press with The Open University), 104–34; William Rubin, “The Genesis of Demoiselles d’Avignon,” in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York: The Museum of Modern Art with Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 13–144; Michael Leja, “‘Le Vieux Marcheur’ and ‘Les Deux Risques’: Picasso, Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Maternity, 1899–1907,” Art History 8, no. 1 (March 1985): 66–81; and Wayne Andersen, Picasso’s Brothel: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (New York: Other Press, 2002). The notion of the erotic as a trap which leads to destruction is also played out in Gaston Leroux’s famous novel, The Phantom of the Opéra (1911). In this case of hereditary syphilis, however, it is the Phantom’s parents whose sexuality has scarred their son for life. The Phantom’s mask conceals the absence of a nose with “two big black holes” in place of eyes and “nasty yellow” skin stretched thin across his face, becoming a symbol of a dread disease that renders him unlovable—even by his parents—and by the soprano, Christine Daaé, whom he desperately tries to seduce. In contrast to John Merrick (“The Elephant Man”), “whose deformities could be the subject both of Victorian curiosity and charity,” the cultural historian Gilman explains, the Phantom’s face was unambiguously and irredeemably marred by the horror of a communicable disease. Sander Gilman, “The Phantom of the Opéra’s Nose,” Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 67, 68. Hericourt, The Social Diseases, 77. William Allen Pusey, Syphilis as a Modern Problem (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1915), 62. On the rarity of congenital syphilis symptoms that first appear only in puberty—known as tardy hereditary syphilis—see Pusey, 67–8 and P. Diday, A Treatise on Syphilis in New-born Children and Infants at the Breast, trans. G. Whitley, MD (New York: William Wood, 1883), 116. Pusey archly notes, “Many of the cases recorded as hereditary syphilis are undoubtedly acquired syphilis, and it is exceedingly difficult to eliminate the possibility of syphilis acquired at birth as a source of error in many of these supposed late first manifestations of hereditary syphilis” (67). Quoted in Alexis Soloski, “‘The Great Imitator’: Staging Syphilis in A Doll’s House and Ghosts,” Modern Drama, 56, no. 3 (Fall 2013): 292. Meyer, “Charles Lang Freer and His Gallery,” 18. Soloski, “The Great Imitator,” 287, 296. The taboo against syphilis—including the word itself—was not limited to Norway. Although there was a lively discussion around syphilis among medical professionals at the turn of the twentieth century, the American press studiously avoided the subject: the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature did not include “syphilis” as a heading until 1907, and it did not appear in the New York Times Index until 1917. Nicholas Jabbour, “Syphilis from 1880 to

