Transporting Visions: The Movement of Images in Early America 9780520355996, 9780520251847

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Long-Distance Pictures
1. Dilemmas of Delivery in Copley’s Atlantic
2. Audubon’s Burden: Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America
3. Gathering Moss: Asher B. Durand and the Deceleration of Landscape
Epilogue: Material Visual Culture
Notes
Selected Bibliography
List of Illustrations
Index

Citation preview

the publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the art endowment fund of the university of california press foundation, which was established by a major gift from the ahmanson foundation.

transporting visions

TRANSPORTING VISIONS The Movement of Images in Early America Jennifer L. Roberts

published with the assistance of the getty foundation university of california press Berkeley

Los Angeles

London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Every effort has been made to identify the rightful copyright holders of material not specifically commissioned for use in this publication and to secure permission, where applicable, for reuse of all such material. Credit, if and as available, has been provided for all borrowed material either on-page or in an acknowledgment section of the book. Errors or omissions in credit citations or failure to obtain permission if required by copyright law have been either unavoidable or unintentional. The author and publisher welcome any information that would allow them to correct future reprints. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, Jennifer L., 1969–. Transporting visions : the movement of images in early America / Jennifer L. Roberts. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-25184-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art and society—United States—History—18th century. 2. Art and society—United States—History—19th century. 3. Visual communication—Social aspects—United States—History— 18th century. 4. Visual communication—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. I. Title. N72.S6R625 2014 701'.0309033—dc23 2013025709 Manufactured in China 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: Long-Distance Pictures

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1.

Dilemmas of Delivery in Copley’s Atlantic

2.

Audubon’s Burden: Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America 69 •

3.

Gathering Moss: Asher B. Durand and the Deceleration of Landscape 117 •

Epilogue: Material Visual Culture Notes 167 Selected Bibliography List of Illustrations Index 219 •

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201

215

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161

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My work on this book has stretched over many years, occupying, in various degrees of intensity, the greater part of my academic career to date. Beginning with my first presentations on Copley in 2006, I have shared the project widely with friends and colleagues— so widely that I cannot possibly capture in these acknowledgments every moment of inspiration that has emerged from public discussion as my ideas have developed. The encouragement, advice, and argument I have received from others have marked this book indelibly, even as all errors and infelicities in the writing remain my own. I would first like to thank the many scholars working outside the Americanist field who have supported this project and provided stimulating new perspectives for my thinking about pictures in transit, especially Tim Barringer, Emerson Bowyer, Holly Clayson, Tom Cummins, Susan Dackerman, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Jeffrey Hamburger, Christopher Heuer, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, John Plotz, Susan Siegfried, Martha Ward, and Christopher S. Wood. My Americanist colleagues have read and responded to my work with unfailing generosity. I have appreciated their specific comments and treasured their intellectual fellowship: Jean-Philippe Antoine, Wendy Bellion, Janet Berlo, Steven Biel, Alan Braddock, Bill Brown, Rachael DeLue, Michael Gaudio, Christoph Irmscher, Caroline Jones, Jane Kamensky, Robin Kelsey, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Ethan Lasser, Michael Leja, Margaretta Lovell, David Lubin, JoAnne Mancini, Angela Miller, Alex Nemerov, Sally Promey, Bruce Robertson, Seth Rockman, Eric Rosenberg, Eric Slauter, Robert Slif kin, Conevery Valencius, Allan Wallach, Michael Willrich, Jason

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Weems, and Bryan Wolf. I presented early versions of this material at the Addison Gallery, the American Antiquarian Society, Brown University, the Clark Art Institute, Columbia University, the Getty Institute, the Huntington Library, Harvard University, Indiana University, Northwestern University, NYU, Princeton University, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Stanford University, the Terra Foundation for American Art in Giverny, UC Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Vassar College, Yale University, and York University. I am grateful to the audience members at each of these institutions for taking the time to attend my lectures and for generously offering questions and comments. The wide-ranging research that this project required was supported by fellowships from the Stanford Humanities Center and the Clark Art Institute, and by the munificent sabbatical policy for junior faculty at Harvard University. I received assistance with primary research materials from many institutions, particularly the Houghton Library at Harvard University, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the National Museum of American History, and the Chapin Library at Williams College. The many research assistants that have worked with me over the years have creatively excavated material on everything from the typology of glassware in the eighteenth century to the cultural history of moss in the nineteenth: thanks to Elizabeth Bacon, Nicole Bass, Sarah Carter, Wendy Ikemoto, Jason LaFountain, Katie Pfohl, David Pullins, Michael Rossi, Katie Steiner, Hannah Yohalem, and Nora Wilkinson. Earlier versions of parts of chapters one and three were previously published in American Art, Art History, and Grey Room. Cynthia Mills, Sarah Monks, David Peters Corbett, and Emerson Bowyer provided invaluable editorial assistance in the preparation of these articles. My editors at UC Press have worked tirelessly to bring this book to fruition; thanks to Kari Dahlgren, Jack Young, Chalon Emmons, and most of all to Stephanie Fay, who nourished this project from its inception. Her exceptional guidance in matters of style and sense have improved this manuscript— and all my future writing—immeasurably. And finally, as always, my deepest appreciation goes to Dan Hisel, for supporting me day by day by day over the thousands of days that this project occupied me. This book is dedicated to him and to our daughter, Lottie, whose arrival delayed its completion but brought new purpose to its every page.

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INTRODUCTION Long-Distance Pictures

Suppose that one wanted, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to engage in what we might now call “visual communication”—​to disseminate, circulate, or otherwise transmit an image. This would have meant that a picture (a physical thing) had to be floated, rolled, or dragged across the surface of the earth. This process took muscle and it took time. It introduced the picture to what economic geographers call the friction of distance, exposing it to the risk of damage, spoilage, theft, or miscarriage and subjecting it to the contingencies of topography, seasonality, and territorial politics. It submitted the picture to the captivation of extrinsic transport and communications systems managed not by artists, patrons, or critics, but by customs agents, packers, drivers, couriers, postmen, and slaves. It withdrew the picture from its normative conditions of visibility and aesthetic distinction, entombing it temporarily in a box or crate and juxtaposing it with everyday commodities. And perhaps most profoundly, it subjected the picture to delay, burdening it with an intrinsic belatedness, however strenuous its own pictorial efforts at presence and unity. Every moving picture, in short, was subject to the inconvenience of “having to pass through the world.”1 In tracing the transit of paintings and prints through British America and the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in this book, I show how such pictures could and did register the complications of their own transmission. Pictures in early America (a social and spatial world notable above all for its great distances) were marked by their passage through space—​not only by the crushed corners, craquelure, and other indexical injuries that they may have sustained along the way, but also by

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their formal preprocessing of the distances they were designed to span.2 The friction of distance, in other words, made itself felt not only on the outsides but also on the insides of pictures: in their emblematic and allegorical configurations, their calibrations of scale and dimension, their semiotic modalities, their management of the sensory matrix of delayed beholding. In this book I try (to borrow a phrase from David Joselit) “to hold in suspension the passages internal to a canvas, and those external to it.”3 The discipline of art history, at least as it has exercised itself in the fields of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western painting, has developed few tools to perceive, measure, or interpret the impact of transit upon pictorial form.4 Although there are many studies of “moving pictures,” these have focused largely on kinetic art forms, the pictorial representation of dynamic forces or moving objects, or the cinematic or protocinematic progression of images in series. They have not generally theorized the movement of pictures in the clunky and literal sense. And although the circulation and deracination of imagery is increasingly a topic of art-historical research (given current interest in globalization, exile, and diaspora), such research has primarily aimed to produce accounts of transcultural influence or ex post facto overviews of the geographic spread of visual information. It has not lingered on the material costs of transporting images—​t he delays, resistance, and losses—​or the effects of such limitations on their formal production as specifically pictorial expressions.5 Paradoxically, the very portability of pictures makes it difficult to acknowledge the analytical salience of their transportation. The portability of pictures was integral to their historical emergence: easel painting was developed in the early Renaissance as a way of detaching images from fixed social and spatial contexts. The advent of the canvas support allowed for a light surface, easy to move and independent of any particular architectural surround. And the strategies that led to the development of the object now called a “picture” (the bounding frame, the internal relation of forms and narratives, and especially the deployment of linear perspective) worked similarly to virtualize the image and liberate its internal space of representation from the external space through which it moved. Its space of illusionistic reference, in other words, was sealed off from its space of physical referral. The resulting geographic autonomy of the picture format would come to exemplify the aesthetic autonomy that defined modern art theory from Kant to Clement Greenberg.6 No wonder, then, that it should now seem counterintuitive to suggest that the transit of a picture has anything whatsoever to do with its illusionistic mechanics. As Nelson Goodman wrote in 1968, “Such properties as weighing ten pounds or being in transit from Boston to New York on a certain day hardly affect the status of [a] painting in its representational scheme.” 7 Against such seemingly commonsense claims, I propose in this study a highwayman’s art history—​one that intercepts pictures on the road, on the sea, on the move. This approach assumes that the significant sites in the life of a work of art include not only those of its production and reception, but also the intervals between these more art-historically propitious locations. It requires subtle but significant shifts in traditional

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concepts of agency to acknowledge works of art as active delegates rather than passive intermediaries. It compels a more thorough attention than usual to the material heft of images, as well as to the undertheorized interface between their visual and material qualities. And by insisting that geography inhabits pictures rather than simply surrounding them, it requires a reformulation of current understandings of the geography of art. Given these methodological terms, my analysis of early American art is often closer in spirit to scholarship on premodern practices of ritual image procession or on the circulation of “portable arts” in the non-Western world than to studies of modern Western pictoriality.8 My analysis begins in Boston in the 1760s, when John Singleton Copley began shipping paintings across the Atlantic for critique and exhibition in London. It ends in the galleries of the National Academy of Design in the 1850s, where Asher B. Durand’s plein air landscape studies offered views carried directly, like fresh produce, from the forests to the city. The intervening century was characterized by ongoing struggles to maintain cultural coherence under the strain of geographic expansion. The long reach of the European empires into North America, and then the Early Republic’s own dizzyingly rapid westward expansion, threw the issues of communication and synchronization into high relief.9 The limits of community—​civic, economic, domestic—​were shaped and tested by distance. Spatial expansion put increased pressure on pictures (as on objects of all sorts) to serve members of far-flung communities as connective devices or “space binders.”10 Pictures adopted a delegatory function, forging and maintaining social links across vast ranges of space. In our own age of synchronous communication, it can be difficult to imagine the profundity of the geographic and temporal separations at issue here. The artists featured in this book lived in a world governed by absolute, intractable separations that we now associate only with interstellar distances. Just as distant stars are fundamentally inaccessible to perception from earth, so were London and Boston separated in the eighteenth century. (The stars in the Andromeda Galaxy, for example, are visible, but because their light has taken more than two million years to reach the earth, we see them only as they existed millions of years ago. For all we know, the entire galaxy has since been obliterated.) To be sure, the Boston–​London gap was closer to two months than two million years, but it was every bit as obdurate in its resistance to synchrony. These separations had formative effects on cultural production. Distances and delays, that is to say, were not merely passive intermissions or negative spaces between active sites of production: by putting pressure on styles and systems of production, they served as productive themselves. Because long, uncertain intervals beset every incident of transmarine communication in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, for example, systems had to be devised to minimize the effects of decay, delay, and mistransmission. Hence the drive to design faster ships and improve navigation; the preference for light, flat, or desiccated cargoes like textiles and tea leaves; and the development of the actu-

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arial, speculative, and fiduciary systems (the arts of time, risk, and money management) that eventually evolved into the circulatory networks of global capitalism.11 The essential argument of this book is that art also actively confronted such gaps. Consider, for example, the impact of the delay between Boston and London on Copley’s practice as a painter in the 1760s and 1770s. Having been elected to the Society of Artists in London in 1766 (news of this honor, by some typical but unexplained glitch in transmission, took over a year to reach him), Copley was expected to send pictures to the annual exhibitions in Spring Gardens.12 He relished this opportunity to exhibit regularly because he was counting on feedback from artists in London to help him refine his self-taught techniques and to align his style with current academic norms. But he struggled with the glacial pace of these critical transmissions. He was mortified to find that he was unable to incorporate the criticisms of one year’s painting into the next year’s because by the time he received the letters bearing criticism on one painting, he had already had to paint the next in order to ship it out in time: “The reason [I am having trouble] is my not receiveing the Critisisms of the Artists and publick earlyer, and I prize them two highly to be willing to lose the advantage of them.”13 These and other effects of delay were translated into formal and compositional decisions. Copley, painfully aware of the inevitable belatedness of any portrait he might send to London, for example, often felt it necessary to simplify and generalize the dress of his sitters. As he put it in a letter to Benjamin West of January 1768, regarding a pastel portrait he was about to ship, “I prefered simplissity in the dress because, should I do any thing in a taste of Drapery forrain from or contrary to what is the prevailling fashon when the picture appears at the Exhibition, it must displease.”14 As I argue in chapter 1, many of Copley’s stylistic innovations can be attributed to his need to secure, in and through his paintings, the illusion of social propriety and proximity despite his peripheral position. Early American paintings moved through a space notable not only for its vastness, but also for its qualitative instability under the pressure of rapid economic and technological change. Historians of early America have characterized this period as embracing both a “Market Revolution” and a “Transportation Revolution”; whatever the continuing debates about the most appropriate label, the two revolutions were mutually constitutive.15 The century prior to the Civil War witnessed the reinvention of transatlantic navigation, the adoption of steam propulsion, the advent of railroads, the organization of the postal system, and the invention of the telegraph. These changes altered the relationship between space and time and destabilized the most fundamental period understandings of memory, communication, and community. And they went hand in hand with the controversial expansion of market relations in the Atlantic world and the United States. The development of a communications infrastructure both followed and reinforced the transformation of local subsistence (or yeoman) economies into integrated markets with broad geographic connectivity. Early American distance then, can hardly be characterized as a neutral field through

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which objects might safely, stably, and indifferently travel. The transition to a commodity economy, in which objects were increasingly extracted from their local contexts in order to enter wider market flows, raised questions about the capacity of things to retain and convey social memory. Because the routes and techniques of transport that brought new opportunities for connection also introduced the possibility of decay, intervention, and detour, moving pictures in early America must not be conceptualized as inert tokens traveling impassively about the globe. It was precisely the stability and constancy of any such tokens that had to be actively secured. Each of the chapters that follow features pictures that were moved from one part of the world to another with considerable strategic complexity. They were created with their transmission in mind, and their explicit charge was, at least partly, to bridge gaps and separations by their own displacement. Chapter 1 examines John Singleton Copley’s attempts to participate in London’s academic art community from his distant position in Boston in the 1760s and 1770s. Beginning with the paintings that he shipped to London for exhibition and critique at the Society of Artists, the chapter recovers the difficulty and delicacy of his task. Copley’s mission—​to convey aesthetically ambitious paintings across the ocean—​was beset by paradoxes, not least of which was that the transatlantic delay that necessarily structured his submissions automatically invalidated period ideals of instantaneity, unity, and conviviality in painting. These paradoxes haunt Copley’s pictures and help account for many of their stylistic eccentricities: their extravagant concern with precision and reflection, their obsession with the coordination of visual and tactile signals, their recurrent theme of plenary embodiment. As he attempted to create paintings with the proper transitive qualities, Copley devised an aesthetic of transmission that amalgamated a variety of discourses of Atlantic exchange and transport: models of spatial compression that paralleled techniques of transatlantic shipping, models of mobile value adapted from numismatics and finance, and models of sensory conveyance adapted from empiricist theory. The chapter concludes with a close analysis of Watson and the Shark (1778; see fig. 18), which demonstrates how Copley’s struggles with the fragmenting power of Atlantic transit played a central role in his later innovations in modern history painting. Natural history illustration was another form of image production in early America predicated on long-distance transmission. Perhaps the most ambitious such enterprise of the early nineteenth century was John James Audubon’s Birds of America project. Aiming to paint, print, and distribute actual-size images of every bird species known in the United States and its territories, Audubon began work on his geographic-ornithological project in earnest in 1820 and completed it in 1839. Although his work has often been equated with the lightness and grace of its avian subject matter, his double elephant size drawings and prints were in fact cumbersome cargo to haul, by flatboat, foot, and horseback, on the underdeveloped transportation networks of the Trans-Appalachian West. Audubon’s pictures of birds, in other words, navigated the early American landscape with far greater difficulty than did the birds themselves.

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Normally visual representations are more portable than their referents. But in Audubon’s project the freight of each image outweighed the effervescence of its own subject matter. Chapter 2 explores this paradox by examining why Audubon insisted on representing the actual size of cranes, flamingos, and other birds, despite the prohibitive physical and financial cost of the practice. I argue that he treated the practice of representation as a material transposition rather than an optical or a conceptual transformation, a commitment he developed after failing as a merchant-importer in the Ohio River Valley, partly because of a financial panic. The scalar fixity of Audubon’s drawings resisted the rampant spatial abstractions of the culture of speculation that had first fueled, and then destroyed, his career as a merchant. Chapter 3 examines the work of Asher B. Durand, tying together his practice as a banknote engraver, a reproductive engraver, and a landscape painter. During the 1840s and 1850s, Durand began producing small, intimate plein air landscape studies and showing them as finished works at major academic exhibitions. The direct physical transmission of the completed paintings from the wilderness to the gallery became part of their production process and their rhetorical positioning. Although the mobility of these paintings was essential to their meaning, their representational programs emphasized stasis, seeking to trap and slow the viewer’s gaze in a topological tangle of precise surface-oriented detail. Durand’s lifelong involvement in technologies of visual communication (particularly engraving), the chapter argues, responded to the radical reorientation of geographic space introduced by the communications revolution. In particular, the chapter on Durand considers what would become of pictures in the age of the telegraph. Before the telegraph, portability and communicability were essentially synonymous, and words were no faster than pictures. Afterward, pictures were left behind—​t heir stubborn materiality and specific visuality crystallized by their recalcitrance to electronic translation. Images seemed, by contrast with words, heavier, slower, and, for lack of a better term, “stickier” (inasmuch as they were invested with the capacity to gather meaning more readily and release it more slowly). Durand’s landscapes make a virtue of precisely this newly conspicuous adhesiveness of the visual arts.

Wait and See: Distance, Delay, and the Gaze of Art History The methodological principle underlying this book’s approach to early American visual communication is that distance is constitutive. Although the notion that the channel between communicants has formative effects is relatively unexplored in art history, it has been established in semiotics since at least the early twentieth century, when Bronislaw Malinowski and Roman Jakobson identified and described the “phatic” elements of language. These phatic elements are performative acknowledgments of the channel of communication itself, rather than referential or descriptive utterances that convey the content of a message. They create and maintain a stable social-communicative connec-

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tion, acknowledging in the process the delays, diversions, and interceptions that always threaten that connection.16 Consider, for example, transoceanic epistolary writing of the eighteenth century, where phatic urgencies regularly erupt in the text. Here is the beginning of a letter from Helena Pelham to Peter Pelham Jr. (John Singleton Copley’s stepfather), written in 1748: “I begin writing to you without knowing whether it will ever come to your hands or not, but I am determined to write, and hope you will get some of my letters if not all.” 17 (As the media theorist Bernhard Siegert puts it, “In all communication, each expression, appeal, and type of referencing is preceded by a reference to interruption, difference, deviation.”)18 In this phatic prefacing, typical of the epistolary archives of each of the artists I discuss in this book, correspondents struggle to establish the very conditions that make communication possible—​worrying about previous letters unreceived, begging for confirmation of previous missives delivered, accounting for letters lost, correcting for confusions caused by letters that have crossed in the mail or been received out of order. This seemingly trivial meta-epistolary text often runs on for half the length of the letter before the writer gets to the “point.” In long-distance epistolary exchange, the phatic dimension weighs conspicuously upon the referential. Where, however, is the phatic dimension of a picture? How might facture, line weight, color scheme, or composition express something like the following sentiment: “I send this painting to you without knowing whether it will ever come to your hands or not”? How might a picture formally acknowledge its own conditions of transitive possibility? Despite the efflorescence of semiotic art-historical methods over the past quarter century, there have been few sustained considerations of the form and role of the phatic in the sphere of visual representation. Where something like the phatic has entered the art history of this period, it has been treated as a suspicious or undesirable aspect of art, alien to its proper goals and functions. Michael Fried’s critical project is probably the most prominent example; it defines the ideal modern form of beholding as a fully absorbed, instantaneous apprehension that disavows the real spatial and durational conditions of viewing.19 Against such constructions, this book develops an approach to the phatic richness of pictures, arguing for the centrality of the phatic to modern art and the modern experience. The constitutive intervals with which I am concerned are temporal as well as spatial. If traveling pictures are in some sense fabricated out of the spatial distances they cross, then they must simultaneously be made of the delays they both figure and endure. The notion of constitutive delay has permeated critical thought since Derrida theorized différance (a term denoting both difference and delay) as the core of all signification.20 It is also central to Pierre Bourdieu’s lesser-known analysis of strategic deferral. In his Outline of a Theory of Practice, Bourdieu implored scholars to take account of the role of delay and duration in cultural practice. The experiential attributes of delay (anticipation, uncertainty, and speculation, for example) are inescapable dimensions of any action taken by agents immersed in the unidirectional flow of time. Such agents must always