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The Medicine of Art 1920: A Public Health Nightmare and the First Challenge of Medical Ethics,” Essays in History, http:​/​/www​​.essa​​ysinh​​istor​​y​.com​​/arti​​cles/​​2​012/​​103. When Ladies’ Home Journal published an article on venereal disease in 1908, it referred to “diseases of immorality” rather than “syphilis” and “gonorrhea”—and still lost 75,000 magazine subscribers for even broaching the topic. Terra Ziporyn, Disease in the Popular American Press: The Case of Diphtheria, Typhoid Fever, and Syphilis, 1870–1920 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 115. Soloksi, “The Great Imitator,” 300. On Oswald’s syphilis, see also Jorgen Dines Johansen, “How Osvald got Syphilis: Pathology and Metaphor in Ibsen’s Ghosts,” in Ibsen on the Cusp of the 21st Century: Critical Perspectives, eds. Pal Bjorby, et al. (Laksevag: Alvheim & Eide, 2005), 99–111 and Evert Sprinchorn, “Syphilis in Ibsen’s Ghosts,” Ibsen Studies 4, no. 2 (2004): 191–204. Henrik Ibsen, “Ghosts,” A Doll’s House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People, The Master Builder (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), 148, 147. Ziporyn, Disease in the Popular American Press, 115. Pusey, Syphilis as a Modern Problem, 114. Today we know that syphilis is rarely communicated in nonsexual ways, but Brandt suggests it was perhaps strategic for late nineteenth-century doctors to acknowledge modes of nonsexual transmission in an effort to make treatment more respectable for Victorian audiences. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 22. Accurate statistics for syphilis at the turn of the century are hard to come by since many cases went unreported, while others were mistakenly identified as other illnesses. Hericourt’s estimate—a quarter of the male population—is on the high end. Hericourt, The Social Diseases, 75. But this partly depends on the measure. Nicholas Jabbour writes that between 10 and 15 percent of the general population carried the disease, though this estimate does not account for the fact the disease was significantly more prevalent among men. Jabbour, “Syphilis from 1880–1920.” Noting that military statistics for syphilis at this time tend to be the most accurate, Brandt cites the rate for venereal disease (both syphilis and gonorrhea) in the US Army in 1909 at around 20 percent, though others have suggested this is a conservative estimate. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 13. Regardless of the numbers, few doubted that the spread of syphilis constituted a public health epidemic. Hericout, The Social Diseases, 85. It is also possible that Freer chose not to marry because he was asexual, bisexual, or gay. Much like syphilis, the subject of homosexuality in the late nineteenth century was also taboo, and so we would not expect to find much, if any, evidence that Freer was sexually involved with other men, even if he were. The example of Oscar Wilde, who was ruined by his 1895 sodomy trial and conviction, would have underscored the damage which could follow the exposure of a homosexual relationship. However, we do know Freer enjoyed an unusually intimate relationship with his Detroit friend, Thomas Jerome, with whom he traveled to Europe and owned

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a home on the island of Capri. The two men briefly lived in the house together, though Jerome eventually married and lived there with his wife. Helen Tomlinson concludes that Freer’s relationship with Jerome “gives currency” but “not proof ” to the collector’s homosexuality. Tomlinson, West Meets East, 229. 41 Agnes E. Meyer, “My Friend: Charles Lang Freer,” unpublished manuscript, Box 126, Agnes Elizabeth Ernst Meyer papers, 1853–1972, Library of Congress, 39, 42. At the same time, Freer took issue with the independent, educated women of his day. Writing to Tryon, he complained that the “modern American women . . . with her fancies of independence, rights, wrongs, extravagance, dress and other diabolical tendencies is startling all sensible people—both male and female the world round.” Letter from Charles Lang Freer to Dwight Tryon, July 7, 1907, typescript, Nelson C. White Papers, AAA. On Gilded Age “men about town” in Freer’s circle, see Elizabeth Lee, “The Electrified Goddess: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White and Diana at Madison Square Garden,” Nineteenth Century 31, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 12–22. Letter from Charles Lang Freer to Thomas Dewing, November 2, 1904, Letterpress book, v. 15, FGA. Chatfield’s address appears in Freer’s diaries in 1898, 1901, 1903, and 1905, FGA. His library vouchers show that he paid her three times for book binding between April 1903 and November 1904, FGA. 42 Painting Inventories, Charles Lang Freer papers, Reel 4746, Frame 4 and Frame 8, AAA. Barbara Dayer Gallati, “Beauty Unmasked: Ironic Meaning in Dewing’s Art,” in The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing: Beauty Reconfigured, ed. Susan Hobbs (New York: Brooklyn Museum; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 67. In the same volume, Susan Hobbs acknowledges that Freer likely enjoyed the sexual innuendo at play in these works, though she argues that his interests were ultimately aesthetic and that he would have primarily viewed the paintings as “vehicles, as it were, for the opulent surfaces that he so admired in Dewing’s art (18).” 43 Russell W. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995), 148. Frederick Baekland, “Psychological Aspects of Art Collecting,” Psychiatry 44 (February 1981): 51. Other especially useful sources on collecting within the vast literature on the subject include: The Culture of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchange in the Early Modern Atlantic World, eds. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995); Werner Muensterberger, Collecting, An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993); Objects and Others: Essays on

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The Medicine of Art Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Douglas and Elizabeth Rigby, Lock, Stock and Barrel: The Story of Collecting (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1944). Lennard J. Davis, “Nude Venuses, Medusa’s Body, and Phantom Limbs: Disability and Visuality,” in The Body and Physical Difference: Discourses of Disability, eds. David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 60, 61, 62. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 5, 13. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 5, 222. See also Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Caroline van Eck, Art, Agency and Living Presence: From the Animated Image to the Excessive Object (Boston: De Gruyter, 2015); and Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 69. Brown, A Sense of Things, 4, 146, 156, 148, 149, 156. Louisine W. Havemeyer, “The Freer Museum of Oriental Art,” Scribner’s Magazine 73 (May 1923): 532. Agnes E. Meyer, “My Friend, Charles Lang Freer,” 27. Robin Veder, Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), 17. On his 1913 visit to Freer’s home in Detroit, Coburn also photographed Freer on his hands and knees examining a painted scroll that spills over the edge of a table onto the floor. We can imagine the collector moments earlier standing alongside the table while looking down at the scroll. This is not the pose Coburn records. Instead, we see Freer down on all fours— physically immersed in the object—with the heel of his right hand and his right knee contacting the work. In both of Coburn’s photographs, then, Freer examines works in his collection on the ground. These were not unique moments specific to Coburn’s visit. Agnes Meyer describes an evening in which she and Freer enjoyed two Japanese screens while sitting “on the floor, leaning on big comfortable pillows,” while admiring “the pine-clad mountain scenery of the screens until it faded away under the deepening twilight.” Meyer, “My Friend: Charles Lang Freer,” 7. The scene Meyer describes is reminiscent of one familiar from Whistler’s Caprice in Purple and Gold, a painting which Freer owned, picturing a kimono-dressed model seated on a rug as she studies a series of Japanese prints with a golden Japanese screen behind her. Sander Gilman, Goethe’s Touch: Touching, Seeing, and Sexuality (New Orleans: Graduate School of Tulane University, 1988), 2. Quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan, “The Pleasures of Touch,” in The Book of Touch, ed. Constance Classen (Oxford: Berg, 2005), 74.

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50 Quoted in Joyce Hill Stoner, “Materials for Immateriality,” in Like Breath on Glass: Whistler, Inness, and the Art of Painting Softly, ed. Marc Simpson (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute with Yale University Press, 2008), 97. Marc Simpson, “Painting Softly—An Introduction,” Like Breath on Glass, 11. 51 Agnes E. Meyer, “My Friend: Charles Lang Freer,” 47. Agnes E. Meyer, “The Charles L. Freer Collection,” 80. 52 With Kindest Regards, 40. Ideals of Beauty: Asian and American Art in the Freer and Sackler Galleries (London: Thames & Hudson; Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2010), 8. 53 Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, eds. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 12. Conn, “Where Is the East?” 171.

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Epilogue It is worth emphasizing that this analysis has unfolded within a particular and unique moment in time in both the history of medicine and the history of art. It begins with the rise of germ theory in the 1880s and the realization that illness was transmitted through invisible microorganisms, thus giving way to a new culture of fear around contagion and the spread of disease. Anxieties remained strong in the decades which followed Koch’s discovery as medical science worked to respond with effective treatments and cures. However, It was not until the 1940s, more than fifty years after Kate Bloede’s death from tuberculosis, that streptomycin became available. Had Kate lived long enough to benefit from this life-saving antibiotic drug, Abbott Thayer would have likely had a very different career, not only in terms of what he painted, but also in terms of where and how he lived. Mourning and loss would not have carried the same presence and weight in his art. Likewise, with antibiotic treatment, Robert Louis Stevenson would have presumably endured less suffering and fewer opportunities to cultivate his persona as a “professional sickest.” Contemporary artists who understood him as a bedridden consumptive and romantic wanderer would have had to rely on other conventions—or invent new ones—in depicting him. The antibiotic revolution also transformed what it meant to have syphilis, a disease which so thoroughly informs our understanding of Freer’s collecting that we can only wonder what works of art he would have pursued without the threat of a disfiguring disease. Would he still have retired early and built a global collection of art in the absence of his “family inheritance”? The displaced desire for touch and haptic pleasure through objects would have certainly held less appeal. While cancer treatment has not had the benefit of an antibiotic “magic bullet,” it, of course, has evolved since the early twentieth century when Saint-Gaudens took up Fletcherism and Dewey’s “No Breakfast Plan” as tools in managing his health. If radiation and chemotherapy had been available as treatment options, would the sculptor have developed the same emotional and psychological investment in his monument to Phillips Brooks? Would he have lingered until his death over the details of this healing figure? These reflections are meant to be provocative, and cannot be definitively answered, but they point to the fact that the state of medicine in the Gilded