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account for delay and can devise strategies for managing or navigating it. Delay, in other words, is productive: deferral, uncertainty, and opacity help constitute the form and meaning of practices by compelling practitioners to make strategic use of them. To illustrate this principle, Bourdieu used the example of strategic temporality in gift exchange, where the amount of time elapsed between a gift and return gift (or “countergift”) could inflect the interpretation of the gift object itself. More generally, Bourdieu insisted that scholars looking back on historical exchanges not “abolish the interval” that originally separated the actions in question. He was concerned about the obliteration of the entire spectrum of deferral effects and their strategic implementation by structuralist anthropology and the detemporalizing, objectifying nature of historical analysis—​the “pernicious alteration” of “synoptic apprehension.” He called on historians “to reintroduce time, with its rhythm, its orientation, its irreversibility,” into their analyses of historical evidence.21 Bourdieu’s admonitions have a special relevance to art historians, who are uniquely implicated in the synopticism of contemporary epistemological paradigms. The pedagogical and research techniques of the discipline have made simultaneity a precondition of its everyday operations: from the phantasmagoric, necromantic apparatus of the slide (now digital) projector, which mystically and instantly displaces faraway art objects into lecture halls, to the zeitgeist effect of archives and museums, where contemporaneous objects array themselves before the art historian in juxtapositions that were never available to their makers.22 Any group of historical objects made at the same time cannot strictly be considered “contemporaries” because such objects were, in all probability, separated by space. When they are displayed together, this original separation, along with its attendant mistranslation, anticipation, desire, disappointment, or just plain unknowing—​disappears from consideration. As has often been noted, modern art history, by relying on photographic reproductions, has evolved into a disciplinary instantiation of Malraux’s “Museum without Walls”: a collection of wispy replications of the world’s art objects that allows for their analytical recombination without regard to size, medium, or place of origin.23 This museum without walls, needless to say, is also a museum without a loading dock or a freight elevator—​a museum unbothered by the material bulk of art objects or by the shipping and handling ordeals of their actual geographic relations. By treating the state of transit as central to the configuration of the artwork—​treating it as part of the work’s structure, treating its risks, pressures, and deferral function as generative and productive—​I hope to bring this forgotten dimension of materiality into the analysis of painting.24 Although all pictures are in some way material, transit renders their “thingness” conspicuous in a way that the static equilibrium of traditional modes of display cannot approximate. Everything is heavier when it has to be picked up and moved; pictures hefted through space necessarily become “ponderous bodies,” in the words of the nineteenth-century itinerant painter Rufus Porter. However delicate, weightless, and ephemeral its subject matter, as soon as a painting must be shipped,

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it must be weighed and measured, packed and labeled. Postage must be paid. When modern artists and writers have drawn attention to the inescapable materiality of pictures, they have often done so by invoking their transportation. Jasper Johns, describing a painting as a thing as well as an image, used this metaphor, saying the painting “becomes  . . . a kind of real object; you have to pick it up and move it about the room and pack it in a box.”25 And Martin Heidegger put it this way: “If we consider the works in their untouched actuality and do not deceive ourselves, the result is that the works are as naturally present as are things. The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat. A painting  . . . travels from one exhibition to another. Works of art are shipped like coal from the Ruhr and logs from the Black Forest.”26 The thingness of a picture is somehow not definitively established, in other words, until it has to be moved. If there is a whiff of trauma or impropriety in these shipment vignettes of Heidegger and Johns, it derives partly from the progressive neutralizing and repression of the materiality of images by modern practices of reproducing, displaying, and analyzing painting. This dematerialization certainly applies, as I suggest above, to Malraux’s museum without walls; but it also obtains in museums with walls, in pristine “white cube” gallery spaces where pictures hover complaisantly at eye level and appear as effortless mirages of light and color. The art professions, moreover, have specialized and fragmented to the extent that only a few art handlers and move conservators (whose job it is to pack and prepare objects for the physical strain of transit) ever truly experience paintings as inertial burdens. Their multisensory intimacies with paintings are treated as liminal and mysterious activities, carefully shielded from the public and carried on in covered loading docks and secret back chambers of registrar’s offices. Pictures somehow do not deserve to be treated this way; they are meant to sit still and to be looked at, not to be shipped and handled. Even the museum professions have segregated transit and handling from other conservation concerns. Thus Nathan Stolow, one of the leading experts in art transit conservation, has had to plead for integration: “The care of exhibitions in transit should not be considered  . . . as an isolated phase, but part of a ‘care continuum’ ” to which all museum professionals should attend.27 My analysis in the pages that follow reintegrates transit into the “care continuum” for anyone concerned with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, not only conservators and museum professionals but also historians and theorists of art and visual culture. In considering the material mobility of pictures, I have turned frequently to models of object movement developed elsewhere in the humanities and sciences—​particularly the rich concoction of anthropology, science studies, philosophy, and political economy that is now known as material culture studies (or, to borrow Bill Brown’s more felicitous term, thing theory).28 A nuanced analytical vocabulary has developed in thing theory for the portability, circulation, exchange, and reciprocity of objects. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, for example, in his essay on commodity states, uses the terminology

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of movement and stillness to distinguish between states and categories of commodities—​commodities travel on paths, engage in flows and diversions, or remain relatively static—​“enclaved,” or “terminal.”29 In Appadurai’s work, whole spectra of meaning hinge on the speed or slowness, ease or difficulty, with which an object moves through the world. Likewise, the foundational literatures on the gift economy (a central topos in thing theory) also trace the essence of exchange and movement. Marcel Mauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Annette Weiner, and Jacques Derrida all examine the issue of the inalienability of objects—​in other words, the powers of retention attributed to them as they move through space and time and their consequent ability to forge social relationships and build networks as they move.30 Bruno Latour and the so-called actor-network theorists with whom he is associated in his science studies work are also insisting that moving objects are agents of cultural formation. Latour advocates the practice of “slowciology,” arguing that the seemingly all-encompassing collective entity called the social is always and only the sum effect of individual processes of material transmission. “We have to be very practical again,” says Latour. Society is not “about grandiose epistemological questions but about vehicles, movements, displacements, and transportation systems.”31 Cultural and social analysis, in this model, must first be locomotive analysis. Theories of the agency of objects are also crucial here. In the past, art-historical models of travel and transit have been constructed primarily by examining the travels of artists. From this perspective, artistic geographies emerge from the biographical, psychological, or phenomenological contours of the artist’s experience. But the artist’s viewpoint is of limited use in understanding the movements of what we might call unchaperoned pictures: what happens when the works themselves serve as emissaries or delegates between people and places. Such pictures must be invested with what we would now call artificial intelligence, which emerges from and responds to their function as delegates. The concept of agency in both the humanities and the sciences is undergoing a wholesale revision as traditionally inviolate boundaries between persons and things soften.32 For Latour, humans do not stand over and above “things” in a condition of absolute sovereignty and agency but instead form “collectives” of social action with nonhuman actors. “Social action is  . . . shifted or delegated to different types of actors which are able to transport the action further through other modes of action, other types of forces altogether.”33 Edwin Hutchins likewise describes objects and technologies as participants, along with humans, in broad networks of “distributed intelligence.”34 W. J. T. Mitchell, moreover, posits that pictures may function as “vital signs,” by which he means “not merely signs for living things but signs as living things.”35 I hasten to add that the ambiguous agency I attribute to pictures throughout this book is not merely a projection of contemporary theoretical concerns. To the ears of early Americans, claims for the liveliness of pictures would have had a thoroughly familiar ring, especially when it came to pictures on the move. Added to the residual sense of haunting or possession that viewers already located in portraits and other representa-

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tions at the time (consider the glowering Puritan portraits in Hawthorne) were the effects of sentience bestowed upon objects by transmission, exchange, and movement. Early literary and philosophical explorations of what we would now call artificial intelligence often meditated on the animating effects of transit. The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the widespread popularity of “circulation narratives” or “it-narratives,” which were tales narrated from the perspective of inanimate objects (for example, shillings and pincushions) moved from place to place and exchanged between disparate individuals. The incomplete subjectivity attributed to pictures-in-transit also tied them to the most urgent cultural debates of the antebellum period. As many material culture theorists have recognized, the rhetoric of the partially animate or cognizant object in American culture of this period was inseparable from debates about slavery, which pivoted on the analogously uncertain subjectivity of the slave as both person and property. Bill Brown has argued that because slaves were essentially defined as animate objects, any American discussion of animate objects is necessarily compounded by the specter of slavery: “The point is not only that the inanimate comes to life but that the history of this ontological ambiguity—​human or thing—​is precisely what remains repressed within U.S. culture.”36 Transporting Visions is not a book about slavery, but the pressure of slavery’s conceptual and political cohabitation of its themes does erupt in the text, as in my discussion of the black figure in Copley’s Watson and the Shark as a surrogate for the sensory disjunction of transatlantic communication. I hope, ultimately, that this book opens new avenues for other scholars thinking about slavery and diaspora in this period and suggests new ways to consider how the problem of slavery thoroughly informed (and interrogated) the problem of representation itself in the years leading up to the Civil War.

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1 DILEMMAS OF DELIVERY IN COPLEY’S ATL ANTIC

John Singleton Copley’s Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham) (fig. 1) is best known, indeed almost exclusively known, for its role in a famous transatlantic tale. In 1765, when the picture was made, Copley (1738–​1815) was the premier portrait painter to the mercantile elite in the colonial city of Boston. His considerable skills were largely selftaught; although prints and theory books had made him familiar with European art, he had had little formal instruction and few opportunities to study oil paintings in the flesh, and he had never ventured outside New England. Twenty-seven years old, flush with success as a provincial portraitist but determined someday to attain the exalted status of a history painter on the European model, he wanted to know how his work would be received by the arbiters of aesthetics on the other side of the Atlantic. To that end, he painted Boy with a Flying Squirrel, packed it up, and shipped it to London for exhibition at the Society of Artists.1 Months later, he received the welcome news that no less an authority than Sir Joshua Reynolds had called the painting a “very wonderfull Performance.” Although Reynolds and his colleagues noticed a certain overzealous attention to detail, a certain “over minuteness” in the composition, they recognized Copley’s precocious natural talent and encouraged him to come to London for more training as soon as possible.2 Copley, however, remained in Boston for another eight years, sending paintings across the Atlantic for exhibition whenever possible. When political events preceding the Revolution forced his departure from America in 1774, he was welcomed into London art circles, where

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Figure 1 John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765. Oil on canvas, 30⅜ × 25⅛ in. (77.2× 63.8 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of the artist’s great-granddaughter. 1978.297. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

he went on to become a major figure in late eighteenth-century British art, known particularly for his innovations in modern history painting. The transatlantic passage of A Boy with a Flying Squirrel has long served as an originary episode in histories of American art. Because the painting’s exhibition in London brought Copley’s work into direct juxtaposition with more cosmopolitan fare, the tale of its passage has frequently anchored comparative studies attempting to establish essential differences between American and European or British painting. Many of these studies have used the painting to position Copley as a progenitor of a homegrown American empiricism, a uniquely “unspoiled vision” attributable only to painters in America (this despite the patently global implications of the work’s transatlantic passage). In more recent Copley scholarship, less beholden to the rhetorical imperatives of the “American Mind” school, the interpretation of the painting’s journey has shifted. The painting is now less likely to be cited as evidence of an essentially American aesthetic than to be interpreted as one of many examples of Copley’s attempts to perform British patterns of refinement in a busy Atlantic world of consumption and trade.3 In each of these narratives (whatever their ultimate aim), Boy with a Flying Squirrel is rightly seen to derive its historical significance from its transatlantic relay. But in every such narrative, that relay itself has been almost completely elided. In each telling, the painting’s passage across the ocean is for all intents and purposes treated synoptically: Copley sends, Reynolds receives, Copley hears back—​all in the space of a sentence or two. The massive expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, its peculiar navigational and cultural contours, the long delays it imposed on Copley’s aesthetic transaction—​none of these obstacles has been considered relevant to the close interpretation of the painting, which remains always unproblematically present, to both the historians and the historical protagonists. Never in the telling does it suffer as unseen cargo, as a painting on hold in the hold while it crosses an uncertain ocean. Such spatiotemporal compression has the implicit effect of representing the distance between Boston and London as an inert gap, a predictable intermission that remains external to all art-historical concerns and leaves no trace on Copley’s painting. I argue here, by contrast, that Boy with a Squirrel cannot be understood without taking into account the protraction and difficulty of its long-distance transit, and indeed that the challenge of transatlantic distance deeply affected all of Copley’s work of the 1760s and 1770s. This chapter suggests how the view of Copley’s work might change if, in essence, we put the Atlantic back into Copley’s Atlantic world. In making such suggestions, I follow Pierre Bourdieu and others in insisting on the formative powers of distance and delay. As discussed in the introduction, Bourdieu admonished scholars looking back on historical exchanges not to “abolish the interval” that originally separated the actions in question. He argued that the deferral and uncertainty that thoroughly shape all human activity are precisely what the analytical eye of hindsight tends to obliterate, and that historians must “reintroduce time [and by

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extension space], with its rhythm, its orientation, its irreversibility,” into the analysis of cultural production.4 To examine Copley’s paintings in transit, and the challenges attending their movement, is one way to reinstate the slow Atlantic voyage as a formative interval in eighteenth-century art and material culture.5 As David Harvey and others have argued, contemporary globalized space (and its attendant “postmodernity”) has emerged as techniques of instantaneous communication and information transfer have obliterated experiential distance.6 Synchronization techniques have created modern cartography and global positioning and have allowed contact between distant interlocutors without delay or apparent physical resistance, bringing about the “age of the world picture,” to borrow from Heidegger’s title for his essay describing a world that seems apprehensible at a glance.7 A persistent challenge facing scholars of the early modern Atlantic world is to avoid projecting this synoptic awareness onto the slower, heavier, and darker field that comprised the eighteenthcentury experience of empire and expansion. Historical narratives must avoid replicating, at the level of method, the seemingly frictionless deracinations of contemporary globalization: objects should not leave one side of the Atlantic and bob up immediately on the other as if beamed there by satellite or, what seems the same thing, by the historian’s twin powers of hindsight and overview. For even if early modernity is commonly considered the dawn of globalization, the eighteenth-century Anglo-American world was not in fact a simultaneous and co-present field but emerged instead from conditions of belatedness and epistemological fragmentation.

Boy with a Flying Squirrel as “Sea Piece” To approach Boy with a Flying Squirrel without perpetrating what Alan Sekula has called “the forgetting of the sea,” one must think about the painting not only as a portrait or genre painting but also as a marine painting or, to use a contemporary British term, a “sea piece.”8 Copley’s picture hardly resembles a sea piece by any of the usual criteria—​ no foundering sloops in choppy harbors here, not even the miniature naval composition sometimes found in the background of the artist’s more conventional portraits (see fig. 2). The painting is a sea piece, rather, inasmuch as it addresses the multivalent challenges of the transmarine displacement it was created to endure. In this sense, the painting might itself be said to function like a ship: it is a vehicle that must be properly framed and configured for the successful dispatch, preservation, and delivery of its (pictorial) cargo.9 I do not wish to overdraw the painting-as-ship analogy; I introduce it primarily to trouble the assumption that a painting can refer to the sea only by mimetically representing it. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, in their discussion of the “New Thalassology,” have argued that transoceanic vehicles embody, in their very formation, the social, technological, and temporal dimensions of the oceans they cross—​because they are designed to navigate through particular risk regimes, topographical contours,

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and “connectivities” (communication networks). The form and configuration of Copley’s cargo responded to similar imperatives.10 It is difficult to overestimate the significance that Boy with a Flying Squirrel held for Copley: it was to serve as his calling card for a group of artists whom he idolized and hoped someday to equal, and its success or failure in London would determine the course of his ambitions as a painter. Although its relatively small size (30⅜ by 25⅛ in.) might initially suggest otherwise, Boy with a Flying Squirrel was by far the most consequential painting Copley had yet produced in America. He was, after all, painting a picture specifically for presentation (as he said) “to the inspection of the first artists in the World.”11 Boy with a Flying Squirrel was Copley’s first major noncommissioned work, his first exhibition painting, and the first canvas he produced for a transatlantic audience.12 In painting for these purposes, moreover, he departed not only from his own previous work but also from British portrait and genre conventions more broadly. Indeed, looking back on the painting ten years later, in 1775, Copley attributed its success at the Society of Artists exhibition to its departure from expectations. It was “singled out among the others,” unique.13 The painting’s eccentricities range from seemingly insignificant iconographical irregularities to major structural and generic shifts. For example, in no other image did Copley feature a drinking glass (in period terms, a tumbler). Granted, the ostensible purpose of the glass here is simply to showcase the artist’s hard-won technical skills in rendering transparency and reflection. But surely a glass of water is a curiously overdetermined object to include in one’s first transatlantic painting, especially since the boy’s hand gesture, and with it the delicate suspensional arc of the squirrel’s chain, carefully spans the precise diameter of the lip. Whatever else might be said about this humble motif (I return to it below), it undeniably involves the passage of a sensory chain across a body of water and thereby presents in microcosm the plight or task of the painting itself. In addition, the disposition of the background drapery is unusual. Whereas Copley’s earlier (and later) paintings tend to follow the Van Dyckian convention of arranging drapery on one side of the painting as a threshold opening out to a space behind the figure (compare his Nicholas Boylston, fig. 2), here Copley drapes a flat and relatively symmetrical curtain behind the boy’s head, blocking off the background rather than engineering a relation between the sitter and a larger setting. The curtain, then, functions, not as “a stock stage-set” (as James Flexner put it) but as a conspicuous digression from stock portrait conventions.14 The curtain confines the portrait to a relief-like space, supporting Copley’s turn to a severe profile format in the painting. Neither the significance nor the strangeness of this choice has been widely acknowledged. Profiles were unprecedented in Copley’s work up to that time, and they were unusual in finished oil portraits of the mid-eighteenth century more generally.15 The painting is also the first in which Copley organized his composition around

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Figure 2 John Singleton Copley, Nicholas Boylston (1716–​1771), 1767. Oil on canvas, 50⅛ × 39¾ in. (127.3 × 101.1 cm). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Harvard University Portrait Collection. Bequest of Ward Nicholas Boylston to Harvard College, 1828. H90. Imaging Department © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Figure 3 John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Theodore Atkinson (Frances Deering Wentworth), 1765. Oil on canvas, 51 × 40 in. (129.5 × 101.6 cm). Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photography by Dwight Primiano.

a highly polished table surface. Copley had already begun to experiment with such tables—​in his portraits Nathaniel Allen (1763, Honolulu Academy of Arts) and Samuel Phillips Savage (1764)—​but only with this painting did he begin to use the motif as a metapictorial device rather than a discrete studio prop. Here the surface of the table entirely transects the horizontal expanse of the canvas, mediating between the space of the viewer and that of the sitter as well as producing reflections that underpin the structure of the composition and contribute to the internal patterning already noted. Copley returned to this motif in his most ambitious later American works, but he first deployed it in Boy with a Flying Squirrel. The squirrel is also worth some preliminary remarks. As Paul Staiti and Roland Fleischer have shown, chained squirrels held daintily by women and children were fairly common in colonial American portraits. As an emblematic device, the squirrel signified diligence and patience as well as the proper Lockean education of the sitter, whose own refinement was indicated by and reflected in his or her successful domestication of the wild creature.16 In 1765 Copley produced two other squirrel paintings: John Bee Holmes (private collection) and Mrs. Theodore Atkinson (fig. 3). These seem experimental when compared with Boy with a Flying Squirrel; neither of the other squirrels is as precisely integrated into the composition as the one in the Pelham picture. Note, too, that Henry Pelham’s pet—​not the sitter—​is the creature that makes visual contact with the viewer. The London-bound squirrel serves a pivotal structural role and bears exceptional powers of formal condensation that I address more fully as my argument unfolds.

Copley’s Atlantic The squirrel in Boy with a Flying Squirrel is not just any squirrel; it is a flying squirrel (hence the delicate ruff of skin along its belly), a species native to North America with thematic resonance in travel and movement. These connotations were acknowledged in the eighteenth century: ships named Squirrel and Flying Squirrel passed frequently through Boston in the 1750s and 1760s.17 Such resonance would not have been lost on Copley, who lived in a historical moment and in a community in which people knew the names of ships; Copley understood the metaphoric and mechanical dimensions of the shipping world to which he would entrust his painting. He was born in Boston when the city was the undisputed center of American maritime commercial activity. He spent the first ten years of his life in his mother’s tobacco shop on Long Wharf, an immense pier jutting (then as now) a quarter mile into the center of Boston Harbor (fig. 4). Copley would have awakened each morning to a noisy, smelly, colorful panorama of merchant shipping activity. In his twenties (having relocated a few blocks inland), he built his painting career on commissions from prosperous merchant families like the Hancocks, who ran the largest transatlantic shipping firm in Boston. Four years after painting Boy with a Flying Squirrel he married Susannah Clarke, the daughter of one of the key Boston agents for the British East India

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Figure 4 James Carwitham after William Burgis, A South East View of the Great Town of Boston in New England in America, ca. 1764. Colored engraving. New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, I. N. Phelps Stokes Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. Photograph courtesy of New York Public Library / Art Resource, New York.