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Age had a direct bearing on how at least certain works of art were produced, experienced, and understood. I have tried to show that it was in this particular context that art helped fill a void in medical terms. As physicians became better equipped to dull the pain and suffering brought on by disease, there was less of a need for art to play the same redemptive role. Art was also changing at this time. As the influence of abstraction settled in during the early decades of the twentieth century, a generation of academicallytrained artists who were focused on the human form appeared increasingly part of a bygone era. Sargent and Thayer were both admired for their loose and expressive application of paint, and Saint-Gaudens was praised for the relaxed, animated qualities of his subjects—all qualities which challenged the academic tradition in art—yet these artists remained invested in representation and the figure as a source of meaning. It is hard to imagine the same kinds of analysis put forward in these chapters with the American modernists influenced by European painters such as Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso in their interrogation of the picture plane and experimentation with form. In so many instances throughout The Medicine of Art—whether Robert Louis Stevenson, Mary Thayer, Phillips Brooks, or even the mythological figure of Venus—the human figure has been the carrier of meaning in the context of disease. Finally, what especially stands out now with the benefit of hindsight is how the story of Gilded Age disease resonates with our own twenty-firstcentury experience of Covid-19. Anyone who has lived through 2020 and 2021 can appreciate the uncertainty and fear that accompany the rapid spread of an infectious disease that medical science has identified, and yet is unable to effectively treat or cure. Despite the record-breaking pace at which multiple vaccines for this virus have been developed, there remains a great deal of anxiety—as I write in summer 2021—around new variants of the virus, the rise of “breakthrough” cases among the fully vaccinated, vaccine hesitancy (and refusal) in the United States, and the challenges of making effective vaccines available worldwide. As we await better options for treating Covid, and a hopedfor eventual cure, it is ironic that in an age of sophisticated medical technologies and high-tech solutions, our best strategies for stemming the spread of disease have come down to a basic understanding of germs, drawing from knowledge familiar since the nineteenth century. In her 1860 Notes on Nursing, Florence Nightingale was an early advocate of handwashing as a means of limiting contagion, although it was not until later in the century that the practice was widely adopted in medical settings—and beyond. Similarly, starting in the 1890s, new aseptic procedures meant that surgeons, at least, wore face masks to protect

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their patients in the operating theater. It did not take long for Abbott Thayer to grasp the connection between breath and germs: he gave his children a “breath catcher” to wear at night to prevent the circulation of germs during sleep. Today, of course, we are reminded daily by public health officials that frequent handwashing and mask wearing are among the most essential practices in combatting Covid-19. To return to the book cover—Thayer’s A Virgin—one last time, I will end with reference to another familiar image in our pandemic times. Like Thayer, many of us have found refuge in the outdoors, taking therapeutic walks in nature, far removed from crowds and contagion. Like Mary, Gerald, and Gladys, we have been taking deep breaths and filling our lungs with fresh air, a reassuring sign of health just as it was more than a century ago.