Company.18 In short, Copley’s life and livelihood depended, in virtually every particular, on the profitable transportation of objects and information across and around the Atlantic Ocean. In the eighteenth century the British Empire constituted, in Joseph Roach’s phrase, an “oceanic interculture.”19 It was a culture whose very survival, as well as its habits of thought and expression, was bound up in the effects of oceanic transport on objects, communication, and community. Those effects derived largely from the heterosynchronies that determined all transoceanic communication. Even without pirate attacks, navigational errors, or bad weather, it took at least a month to cross the Atlantic. This delay was hardly predictable or rational (hence the inadvisability of treating it as an abstract intermission). Passage was asymmetrical. The distance between Boston and London was roughly twenty-nine hundred miles. Crossing it eastward toward London took about four weeks, but traveling toward Boston, against the westerly currents, took on average almost twice as long, seven and a half weeks. The trip to Boston was thus regarded as “uphill” whereas the trip to London was “downhill.” The Atlantic also served as a temporal scrambling agent, frustrating the linear sequencing and coordination of events. Five ships launched from London in a particular order, for example, did not necessarily arrive at Boston in that same sequence. As Ian K. Steele has shown, the effects

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of this discontinuity could be seen in early eighteenth-century colonial newspapers, whose editors had to devise elaborate mechanisms to contend with irregular shiploads of information and news that “resolutely refused to come in order.”20 These long, uncertain intervals meant that concerns about decay, delay, and miscarriage affected the very form of transatlantic communication, including Copley’s, and that the ambient threats of shipping applied to his cargo as much as to any other. Copley was painfully aware of the risks he took in shipping a painting across the Atlantic. His papers and those of his family are full of correspondence about lost and delayed transatlantic messages and gifts, and also include many discussions of damage and potential damage to paintings in shipment. Copley was sometimes asked to repair pictures by other artists, including one sent to John Hurd from England, which “by some bad Stowage in the Vessell [had] taken considerable Damage.”21 A letter from Copley’s wife to his daughter Elizabeth talks about what to do if a painting should “contract a fog” in consequence of “being shut up, or by the dampness of the sea.”22 Copley’s letters pertaining specifically to Boy with a Flying Squirrel demonstrate his keen awareness of the painting’s organic delicacy: he worried about a “changing of the colours” of the paint during the long sea passage to London. Wanting to get the work to London in time for the Society of Artists exhibition, he appears to have sent it before the paint was fully set and dry but felt it better to “risque the picture” than to risk waiting another year for the opportunity to exhibit.23 Other letters announce the outright loss of his works in transit. In the spring of 1765, probably just as he was beginning work on Boy with a Flying Squirrel, a group of his pastels was lost in a wreck en route to Halifax: “I am sorry to have the Mortification to tell You,” says the letter breaking the news, that “the Vessel  . . . was lost about 30 leagues to the westward of this port, and your drawings, together with several other things, have become the prey of the barbarous Inhabitants.”24 To ship any cargo successfully required, in addition to safe passage across the water, a network of flexible intelligence that could guide it through the unpredictable real-time conditions it would encounter on and after its journey. Because information at the time moved no faster than freight, transatlantic merchants could not gain current knowledge of the market conditions on the other side of the ocean, and the anticipated exchange rate for a shipload of goods often needed to be renegotiated when the materials reached their destination. Commodities could not negotiate for themselves, so cargo had to be accompanied by human agents. In the English Atlantic during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these were the so-called supercargoes, sent across the ocean along with the cargo to oversee its stowage, manage its marketing on the other side, and report the results back to the sender. For large shipping outfits, the supercargo system was often augmented by a group of trusted agents resident in various ports who would receive and handle the arriving goods.25 In conveying Boy with a Flying Squirrel to London, Copley assembled his own team of mercantile aesthetic negotiators, who were partly successful in delivering the painting to the Society of Artists. He first gave the painting (which was almost certainly shipped

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stretched, in a box) to a Mr. Roger Hale, who included it with his baggage on the ship to London and served therefore as a kind of supercargo.26 Once across the Atlantic, Hale delivered it to Captain R. G. Bruce, a merchant navy friend of Copley’s then living in London.27 Bruce conveyed it to a certain Lord Buchan (also known as Lord Cardross), who, fancying himself a familiar of Reynolds’s because he had sat for a portrait a year earlier, took it to Reynolds’s studio.28 What transpired next remains unclear. In 1948 James Flexner filled in the scene in Reynolds’s studio with unsubstantiated details, claiming that Buchan forgot the name of the painter whose work he had conveyed to Reynolds. Benjamin West, who was living in London, stopped by to have a look and identified the wood used to construct the frame as American pine. Buchan was then sent out again to fetch Bruce (“a large, seafaring American,” according to Flexner), who revealed the identity of the painter, but Reynolds “was so excited that he forgot to write down” Copley’s name.29 Whatever the actual contours of the confusion in Reynolds’s studio, it is true that when the painting was shown at the Society of Artists in 1766, it was mislabeled as having been painted by “William Copeley.”30 If nothing else, the transatlantic adventure of Boy with a Flying Squirrel confirmed the fragility of the link between cargo and information during this period and the difficulty of ensuring that any object sent across the ocean would be advantageously conveyed, marketed, or translated. It also helps explain the extent of the painting’s reliance on maritime networks and naval intermediaries for its own criticism and interpretation. Consider that Captain Bruce not only did the work of collecting Copley’s painting when it reached London but also, once it was exhibited, eavesdropped on the conversations of viewers, interviewed Reynolds about the merits of the work, and reported back to Copley what he had learned. Everything we know today about Reynolds’s analysis of Boy with a Flying Squirrel—​all the piquant period statements about the picture’s “wonderfull” qualities—​comes from the pen of a merchant captain rather than directly from Reynolds himself. One of the key documents in early criticism of American art is, in more ways than one, a form of maritime art criticism.

Pictorial Mobility: The Numismatic Profile As he prepared for the project of sending a painting to London for exhibition, Copley faced aesthetic risks as well as shipping risks. He needed not only to secure the smooth delivery of the painting as an object, but also to ensure the portability of the painting’s illusionary content. Meeting these requirements meant reconsidering his usual approach to portraiture. His eager reading of European art theory texts had taught him that straight portraiture could not produce the abstract generalizations that characterized the grand manner, which he longed someday to practice. (“An History-painter paints man in general,” Reynolds later said, “a Portrait-Painter, a particular man, and consequently a defective model.”)31 In reality, the Society of Artists exhibitions held thus far in London had shown plenty

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of portraits, but most of these had been “elevated” by dressing the sitters as allegorical figures or by focusing on illustrious or celebrity sitters.32 Copley’s knowledge of contemporary portraiture in England would have been largely restricted to this kind of portrait, because the information he had about the current state of portraiture was embodied almost entirely in the imported engravings that he frequently adapted for his own portraits. Such engravings featured noble or celebrated sitters by definition, for a portrait would be engraved only when the sitter was illustrious (or notorious) enough to inspire a wide market for the reproductions.33 Portable heads, in other words, were by definition “illustrious heads”; pictorial portability was equated with generality. Note that this correlation served to equate universality, mobility, and commercial potential. In the long-distance transatlantic transport of these images, the values of elevated universality and the values of commodity marketability become impossible to separate. Thus Copley knew that his typical portraits of colonial merchants, to speak metaphorically, would not travel well (see fig. 2). They would be dragged down in an aesthetic sense by their specificity and singularity, qualities that would lash them to the particular time and place of their production. Indeed, as Margaretta Lovell has argued, the function of privately commissioned portraiture in eighteenth-century New England was to be illiquid in precisely this manner. Once painted, portraits had a negligible exchange value and were unlikely to be sold. They were, to use an anthropological term, terminal commodities. Unlike other possessions (such as silver) whose increasing fungibility in a market economy threatened their suitability as heritable objects, portraits, characterized by singularity and specificity, were likely to stay in families from one generation to the next, reinforcing familial—​particularly patrilineal—​ties.34 Portraits in eighteenthcentury America, in a sense, had an adhesive function. Copley, when painting Boy with a Flying Squirrel, had to devise ways to overcome the fundamental intransitivity of his oil portraits of colonial merchants and provincial ecclesiastics. He had to work to make his painting move. The imperative to generalize his portraits for transatlantic transit helps account for many of Copley’s choices as he produced his exhibition piece. He chose to paint Pelham as a boy of about ten rather than as the young man of sixteen or seventeen that he actually was in 1765.35 In exaggerating Pelham’s youth, Copley steered the painting toward the generic and away from the specific. Eighteenth-century paintings of children in both France and England had connotations of generality. The Lockean interest in education at the time turned such paintings into typological explorations of human development; they were also infused with a synthetic, generalized temporality, inasmuch as the image of youth was not meant solely to convey the character of the child at the moment of depiction but was also understood to imply or foresee the future character of the adult.36 Copley’s decision to paint Pelham in strict profile was an even more important generalizing strategy, however. Boy with a Flying Squirrel is the only single-sitter profile painting Copley produced in America.37 Although profile portraits became fashionable with the spread of neoclassical aesthetics in the later eighteenth century, they were less com-

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Figure 5 Jean-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737. Oil on canvas, 23¾ × 28¼ in. (60.3 × 71.8 cm). The National Gallery, London. Bequeathed by Mrs. Edith Cragg, as part of the John Webb Bequest, 1925. © The National Gallery, London.

mon in Europe and exceedingly rare in America in 1765. Precedents for Copley’s treatment existed: the artist had almost certainly seen, in engravings, Jean-Siméon Chardin’s genre paintings of boys at tables from earlier in the century (fig. 5).38 But even though Chardin’s example undeniably operates here (I return to it in more detail below), it does not fully explain the resonance of the profile in Boy with a Squirrel, which also draws on other conventional associations of the profile view in eighteenth-century England. In British art of the mid-eighteenth century, profiles were associated with commemorative or honorific modes of representation. This association derived from the relation of the profile format to ancient profile medallions or coins. Profiles often featured distinct allusions to ancient numismatic imagery, and many were deliberately rendered to look like ancient portrait medals. This connection is so important to the transatlantic relay of Boy with a Flying Squirrel that it is appropriate to call the painting a numismatic profile.39 The eighteenth-century art treatises Copley had read usually grouped portrait medals with ancient sculpture as ideal classical forms the modern artist should emulate

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to improve his compositions. Jonathan Richardson, explaining how portraits might best be injected with an air of dignified generality and classical authority, wrote: “Painters should take a Face, and make an Antique Medal, or Bas-Relief of it.”40 Copley’s deployment of the profile format thus lends the painting an air of ancient detachment, distancing and generalizing it and helping to rid it of its particularist ballast. Even if Copley had never seen a profile portrait medallion, he would have had opportunities to see engraved profile portraits that mimicked the medallion format. Copley’s friend the Boston engraver Nathaniel Hurd, whose portrait Copley was painting about the time he was working on Boy with a Flying Squirrel, had produced at least one such image. The curator Ellen Miles has identified this composition, dated 1762, as the first produced in the American colonies that incorporated profile portraits (fig. 6). Hurd makes no attempt to integrate the spatial world of the carefully framed medal-like profiles with an existing composition on the page. He represents them in clipeus, which, as Marcia Pointon has explained, is the nested framing of an image in a cartouche, as if it had been transposed or “clipped” from one place and inserted into another. Hurd confirmed this clipeus function in the advertisement for the engraving, noting that if cut along the circular borders, the portraits could be made “fit for Gentlemen and Ladies to put in their Watches.”41 The imago clipeata tradition dates from antiquity and most likely derives from the practice of soldiers who bore the emperor’s portrait on a circular shield before them as they moved. The format was then used in Early Christian art to provide a cartouche around the figure of Christ so that his body could be represented without implying that it was fully present in the scene along with the other figures. Pointon argues that mideighteenth-century profiles were so closely associated with the clipeus form that they adopted its inherent structural significance as a “bearing-forth” of a detached or distant image. The profile, in other words, was understood as a transported vision that made absence present without fully integrating it into the space of the viewer: “The clipeus is used to indicate absence: the device draws together those absent and those present.”42 It was structurally identified as an image from elsewhere, a moving and mobile picture, detached from any coherent relation to a specific ground. These implications of displacement were also reinforced by the Plinian connotations of profile portraiture in the eighteenth century. Pliny’s account of the origin of painting in his Natural History describes how a Corinthian maiden, whose lover was about to depart for war, traced the outline of his profile on the wall (fig. 7). This anecdote was common currency in European cultural discourse of the 1760s; it became a frequent subject of British painters by the 1770s and an animating idea behind the popularity of silhouettes and silhouette cutting later in the century.43 In each case, the profile became a token of loss and departure. It seems logical to suggest that Copley used the profile in Boy with a Flying Squirrel to borrow its portability as well as its prestige. The profile serves as pictorial packaging—​a way of preparing a portrait for geographic and temporal displacement. James

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Figure 6 Nathaniel Hurd, Britons Behold the Best of Kings, 1762. Engraving, hand colored, 4½ × 5⅞ in. (11.5 × 15 cm). Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.

Bunn, in his article “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism,” argues that the profusion of transported objects arriving in England from the ever-expanding reaches of the global empire required that these objects be cut off from the local and specific contexts that defined their original meaning.44 Copley’s profile serves as a pictorial version of that globalizing commodity operation: inasmuch as its deployment of the profile was inseparable from themes of displacement, it was itself a form of excised portraiture. The profile permits the painting to enter an abstract space of transmission and exchange. The profile also draws the painting into the associational orbit of what was perhaps the most mobile and circulatory of all eighteenth-century objects: the coin (fig. 8).45 During the eighteenth century, as British culture continued to grapple with the advent of modern finance, the money economy, and the attendant volatility of value, the semiotic function of coins and other currency was a topic of intense debate.46 A common subject of discussion was the purported capacity of coinage to serve as a stable, unimpeachable, and universal form of transmission. As David Alvarez has argued, Whig theorists like Joseph Addison showed “a great deal of interest in how information can be transmitted without the risk of interpretation” and turned to the numismatic image as a superior

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Figure 7 Joseph Wright, The Corinthian Maid, 1782–​84. Oil on canvas, 41⅞ × 51½ in. (106.3 × 130.8 cm). National Gallery of Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 1983.1.46. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

method of communication that could provide a direct connection to antiquity by virtue of its compelling aesthetic force. Ancient coins were understood to have bridged space and time in sprawling empires. And this numismatic transport function had been neatly reinforced for moderns by John Locke, who, in his second treatise on government, argued that specie money circumvents the limitations of time and space because it is portable and does not decay.47 It serves as a reliable medium for the storage and transportation of value. The profile view, then, whether derived from medallion, coin, or other clipeus format, embodied not only “distance” in the honorific sense but also distance in the geographical sense. David Hume explicitly equated ancient portrait medals with world travelers. Explaining why “a very great distance encreases our esteem and admiration for an object,” he wrote: “A great traveller, though in the same chamber, will pass for a very extraordinary person; as a Greek medal, even in our cabinet, is always esteemed a valuable curiosity. Here the object, by a natural transition, conveys our views to the

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Figure 8 Royal Mint, London, half guinea with laureate bust of George III, 1765. Gold coin with milled edge, ⅞ in. dia. (2.1 cm). Museum Victoria, Melbourne. Photograph: Museum Victoria.

distance.”48 This idea that medals and coins bear information from afar was also widely explored in new literary formats that drew upon the fluency and mobility of currency in order to imagine narratives of global connection. Consider Joseph Addison’s wellknown essay “Adventures of a Shilling” (1710), which describes a shilling heaving up onto its edge and speaking, in a “soft Silver Sound,” an account of its adventures.49 The shilling describes its birth in a Peruvian silver mine and then proceeds through a narrative of its various owners and the objects for which it was exchanged. Addison’s tale is an early example of the so-called circulation narratives or It-narratives popular throughout Britain and the American colonies in the eighteenth century. In these narratives adventures are related from the perspective of an inanimate object (often a piece of currency) that is exchanged between disparate individuals. Other examples include The Adventures of a Rupee, the Adventures of a Bank Note, the Adventures of a Pincushion, The Genuine Memoirs and Most Surprizing Adventures of a Very Unfortunate Goose-Quill, and so forth. As Liz Bellamy has argued, these narratives emerged as attempts to gain symbolic perspective on the global market economy—​a growing network of exchange, influence, and agency that remained too complex to be perceived by any one individual. If circulation narratives granted coins and other commodity objects a voice, it was because in the new global exchange networks, to which no individual could have anything but a fragmentary access, these objects themselves were the only witnesses to the comprehensive sum of their own movements. It-narratives attest to the emergence of Boy with a Flying Squirrel from a cultural moment that was actively exploring the agency of circulating objects in the process of binding together a far-flung empire.50

From Clipeus to Conversation Copley turned to the profile because it provided a pictorial model of honorific generalization and efficacious long-distance transmission. Yet Boy with a Flying Squirrel is not

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simply a profile. Other elements of the painting seem to contradict or at least to temper its governing clipeus effect. The polished tabletop, in particular, brokers a complex transformation between the background and the foreground of the painting, shifting the primary surface of illusionary articulation from the vertical, parallel plane of the profile to the orthogonal tabletop and transforming the primary rhetorical mode of the painting from the detached or distracted air of the clipeus to the pointed address of the table corner as it thrusts toward the viewer. It is as if Copley felt that he had to deliver his honorific, generic profile portrait to the viewer in a more intimate, particularizing, and sociable fashion. Here we might return briefly to Addison’s “Adventures of a Shilling” and note that his perambulatory coin undergoes a similar social and spatial transformation. Addison’s narrative, after all, is not simply demonstrative. It does not simply show the reader a coin but enlivens the coin as a conversational partner. Addison dramatizes this transformation spatially toward the beginning of the narrative: from its position lying flat on the table, the shilling “reared it self on its Edge, and turning the Face towards me, opened its Mouth, and in a soft Silver Sound gave me the following Account of his Life and Adventures.”51 By an act of convivial rotation, heaving itself up from the flat surface to engage the three-dimensional space of the narrator’s chamber, the shilling turns itself from an inanimate, reified object-from-afar, a mute specimen of exchange, into a speaking object in a real-time interaction. The shilling turns from a profile into a talking head. If Addison achieved this fantastical transformation by literary means, Copley did something similar by grafting together two otherwise incompatible conventions of painting: the profile and the conversation piece. The profile portion of Boy with a Flying Squirrel evoked transit and generalization, but the tabletop and its attendant structure of spatial address belonged more securely to genres designed to evoke intimate contact and familiarity. The tabletop echoes the frontal sill that projected illusionistically toward the viewer in Renaissance portraiture, as well as a variety of threshold devices in Dutch and French genre painting. But it evokes most directly (in spirit if not precisely in configuration) the portrait convention of the “conversation piece” that emerged in eighteenthcentury Britain as performance and exemplification of a newly urgent form of polite sociality in the public sphere. Evolving from seventeenth-century courtly portraiture, Dutch group portraiture, and Godfrey Kneller’s kit-kat portraits of Whig politicians, the conversation piece presumed equivalence and familiarity between sitters in the painting and between the sitters and the viewer. This rhetoric of familiarity in the conversation piece was partly secured by tables across which the sitters gazed, approximating live contact. In these pictures, the older side table or pedestal table standard in seventeenth-century portraiture, used to support a sitter leaning on it with diffident courtly nonchalance, rotates to the front of the painting, as if to set a place for the viewer and translate the picture plane from a voyeuristic threshold into one of companionable exchange (fig. 9).52 And as Stephen Copley has argued, the ideal sociality of the conversational mode that was reenacted pictorially in

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Figure 9 Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne; Henry Clinton, 7th Earl of Lincoln, ca. 1721. Oil on canvas, 50 × 58¾ in. (127.0 × 149.2 cm). National Portrait Gallery, London. Given by the Art Fund, 1945. Primary Collection, NPG 3215. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

the subject matter of the conversation piece was also deployed as the governing metaphor for its reception: “The process of appreciation itself is figured as a species of conversational exchange in terms that at times blur the distinctions between the material and social associations of the term.”53 Looking at art presumes, on this model, direct interlocution, ease, and familiarity. Copley, in painting Boy with a Flying Squirrel, was in a bind: he needed to produce an adequately distanced and generalized painting, but he also wanted to begin an intimate conversation—​to join, by proxy, the community of painters in London that he admired. His painting needed to cross two distances: twenty-nine hundred miles of Atlantic ocean and a space in many respects more difficult to navigate successfully: the thirty-six inches or so representing the conversational span between itself and its future viewer in London. The incompatibility of these aims and the awkwardness of Copley’s absentee

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position (thousands of miles from the nearest English tavern or coffeehouse, Copley was automatically excluded from this sort of intimate conversation), help account for the painting’s strained and bifurcated spatial configuration.54 Boy with a Flying Squirrel balances contradictory modes: the distant ideality of the portable profile and the intimacy and exclusivity of the conversation piece. One mode accepts its belatedness; the other disavows it to claim the viewer as a direct interlocutor. The painting performs an internal transformation from profile medallion to conversation piece, from an aesthetics of distance, estrangement, and exteriority to one of intimacy, liveliness, and embodiment. In this sense, Boy with a Flying Squirrel performs and reflects the challenges to the social body posed by a transatlantic interculture. The production of transatlantic community requires the mobilization of generalized tokens of communication and exchange like coins and profiles. But because those same tokens produce fragmentation and detachment, they must be incorporated or reembodied upon disembarkation. Universalizing projects of transport and communication in the eighteenth century (empires, encyclopedias, economies) had to manage the coding of the particular into the general and to prepare for its re-particularization at the other end. Portable generalizations had to be properly reintegrated into specific material situations. For Boy with a Flying Squirrel to overcome the social fragmentation of Copley’s relationship to the art community in London, the temporal detachment embodied in the profile needed to be transformed into immediate intimacy. Pelham’s generalized head needed to be grafted back into a living matrix of reception. Copley attempts this in Boy with a Squirrel, not (as in Addison) by having the profile itself turn to face the viewer, but by an analogous spatial torque and projective funneling of compositional elements. Progressing from the curtain in the background to the sharp table corner jutting into the viewer’s space in the foreground, the painting shifts from a planar image to an evocative projection of a fully rounded world. Simultaneously, along the same axis, it leads the viewer through a process of sensory concentration, from disconnected, heterogeneous sensation in the curtain and profile to a synthesized sensorium in the body of the squirrel. That Copley means viewers to read these planes in deliberate progression is evident in the congruent forms he pulls through the depth axis of the painting. To begin with, there are strange markings spread across the background drapery that function like premonitory echoes of the boy’s head (fig. 10). The fold in the curtain to the left of the face reiterates precisely the shape of the boy’s eye.55 The shape to the right of the head suggests a similar displacement, mirroring the folds of the ear but also, in its angle and hinging, the boy’s mouth. It is as if Copley were attempting to show a transition, in the move from curtain to profile, from precursory graphic signs to an evocation of bodily plenitude. But Pelham’s profile is still quite flat, and Copley evokes the boy as a sensory being so that he seems to retain some of the scattered or diffracted qualities of the markings in the drapery behind him. As in any profile rendering, his eye is cleaved from his ear, the two organs on perpendicular trajectories separated by an expanse of cheek. In other

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Figure 10 John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765 (detail of fig. 1).

words, Pelham looks in one direction and listens in another. This sensory dispersion, along with the seemingly distracted way in which his hand fiddles with the squirrel’s chain, helps explain why his attitude in this picture has often been described as that of a daydream or reverie. Pelham’s head may be pinned to the canvas, but his mind, Copley suggests, is elsewhere. Such effects reinforce, at a narrative level, the detachment and discontinuity inherent in the profile format. They also differentiate Copley’s painting from Chardin’s, in which the boy’s absorbed attention to his task helps unify and concentrate the composition overall (see fig. 5).56 Indeed, Copley’s deviation from Chardin’s model here is just as notable as his adherence to its basic recipe of elements. Chardin’s scenes of childhood play have been noted for their production of aesthetic self-enclosure. (For Michael Fried, they are nothing less than early expressions of the modernist autonomy of painting.)57 Whatever the validity of this reading of Chardin, Copley’s Boy with a Flying Squirrel is, in contrast, much more adamantly phatic. We might see Copley’s painting as a socially and spatially “stretched” version of the Chardin: it is far more insistent in evoking an extrinsic space (indexed by Pelham’s gaze), and also more importunate (with its jutting table corner) in its appeals to the viewer before the painting. The core aesthetic of both paintings centers on a tabletop, but Copley’s treats that tabletop as a surface of active relay between places rather than an isolated space of absorbed play. That relay is not merely spatial but also sensory. Even as the painting proclaims a state of sensory dispersion or fragmentation in the profile, it pictures the conversion of that fragmentation into a unitary sensory bundle delivered to the viewer in the figure of the squirrel. The formal kinship between the squirrel and the boy invites comparison of the two figures. The gentle curve of the squirrel’s shoulder echoes the boy’s shoulder (as well as the curve of the back of the boy’s hand), the point of its nose picks up the triangular curve of the boy’s jaw, and—​most conspicuous—​the meticulously painted white-edged ruff of the squirrel’s underbelly presents an exact retracing of the folds of the boy’s ear. In these echoes, the sensory marks disposed centrifugally in the boy become condensed and even synesthetically conflated in the compact body of the squirrel. Whereas the boy’s hand, mouth, and nose are disconnected, for the squirrel, touch, taste, and smell all meet in the knotted junction of claw, nose, and nut (which is itself

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joined in a compact triangle with eye and ears). The other visual conjunction or condensation permitted—​but only by the body of the squirrel—​is the animal’s gaze connecting the painting and the viewer. The squirrel, like an internal pictorial supercargo, delivers the bundle of sensory information to the viewer. Spatially, then, the painting moves from flatness to fullness; sensorially, from scatter to synthesis. This shift from flat, abstract background to vivid, embodied foreground is consistent with Copley’s other American paintings. As Margaretta Lovell has shown, Copley’s composition during these years was based in chiaroscuro and figure-background layering rather than strictly in linear perspective. Indeed, the art books Copley read promoted projective figuration as the primary means to lifelikeness: Daniel Webb, in his 1761 Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting, encouraged painters to attain “that roundness or projection, by which figures are disengaged from their fond, and spring, as it were, from canvas into life.”58 But Copley’s application of these techniques in Boy with a Flying Squirrel was hardly workmanlike or unreflective. The rhythmic exactitude with which he managed the illusion of objects springing “from their fond”—​pulling congruent forms through a series of spatial transformations, as in the earlike shape that travels from the curtain, to the profile, to the squirrel’s body—​suggests otherwise. Boy with a Squirrel has a metapictorial intensity that had not been evident in Copley’s earlier work; it has the character of a demonstration of the ability of painting to deliver cohesive sensory experience from afar.