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Select Bibliography Archival Collections Abbott Handerson Thayer papers, Dublin Historical Society, Dublin, NH. Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer family papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Agnes Elizabeth Ernest Meyer papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Augustus Saint-Gaudens papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Bakken Museum artifact and ephemera collection, Minneapolis, MN. Charles Lang Freer papers, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. Charles Lang Freer selected papers, 1876–1931, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. College of Physicians Historical Medical Library, Philadelphia. F. W. Sargent papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Frederic William MacMonnies papers, 1874–1997, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports, University of Texas, Austin, TX. Horace Fletcher papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. John Singer Sargent archive, Richard Ormond collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Nancy Douglas Bowditch and Brush family papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Nelson and Henry C. White Research Material, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Richard Murray research material regarding Abbott Handerson Thayer, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Robert Louis Stevenson Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. The Wolfsonian/Florida International University collections, Miami, FL. Thomas B. Brumbaugh research materials on Abbott Handerson Thayer and other artists, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Trinity Church Archives, Boston, MA.

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Index Adams, Henry  2, 143 Adirondacks  42, 60, 68–9, 101 Alexander, John White  1, 2, 29 n.6 Repose  2 Antimodernism  22, 104 artist colonies  86, 111 n.10, 112 n.11 Cornish, New Hampshire  24, 26, 86, 111, 127–30, 149 n.42, 166 Dublin, New Hampshire  24, 72, 84–99, 113 n.29, 128 Art Students League  133 Bailin, Miriam  28, 55, 65–7 Baird, Julia  177 Baudelaire, Charles  7 Baudrillard, Jean  185 Bazille, Jean Frédéric  63 Improvised Hospital Bed  64 Beaman, Charles  128 Beard, George  86, 121, 134–6 neurasthenia  7, 8, 23, 31 n.28, 123, 128–30, 161, 170 Beard, John  134 Belk, Russell  179 Bell, Adrienne Baxter  97 Benjamin, Walter  168, 182 Bigelow, William Sturgis  163, 167 Brooks, Phillips  25, 138–46, 155 n.103 Brown, Bill  181–2 Brush, George de Forest  26, 99, 113 n.31 Dublin  89–90, 92, 103 The Moose Chase  92 Native American subjects  90–3, 114 n.42, 114 n.43 The Weaver  91 Burns, Sarah  13–15, 164 cancer  5, 22, 23, 148 n.21 causes  123–4, 148 n.18 link with depression  136–7 rectal cancer  24, 147 n.10 surgery  124–5

taboo subject  23, 137–8 Tripsyn cure  25, 134–5, 152 n.68 Cézanne, Paul  97, 198 Mont Sant-Victoire  97 Chatfield, Mollie  177 Church, Frederick  161, 162 classical antiquity  17–22, 74, 92, 107–11, 119 n.95, 128–30, 132–4, 150 n.44, 152 n.64, 180 Clausius, Rudolf  2 Cleaves, Margaret  135–6, 153 n.72, 154 n.91 Coburn, Alvin Langdon  179, 180, 194 n.48 collecting  163, 179–85, 193 n.43 Cornish, New Hampshire, see artist colonies; Augustus Saint-Gaudens Covid-19  101, 198–9 Curry, David Park  157, 159 Davis, Lennard  180 Davos, Switzerland  42, 59, 68 de la Peña, Carolyn  3 Dewey, Edward Hooker  126–7, 139, 145, 149 n.36, 197 Dewing, Thomas  1, 12–13, 26, 106, 128, 145, 157, 166, 169, 177, 178, 187 n.14, 188 n.19 The Carnation  177 Four Sylvan Sounds  167 Lady in White  12 The Pearl  179 Portrait in Blue  178 disease definition  4–5, 28, 38 n.87, 40 n.97, 53 exercise  131–2 gender  67 germ theory  52, 54, 197 “healthy mindedness”  143–4 mental illness  36 n.85 miasmas  53 organic vs. non-organic  22–3