Empire and Empiricism In its concern with sensation, Boy with a Flying Squirrel participates in the broader Enlightenment discourse of empiricism. The intensity of observation in Copley’s American paintings has been associated with empiricism before; as Barbara Novak has phrased it, “The problem of how the external world is perceived is an urgent issue” in Copley’s time.59 But whereas Novak gives Copley’s empiricism a nativist bent, connecting it to an essentially American desire to get at the unvarnished truth of things, I emphasize instead the status of empiricism as a quintessentially transatlantic project. For Novak, first writing about Copley in the 1960s, his empiricism (“the need to grasp reality, to ascertain the physical thereness of things”) was “a necessary component of the American experience” that was constantly threatened by Copley’s dalliance with the imported European illusionistic conventions that would “master and, in many ways, destroy him after he fled from Boston to Europe.”60 Novak’s influential definition of empiricism as a provincial artistic project has had two problematic effects on later analysis of Copley’s work. First: by tying empiricism to American essentialism, her reading effectively foreclosed it as a topic of serious analysis for later scholars more interested in the transnational qualities of Copley’s painting. Indeed, compared with scholarship on French and English art of the eighteenth century, which has devoted significant attention to sensationalist philosophy and painting, writing on American and American

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colonial painting of the same period has remained eerily silent on the topic. Second: the nativist view of empiricism as a project opposed to the importation of conventions obscures the close and indeed structural connection between empiricism and importation, between empiricism and the long-distance transmission of goods and ideas. Empiricist tracts grappled constantly with problems of communication and perception across long distances. Locke, George Berkeley, and Hume were each consumed by the problem of distance, particularly its effect on the strength of sense impressions. Hume, for example, wrote at length about how and why spatial and temporal removals produce a “diminution of vivacity” in the perception and/or recollection of “foreign and remote objects.”61 These questions about “removal” also drove the development of communications and commodity exchange across the Atlantic Ocean and across the other spatiotemporal gaps separating areas of the dilating British Empire. There is surprisingly little discussion of the relationship between empire and empiricism in the literature of the Atlantic world; what there is tends to focus on how empiricism’s encouragement of data gathering helped drive and justify expansion and colonialism, and how imperial contact with the variable cultural worlds of distant peoples helped strain belief in the innate basis of ideas and reinforced the skeptical energies of empiricist thought.62 Copley’s paintings are uniquely positioned to reveal another connection: because imperial enterprise interjects unprecedented distances and delays (extensions and durations, in empiricist terms) into communal life, it forces imperial subjects, especially those at the peripheries, to manage and address the issue of sensory continuity through space and time. In empiricist discourse, removals in time and space could threaten to tear apart the very fabric of subjectivity and society. The blind intermission the Atlantic imposed between far-flung members of the British Empire was perhaps the most substantial challenge imaginable to the continuity and juxtaposition of sense impressions and the principles of association that provided empiricists with “the only links that bind the parts of the universe together.”63 Indeed, to send an object across the Atlantic was to confront, on an unavoidably practical level, the theoretical durations and extensions that populated empiricist tracts. Copley’s paintings help reveal the shared concerns for connection over distance that animated both empire and empiricism. The broader implications of Copley’s empiricism are evident in his most ambitious and accomplished later American paintings, his series of “tabletop pictures” that Boy with a Flying Squirrel prefigured. I expand the discussion here to these works, which include (in order of execution) Paul Revere, 1768 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); Mrs. Humphrey Devereux (Mary Charnock), 1771 (see fig. 12); Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwait (Elizabeth Lewis), 1771 (see fig. 13); Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell), 1772 (see fig. 11); Mrs. Dorothy Quincy, 1772 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); Mrs. John Winthrop (Hannah Fayerweather), 1773 (see fig. 16); Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (Sarah Morris), 1773 (Philadelphia Museum of Art); and Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (Jemima Debuke), 1773 (see fig. 21). I would also add Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard (1775, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) to this group. (It was among the first paintings Copley made after leaving the colonies.)

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Featuring sitters addressing viewers across highly polished tables, these paintings have come to exemplify Copley’s precise American style, notable for its divergence from the loose, brushy facture popular in London and practiced by the likes of Reynolds and Gainsborough. The tables in these paintings are not without precedent: as noted above, they derive partly from thresholds and visual supports in Renaissance portraiture and Dutch and French genre and still-life painting. Probably their closest visual analogues lie in the portraits of Holbein and his followers, which Copley would have known well through British prints. But Copley developed the table motif to a level of polish, emphasis, and metapictorial investment not seen before or, arguably, since. In each of Copley’s tabletop paintings, the orthogonal surface of the table occupies and defines the space implied between the sitter and the viewer, mediating the exchange of visual information in the painting. On this surface, the elbows, palms, forearms, wrists, and fingertips of the sitters—​along with the objects they hold—​generate precise reflections. Copley takes evident delight in the forms that unfold from the meeting of flesh and reflection, such as the striated orb-like shape that develops from the reflected hand in Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell) of 1772 (fig. 11). These half-reflected forms install bursts of spatial complexity in the portraits, producing illusions of multidimensional fullness that partly transcend the two-dimensional limitations of pictorial representation. Although in reality the reflected image of Dorothy Wendell’s hand occupies the same plane of the two-dimensional canvas as the rest of the portrait, it helps generate a multidimensional impression by replicating itself along other implied axes. The hand seems to lurk below the surface of the table and also appears to stretch forward toward the viewer along the tabletop. Copley is careful, moreover, to show that the reflection adds information the predominant point of view in the portrait cannot reveal—​note that Mrs. Skinner’s little finger is more dramatically crooked in reflection than can be seen in her foreshortened “real” hand. Like Boy with a Flying Squirrel, many of the later tabletop pictures also engaged issues of long-distance sensory adjudication and dimensional conversion. Mrs. Humphrey Devereux (fig. 12), for example, was painted explicitly to produce and maintain a sensory and mnemonic connection across the Atlantic. The portrait, painted in Boston, was commissioned for the sitter’s sixtieth birthday by John Greenwood, her son, who, living in London, was a painter, art importer, and founding member of the Society of Artists.64 Although these paintings were not all produced for dispatch across the Atlantic, all of them thematized transmission and sensory connection in a world where these processes were governed by transatlantic challenges, doing so by virtue of the aesthetic strategies Copley had been compelled to develop when painting Boy with a Flying Squirrel. None of them are profiles, but most share with Boy with a Flying Squirrel the structure discussed above, in which the hands of a distracted or otherwise distanced sitter (along with other objects) are captured and relayed by the surface of a polished tabletop. Copley’s elaborate treatments of reflection and polish turn these tabletops into

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Figure 11 John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell), 1772. Oil on canvas, 39¾ × 30½ in. (101 × 77.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer. 06.2428. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure 12 John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Humphrey Devereux, 1771. Oil on canvas, 40⅛ × 31⅞ in. (102 × 81 cm). Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Gift of the Greenwood family, 1965. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa/1965–​0013–​1.

metasurfaces for the process of long-distance communication. Overall, they are strenuously hopeful essays in the capacity of painting to deliver transitive form and thereby to hold “the parts of the universe together.” Copley’s access to empiricist philosophy is difficult to trace precisely. It is impossible to determine whether he had read specific empiricist authors and particular tracts—​or whether (as is more likely) he absorbed information about sensationalist philosophy secondhand, from conversation and from widespread discussion in the general literature. It emerges from both his writings and paintings that two tenets of empiricist thought were central to his work: first, the notion (most purely articulated in Berkeley) that external objects can be perceived only by synthesizing, in the mind, independent data from the visual and the tactile senses, and second, a general vocabulary of ideas and impressions in which immediate experience is “impression” and its vitiated afterlife, experienced as reflection or memory, is “idea.” George Berkeley, perhaps the most important theoretician of vision in the eighteenth century and a figure closely tied to Copley and Boston, argued in his essays on vision that the outside world arrives at the threshold of consciousness as a set of heterogeneous sensory impressions that must be synthesized by the perceiver. He noted, for example, that the perception of distance or depth is not purely visual but requires the synthesis of visual and tactile perception.65 For Berkeley, vision provided only a flat pattern of color and light: “What we immediately and properly see are only lights and colours in sundry situations and shades, and degrees of faintness and clearness, confusion and distinctness.”66 Distance and depth are not immediately seen; they require that the mind coordinate the planar visual patterns with the information gained by exploring the tactile world. Berkeley called this a process of “incorporation” because the fullness of the world could be produced only in the act of its proper ingestion and assembly by the body and mind. Ann Gibson and Lucia Palmer have argued that Copley, as a Bostonian and a painter, could not possibly have avoided Berkeley’s theories. Berkeley had traveled to New England in 1729 with John Smibert, who became a close friend and associate of the engraver Peter Pelham, Copley’s stepfather, in Boston. Berkeley’s ideas had a deep impact on Smibert’s painting techniques, and Copley gained much of his knowledge about painting in Smibert’s studio and library.67 Although forensic and theoretical connections between Copley and Berkeley would not alone justify making an interpretive connection between them, there was already something in Copley’s own painting of his tabletops that compelled him to tap into this particular period philosophy.68 For Copley, Berkeley’s questions about distance and sensory fragmentation were not dry or hypothetical. The issues in play in contemporary empiricism—​how are objects at a distance perceived?—​were direct operational challenges to Copley as a painter and particularly as a transatlantic painter. As mentioned above, a key aspect of Berkeley’s theory was the heterogeneity of the senses. The information gained from looking at a water glass three feet away is purely

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visual; the information acquired by touching it is purely tactile. These two bodies of information never cohere in reality (and for Berkeley, the glass seen and the glass touched are two entirely different objects); one can only perceive a “glass at a distance of three feet” by synthetic operations of the mind. Like language, these synthetic operations are learned, although they happen so quickly and habitually as to seem natural and automatic. “Hence it is, we find it so difficult to discriminate between the immediate [disassembled] and mediate [synthesized] objects of sight, and are so prone to attribute to the former, what belongs only to the latter. They are, as it were, most closely twisted, blended, and incorporated together.”69 Berkeley wanted to interrupt and thereby denaturalize this process to reveal it. He led his readers through a series of examples that served to untwist, unblend, and disincorporate these ideas, if only for a moment, to reveal the mechanics of perception. Significantly, painting was one of the examples Berkeley called on to help him make his argument about sensory heterogeneity. He argued that the visual illusions routinely proffered in paintings demonstrate that visual impressions are not naturally or necessarily connected to the tangible objects they evoke. What looks, in a painting, like the object called water glass does not feel like a water glass; it feels instead like a flat surface coated with dried oil paint. “That there is no necessary connexion between visible and tangible ideas suggested by them, we need go no further than the next looking-glass or picture to be convinced,” he commented.70 Even as this example demystified the operations of painting, however, it emphasized the centrality of the art in the empiricist discourse of sensory conveyance and highlighted its power to evoke (if somewhat deceptively) the presence of objects and to deliver the sensory experience of distant objects to a viewer. This power would have been interesting to Copley, and Boy with a Flying Squirrel, in its play between flatness and volume, surface and depth, and the disconnection and regathering of sensory information, showcases precisely this process. The glass and hand on the table are particularly relevant in relation to the delamination and synthesis of the visual and the tangible. As noted earlier, Copley painted the hand so that the curve of the chain appears to span precisely the diameter of the tumbler of water. This makes it appear, at first glance, that the hand hovers directly over the glass. But closer inspection reveals a visual deception, for in fact the hand is placed well behind the glass. If one could slide the tumbler back so that it actually did sit just underneath Pelham’s fingers, it would (visually) contract, and its diameter would no longer correspond to the measure provided by the chain. The placement of the glass is too provocative to be merely accidental. Copley set it precisely where it would engender maximum confusion about its size and position. It sets in play on the table a full-fledged drama of calibration: although the boy’s hand measurement of the diameter of the glass is correct in one universe (the tactile world of the painting as a two-dimensional object, in which glass and hand share the flat surface of the painting), it is incorrect in the other one (the optical world in which glass and hand share the flat surface of the illusionary table).71 In explaining the heterogeneity of visual and tactile measurement, Berkeley argued

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that visual inches and tactile inches were categorically different. Whereas an inch marked on a ruler always remains the same when measured by a finger held against it, that same inch has “a different visible extension,” depending upon the distance of the ruler from the eye.72 By suggesting the equivalence of the visual span of the glass (which already connotes optics and lenses) to the tactile span of the hand but then demonstrating that equivalence to be false, Copley invites his viewers to acknowledge that they have actively equated visual and tactile inches and have therefore performed a synthetic act. The habitual synthetic operations that permit painterly illusionism erupt into uncanny visibility here on Copley’s table. The glass-hand puzzle interrupts the viewer’s easy and automatic apprehension of the image, revealing the operation that makes that illusionism possible. Copley pries apart vision and touch just enough to claim their bravura synthesis—​and with it the successful delivery of sensory information to the body and mind of the observer—​for his own art of painting. Copley’s other tabletop paintings stage similar visual-tactile dynamics. As twodimensional illusions, Copley’s paintings cannot escape their own status as mere “lights and colours” on a flat plane. But as if attempting to overcome this fragmentation, they go out of their way to encourage the viewer to synthesize the optical information on offer with memories of tactile experience and thereby to produce a fully incorporated reception of the painting. In Mrs. Richard Skinner (see fig. 11), for example, the well of forms created by the deep reflections in the table as they align with the front of the sitter’s dress creates an axis of confusion in depth similar to that in the hand-and-glass passage in Boy with a Flying Squirrel. Most of the reflections in these polished tabletops, moreover, are of hands and the tactile manipulations in which they engage. As they blossom into reflection on the tabletops, the hands are joined to their optical doubles, synthesizing tactile and optical worlds. Within these oscillatory reflections, scenes of reconciliation between tactile and optical sensation are repeatedly staged. The optical and tactile sides of the divide complete each other (while also revealing their essential scission) in reflection: hands and the objects they hold are “unfolded” into a heightened impression of multidimensional reality by virtue of the reflections that reveal their appearance from multiple angles. At the same time, the immaterial reflections are substantiated by their attachment to hands and solid objects. Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwait (Elizabeth Lewis) (fig. 13) is especially suggestive in this regard. The formal theme of the painting emphasizes sensory plenitude through doubling. As the circular tray holding the peaches meets its reflection in the table below, its mirrored form recalls the peaches themselves, which consist of fleshy half-spheres joined at a cleft. Tray, table, and peaches then echo Mrs. Goldthwait’s ample form (with “double chin”). Copley’s tabletops, then, serve both as stages for and performances of tactile-optical syntheses. In this sense, they directly recall a celebrated table in the history of perceptual philosophy, namely, the table in Molyneux’s Problem, which functioned, arguably, as the primal scene of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century empiricism. Here is Locke’s description: “Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to

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Figure 13 John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwait (Elizabeth Lewis), 1771. Oil on canvas, 50⅛ × 40⅛ in. (127.3 × 101.9 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of John T. Bowen in memory of Eliza M. Bowen. 41.84. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

distinguish between a cube, and a sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the cube, which the sphere. Suppose then the cube and sphere placed on a table, and the blind man to be made to see: Quaere, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the globe, which the cube.” 73 Locke and Berkeley argued that the blind man would be unable to distinguish the two forms by sight; only after he had handled the objects while looking at them, and learned to associate their tactile contours with their visual contours, could he recognize objects simply by looking at them. If Molyneux’s table is a charged surface across which the adjudication of sensory knowledge takes place, so are Copley’s tables, across which the viewer of the painting receives the visual information that the painter offers and extrapolates its three-dimensional reference. Although Copley hardly presumes the literal blindness of his viewer, his paintings engineer and allegorize something like an experience of “first sight.” This operation, the encounter with data from a distance, is for Copley a form of active re-collection and “incorporation” (to use Berkeley’s term).74 In moving from background to foreground, the viewer actively translates flattened, heterogeneous, dismembered sensory information into whole bounded bodies or objects. Some assembly, to proffer a suitable anachronism, is required. Tables and table-like surfaces are conspicuous presences in eighteenth-century sensationalist discourse. Along with Molyneux’s table there is Locke’s tabula rasa, which figured the act of sensory apprehension as the creation of impressions of images on a tabular surface. Copley’s tables are deeply implicated in this discourse of impression as well. In the empiricist discourse about impression (I take Hume as exemplary), those things that caused the most powerful and immediate impact on the mind (“those which enter with most force and violence”) were called “impressions”; “ideas” were “the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning.” 75 These ideas, when later recalled from memory and reflected upon, could cause new impressions (“impressions of reflection”).76 The oscillation from impression to idea and back again could theoretically continue indefinitely: An impression first strikes upon the senses, and makes us perceive heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain of some kind or other. Of this impression there is a copy taken by the mind, which remains after the impression ceases; and this we call an idea. This idea of pleasure or pain, when it returns upon the soul, produces the new impressions of desire and aversion, hope and fear, which may properly be call’d impressions of reflection because deriv’d from it. These are again copy’d by the memory and imagination, and become ideas; which perhaps in their turn give rise to other impressions and ideas.77

The efficacy of the preservation, transmission, and refreshment of sensation was linked to values of indexicality, precision, and replicability: precisely the operations in play on Copley’s tables. Copley’s letters indicate that he was familiar with the dis-

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tinctions between ideas and impressions, their relation to the preservative capacity of memory, and the applicability of all of these notions to painting.78 Moreover, Copley’s artisanal apprenticeship (such as it was) was in printmaking, where getting a good “impression” involved peeling away reversed images from a matrix on a table-like bed. Copley builds tropes of memory, sensory continuity, and impression into the reflective structure of the paintings, so that the paintings perform their own convertibility between idea and impression and therefore their capacity to forge a continuity of consciousness. The reflections attest to the force and vivacity of the image, inasmuch as they advertise the painting’s own capacity to leave an impression, to copy itself on the mind, or to toggle between image and impression. It is as if, for Copley, the sheer force and vivacity of his portraits have caused them to leave imprints on their own interior surfaces. The reversed contours of the shapes visually impressed in the tabletops present this image of simultaneous replicability and stability: the image is dynamic because it can be transferred from surface to surface, place to place, or person to person—​but the reflections also “lock” the portraits into place, as if to vouch for their ability to be securely apprehended. Copley’s tabletops, then, prompt synthetic incorporation in the viewer, producing and perpetuating impressions. Both functions assert the capacity of Copley’s pictures to overcome gaps in long-distance perceptual continuity. These paintings attempt to ensure their own efficient embodied delivery in one other way. Virtually every contemporary art theorist in Europe at the time called for immediacy, instantaneity, and unity in paintings so as to avoid the interruption or deflection of attention and thus the “diminution of vivacity” that Hume and others described. As Reynolds put it, the painter should avoid “whatever may in any way serve to divide the attention of the spectator.” 79 Roger de Piles, in his Principles of Painting, which Copley had read in English translation, claimed that paintings should work “to hinder the eye from being dissipated, and to fix it agreeably.”80 For many theorists, the most problematic formal dissipations were those that drew too much attention from the upper half of the canvas (territory of the head and hands, primary loci of expressive rationalism) to the lower half. Copley got a direct lesson about this in 1767, when he sent to the Society of Artists a follow-up to Boy with a Flying Squirrel, titled Young Lady with a Bird and Dog (fig. 14), without, as mentioned in the introduction, having had sufficient time to incorporate a response to comments he had received on the first painting. This painting was compared unfavorably to Boy with a Flying Squirrel, which, although it had been “to liney” and had suffered from “over minuteness,” had nonetheless managed better to subordinate the lower half of the painting. On the comparisons made in the Academy room, Captain Bruce reported, “Mr. Reynolds and the Majority prefer the first [Boy with a Flying Squirrel], because in that you have made the under parts of the Picture more subordinate to the principal than in the last, where they say the under parts such as the Dog, Parrot Carpet etc., are too brilliant and highly finished in proportion to the Head and Hands.”81 Copley absorbed this advice (from Reynolds and others) so well that he was careful to pass it along to Pelham later on. In a

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Figure 14 John Singleton Copley, Young Lady with a Bird and Dog, 1767. Oil on canvas, 48 × 39¾ in. (122 × 101 cm). The Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, Ohio). Purchased with funds from the Florence Libbey Bequest in Memory of her Father, Maurice A. Scott. 1950.306. Photograph: Photography, Incorporated (Toledo).

letter to Pelham from London, in which he suggests that Pelham might “try somthing for an Exhibition,” he admonishes him to “be carefull as you go towards the bottum of your Canvis to mannage your objects that they do not take the eye.”82 Another benefit of the tabletop motif for Copley, then, was that it allowed him to subordinate what we might call the nether regions of the painting while maintaining an overall consistency of sharpness and finish. The tabletops cast the bottom half of the painting (along with the “under parts” of the sitter) into shadow or obliterate it from view altogether. In its place are the reflections of the sitters’ hands—​doubled reinforcements of the top of the painting. Copley’s tabletop reenactments of empiricist tenets, however sophisticated, were not simply dry demonstrations of theoretical knowledge. Empiricism’s promise that perceptual information could be successfully delivered, synthesized, and incorporated across distance had immediate urgency for Copley not only as a painter but also as a colonist. Consider how closely the empiricist dynamics in Copley’s tabletop paintings, in which objects unfold into synthetic impression across thresholds of exchange, mirrored the workaday dynamics of reception that pervaded social and economic life in colonial Boston. Indeed, what is perhaps most compelling about Copley’s empiricism is that it restages the transatlantic commodity exchange and consumption that pervaded the colonial Atlantic world. Throughout this world, the shipping and reception of commodities and information constituted a drama of dimensional conversion, expansion, animation, and incorporation. Every scrap of knowledge that American colonists had about England, every image, every object, every memory, had to be physically transported thousands of miles across the water on a ship. “England” was a cargo of ideas, accessible only as a vitiated packet of information: parcellated, modularized, dehydrated, pickled, or pressed. It arrived in schematic form and needed, upon arrival, to be concretized.83 Objects did not usually pop out of ships, in other words, ready to be passively consumed. Consider the complex processes of physical and perceptual transformation involved in loading and unloading even the most basic staples of transatlantic commerce. The shipment of necessities like molasses, rum, pitch, and potash, for example, required the skilled and specialized work (not to mention the specialized vocabulary) of the cooper, who handled the heading and unheading, shifting, lining, drawing, bunging and unbunging, truckage and porterage of the finely built casks (caggs, hogsheads, pipes, and so forth) that were the workhorses of transatlantic shipping. Such practices of material recalibration were part of the very fabric of maritime existence for Copley and his clients. (A single daybook of the Boston cooper Joshua Pico, covering the spring and summer of 1765, includes accounts with several of Copley’s sitters).84 In these material techniques and transformations lies the intersection of transit and consumption—​indeed an entire material philosophy of movement, communication, and reception. The efflorescence of forms as they pass Copley’s polished table thresholds is analogous in many ways to the bustle and din of the colonial threshold of Boston Harbor, where commodities burst out of crates and caggs and began

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Figure 15 Northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) gliding, controlled conditions, native to North America. Photograph © Stephen Dalton / naturepl.com.

the process of sensory transplantation on which the survival of British colonial culture depended. These processes didn’t end at the waterline but constituted a way of colonial life. In architectural pattern books, the bodies of buildings in England and Europe are flattened, modularized, and atomized before being resynthesized and reincorporated into habitable buildings in America. Bolts of imported textiles unfurl and recombine into sewn ensembles—​t hree-dimensional arrangements of kinetic fabric—​on the bodies of colonists. Tea expands not on but in the bodies of colonists, its rehydration a literal sensory incorporation. Seeds inflate into plants in the body of the colonial earth. Etiquette books and comportment manuals are performed in colonial bodily gestures (Copley’s stepfather was a Boston dancing master as well as a printmaker). And prints are copied into paintings that are “incorporated” with color and chiaroscuro.85 The squirrel in Boy with a Flying Squirrel—​breaking open and consuming a nut as if to echo the opening of

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Figure 16 John Singleton Copley, Mrs. John Winthrop, 1773. Oil on canvas, 35½ × 28¾ in. (90.2 × 73 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Morris K. Jesup Fund. 1931 (31.109). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

the painting’s own wooden crate and its subsequent aesthetic incorporation—​serves as a demonstration of this entire process. The aptness of Copley’s choice of a flying squirrel for the painting is also evident here. The body of the flying squirrel, when flying, is the most perfect mammalian analogue imaginable of a stretched canvas in transit (fig. 15), and more generally, the flying squirrel’s body is a convertible one that is capable of transformation between flatness and fullness. In flight (transmission), it is schematically flat, its body nearly unrecognizable, but on land again it reconstitutes itself into a whole, three-dimensional body. How better to simulate the aims of the painting itself? All the transatlantic consumption activities discussed above were manifestly social and socializing processes that bound far-flung members of the empire through conventional practices of sensory reception. Often the objects on Copley’s tabletops are marked specifically as transatlantic delegates that have (or will have) experienced such transformation. As Paul Staiti has shown, for example, the nectarine branch that Mrs. John Winthrop proudly displays on her table (fig. 16) was the result of a complex operation in which imported nectarine stock was grafted into American trees.86 Indeed, this process of grafting is a serviceable analogy for colonial processes of reception generally—​portable, partial information from a distance must be reattached to local American bodies upon receipt. In the same way, Copley’s tabletop sensory synthetics attempt to ensure that the painting itself might be grafted onto the viewer’s living sensory matrix.

Theory and Artisanship in Colonial Art Communication Issues of sensory incorporation had high stakes not only for Copley as a colonist but also for Copley as a colonial painter. His constant challenge in teaching himself to paint in Boston was to translate the vitiated, imported information he received about painting in shipped books and engravings into his own bodily practice (techniques) and into fully fleshed-out, credible oil paintings. In drawing attention to the sensory deprivation of Copley’s position as an artist, I am implicitly contesting the long-standing assumption that his work in America was characterized primarily by an artisanal rather than a theoretical sensibility.87 The literature on colonial American painting has persistently equated provinciality and theoretical naïveté; in Copley’s case it is imperative to decouple these notions. Copley was a painter without a serious mentor, living three thousand miles from the nearest academy and subsisting without access to any of the original old-master paintings that formed the sacred core of period aesthetics in Europe. But he was not therefore merely a “mechanick,” nor was his painting (as generations of isolationist critics have asserted) sincere, direct, and innocent of European theoretical contamination.88 If anything, it was the opposite. It cannot be argued that Copley had no theoretical access to European aesthetics; on the contrary, theoretical access was almost the only kind he had. References in his letters provide direct evidence that he had closely read Francesco Algarotti, Charles du Fresnoy, Roger de Piles, Horace Walpole, Daniel

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Webb, and George Turnbull; but his sphere of reading was almost certainly much larger and probably included key tracts by Shaftesbury, Jonathan Richardson, Joseph Addison, and William Hogarth as well. His provinciality increased his reliance on theory and highlighted the difficulty of translating that theory into practice.89 Indeed, Copley felt excluded, not from the theoretical, but rather from the kinesthetic and mechanical traditions of painting—​its performative secrets and material practices. He had far more access to the mind of painting than to its body. Beyond written art treatises, his visual understanding of the history of art was restricted almost entirely to engravings.90 His constant challenge was to take this coded, abstracted, portable, grayscale data about painting and attempt to transform it into fully developed artifacts that might somehow incorporate the color, facture, scale, and tactility of “painting,” something that happened thousands of miles away. He did have access to a few copies of old-master paintings scattered around British North America; these he studied intensely for clues to the true touch of the originals.91 When he finally got to Italy in 1775 to study such paintings directly for the first time, he wrote letters back to Pelham (who was then working to become a painter himself) that indicate the immense care with which he had examined every inch of these copies in America. Writing from Parma, for example, he raves about the inimitable transparency of Titian’s color and suggests that the only passage of paint on the Eastern Seaboard even remotely similar to it is “the knee and part of the thigh of the little Jesus in the Madonna’s lap at Mr. Chardons.”92 Copley’s letters to Pelham from Italy also brim with technical advice—​detailed practical tips about things like the proper ratios of gum mastic and turpentine—​rather than flighty arias about theory and ideal beauty.93 Having deduced Raphael’s method of composing ambitious multifigure paintings by looking closely at his preparatory drawings, Copley describes the method to Pelham and adds: “I hope you will be profited by this very perticular Account of my proceedings. . . . I should have been happy to have had such a plain account of the process when I was in America, and what may seem trifling to a Man who has not known the want of such information, I know to be of the last importance to one who has not had an oppertunity of knowing the manner the great Masters have pursued their Goddess with success.”94 He bemoans the general ekphrastic inadequacy of the “Eligant treatise[s] on the Art” that he had read in Boston.95 Blaming European art discourse for its air of presumptive proximity, he writes to Pelham: “Those who have wrote on the subject seem always to suppose their Readers to have the Works of the Great Masters before them; hence they are very defective and convey little or no Idea, at least no just Idea, of their Works.”96

Failure to Deliver: Watson and the Shark and the Boston Tea Party Copley’s tabletop paintings contest the deficiencies of transmission by positing themselves as objects that can ensure lossless communication, fixative impression, and ple-

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nary perception and might therefore link far-flung colonial subjects in communities of embodied conviviality. This, at any rate, was the ideal. In reality, Copley was living through the spectacular breakdown of these relations in the years leading up to the Revolutionary War. He painted Boy with a Flying Squirrel in the midst of the Stamp Act crisis and continued painting in Boston for nearly a decade as controversies about nonimportation agreements, violent resistance to excise duties, and other expressions of consumption politics raged around him. The breaking point in colonial relations (according to Copley as well as many modern historians) was the Boston Tea Party of December 1773 (then called the Destruction of the Tea), when a group of patriots armed with hatchets stormed three ships at dock that were holding dutied tea from England, broke open the chests, and dumped the tea into Boston Harbor. After this incident, Copley, because of his Loyalist connections, could not remain in the city for long. Making good on his long-postponed plans to travel abroad for artistic training, he left for Italy in 1774 and joined his family in London in 1775, never to return to America. It is no accident that the figures in Copley’s tabletop paintings all have the air of taking tea even though none of them are actually depicted doing so. The paintings evoke long-distance sensory incorporation, and the consumption of tea was both the primary practice and the master metaphor for that incorporation in the British Empire at the time. Tea was a global commodity, elaborately processed and packed, shipped thousands of miles, and then reincorporated not only by drinking it but also by performing elaborate gestural rituals that redoubled the communal function of consumption. To take tea was to be in intimate conversation with one’s own immediate compatriots and with England. In the years before and after the Boston Tea Party, the misincorporation or misdelivery of tea came to symbolize the collapse of the integrated transatlantic body of the British Empire. The imposition of unfavourable mercantile relations and the resistance to those relations were often represented in contemporary visual culture, for example, as a forcible introjection of tea into hapless bodies (fig. 17). In the Boston Tea Party itself, opposition to British policies was performed as the refusal to “take” tea properly, by the enforced spoilage of the tea cargo, prematurely brewed in the harbor. Indeed, themes of imperfect or interrupted delivery—​quarantine, spoilage, and wreckage—​functioned throughout the theater of revolutionary politics. Questions of failed or refused importation were politicized during the very years that Copley was working so strenuously to develop an aesthetic of perfect perceptual delivery. The fragility of that aesthetic in Copley’s tabletop images becomes clear in the circumstances of its unraveling around the Tea Party crisis. If Copley’s American portraits had attempted to imagine a lossless transfer of perceptual experience over distance, Watson and the Shark, the famous modern history painting Copley completed in London in 1778, revised and ultimately renounced that hope (fig. 18). Although the radical differences between Watson and the Shark and Copley’s colonial tabletop portraits derive partly from developments in Copley’s academic train-

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Figure 17 The able Doctor, or, America Swallowing the Bitter Draught, illustration from London Magazine 43 (May 1, 1774). Etching. British Cartoon Prints Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-ppmsca-19467.

ing and the shift in genre from portraiture to history painting, the historical politics of delivery in the Revolutionary period, particularly as crystallized in the Boston Tea Party, can also productively illuminate them. The Tea Party—​the most momentous political event of Copley’s time in America and one in which Copley himself was deeply involved—​was also an event that might be described as the most spectacular “misdelivery” of the Revolutionary era. Watson and the Shark wrestles with the failure of transatlantic communal life and the broader catastrophe in Anglo-American material relations that the Tea Party represented. The painting also imagines the implications of that failure for the function and meaning of art itself. Copley left Boston in June 1774, just as the British began barricading Boston Harbor in punishment for the Tea Party.97 Soon after taking a grand tour of Italy and moving permanently to London, he began work on Watson and the Shark, his first large-scale history painting. The overt subject of the painting is well known: a perilous incident in the young life of the British merchant Brook Watson. In 1749, at the age of fourteen, Watson had slipped overboard the merchant ship he was working on to take a quick swim in Havana Harbor.98 While swimming, he was nearly killed by a shark. It attacked twice, first stripping off all the skin on one leg, then taking much of the leg itself, just

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Figure 18 John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778. Oil on canvas, 7111⁄₁₆ × 90 in. (182.1 × 229.7 cm). National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Ferdinand Lammot Belin Fund. 1963.6.1. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

below the knee. Watson’s comrades, meanwhile, were frantically rowing out to save him. The painting meets the narrative just at the moment the rowboat arrives and the shark comes around for a third (presumably final) blow. Commissioned by Watson and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1778, Watson and the Shark was an immediate sensation.99 It was a stunningly original composition; indeed, it was aesthetically subversive for many of the reasons attributed, nearly fifty years later, to Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa:100 it lavished grand-manner treatment on an event from recent history, it transformed the modest genre of the sea piece by elevating it to history painting and focusing on figures rather than seascape, and it placed a black figure at the apex of the composition. It is now recognized both as a seminal work of modern history painting and as one of the first articulations of the romantic sublime in the visual arts. The fundamental question animating the scholarship on Watson and the Shark is this: What led Copley to believe that a merchant’s terrifying but historically inconsequential childhood swimming accident had the necessary resonance to support a mod-

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Figure 19 Americans throwing the Cargoes of the Tea Ships into the River, at Boston. Illustration in W. D. Cooper, History of North America, London, 1789. Engraving. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZC4–​538.

ern history painting of this scope and ambition? Although existing commentaries focus on the painting’s religious resonance, its alignment with early American salvation narratives, its relationship to contemporary political prints, and its intersection with debates about the slave trade—​and Copley’s work is fully legible in each of these terms—​Watson and the Shark also functions as a meditation on the breakdown of transatlantic material relations and thus on the breakdown of the model of plenary, synthetic perception Copley had perfected in his portraits. Although Watson and the Shark, as an enormous history painting, may seem to have nothing to do with Copley’s more modest tabletops, those earlier works form the compositional and thematic template from which the later painting both emerges and diverges. The Watson painting, like each of the tabletops, is defined by the intersection of vertical figures with an orthogonal plane that stretches forward to engage the perceptual space of the viewer. This plane is defined in Watson by the surface of the water, and in the portraits by the watery reflective surfaces of the tables. Such compositional similarities only emphasize the profound renunciation in the Watson painting of the tabletops’ perceptual functions. Images of the Boston Tea Party are surprisingly scarce, despite the status of the event as conspicuous political spectacle and its pivotal role in triggering the American

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Revolution. Most of the illustrations now used in history textbooks were produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An engraving of the incident was published in London in 1789 (fig. 19), but it did not seize the contemporary cultural imagination, perhaps because it lacks the pedigree of immediate reportage that characterizes other prints of major pre-Revolutionary events like the Boston Massacre or the battles of Lexington and Concord. Indeed, Watson and the Shark is arguably the closest thing we have to a period visual imaginary of the Destruction of the Tea and the only image that struggles with the full range of the event’s implications both for history and for painting. When the connections between Watson and the Shark and the Boston Tea Party are explored, Watson’s misadventure in Havana comes into compelling alignment with Copley’s most acute and immediate concerns about the fragile status of the British Empire in America, his own status as an artist, and the very function and meaning of painting in the fracturing Atlantic World.

Copley and the Tea Party Because of his family connections, Copley was intimately involved in the Tea Act crisis of 1773. His success as a Boston portraitist through the uneasy years of the 1760s and early 1770s had depended on his ability to maintain a meticulous political neutrality, painting portraits from both ends of the Whig–​Tory spectrum. The conditions produced by the Tea Act crisis, however, put Copley in a position of extreme political vulnerability that would ultimately make such neutrality impossible. His family was at the center of the difficulties. Four merchant firms in Boston had been consigned to receive and sell the notorious shipments of tea from the British East India Company: one of the Boston firms was headed by Richard Clarke, Copley’s father-in-law, and another by Copley’s wife’s cousins.101 These consignees became the focus of patriot enmity during the crisis because they refused to bow to nonimportation pressures and send the tea back to England. In the weeks leading up to the Destruction of the Tea, Copley’s extended family was twice attacked by mobs and his father-in-law received death threats.102 As the crisis worsened, Copley, desperate to prevent the outbreak of violence, volunteered to serve as mediator between the growing crowds of patriots meeting at Old South Meeting House demanding the return of the tea to England and the consignees holed up for protection in the British fortifications at Castle William on an island in Boston Harbor.103 On the frigid night before the destruction, Copley rowed back and forth across Boston Harbor, carrying messages between the two parties in an attempt to prevent a conflagration. Had he succeeded in his arbitration efforts, the course of world history might well have been drastically altered. But he failed to prevent the outbreak of violence, and the rupture in colonial relations occasioned by the Destruction of the Tea was a key factor in his decision to leave Boston in 1774. The letters between Copley and his half-brother Henry Pelham about “the fatal Era of the Tea’s arrival” make clear not only that Copley perceived the Tea Party as the decisive

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event in the dissolution of colonial relations and the direct cause of the Revolutionary War, but also that he recognized the monumental implications of his own failure to prevent it.104 In his letters, Copley agonizes over his thankless attempts to stop the destruction: “You must think I aught to have many friends and thanks for the pains I took to prevent so violent and rash a peice of conduct. I was sure it would produce the consiquences that have followed and are only the faint beginings of More fatal and terrable evils than have yet taken place.” “Ocians of blood,” he writes, “will be shed.”105 Copley wrote these and similar letters while traveling in England and Europe, at the time he was engaged in his most concentrated efforts to teach himself history painting. After leaving Boston, he had made a quick stop in London, where he saw Benjamin West’s Death of General Wolfe (1770, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa), his key precedent for modern-dress history painting and its infusion of profound historical allusions into contemporary events.106 He then traveled to Italy, where he studied and copied old-master paintings, spending several weeks in Rome and the Vatican, where he examined Raphael’s Transfiguration (see fig. 24) with particular care. His letters from Italy veer from his growing confidence as a painter of complex historical subjects to his growing concerns about both the consequences of the Tea Party and the safety of his family and friends who remained barricaded back in Boston. Given that Copley had found himself at the center of the Tea Party, which he knew to be an event of world-historical importance, and given that his greatest anxieties about the outcome of that event corresponded with his most furious preparations to be a history painter, it is worth wondering whether he might have considered the Tea Party itself as the overt subject of a modern history painting. But such a painting would have required a commission, which was not forthcoming. And even if the Tea Party was a compelling subject, it was also an impossible one for him for reasons internal to the event and his own involvement in it. Two months after the Destruction of the Tea, Copley was already struggling with the question of committing the event to public memory. He wrote to his father-in-law, Richard Clarke, about the possibility of producing a “Memorial” of the event (by Memorial he meant an official court statement laying out the facts of the event from the family’s perspective): “The matter of a Memorial had started in my mind more than three Weeks ago but I had many objections to it which I could not get over, the most meterial was this, that however Clear the facts may be yet they may be controverted, your conduct misrepresented, and what ever you either have or shall say misconstrued.”107 The letter shows that Copley, even as he worried about setting the record straight, also recognized that a straightforward recitation of the facts would not be an effective way of doing so. The topic was too controversial to be remembered without “misrepresentation,” and Copley and his family were too close to the event for their testimony to appear disinterested—​whatever they “have or shall say” about the event would be inevitably “misconstrued.” The simultaneous urgency and impossibility of representing the Destruction of the Tea make it easier to understand why Copley embraced Brook Watson’s commission

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so enthusiastically. In requesting a painting of his encounter with the shark, Watson commissioned an image depicting an American harbor in which something has gone overboard and is in imminent danger of obliteration. This brief gave Copley an opportunity to paint a scene onto which he could easily displace many of the elements of the Destruction of the Tea. Granted, it would be preposterous to set up a point-for-point correspondence between Watson and the Shark and the Tea Party. Watson is not a systematically coded allegory with this or that figure standing in neatly for the tea or the merchants or the patriots. But the painting resonates so fully with the memory of the Tea Party that it would be equally preposterous to ignore the connections. Even though the painting does not represent the Destruction of the Tea directly, it is difficult to imagine a commission more fully imbricated in the event and its aftermath. The setting, the cast of characters, the compositional management of forces in space, even the basic model of perception offered by the painting all intersect with the key political and artistic problems raised for Copley by the Destruction of the Tea. First, the cast of characters. As noted above, Copley was entangled in the Tea Party crisis by virtue of his relation to the consignees set to receive the tea. Brook Watson was equally complicit, as the head of one of the export firms that had handled its shipment to Boston. In other words, the painting was commissioned by the tea’s sender and painted by a close relation of the tea’s receivers.108 The tea chests hacked to bits in Boston Harbor were Watson’s, as was the body threatened by dismemberment in the waters off Havana. Second, the setting. In both the Boston Tea Party and Watson’s misadventure in Havana, something went wrongly overboard in an American harbor. Of course Havana is not Boston, but the two ports were both understood as American harbors and were easily conflated in the eighteenth-century imagination. As another corner of the triangular trade associated with British naval power, Havana was as much a part of America as Boston was.109 Moreover, the idea of all America as a tropical zone, forged by earlier images of explorations in South America and the Caribbean, continued to inform imagery of the North Atlantic for many English and European audiences, furthering the imaginative interchangeability of Boston and Havana. Notice that the 1789 engraving of the Tea Party (see fig. 19) includes palm trees and what looks like a volcanic outcrop in the background, neither element a feature of Boston Harbor. Third, the violent forces at play in Copley’s shark attack echo those applied to the tea in Boston Harbor. This connection is difficult to recover today, because existing visual renderings have evacuated the Tea Party of its physical severity. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrations show Sons of Liberty casually lifting tea chests overhead and tossing them overboard (fig. 20). More recent images have continued this trend until the dematerialization of the event seems to have reached its limit; in these images the Tea Party’s value as pure political sign is repeatedly folded back onto the material imaginary of the actual occurrence. But in fact each lead-lined chest of tea weighed 450 pounds. The chests had to be hoisted on deck with block and tackle and then hatcheted open before being emptied over the side of the ships.110 The damaged chests then landed

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Figure 20 Howard G. Laskey, The Boston Tea Party. Illustration in The Beginner’s American History, 1902. Special Collections. Monroe C. Gutman Library, Harvard Graduate School of Education.

in the shallow water of low tide, where patriots, splashing about in the salty tea blooming in the harbor, continued to hack away at them to ensure their final destruction.111 The raising, straining, leaning, and violent dismemberment in the painting, in other words, were also features of the Destruction of the Tea. Moreover, the painting features a boat that has been strenuously rowed across a harbor in hopes of preventing a fatal calamity. Copley’s desperate efforts at mediation had required him to row hurriedly back and forth across the harbor between Faneuil Hall and Castle William, delivering messages between the two parties. (Note that Watson also features a castle: Morro Castle, in the distant background at right.) Although the posture of the central figures, as they reach forward to pull Watson upward and inward, evokes an attempted rescue that seems thoroughly unrelated to the overboarding vector of the Tea Party (where men reach over the side to cast out materials), the reaching figures function ambivalently as signs of both casting out and retraction or rescue; indeed, this essential ambivalence characterizes not only the indecision of the moment itself (it isn’t clear whether Watson will be reached) but also the sources from which Copley drew to design the figures. It is well known that he borrowed from

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Raphael’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes as he composed these figures (drawing or pulling in) but less so that he similarly derived elements from engravings of Rubens’s treatment of the men throwing Jonah—​casting him—​overboard to be devoured by the whale. The exertion of the men in Watson can thus be said to conflate casting and retrieving.