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sickbed  65–6, 69 transmission  99, 172–5 Dublin, New Hampshire, see artist colonies; Thayer, Abbott Handerson Duncan, Isadora  19 Isadora Duncan at the Parthenon Theater  21 Eakins, Susan Macdowell  10, 18, 20 Eakins, Thomas  16, 27, 35 n.68 Arcadia  19 Arcadian scenes  17–21, 35 n.73 Avondale  20–1, 36 n.79 The Champion Single Sculls  18 Miss Amelia van Buren  11 neurasthenia in art  10–11, 33 n.42, 33 n.45 neurasthenic breakdown  9–10 rowing  17 [Standing Male Nude with Pipes]  20 École des Beaux-Arts  19, 121 Edison, Thomas  127 electricity  3, 6 electrotherapy  3–4, 25, 33 n.50, 134–5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  83, 85, 87–90, 93–4, 96, 99, 100, 113 n.19, 128, 167 Eyre, Wilson  169 Faulkner, Barry  101–2 Fenollosa, Ernest  157, 184 Fletcher, Horace  25, 50, 127, 139, 144, 149 n.40, 197 Fournier, Alfred  172–3 Foutch, Ellery  133, 151 n.57 Freer, Charles Lang  1, 5, 71, 106, 134–6, 157–85, 197 Detroit home  167–9 Freer Gallery of Art  157–9, 185 neurasthenia  161–70 sexuality  177–80, 192 n.40, 193 n.41 syphilis  25, 161, 174, 190 n.29 touch  182–5 fresh-air routine  24, 53, 84–5, 89, 100–3, 111, 118 n.91 Galen, Claudius  5, 136–7 Gallati, Barbara  119 n.96, 178 Gardner, Isabella Stewart  163, 186 n.9 Gérôme, Jean-Léon  180 Pygmalion and Galatea  180

Gilbreth, Frank and Lillian  3 Gosling, F. G.  8, 186 n.7 Grant, Ulysses S.  137 Harman, Claire  42, 67, 68 Havemeyer, Louisine  182 Hecker, Frank  161–2, 169, 174 Hippocrates  5 Hirsh, Sharon  37 n.86, 56–7 Hirshler, Erica  46 Hodler, Ferdinand  56, 57 The Consecrated One  57 Ibsen, Henrik–Ghosts  170, 175–6 Inness, George  15, 86 The Home of the Heron  16 James, Henry  43–4, 50–1, 67, 74, 127 Alice James  47, 49, 76 n.13 The Spoils of Poynton  182 James, William  3, 12, 15, 123, 143–5 Kellogg, John H.  25, 156 n.121 Lacan, Jacques  180 La Farge, John  139–40 Lears, T.J. Jackson  21–2, 25, 95, 163 LeBrocq, W.C.  169 Low, Will  41, 59, 68, 122–3, 130, 145 Lutz, Tom  8–9 Mabie, Hamilton Wright  166 Macfadden, Bernarr  3, 108 MacKaye, Percy  86, 128 MacMonnies, Frederick  138 Mann, Thomas  42 Manning, William  131–2 Marey, Étienne-Jules  3 Matisse, Henri  18–19, 22, 163, 198 Mazow, Leo  15 Meyer, Agnes  159, 174–7, 183–5 mind cure  12–13, 33 n.48 Mitchell, S. Weir  9, 11, 15, 31 n.34, 33 n.47, 189 n.2 modernity  7, 8, 14, 18, 22, 30 n.22, 88–91, 94–5, 123–4 Monet, Claude  64, 96 Munch, Edward  37 n.85, 37 n.86, 80 n.40, 174 The Inheritance  174, 175