Perception and Reception in Watson and the Tea Party Along with the compositional and iconographical slippages already noted, Watson and the Shark and the Boston Tea Party exhibit a more structural connection in Copley’s altered model of beholding, his revised conception of perceptual delivery that painting is (or is not) capable of achieving. Watson and the Shark is a post–​Tea Party painting inasmuch as it abandons Copley’s previous model of sensory delivery by replicating the material destruction of tea in the harbor in his pictorial structure. The Destruction of the Tea as it might appear through an empiricist lens would involve a perceptual bundle coming from England but violently intercepted before it could be fully and properly incorporated into the colonial sensorium. The tea, as part of a spectacle of destruction watched by thousands of people lining the waterfront, would be a sensorially fragmentary tea that could be seen but not touched or tasted—​tea that never reached its intended destiny as an agent of multisensory synthesis. It was tea taken by the harbor rather than by the bodies of colonists so that it manifestly failed to produce plenary receptive impressions. In other respects as well, the Tea Party was understood as a sensorially misaligned or unnatural perceptual experience. Commentators noticed, for example, that the fires and moonlight created a ghastly hyperillumination—​“Everything was as light as day, by means of lamps and torches; a pin might be seen lying on the wharf”—​but this acute visibility was accompanied by an eerie silence: “Although there were many people on the wharf, entire silence prevailed,—​no clamor, no talking.” There was “a great silence of the neighborhood.”112 Access to the event was granted to vision, but not to other senses. The same failures characterize Watson and the Shark. Indeed, every operation of reflective impression, sensory synthesis, and focal attention that Copley developed in the tabletop paintings is retracted in the history painting. Where there were once unruffled tabletops that announced their capacity for retaining and regenerating precise impressions of reflection, there is now (occupying an equivalent portion of the canvas) a choppy and eerily unreflective sea that offers, at best, only displaced and distorted formal echoes. As in each of the tabletop pictures, Copley populates this surface with grasping hands, but in Watson and the Shark, they all dramatically fail to reach their appointed objects. In the tabletop paintings, hands placidly align with their reflections coming up from below; in Watson and the Shark, the hands in the upper and “bottum” parts of the painting miss each other entirely, creating an effect of sensory shear rather than equilibrium (figs. 21–​23). In Watson, Copley disrupts the neatly covalent lozenges made

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Figure 21 John Singleton Copley, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (Jemima Debuke), 1773. Oil on canvas, 40 × 48¾ in. (101.6 × 123.82 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the M. and M. Karolik Collection of Eighteenth-Century American Arts, 39.250. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

by reflection in the tables (for example, the balanced, perfect forms made by the tabletop as it meets Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow’s hands, in figure 21), offering instead a series of offsetting triangles that echo, if anything, the jagged shapes of the shark’s teeth. Connections between top and bottom, background and foreground, are also severed. Boy with a Flying Squirrel had featured a delicate chain connecting foreground and background figures over an expanse of water (the glass), and in Watson a rope stretches between a figure in the boat and the figure in the foreground sea. But now the rope lies slack, the connection broken. The viewer’s role in the painting shifts sharply with these missed connections and misregistered reflections. Whereas the foreground of the tabletop paintings stages the enlivenment and embodiment of objects as they pass outward toward the picture plane, the viewer’s corporate synthesis recuperating those objects from flat signs to multidimensional realities, the foreground of Watson and the Shark stages the opposite process: fragmentation, dismemberment, disincorporation. The ripping teeth of the giant shark

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Figure 22 John Singleton Copley, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (Jemima Debuke) (detail of fig. 21). Figure 23 John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark (detail of fig. 18).

and the flayed and dismembered leg of the figure of Watson are only the most obvious signs of this process. Watson, for example, is multiply resonant as a figure of aesthetic interruption and even disaster. As commentary on the painting by other scholars has shown, Watson is a hybrid of quotations from two sources Copley had studied intently in Italy: the figure of the possessed boy in Raphael’s Transfiguration and one of the sons in the Laocoön group.113 But the full resonance of these allusions has not been traced. The boy in the Transfiguration (fig. 24) had been described by earlier eighteenthcentury critics as a flaw in Raphael’s composition because he broke the narrative unity of the scene and served to “divide the Picture” by introducing an “Under-Story.” As Jonathan Richardson wrote: “O Divine Rafaelle, forgive me if I take the Liberty to say I cannot approve in this particular of that Amazing Picture of the Transfiguration, where the Incidental Action of the Man’s bringing his Son possess’d with the Dumb Devil to the Disciples, and their not being able to cast him out is made at least as conspicuous, and as much a Principal Action as that of the Transfiguration.”114 Richardson associates the possessed boy (already entangled with themes of diabolical or deviant “possession” or seizure, as well as the action of casting out) with the shattering of narrative unity. The Laocoön allusion (fig. 25) imports into the foreground of Watson an even more traumatic echo of aesthetic breakage. Copley, having “stood astonished” before the original in Italy, purchased a plaster cast of the Laocoön group. It was one of a group of casts he acquired in hopes of transporting the sculptural heritage of the classical world to his future studio in London. Writing to his wife from Florence in 1775, he promised, “I shall find means to carry with me the most valuable specimens of art, in casts of plaster of Paris, of the finest works in the world.”115 But this act of aesthetic transmission went horribly wrong: as one of Copley’s earliest biographers wrote, “It may here be mentioned that, when Copley received the case containing the above-named casts, they were found to be broken into a thousand pieces, from want of proper care in packing,—​a disappointment which, in the words of his son, ‘he never ceased to regret during the whole course of his after-life.’ ”116 If Copley still clung to some hope that transit could suture longdistance separation even after the splintered tea chests in Boston Harbor announced the violent miscarriage of transatlantic sensory communities, that hope must surely have been dashed into a thousand pieces along with his Laocoön. With Watson and the Shark, it is as if the tabletops have dropped out of Copley’s portraits, revealing both the under parts (so assiduously obscured by the tables and disavowed by their clean reflections) and a profusion of incident which—​with its diabolical “under-story”—​draws attention from the upper quarters of the painting. The crucial synthetic link between vision and touch has been severed—​standing before Watson and the Shark, viewers are no longer beholders (be-holders); they have become spectators. Copley not only forces this model of distanced and compromised reception upon the viewer; he also installs it in the world of the painting. Consider his unusual treatment of the figure of the black sailor in the rowboat. This figure befuddled critics, not only because his position at the top of the pyramidal composition radically inverted

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Figure 24 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), The Transfiguration, 1520. Oil on wood, 13 ft. 5⅜ in. × 9 ft. 10 in. (410 × 279 cm). Pinacoteca, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

Figure 25 Laocoön. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photograph: Alinari/ Art Resource, New York.

the normative hierarchies for such arrangements (with social subordinates occupying the subordinate corners of the pyramid), but also because of his cryptic expression and ambiguous role in the narrative action. Reviewers, who repeatedly praised the expressions of sympathy, “eagerness,” and general physical/emotional exertion of the other figures (“the Eagerness and the Concern so strongly marked in every Countenance,” “Horror bristling their Hairs, and the Eagerness of a compassionate good Heart for the poor Sufferer in their Faces”), puzzled over the nondescript expression of the black figure and his failure to assist in the rescue efforts:117 “But we must suppose, that at that instant of time, no horror in beholding the object would prevent seamen from acting to his rescue. It would not be unnatural to place a woman in the attitude of the black; but he, instead of being terrified, ought, in our opinion, to be busy. He has thrown a rope over to the boy. It is held, unsailorlike, between the second and third finger of his left hand and he makes no use of it.”118 In these texts, the black figure exemplifies a numb impotence that is further reinforced by the critic’s suggestion of emasculation. The crux of the description is that the figure is said to see but not physically participate in the action surrounding him: “He makes no use of” his hands. At least one critic found a way to justify the figure’s reticence, suggesting that the black man, though leaning back out of an irrational fear, was at least keeping the boat from capsizing as the other figures reached out. “An idle Black, prompted by the connate Fear of his Country for that ravenous Fish, leans backward to keep the Gunnel of this Side of the Boat above Water.”119 Whatever the causal connection between the black sailor and the disposition of the boat, that sailor’s detachment parallels the oddly neutral position of the boat, which seems similarly disconnected from the physical dynamics around it. Critics noticed this too: “The sea should be of a foam with the lashing of the shark’s tail, and the boat, as almost every man leans on one side, in order to save the boy, ought to lie nearly gunnel to, whereas the waves are as placid as those of the Thames when there’s little or no wind, and the boat as steady as if it was in that sort of safe sea which is occasionally exhibited on the stage of Sadler’s-Wells.”120 The black figure has rightly received a great deal of attention in treatments of the painting, most notably that by Hugh Honour and that by Albert Boime, who draws the painting into a detailed history of the role that the politics of abolitionism played in British responses to the American Revolution during the 1770s and 1780s. For Boime, Copley’s inclusion of this figure was a Tory propaganda tactic intended to show sympathy for the enslaved and thereby to highlight the slaveholding hypocrisy of the American “Sons of Liberty.” He reads the weak agency of the black figure (who “functions as little more than a peg on which to hang the towline”) as evidence of Tory cynicism, because the figure serves merely a symbolic function in a Revolutionary debate and is not actually to be granted liberty or agency in the real world. He is “an invisible man whose capacity to act in the real world is blocked.”121 To build upon—​and also complicate—​this account, I argue not only that Copley shows sympathy for the black figure but also that the black figure occupies Copley’s own

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Figure 26 John Singleton Copley, Rescue Group, 1777/78. Black chalk heightened with white on paper, 14¼ × 23¾ in. (36 x 55.1 cm) Detroit Institute of Arts, USA / City of Detroit Purchase / The Bridgeman Art Library, DTR 375599.

imagined position in the action, standing in for precisely the neutrality, impotence, and hesitation that Copley expressed in his letters about the Tea Party and the Revolution generally, but which he could not publicly embody in painting in the figure of a white man. Yet the black figure also mirrors the viewer’s own imagined position before the painting, standing in for the blocked, impotent, dis- or misembodiment that characterized transatlantic material relations during the Revolutionary crisis. The black figure was interpreted as unable to fully inhabit the moment, to act or to react according to the codes of synchronic sympathy; he looks at the action around him but cannot or will not participate bodily in the scene.122 Copley scholars know that the pose and the position of the black sailor had been planned originally for a white figure (fig. 26).123 Only later in the process of painting did Copley change the ethnic identity. This alteration indicates both the importance the figure held for Copley and his difficulty finding the proper embodiment for the role the figure played. Copley’s decision here deploys racial discourse to articulate the spectator’s traumatic impotence and problematic neutrality by nominating a subaltern proxy to bear these functions in the painting. In his book Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm for a Metaphor for Existence, Hans Blumenberg argues that the metaphor of the observer watching a shipwreck or other naval

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disaster from shore develops, during the nineteenth century, into the core metaphor for modern subjectivity, aesthetic distance, and the “spectator position with regard to history.”124 Watson and the Shark represents an earlier opening onto this position, defining it, moreover, as integral to the art of painting. The breakup of the senses in shipwreck (from shore, one can see but not reach it) is both coeval with what would become the fragmentation of the viewing subject in romanticism, and (as Copley allows us to see) an analogy for the limitations of painting as a synthetic, recuperative mode of communication and for the failure of long-distance sensory communities. The shipwreck is to the dockside spectator what the painting is to the viewer—​all image. Copley’s tabletop paintings had assiduously attempted to make painting a device for the plenary propagation of experience across the sea. Watson and the Shark, imagined as it is through the experience of the tea’s destruction in Boston Harbor and the realization that the full reincorporation of objects over distance is impossible, recognizes the annulment of Copley’s dream. All paintings are shipwrecks, Copley seems to realize; like the English tea ships, they cannot deliver synthetic, multisensory, immediate impressions. The relationship between this sensory disjunction and academic painting later becomes concretized in the flowering of romanticism, but Copley’s painting allows us to account for one of its origins in colonial traumas of transit.

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2 AUDUBON’S BURDEN Materiality and Transmission in The Birds of America

Beginning in the late 1990s, the artist Fred Tomaselli produced a series of collages featuring altered ornithological field guides. In works like Old World Warblers (fig. 27), Tomaselli replaced the body of each bird with a piece of a page from an L.L. Bean, Land’s End, or other outerwear catalog. Tomaselli’s birds thus come to be clothed in photomechanical reproductions of pullovers, anoraks, raincoats, squall jackets, and buttondowns. They wear Polartec of every imaginable gauge, as well as nylon, polyester, Lycra, elastane, and, most ironically, down. This chapter begins with Tomaselli’s project because I want to draw upon the forcefulness and concision of the questions it raises about American ornithological representation generally. Tomaselli’s collages conflate nature and culture, feathers and Polartec. That much is evident. But they also juxtapose the migratory patterns of birds to what we might call the migratory patterns of commodities. For these are not just any Polartec pullovers—​t hese are L.L. Bean Polartec pullovers, cut from a catalog. These are birds made out of mail order; out of mobile merchandise. In them are conflated the flapping of wings and the rumbling of UPS trucks, the bird alighted on the tree outside the window and the package alighted (with the same magical weightlessness) on the porch outside the door. Tomaselli’s collages posit a structural connection between two treasured species of transcendence. They suggest that the qualities long envied in birds—​t heir ability to move smoothly through space heedless of earthbound limitations—​are eerily congruent with the aims of the global commodity system, which seeks the same immediacy, fluidity, and transcendence of geopolitical

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Figure 27 Fred Tomaselli, Old World Warblers, 2000. Collage, 11 × 8 in. (27.94 × 20.32 cm). © The Artist / Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

boundaries. The collages prompt a question: Have images of birds long functioned as figures of commerce as well as symbols of natural or spiritual uplift ? And they suggest that it is worthwhile to wonder whether bird illustration has not always been entangled with the imagination of delocalization, transmission, and the economic geography of things. This chapter explores these connections as they were articulated in John James Audubon’s celebrated Birds of America project of the 1820s and 1830s. Setting aside, for a moment, the major trends in Audubon scholarship (analyses of the artist’s uncertain position between fine art and scientific illustration, psychobiographical approaches to his interest in the mating habits and violent behavior of birds, art-historical accounts of his source imagery, readings of his birds as tutelary emblems of national comportment), I focus on the materiality of Audubon’s pictures and the arduous travel required to produce and distribute them.1 The Birds of America, I hope to show, was as impressive a shipping and distribution project as it was an artistic project; indeed, its ambitions as a model of matter-in-motion helped determine the character of its aesthetic achievement. Audubon (1785–​1851) began work on The Birds of America in earnest in 1820. Aiming to discover and depict every bird species extant in the United States and its rapidly expanding territories, he started by making drawings in an innovative blend of watercolor, pastel, gouache, and graphite (fig. 28). From these original drawings, the London engraving firm of Robert Havell (1769–​1832), under Audubon’s close supervision, then produced hand-colored prints, combining etching, engraving, and aquatint.2 The prints were delivered to subscribers as they were finished, in sets of five (each set called a fascicle), and then later bound into four volumes. The final print—​number 435—​was delivered to subscribers in 1839, some twenty years after Audubon had begun.3 Although Audubon’s bird images have now become so familiar as to seem thoroughly domesticated, they were received with astonishment at the time. Artists and naturalists alike praised them: as illustrious a savant as Baron Georges Cuvier called The Birds of America “the most magnificent monument that has yet been raised to ornithology.”4 It was widely agreed that Audubon’s were the most vivid and lifelike ornithological illustrations that had ever been produced—​“every feather,” said the Edinburgh Journal, “appearing to be inspired with life.”5 This sense of vivacity was attributable largely to Audubon’s unique method of working in the field with freshly killed birds that he had shot himself. Audubon wanted to enliven ornithological illustration by depicting birds in action, “alive and Moving” in their habitual postures and behaviors.6 In what amounted to a form of ghastly puppetry appropriate to the age of Frankenstein in which it was pursued, he would pierce the warm body of the dead bird with sharpened wires and pin it in a lifelike pose to a gridded board before drawing it.7 He disliked drawing from stuffed specimens because, as he wrote, the taxidermists who prepared them were unstudied in the habits and anatomies of birds and mounted the specimens with “no further talents than that of filling the skins, until plumply formed,

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Figure 28 John James Audubon, Carolina Parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis, ca. 1825. Watercolor, gouache, crayon, pastel, 2911⁄₁₆ × 213⁄₁₆ in. (75.4 × 53.8 cm). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, 1863.17.26. Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions.

and adorning them with eyes and legs generally from their own fancy.”8 Previous illustrators, relying on such specimens, had produced nothing but “stiff unmeaning profiles.”9 Because Audubon served as hunter, naturalist, and illustrator all at once, he was able to avoid the standard divisions of natural-historical labor and work quickly, with the freshest possible specimens.10 It may be difficult at first to imagine Audubon’s bird project having anything to do with the commercial world of shipping and merchandise, because Audubon has come down to us as a denizen of nature, an autochthonous emissary from a landscape uncontaminated by market relations. As an anonymous poet wrote in an 1859 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Audubon inhabited an American wilderness “Where Nature yet frowns back the sounding mart.”11 Audubon himself was largely responsible for this myth. While traveling through Scotland, England, and France in the late 1820s, he fashioned himself—​to the delight of his audiences, fed on Francois-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand and James Fenimore Cooper—​as the quintessential American backwoodsman, with a buckskin jacket and long hair slicked with bear grease (fig. 29).12 Although Audubon certainly did spend a lot of time in the woods, he was a cosmopolitan from the start, swept up in the brutal and complex circum-Atlantic commercial systems of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Born in the French colony of Saint Domingue (now Haiti), he was the illegitimate son of Jean Audubon, a French plantation owner, slaver, merchant, and sea captain, and Jeanne Rabine, a French chambermaid. His mother died soon after he was born, and the infant Audubon was nursed either by his father’s quadroon mistress, Catherine (nicknamed “Sanitte”), or one of the slaves on his plantation.13 His father removed him from the island in 1788, as the slave revolts approached, and Audubon spent most of his childhood in France, where, among other things, he witnessed the Terror,14 and he claimed to have studied art for six months under Jacques-Louis David.15 In 1803, his father sent him back across the Atlantic to manage property he owned outside Philadelphia. There, his shooting costumes were of satin and silk and “the finest ruffled shirt Philadelphia could afford.”16 In 1807 Audubon went west to Kentucky. But not to chase birds; he went there to become a merchant. He recognized that the rapidly opening West was a market hungry for commodities imported from the East Coast and from Europe, and that money could be made simply by transporting them there. In a letter detailing his decision to move to Louisville, he wrote, “Objects well chosen, favorably bought, and shipped with care, are always sure of meeting a good sale.”17 Shipping with care: that was the trick. The communication of merchandise—​indeed any transport—​was exceedingly difficult in and around the Trans-Appalachian West at the turn of the nineteenth century. Traveling to Kentucky on the route Audubon took, for example, involved dragging everything over the Appalachians between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, a nearly three-hundred-mile trip that took at least sixteen days. Heavy Conestoga wagons were used to get over the stump-riddled mountain passes, and it was not unusual for passengers to be asked to get out and lean against the wheels to prevent

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Figure 29 John Syme, John James Audubon, 1826. Oil on canvas. 35½ × 27½ in. (90.2 × 69.8 cm). White House Historical Association (White House Collection): 485.

the wagons from tumbling over on downgrades.18 (Audubon’s wife was hurt in a similar accident.) Once in Pittsburgh, emigrants would usually hire a flatboat and pick up a copy of Zadok Cramer’s indispensable Navigator: Containing Directions for Navigating the Monongahela, Allegheny, Ohio, and Mississippi Rivers (fig. 30).19 Floating down the Ohio would be relatively easy, provided there weren’t too many snags or sandbars in the way. Once on the water, a boat had no easy way to go back, at least not until steamboats became common in the late teens. The only way to get back upriver was to walk north along the Natchez Trace, to take a keelboat (which had to be poled and cordelled with ropes against the formidable current), or to continue down to New Orleans, catch a ship back around to a port on the Eastern Seaboard, and start over.20 Because flatboats that

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Figure 30 Zadok Cramer, The Navigator, 1814, page 135. The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky.

had completed the downstream trip were useless for a return, they were dismantled in New Orleans and sold as waterlogged lumber. I provide these arcane details about river transportation to press the point that the landscape Audubon first confronted in the early nineteenth-century West was one whose contours were defined almost entirely by narrow transportation routes, themselves delineated by the ease or difficulty of movement. It was a landscape in which the direction of a river or the position of a town above or below a waterfall could have enormous market and material consequences. It was a landscape characterized by the near-total alignment of bodily experience, economic activity, and topographical incident. As a merchant, Audubon came to know this geography intimately. Like most merchants, he needed to make annual or biennial trips to the East Coast to order merchandise for his store. This meant eight-hundred-mile excursions back and forth between Philadelphia and eastern Kentucky, moving sometimes on horseback, sometimes by a combination of coach, walking, and flatboat.21 He frequently hauled cargo on difficult trips. In the winter of 1810, for example, to transport merchandise to a general store he hoped to open upriver at the French settlement of Sainte Geneviève (in what is now Missouri), he and a partner spent two months trying to get a keelboat of cargo up the Mississippi against an icy current.22 Audubon, who drew and observed birds during breaks in such hauling activities, recognized that the birds had an easier time of it. He was especially interested in their ability to traverse in an instant what for Audubon himself was a laborious, crawling process of earthbound movement: “How much I envied their power of Flight to enable me to be here, there, and all over the Globe comparatively Speaking in a Moment.”23 Audubon’s ornithological representations are always inherently concerned with this gap between the aerial and the corporeal experience of the material world. However freely the birds of his Birds of America flew, the circulation of the pictures he drew of them was constrained by gravity, sequence, and topographical exigency. Audubon’s technical and compositional decisions thematized this tension between forms of transmission.