Index nerves  5–7, 14, 31 n.29 neurasthenia  189 n.21 class  8–9 cover for other diseases  23, 170, 189 n.23 definition  7–8, 38 n.88 disease status  22–3, 186 n.7 gender  9, 31 n.34 mind cure  12–13, 33 n.48 rest cure  9, 11, 15, 31 n.34 New Thought  12, 143 Nietzsche, Friedrich  5, 16 Nightingale, Florence  198 Osbourne, Fanny (Mrs. Stevenson)  24, 42–4, 51, 58, 59, 63, 75 n.3 Osbourne, Lloyd  43 Ott, Katherine  52, 55, 65, 77 n.18 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts  9, 11, 17 physical culture  4, 17 Picasso, Pablo  198 Porter, Roy  53 Pyne, Kathleen  161, 169, 187 n.14, 190 n.29 Quimby, Phineas Parkhurst  143–4, 155 n.114 Rabinbach, Anson  3 racial whiteness  8–9, 22, 25–6, 151 n.59 Ricord, Phillipe  170, 174 Rockefeller, John. D  127 Roosevelt, Theodore  9, 67, 96 Rosenberg, Charles  7–8, 31 n.28 Ross, Zachary  11–13, 33 n.50 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  56 Ruedi, Karl  42, 68 Saint-Gaudens, Augusta  64, 134–6, 138, 147 n.6 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus  1, 5, 24, 26, 41, 70, 74, 170, 177, 197–8 Adams Memorial  43–4, 143 Amor Caritas  121 Cornish  128–30, 150 n.50 Diana  64 Farragut Monument  121 General John Logan Memorial  121

221

health  23, 42, 111, 122–46, 147 n.7, 153 n.73, 156 n.121 Morgan tomb angels  121 Peter Cooper Monument  121 Phillips Brooks Monument  25, 138–46, 197–8 religion  143 Robert Gould Shaw Memorial  121 Robert Louis Stevenson  62 Robert Louis Stevenson (and replicas)  63–6, 69, 70 St. Giles Memorial  64, 66, 69–70, 81 n.52 Sherman Monument  138 Standing Lincoln  64 Saint-Gaudens, Homer  130, 138, 140–1, 145, 147 n.12, 154 n.91, 155 n.108 Salisbury, Laura  7 Sandow, Eugen  130, 132–4, 151 n.57, 152 n.62, 152 n.64 Sargent, John Singer  42, 50, 51, 70, 74, 105, 198 The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit  45, 46 Family life  47–9, 76 n.10, 76 n.12 Robert Louis Stevenson  51, 52, 67 Robert Louis Stevenson and his Wife  24, 26, 41, 43–6, 51, 70 Schwain, Kristin  105, 143 Shail, Andrew  7 Sidlauskas, Susan  46, 76 n.8 “simple living”  85, 89–93, 103 Sontag, Susan  55, 61, 67, 77 n.18, 123, 137, 170 Spencer, Herbert  8–9, 86 Spies, Kathleen  10 Steichen, Edward  184 Stevenson, Robert Louis  50, 74, 83, 85, 197–8 “Bottle Imp”  61 Bournemouth  41, 43–4, 51, 61, 62, 70, 74 A Child’s Garden of Verses  72 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  61, 62 “Health and the Mountains”  60 Hotel Albert in New York  63, 65, 69, 70, 80 n.39 New Arabian Nights  63 “Ordered South”  59 Samoa  51, 62, 67, 70, 72

222 smoking  41, 63, 68–9 “The Stimulation of the Alps”  60, 68 tuberculosis  5, 24, 27, 42, 57–61, 67–8 “Underwoods”  60 Stott, Annette  11, 33 n.45 Swedenborg, Emanuel  15 syphilis  5, 22, 23, 170–5, 190 n.32, 192 n.39, 197 congenital vs. acquired  176–7 treatment  171 Thayer, Abbott Handerson  1, 5, 24, 26, 27, 42, 43, 109, 157, 197–9 Angel  104, 105, 119 n.95 animal camouflage  98, 116 n.67 Below Mount Monadnock  97, 98 Caritas  107 Clara May  106–7, 110 copying practice  71, 82 n.55 Dublin  24, 26, 72, 83–90, 92–104, 106, 107, 111, 115 n.52, 127, 128 Elise Pumpelly  107, 110 Emma Beach  106 Gerald Thayer  72, 99, 101, 105, 110 Gladys Thayer  72, 94, 99, 102, 105, 106, 110 Kate Bloede Thayer  24, 27, 72, 74, 83–5, 99, 104–6, 111, 197 Mary Armory Greene  84, 96 Mary Thayer  72, 99, 104, 105, 110, 198 Monadnock Angel  106 Monadnock in Winter  97 Mother and Child  84, 105 Mount Monadnock  72, 84–5, 87–8, 94–101, 106, 112 n.17 My Children  72, 73 Portrait of Bessie Price  72 Stevenson Memorial  24, 70–2, 74–5, 82 n.54 A Virgin  72, 105, 111, 199 Virgin Enthroned  72, 105, 106 William Henry Thayer  27, 83–5, 99 Winged Figure Seated on a Rock  71, 72 Woman in Grecian Gown  107 Young Woman  72