An “Enormously Gigantic Work” Audubon failed as a merchant. Like many merchants along the frontier in the era of the War of 1812, he was hurt by restrictions and obstructions to the movement of goods (bottlenecks, blockades, embargoes, transportation accidents) and the instabilities of the chaotic credit system of the period.24 He ultimately suffered a total financial ruin in the Panic of 1819 and was forced to liquidate all his assets to pay off his creditors.25 His decision to devote his life to a project of drawing every bird in America came directly on the heels of this commercial failure. Luckily (or so one would expect), Audubon’s new project promised to be less physically arduous. Drawing upon his brief training as an artist in France, dealing in illusions rather than flour or lard, Audubon could lighten his load. He now had at his

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Figure 31 Jules-César Savigny, black ibis and white ibis from Description de l’Égypte, 1809–​22. PF Typ 815.09.3210 v. 17, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

disposal all the transformative powers of visual representation—​the magic elasticity of scale variation, the coding and compression allowed by the transfer of objects from three to two dimensions, and the systematizing and abstraction of virtual space allowed by perspective. He needed to transport, not substances themselves, but only their wispy images. As a would-be naturalist, moreover, he might make use of the entire array of abstraction techniques common in natural-history illustration. He could follow his immediate ornithological forebears, like Alexander Wilson (his primary predecessor and competitor in America) and Jules-César Savigny (the savant who drew the birds for the Description de l’Égypte, which Audubon knew well), and present his birds in a diagrammatic style, isolated and recombined against blank backgrounds (fig. 31). This would permit the extraction of the material birds from their spatial and ecological milieu and secure their entry into the “cascade of ever simplified inscriptions” that Bruno Latour has shown to be typical of expeditionary image practices.26 In short, he could subject his birds to what Michael Lynch has called the mathematization of scientific illustration, in which the unruly specificity of the specimen is controlled through calibration, standard-

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ization, and categorization.27 Indeed, such dematerializing treatments seem eminently appropriate to his avian subject matter. Audubon might rightly have considered the magic of pictorial representation, especially in the relatively portable print format, a way of emulating the effervescence and mobility of the birds themselves. But the puzzle and the paradox of Birds of America is that Audubon refused almost all these strategies and produced instead one of the largest and heaviest and most outrageously material works of illustration ever made. Each of its four volumes weighed more than forty pounds, requiring, as Audubon put it, “two stout arms to raise it from the ground.”28 Not only is Birds of America the largest ornithological book ever published, but it was, according to Greg Nobles, also the largest book ever published, period. (That honor passed in 2004 to a 5-by-7-foot, 133-pound volume on Bhutan.)29 Figure 32 shows a volume in use, making clear its scale relative to the human body as well as to the books shelved behind it. The excessive bulk of The Birds of America derives primarily from Audubon’s insistence on drawing and then printing each of the birds at actual size. After killing a bird and pinning and posing it in the desired attitude, he used a drawing compass to transfer the measurements of the arrangement to his watercolor page. When the watercolor was later printed, he demanded that the dimensions of the bird in the original drawing be preserved without alteration. It is one thing to represent a warbler or a finch at actual size, but a whooping crane or a great egret is an altogether different matter. Such big birds placed extraordinary demands on the representational support and required that the entire project be printed on double elephant folio paper, the largest art paper then manufactured, measuring roughly 29½ by 39½ inches per sheet.30 One of the reasons that the project had to be printed in London was that it was impossible to obtain large enough copper sheets for the engravings in America.31 Descriptions of the project in the American and European press repeatedly noted the unusual size. “To those  . . . who hitherto have not had an opportunity of seeing it, we shall state,—​what they may already have conceived, knowing the objects described to be as large as life,—​t hat the first volume, already published, containing one hundred plates, is truly a gigantic volume.”32 The eminent British ornithologist William Swainson wrote in 1828, “The size of the plates, exceeds any thing of the kind I have either seen or heard of; they are no less than 3 ft. 3 in. long, by 2 ft. 2 in. broad! On this vast surface every bird is represented in its full dimensions. Large as is the paper, it is sometimes (as in the male wild turkey, pl. 1.) barely sufficient for the purpose.”33 Cuvier spoke of the “dimension extraordinaire” of the volumes.34 Reviews often had to refer readers to their own immediate corporeal scene to convey the size of Audubon’s pages. Simply citing the numerical measurements did not do the trick: “The grandeur of the work may be judged of when we say, that the plates are larger than the whole sheet opened and laid sideways upon which this paper is printed.”35 Many of Audubon’s colleagues (and critics), skeptical of his actual-size directive, warned him against this wildly impractical strategy (not least because it meant that the

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Figure 32 Illustration of Birds of America in use. © 2010 The Associated Press.

full set of volumes would cost upward of a thousand dollars in the United States). William Dunlap, an important period historian of American art, wondered “how much science gains by increasing the picture of a bird beyond that size necessary to display all the parts distinctly.”36 Audubon himself acknowledged that there had been many objections to the “great size of the paper upon which the representations are offered.”37 He wrote in 1826 of what he called his “enormously gigantic Work”: “Some of my friends are against the pictures being the size of life, and I must acknowledge it renders the work rather bulky, but my heart was always bent on it, and I cannot refrain from attempting it.”38 Despite being “bent on it,” Audubon must frequently have been tempted to jettison his actual-size policy. Because his bird images were so bulky and the transportation networks through which they had to be communicated were so undeveloped, moving them proved exceptionally difficult. Audubon bore the brunt of this transit himself.39 He traveled through thick woods and canebrakes, rivers and swamps, from Labrador to Florida to Missouri, making actual-size drawings of birds. On every “tedious, difficult, and perilous journey” (as he put it to the press in 1831), he carried these drawings in hundred-pound tin-lined cases.40 Four times, he carried drawings, prints, and proofs of prints back and forth across the Atlantic. He went door to door, often on foot, with huge portfolios, seeking subscriptions throughout the cities and the countryside of the United States, Britain, and Europe.

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Audubon’s folios and cases were subject to all the usual mishaps and complications of cargo transport. In 1820 he accidentally left one of them on a dock in Natchez and was lucky to have it returned to him in New Orleans.41 The cases also, inevitably, intersected with the racial and labor politics of cargo haulage. They were bulky and conspicuous enough, for example, to make it difficult for Audubon to walk through the streets of New Orleans in 1821 without attracting stares—​white men were not expected to carry such burdens.42 One thing is certain: Audubon’s pictures of birds had a much more difficult time navigating through the landscape than did the birds themselves. It has been estimated that Audubon traveled thirty-five thousand miles for (and with) the pictures for The Birds of America.43 Granted, he was not the first naturalistentrepreneur to suffer the strains of travel and transportation: his predecessor Wilson had complained of being “shaken to pieces in stage coaches” when he was seeking subscriptions for his own volumes.44 But Audubon’s drawings and prints (because they were life-size) were much larger than Wilson’s, and his travels much more widespread. The transatlantic coordination of print production and the distribution of the final prints were themselves massive material undertakings. Numberless tubes and crates of proof images were sent from Havell in London to Audubon (who was constantly traveling) and back. Then armies of couriers carried the special tin cases in which each set of five finished prints was packed and delivered to subscribers.45 Despite these inordinate costs—​t he shipping charges, the physical strain on Audubon and the couriers, assistants, and unnamed servants who helped him, and the inconvenience to viewers and virtual tourists as his images turned his birds to elephants—​ Audubon insisted on his actual-size model of representation.

Actual Size Audubon’s insistence on actual size—​in all its complexity and indeed perversity—​has not been adequately addressed in the scholarship. Nor have its implications for the design and composition of Audubon’s images and the questions it raises about the ontology of representation itself. The natural- and art-historical literature on the nineteenth century provides no sustained examination, to my knowledge, of the conceptual and material implications of actual-size representation. Despite the impression of bigness that Birds of America conveys, the essential characteristic of Audubon’s pictures is their literalism, not their gigantism per se. Audubon was less interested in manipulating size to produce an overwhelming grandeur—​what Robert Morris has named “the Wagner Effect”—​than in something more precise, uncanny, and ultimately unsettling to the regime of visual representation.46 Audubon emphasized the absolute precision of his actual-size model of representation. In 1831, in the introduction to the first volume of his Ornithological Biography, a set of texts published as a companion to The Birds of America, he explained:

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Merely to say, that each object of my Illustrations is of the size of nature, were too vague—​ for to many it might only convey the idea that they are so, more or less, according as the eye of the delineator may have been more or less correct in measurement simply obtained through that medium; and of avoiding error in this respect I am particularly desirous. Not only is every object, as a whole, of the natural size, but also every portion of each object. The compass aided me in its delineation, [and] regulated and corrected each part . . . . The bill, the feet, the legs, the claws, the very feathers as they project one beyond another, have been accurately measured.47

Note that for Audubon natural-size representation entails an adamantly non-optical method of apprehension and transfer. He explicitly rejects vision as a method of measurement, insisting, in so many words, that he does not “eyeball” his dimensions, disavowing the “eye of the delineator” as only “more or less” precise. He claims, instead, to have effected a near-indexical transfer from body to page, compass touching bird touching paper. The contemporary painter Walton Ford re-created Audubon’s working process for a PBS documentary in 2006. Ford (whose own work features Audubonesque natural-historical tableaux) demonstrates the constant physical contact with the dead bird that Audubon’s method of drawing birds required, both when he posed the bird and when he translated its size to the page. Indeed, Ford’s demonstration makes vividly clear that the dimensions of the bird are physically carried across (to take the word translate in its literal meaning) from the carcass to the drawing.48 Audubon, who undertook this meticulous measurement only in the service of this direct transfer, did not take what would seem to be the next logical step for such a precise metric activity: he did not convert his measurements into the conventional units that might then be used to generate ratios and scale shifts. No measurements are listed anywhere on the prints, nor is there evidence that the span of the compass in any of the translations was ever numerically recorded.49 Measurement is evident in Audubon’s pictures only in the compass of the birds themselves. Measurement stops at measurement and does not cross over into calibration; Audubon refuses to submit the birds to the de-realizations of metric transformation. In other words, Audubon’s bird pictures do not have a scale; they have only a size. In not having a scale, Audubon’s birds refrain from fully engaging the virtual space typical of Western representation. David Summers, in his book Real Spaces, argues that the founding operation of virtuality in the Western pictorial tradition is abstraction from size.50 The ability to break objects out of their given corporeal dimensions while retaining their proportions allows for their simultaneous pictorialization and rationalization: “Once abstracted—​t hat is, once the measurable has been apprehended as pure relation, as pure ratio, then it is admissible to mind, which Aristotle called ‘the place of forms’ (De anima 429a28). . . . The importance of the abstraction from size involved, first in seeing, and then in thinking, cannot be overstressed. It means that things are known, and best known, apart from their corporeality, in terms of potentially notional ratio.”51

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Figure 33 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Louisiana Tanager, Tanagra ludoviciana / Scarlet Tanager, Tanagra rubra, 1837, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38. Hand-colored engraving. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Figure 34 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Snowy Owl, Strix nyctea, 1837, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38. Hand-colored engraving. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Thus a representation prepared without that abstraction (prepared, that is, at actual size) has in some essential way refused to cross over into the metric-optical space that governs the discourse of images. Such a representation involves a pictorial logic of substitution and transposition instead of abstraction and exchange. By clinging to its original spatial articulation, it also remains tethered to tactile modes of apprehension and their consequent values of adjacency and contact. As Summers puts it, “We can only touch things at the size they are.”52 Audubon’s birds still occupy the dimensions of their originary reality and transfer that space, laterally and literally, into the real corporeal space of their observers. In these terms, one might even claim that Audubon’s pictures are not images. There is an instructive irony in the impossibility of conveying Audubon’s dimensional actuality by means of the reproductions in this book, which are far smaller than actual size. My own technologies of display are based on the scale elasticity conferred by optics and digitization—​both of which Audubon’s pictures vehemently resist.53 Perhaps the best way to illustrate Audubon’s actuality effect, given these limitations, is to show images taken of two full pages from the Birds of America volumes, so that at least the relationship between the large and small birds as they occupy different spatial proportions on the pages becomes evident (figs. 33 and 34). Although modern reproductions have made it difficult to appreciate the sheer bulk of The Birds of America, the corporeal burden of Audubon’s work was impossible to ignore at the time. Consider the seemingly simple problems of storage and display. Because subscribers generally did not have the necessary shelving capacity for their gigantic Audubons, many had special cabinetry built to hold the volumes. Dr. Benjamin Phillips of London, for example, commissioned a convertible ottoman on casters to store and display his Birds (fig. 35). Each of the four volumes rests in its own mahogany drawer that pulls out, hinges open, drops legs, and forms a table for the perusal of the pages.54 What a place for a flittering bird to end up—​in an ottoman—​an object devoted above all else to the cultivation of stasis. The strangeness of Phillips’s ottoman becomes even more apparent when it is seen alongside the wide array of other cabinetry made for viewing prints in the early nineteenth century. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the golden age of what might be called optical furniture, such as a tambour desk from about 1800, whose top is fitted with a lens and mirror for looking at vues d’optique placed in the bottom (fig. 36).55 Peering into an apparatus like this, viewers experienced a dramatically heightened illusion of recessional depth in the print placed beneath the lens. Whereas these contraptions highlighted the potential for virtuality inherent in printed images by providing a stable material base against which vertiginous perspectival transformations could be experienced, Phillips’s ottoman serves instead to underline the intractable materiality of Audubon’s prints.56 The volumes, digested as they are by the ottoman, seem at home in its sitting-room format—​t heir covers mirrored in the ottoman’s table wings and ultimately in the wings of the depicted birds. Furniture and image are related by analogy, rather than contrast.

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Figure 35 Custom ottoman made for Dr. Benjamin Phillips, © The Field Museum, Chicago #GN81920.

In fact the ottoman actively forecloses the disembodied optical apprehension encouraged by the optical desk and other period print-viewing devices like the zograscope (and by the 1840s, the stereoscope). Whereas these devices used cabinetry to regulate the viewer’s posture, immobilizing the body to ensure that the eye was positioned correctly, the ottoman compels the viewer to go through an elaborate series of movements, stooping to open the side, straining to pull out the heavy drawers, and then coordinating the unwieldy page-turning operations, which require at least two hands (and arms). To see Audubon’s birds by this means is necessarily to touch them. In or out of their viewing cabinetry, Audubon’s hefty prints have often been criticized for interfering with the purity of their own visual reception. As one print scholar wrote in 1909, “The most sumptuous work to which aquatint was ever applied in illustration is undoubtedly The Birds of America. . . . The only drawback to one’s pleasure in such a marvel of form and colour is the size and weight of the original volumes.”57 Audubon’s understanding of representation as transposition rather than transformation has enormous formal implications. As is evident in figures 33 and 34, the relationship between the dimensions of the birds and the dimensions of the page becomes increasingly salient. In most illustrated books, readers have little or no awareness of the rela-

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Figure 36 Tambour desk made by Edmund Johnson, 1793–​1811, Salem, Massachusetts. Museum Purchase, 1955.96.4.1. Photograph courtesy Winterthur Museum.

tionship between the size of the images and the size of the page itself. Because the scale of the illustrations is variable, the illustrated objects bear no consistent relationship to the material dimensions of the book, and the experience of reading and looking is dematerialized. The book becomes an optical device whose own presence is downplayed. But Audubon’s actual-size project has the opposite effect. The attitudes and poses of the birds must obey the size of the page, whose stubborn constancy thereby becomes evident. The page becomes less a window or lens than a container, a box into which avian objects of various sizes, S, M, L, XL, have been placed, some more easily than others. The smallest birds seem dwarfed by their frame, whereas the largest birds, folded over in uncomfortable configurations like dry goods, only emphasize the status of the page as a container or crate straining to hold its cargo (figs. 37–​39).58 This strategy of containerized representation has a palpable effect on interpretation.

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Figure 37 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, American Flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber, 1838, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38. Hand-colored etching and aquatint on Whatman paper, 39⅞ × 26⅞ in. (101.3 × 68.3 cm). National Gallery of Art, Gift of Mrs. Walter B. James, 1945.8.431. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Figure 38 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias, 1834, plate 211 from The Birds of America, 1824–​38. Etching and aquatint, hand-colored sheet, 40 × 28 in. (101.6 × 71.1 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of William Hooper. 21.11772.211. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Figure 39 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Hooping Crane, Grus americana, 1834, plate 226 from The Birds of America, 1824–​38. Hand-colored engraving with etching and aquatint, approx. 40 × 28 in. (101.6 × 71.1 cm). Graphic Arts Collection, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Unlike scaled images, Audubon’s pages, with their material restraints, inflect the manner and disposition of the things represented upon them. For example, Audubon is well known for enlivening his bird illustrations by creating quasi-domestic relationships among multiple birds on a page, writing of his practice of “representing, if possible, each family as if employed in their most constant and natural avocations” (see fig. 28).59 Yet this multiplicity was itself predicated on his actual-size strategy: in the images it is always the smaller birds that exhibit domestic felicities, because so many of each could be made to fit on a large page. Cuvier pointed out how the extraordinary size of Audubon’s prints “permitted him to render species the size of the eagle and the grouse in natural size, and to multiply those that are less bulky in such a way as to represent them in all possible attitudes.”60 But if the large container-frame gives smaller birds space to flock together, it sentences the larger birds to a solitary confinement. They are atomized and thereby barred from the anthropomorphized social relationships suggested elsewhere in the book (compare figs. 28 and 38). Many of them adopt awkward or ungainly postures that only reinforce their outsider status; as Audubon wrote of the birds, in the third volume of his Ornithological Biography, “Many of them in fact are so large that only a single figure could be given, and that not always in so good an attitude as I could have wished.”61 Audubon’s approach to size deviated from ornithological convention. He was not the first to illustrate birds at actual size (the term usually used was the size of life or natural size), but his project was the first to make such literalism an ironbound governing principle despite its palpable difficulties; the first in which adherence to an actual-size rule determined a full array of aesthetic decisions; and one of the first to insist on a consistent treatment of scale in general.62 There was no common or coherent system for managing scale in ornithological illustration in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the French, British, and American bird illustrations that Audubon had seen and studied, two measurements, length and “extent,” were almost always indicated in the text accompanying the illustrations.63 But the relationship between those measurements and the scale of the illustrations themselves was only haphazardly indicated. For example, Coenraad Jacob Temminck’s Nouveau Recueil de Planches Coloriées d’Oiseaux, a continuation of the ornithological plates in Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, greatly influenced bird iconography in France and Britain in the early nineteenth century. Temminck’s bird images usually (but not always) included a scale marker beneath the illustration of the bird and sometimes (but not always) made a point of indicating whether the image was “figuré de grandeur naturelle.”64 Closer to home, Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology was similarly inconsistent in its appeal to natural size and in its general attitude toward information about scale. Wilson (with one exception) included no scale rulings or other information about scale on the plates themselves—​ he gave such information only in the accompanying texts (and then only occasionally).65 Although he clearly intuited the authenticating significance—​systematic and

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rhetorical—​of referring to the actual size of the birds, his application of the principle was uneven. He frequently reduced birds to fractional scales, and only sometimes announced in the text that he had done so: thus for plate 51 in volume six, Wilson, who clearly reduced the size of the birds on the page, makes no mention of the reduction in his text. For plate 52, however, he states: “The figure of this bird, and those of the other two Hawks on the same plate, are reduced to exactly half the dimensions of the living subjects.”66 The categorical difference between Audubon’s understanding of metric actuality and that of everyone else reveals itself most clearly in his handling of very large birds. Many books presented bird illustrations at natural size, but only until it became inconvenient—​t hat is, only until the actual size of the birds exceeded the actual size of the page being printed. Most birds are book-size as it is (one could devise a system of standard biblionomial nomenclature—​birds in octavo, quarto, and folio families—​that would embrace most of the avian species on the planet), so it takes no special effort to present them in their natural extension on the page. But this dimensional complacency was always prone to interruption by eagles, falcons, peacocks, and other species of birds whose bodies exceeded the available page space. In nearly every case, these illustrations would be correspondingly reduced. This is true of virtually every major ornithological work of Audubon’s time, including the folio and imperial folio volumes of the most famous French luxury ornithologies.67 In Wilson’s American Ornithology, the big birds were usually reduced by half or more. Occasionally they would be represented in part in actual size, or on mixed pages with scaled illustrations. For example, in plate 29 (fig. 40), the two woodpecker heads at the top of the page are represented at life size. But because these heads are fragmentary and share the page with three reduced images of whole woodpeckers, there is no consistent relationship between the real size of the birds and the real size of the page. Compare this with Audubon’s images of the same bird (fig. 41). Figures 40 and 41 are reproduced in their original proportional relationship. Audubon, for whom the natural-size body of the bird was inviolate, found these reductions and aggregations unacceptable. Instead, he selected the largest available paper and contorted the birds within its boundaries to get large birds to “fit.” In his adequation of the dimensions of the pages and the birds, Audubon drew his birds to inhabit the page, inhere in it, whereas the birds illustrated by other naturalists rest more lightly on the picture plane, which supports them only as a matter of temporary convenience. They could just as easily flit away, rescaling themselves, to a smaller or larger book. Audubon, in other words, made the book fit the birds; other naturalists made the birds fit the book. This principle of absolute actuality signals not only an unusual approach to the figures of the birds, but also an understanding of negative space that differed fundamentally from other current models. In the drawings of Wilson, Temminck, and other bird illustrators, the negative space surrounding the birds has no integral spatial properties of its own; it is a purely diagrammatic field, a field of sheer convertibility operating

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Figure 40 Alexander Wilson, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker from American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 1808–​1 4. F Typ 870.08.8778 v. 4, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

according to a principle of nonrelation between the illustrational elements it separates.68 Audubon’s negative space, however, has its own coherent presence. Within the dimensions of the container-page, the inconvertible expanse of “empty” space—​this much real space—​is almost as salient as the dimensions of the bird that shares it. Slices of real space, in other words, were delivered to Audubon’s subscribers along with the birds. This spatial structure has other implications for the look of Audubon’s pictures. Most important, it places enormous pressure on their extreme foreground as a surface of indexical verification. When discussing his measurement practices, Audubon wrote: “My drawings have all been  . . . copied with a closeness of measurement that I hope will always correspond with nature when brought into contact.”69 The function of the drawings and prints, in other words, had to be analogous to that of a nature print: a dead bird “brought into contact” with the page would match the size of the representation as if it had impressed its image upon the paper. Indeed, Audubon’s illustrations align more closely with the traditions of botanical than of ornithological illustration, particularly nature printing and photogenic drawing (neither of which became widely popular until later in the century), produced by direct contact between the specimen and the paper.70 Moreover, for much the same reason that a nature print cannot convey depth or thickness beyond a narrow range, Audubon’s isometrism severely compromised his ability to use perspective. A representation can function at actual size only along a single plane of contact: the infinitely thin surface of the paper that forms the membrane between illusion and actuality. Any bird that sneaks away from this plane will necessarily diminish in scale as it recedes into perspectival depth. Audubon’s birds are allowed a hesitant foreshortening, but however dynamic and baroque the vortical arrangements in some of his drawings, his birds all tumble and thrash in a crowded foreground, a narrow vitrine of space, generally no deeper than a single bird (fig. 42).