Index therapeutic art  12–16, 22–3, 33 n.50, 34 n.65, 36 n.80, 163–9 art therapy  34 n.66 Thoreau, Henry David  85, 87–9, 96, 113 n.25 Trinity Church, Boston  138–9 Reverend E. Winchester Donald  139–40, 145 Trudeau, Edward  34 n.79, 42, 59, 60, 68, 75 n.3, 89 Tryon, Dwight  1, 13, 157, 164–6, 169, 182 Apple Blossoms  13 Daybreak  165 Night: A Harbor  166 tuberculosis  5, 22–4, 53, 77 n.19, 78 n.23, 124 “beautiful” death  54, 57 vs. consumption  52 consumptive “look”  55–7, 74, 104 gender  55–7 sanatorium treatment  24, 59, 60, 79 n.33, 100–1, 103, 111, 117 n.80, 118 n.81 streptomycin  52, 100, 197 Twain, Mark  143 Van Rensselaer, Maria (M.G.)  41, 65 Veder, Robin  183 Venus de Milo  108–10 Von Helmholtz, Hermann  2, 7 Vrettos, Athena  28, 55 Whistler, Beatrix  158–9 Whistler, James McNeil  1, 14–15, 25–6, 28 n.1, 51, 157–61, 164, 180, 184–5, 186 n.3 Harmony in Blue and Gold  158 Nocturne: Blue and Silver  14 The Siesta  159 Venus Rising from the Sea  181 White, Ellen G.  145 White, Stanford  125, 136, 148 n.26, 169, 177 Whitman, Walt  9–10 Wilde, Oscar  29 n.1, 67, 81 n.50, 192 n.40 Wilderness preservation  95–6 Wilkinson, Burke  136 Wister, Owen  9

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Plate 1 John Singer Sargent, Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife, 1885. Oil on canvas, 20 ¼ × 24 ¼ in. (51.4 × 61.6 cm). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2005.3. Photograph by Dwight Primiano.

Plate 2  Abbott Handerson Thayer, Stevenson Memorial, 1903. Oil on canvas, 81 5/8 × 60 1/8 in. (207.2 × 152.6 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly.

Plate 3  Abbott Thayer, Monadnock in Winter, 1904. Oil on canvas, 35 5/8 × 35 5/8 in. (90.5 × 90.5 cm), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1904.359a.

Plate 4  Abbott Handerson Thayer, Angel, 1887. Oil on canvas, 36¼ × 28⅛ in. (92 × 71.5 cm). Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.112.

Plate 5  Abbott Handerson Thayer, A Virgin, 1892–3. Oil on canvas, 90 7/16 × 71 7/8 in. (229.7 × 182.5 cm). Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1893.11a.

Plate 6  Augustus Saint-Gaudens in Paris Studio, 1898. Photograph by Marie Olga Kobbe. Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, Cornish, New Hampshire, #4091.

Plate 7  Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Phillips Brooks Monument, Copley Square, Boston, 1893–1910. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Plate 8  Alvin Langdon Coburn, Charles Lang Freer, 1909. Charles Lang Freer Papers, FSA_A.01. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC: Gift of the estate of Charles Lang Freer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, FSA_A.01_12.01.2.3.