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Figure 41 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Picus principalis, 1829, plate 66 from The Birds of America, 1824–​38, approx. 40 × 28 in. (101.6 × 71.1 cm). Hand-colored engraving. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Figure 42 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Mocking Bird, Turdus polyglottus [sic], 1829, plate 21 from The Birds of America, 1824–​38, approx. 40 × 28 in. (101.6 × 71.1 cm). Hand-colored engraving. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Despite Audubon’s distaste for the “stiff unmeaning profiles” of his artistic precursors, his birds are still trapped in a narrow sliver of profilic space. This planar imperative helps explain why the most successful backgrounds in The Birds of America are not, strictly speaking, “backgrounds” at all; they are flat botanical traceries, providing a lattice-like structure that motivates the birds’ stacking up along the picture plane. Indeed, these prints have a decorative air—​some approach the surface delicacy of chinoiserie (see fig. 33). Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that one of Audubon’s subscribers, the Marchioness of Hertford, cut out twenty-eight of the birds of the first volume and pasted them onto the sheets of Chinese wallpaper she was installing in her country house, Temple Newsam House, in Leeds. The wallpaper, with its Audubon additions, has recently been restored and is available for viewing in its original context (fig. 43). Audubon scholars have often scoffed at the marchioness’s misappropriation of the prints, and Audubon himself was appalled by the affair (not least because his critics took it as evidence that his work was not taken seriously as natural history), but I would suggest that the marchioness was actually one of the more astute viewers of Audubon’s work.71 She recognized the shallow, essentially decorative habitat of Audubon’s birds and the many (probably unintentional) similarities between Audubon’s attitude toward pictorial space and that of Asian export art.72 Moreover, perceiving the tactile values engendered by that form of spatiality, she installed the birds in a domestic space charged with bodily phenomenology and resistant to optical purification. The inherent flatness and surface tropism of actual-size representation helps account for the ambivalent treatment of landscape in many of the larger illustrations. Audubon did not generally draw his own landscapes, perhaps because he realized that their perspectival recessions and scale transformations made them categorically incompatible with actual-size representation, which recognizes only the foreground as a valid spatial locus.73 The prints with landscape backgrounds segregate the two forms of space so that the corrosive scalar force of perspective cannot threaten the full-bodied actuality of the foreground birds. In the flamingo print, for example, a series of tiny flamingos can be seen in the distance (see fig. 37). They are miniaturized so that they cannot be read as inhabiting a space continuous with that of the foreground specimen. And in these prints there are always awkward passages where the seam between the birds and their habitats is imperfectly masked. In the Roseate Spoonbill print (fig. 44), for example, the bird leans over to drink from the water that shares its extreme foreground, but the ripples emanating from its beak improbably propagate to the wetlands in the far distance. The occasional print where these compromises fail completely is instructive, demonstrating the strained relations between the two representational systems when actualsize birds are placed in perspectivally conceived landscapes (fig. 45). In plate 141, nonsensical spaces erupt from this failure. Havell, without any indications of a setting in Audubon’s original drawing (itself a collage of actual-size bird drawings from different moments in Audubon’s career), added the landscape during the engraving process. For whatever reason, in doing so, he interpreted the smaller hawk at right as a hawk at a

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Figure 43 John James Audubon and Lady Hertford, a pair of magpie jays, cut from The Birds of America and pasted onto hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, 1827. Collage. © Leeds Museum and Galleries (Temple Newsam House).

Figure 44 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Roseate Spoonbill, Platalea ajaja, 1836, plate 321 from The Birds of America, 1824–​38. Etching and aquatint, hand-colored sheet 40 × 28 in. (101.6 × 71.1 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of William Hooper, 21.11772.321. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

distance rather than simply a small hawk; he placed it on a middle-ground island and then had to accommodate the bird’s tail with an awkward dip in the foreground islet.74 Audubon has often been lauded as among the first to produce an “environmental” zoological illustration, showing animals as integrated in their natural habitat rather than isolated on a blank field of paper.75 But although he did rescind the “bird-on-astick” style typical of these schematic pictorial arrangements, the spatial fragmentation impelled by his actual-size rule made any true immersion in a pictorial-environmental field impossible. For Audubon, landscape habitats were distant scenographies from which his larger bird specimens had been structurally exiled. The true habitat of his birds is the material page, not the miragelike landscapes before which they are propped. Each of Audubon’s pictures, then, struggles between incommensurable systems: a near-indexical strategy that favors the real space of the picture plane and an optical, perspectival strategy that favors virtual depth. Each picture must effect a compromise between tactile and optical models of apprehension; between the index and the icon. But always, for Audubon, the actual size of the bird, with all its tactile and indexical implications, takes priority. The picture plane in such images is not the transparent pane of linear perspective. Nor, it must be noted, is it the transparent conceptual pane

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Figure 45 Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Goshawk, Falco palumbarius / Stanley Hawk, Falco stanleii, ca. 1832, plate 141 from The Birds of America, 1824–​38. Etching and aquatint, handcolored sheet, 40 × 28 in. (101.6 × 71.1 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of William Hooper. 21.11772.141. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

of scientific illustration as defined by Foucault—​in which any surface qualities of the image defer to the textual, tabular, and taxonomical organization of Linnaean knowledge shining up from behind.76 The picture plane here is not so much a window as a plane where reality and illusion, materiality and opticality, collide. If we must call it a window, it’s like a window that a bird has flown into: a surface that records a collision between a material body and the hard limits of a system built for illusion. In such “collisions,” Audubon raised sharp questions about the relationship between actuality and illusion and about the materiality of representation itself, questions that would not be taken up again with such urgency until the late twentieth century.77 Indeed, in the absence of a sustained theorization of size, surface, and materiality in the Audubon literature itself, the art of the 1960s offers the most articulate and trenchant “readings” of Audubon’s paintings. A watercolor like Audubon’s Common Tern, circa 1834 (fig. 46) finds its closest analogue not in other period ornithological illustration but rather in the work of artists like Jasper Johns and Mel Bochner, both of whom also explored the problem of actual size to articulate the entanglement of objecthood and illusionism in pictures. For his Actual Size project of 1968 (fig. 47), Mel Bochner photographed parts of his own body next to a ruler. Then, when printing, he enlarged the photographs to the point where the length of the ruler depicted was congruent with that of the original ruler. Bochner later attested to the uncanny effects of plying the boundary between literal and pictorial space, claiming he had sometimes felt that the reversion to actual size would erase the effect of mediation altogether: “Nothing would be left other than the face and the hand, and the photographs would essentially just disappear.” 78 Jasper Johns’s Device paintings of the early 1960s seem even closer to Audubon’s work (fig. 48). In many of the works in this series, Johns attached rulers to freshly painted canvases and used them as devices to scrape out arcs of blurred and smeared paint. The resulting smudges resemble the deep atmospheric space the oil medium has always excelled at evoking, but the relentless factuality of the rulers, with their actualsize inch markings, declare illusion’s dependence on quotidian surface area and its contiguity with the immediate spatial world of the viewer. Moreover, Johns’s arcs have been produced with the same syntagmatic material translation—​with a single extension dragged across a surface—​that Audubon used in his own measurements. Johns’s rulers, used as pivots to trace out measured arcs, recall the drawing compasses Audubon used to transfer the exact dimensions of the dead birds to his drawings. Johns’s rulers, like the wings of Audubon’s actual-size birds, announce that the picture is a space of lateral and literal translation of matter before it is a virtual space of imaginary volumetric movement.79 Each of these artists—​Audubon, Johns, and Bochner—​treats measurement as something local, material, and particular rather than as an instrument of standardization. It is as if each reverted to a primitive measurement system, clinging to the primordial relationship between measurement units and the parts of the body. (Bochner reenacts

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Figure 46 John James Audubon, Common Tern (Sterna hirundo), ca. 1834. Watercolor, gouache, and graphite on paper, 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm) with mat. Collection of the New-York Historical Society, 1863.17.309. Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions.

Figure 47 Mel Bochner, Actual Size: Hand, 1968. Black-and-white photograph, 23⅛ × 14⅞ in. (58.7 × 37.8 cm). Photograph courtesy of the artist.

such a system of measure by alluding to the cubit—​the distance from the tip of the middle finger to the elbow—​in his explorations of actual size.) The body is the first space, prior to abstract measuring systems. Space must be swept out, arced out, hand by hand, hand by elbow, wing by wing.80 Audubon’s innovations in actual-size representation have not been recognized in prevailing narratives of modern art. Yet the arresting (because seemingly anachronistic) modernity of the Common Tern is impossible to ignore: its stark, near-abstract treatment of contour, its quasi-monochromatic color scheme, its “tautness” (to borrow Clement Greenberg’s term) or expressive tropism toward the flat picture plane, and above all its exquisite ambivalence about its own status as both an illusion and an object occupying real space. I do not mean to imply that Audubon directly influenced these later artists (though it is difficult to imagine that Johns, in particular, had not seen and pondered Audubon’s diving birds) or to suggest that they follow each other in a simple historical continuum. But Audubon, wrestling with the complications of surface and depth raised by his literal approach to size, confronted the classic problems now associated with a genealogy of modernist painting from Courbet and Manet to Rauschenberg, Johns, and Bochner. Audubon insisted on producing something very close to what Rosalind Krauss

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Figure 48 Jasper Johns, Device, 1962. Oil on canvas with wood, yardsticks, fabric batting, nails, screws, and wing nuts, 40 × 30 in. (101.6 × 76.2 cm). Baltimore Museum of Art: Purchase with funds provided by the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Trustee Corporation Fund, and by Edith Ferry Hooper, BMA 1976.1. Photography: Mitro Hood. Art © Jasper Johns/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

has described as the “materialized image” and Leo Steinberg as the “flatbed picture plane”; he recognized in doing so that his decisions about size and surface interrupted the virtualizing force of pictorial tradition.81 It might be argued that Audubon’s work should be disqualified as modernism because it originated accidentally; its modernity, in other words, was simply forced upon it by the proscriptions of actual-size representation. But whatever its origins, Audubon’s work nevertheless developed into a sustained practice of pictorial investigation that he pursued in unacknowledged fellowship with properly authenticated species of modernism. Indeed, The Birds of America emerges from and responds to the same forces that underlie modernity itself—​capital flows, communication technologies, and upheavals in models of subjectivity. Jonathan Crary has said of Turner (a contemporary of Audubon’s whose relationship to modernism is better established): “Apprehensible to Turner and some of his peers were a boundless earth, unforeseen multitudes, and flows of wealth, charged with forces and destinies at once terrifying and wondrous.”82 Audubon was one of those peers, and I turn now to the terrifying and wondrous flows that he too apprehended.

The Geography of Scale in Early America I have suggested that there is a Sisyphean quality about Audubon’s project—​t he drawings, prints, and volumes seem preposterously, and unproductively, bulky. Indeed, The Birds of America could easily be grouped among such absurdist topoi of “actual representation” as Borges’s 1:1 map and Swift’s actual-language society, in which citizens carry on conversations by displaying real objects rather than speaking the words that would more compactly represent them.83 For Audubon, whose project involved so much arduous travel for both collection and distribution, everything dictated the use of what T. J. Demos has called an “aesthetic of exile”: portability, collapsibility, miniaturization, compactness.84 Why refuse these aesthetic options—​why go through all the trouble of making and moving such large images? Other powerful factors must have selected for the actuality Audubon demanded, at great financial and bodily cost to himself and to his subscribers. What did it mean to insist on actual size—​and, more specifically, actual size in transmission—​in early nineteenth-century representation? Answering this question requires the construction of a history of scale in early America, one that attends not only to individual instances of representation but also to the spaces in and through which such representations passed. When the first fascicle of life-size prints for The Birds of America was shipped, coached, and carried to Audubon’s subscribers in 1826, the discourses of scale and transmission had already been entangled in transatlantic natural philosophy for over half a century. Questions of size and movement had been an especially sensitive issue in American natural history circles. In the eighteenth century the prominent French

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naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, had developed his infamous theory of American degeneracy, which stipulated that old-world species become weaker, less fertile, and in general “shrink and diminish” upon transposition to the New World.85 Buffon speculated that the climate in the New World was largely to blame for these diminutions, but his theory rested on an underlying model of displacement itself—​movement from one place to another—​as corrosive to formal integrity. Buffon’s degeneracy theory was in essence a theory of biological transportation in which removal from the native habitat causes degeneration (shrinkage, sterility, and so forth) from the prototype: “All the animals which have been transported from Europe to America, as the horse, the ass, the ox, the sheep, the goat, the hog, the dog, &c. have become smaller; and those which were not transported, but went thither spontaneously, those, in a word, which are common to both Continents, as the wolf, the fox, the stag, the roebuck, the elk, &c. are also considerably less than those of Europe.”86 Buffon’s system, which modeled nature in the New World as a reduced and debilitated representation of nature in the Old World, incensed early American naturalists, whose writings crackled with derision for Buffon’s theory. This “Buffon effect” was the source of the outsize emphasis on outsize creatures in early American philosophical and political discourse. Thomas Jefferson included tables accounting for the large weight and size of American mammals in his Notes on the State of Virginia. Charles Willson Peale enthusiastically promoted and displayed the bones of the American mastodons whose fossilized remains were being frantically exhumed in Kentucky and upstate New York at the turn of the nineteenth century (fig. 49). These efforts accompanied countless other natural-historical celebrations of the vigor and bigness of American species, all of them conceived at least partly as rebuttals to Buffon’s hemispheric insults, and all of them charged with a nationalist political urgency. Buffon’s theories inspired not only reactionary emphases on American largeness, but also more subtle shifts in the entire discourse of size in American natural history. Alexander Wilson, in his American Ornithology, understood that Buffon’s work compelled a reformulation of both bigness and smallness. Given the pall that Buffon had cast over smallness in America, Wilson made a point of explaining that the small birds on his pages were simply that—​small birds—​not shrunken descendants of some larger progenitor. In his description of the Downy Woodpecker, he scolds Buffon: “This is the smallest of our Woodpeckers, and so exactly resembles the former [the Hairy Woodpecker, a larger bird], that I wonder how it passed thro the count de Buffon’s hands without being branded as ‘a spurious race, degenerated by the influence of food, climate, or some unknown cause.’ ”87 Wilson’s witty critiques of Buffon were part of American Ornithology’s wide-ranging protest against the mismeasurement of American birds in British and European atlases. In a typical description, in this case of the wood thrush, Wilson comments on mistakes in size: “The figure in Edwards is considerably too large; and that by Catesby has the wings and tail much longer than in nature.” He understands that such mistakes derive

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Figure 49 Charles Willson Peale, Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806–​8. Oil on canvas, 50 × 60½ in. (127 × 153.7 cm). Baltimore City Life Museum Collection/Museum Department. Courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society, MA5911.

from the decay of information as it travels across the Atlantic and through the philosophical communities of Europe. Continuing his discussion of the wood thrush, he moves on to the color errors in European books: “Mr. Pennant also tells us, that the legs of this species are black; they are, however, of a bright cinnamon color; but the worthy naturalist, no doubt, described them as he found them in the dried and stuffed skin, shrivelled up and blackened with decay; and thus too much of our natural history has been delineated.”88 In such statements, Wilson taps into deeper issues raised by the degeneracy debates: the relationship between perception, transmission, and form.89 The stuffed, rum-logged, or desiccated specimen sent from America to Europe, with its blank stare, discoloration, and shriveling, would indeed convey the impression of a deteriorated American nature. Wilson implies in these passages that the declension Buffon perceived as integral to American specimens was actually an effect of the distance over which they traveled to be seen in Europe. Wilson thus implicitly inverts Buffon’s arrow of diminution: the “degeneration” of American species actually occurs, not when they

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migrate from Europe to America, but when they are migrated as specimens from America to Europe. Wilson occasionally used optical metaphors to express this dynamic, figuring the transatlantic gap as a flawed lens or glass that distorts vision. The shrunken species of America were not actually but only perceptually deteriorated, a product of the “wretched window-glass, through whose crooked protuberances every thing appears so strangely distorted,” that Europeans used to squint at a faraway, foreshortened America.90 Indeed, Wilson’s suggestion that degeneration was an effect of optical distortion that was mistaken for material reality had been raised earlier in the debates, notably by Joel Barlow, in his 1787 Anarchiad, which imagined European savants peering across the Atlantic, using special telescopes with “inverted optics” designed to “diminish all objects, according to the squares of the distances.” See vegetation, man, and bird, and beast, Just by the distance squares in size decreased; See mountain pines to dwarfish reeds descend, Aspiring oaks in pigmy shrub oaks end;—​ The heaven-topp’d Andes sink a humble hill—​ Sea-like Potomac run a tinkling rill;—​ Huge mammoth dwindle to a mouse’s size—​ Columbian turkeys turn European flies.91

Wilson’s and Barlow’s passages, in the aggregate, demonstrate that diminution-throughdistance was seen as a fate shared by both optical and physical modes of transmission, and, moreover, that the two forms of diminution were frequently transposed or collapsed. Optical models of shrinkage-through-distance were susceptible to real-world transduction and vice versa. The enumeration of size in early American representation, then, was charged with a phatic subtext: scale variation was tightly bound to problems of transmission. Scale was mortgaged to distance and to the management of its perceptual, philosophical, and political effects on bodies. This was also true of other discourses of scale less immediately linked to the degeneration debates. In particular, scale was associated in theories of political rhetoric with the spatiality of communication: Martin Brückner, for example, has shown that British American colonists in the 1760s compensated for the threethousand-mile gap between them and their parliamentary interlocutors by developing amplification effects in their writing style (shouting to be heard across the void, a kind of stylistic scaling).92 In an essay on anatomical models in Peale’s Philadelphia, Alexander Nemerov has eloquently described how a given object rendered at a given scale both conjured and presumed a discursive community of a corresponding spatial and social radius.93 Bigness in the Early Republic, then, was related to transmission; bigness was the

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boost or amplification needed to convey impact over distance. The gigantic prehistoric molars and tibias extracted from American marl pits at this time (see fig. 49) have often been said to function as metonymic representations of the sheer size of the new nation (or “mammoth state,” to quote Laura Rigal).94 Although period representations of gigantism are related to the country’s huge geographic expanse, that relationship is as much strategic (or phatic) as it is metonymic. Peale’s mastodon, rather than resemble the looming territory of Manifest Destiny in a directly proportional way, compensates (in its own looming) for the vastness of the territory through which it must struggle to appear. As the first decades of the nineteenth century elapsed, the amplification rhetoric of the Early Republic was itself amplified. The most urgent transmission distances were no longer those of the Atlantic basin but those of the vast interior space opened up by the Louisiana Purchase, and the rhetoric itself evolved into a highly self-conscious emphasis on exaggeration that made Peale’s earnest pamphlets on the mastodon seem quaint. Living, working, drawing, and shooting along the Ohio River frontier in Kentucky, Audubon occupied the epicenter of a lovingly articulated cultural mythology of hyperbolic western woodsmen and river men, the most outrageous of whom were usually identified as Kentuckians. These “half-horse, half-alligator” men (a term conveying their improbable size as well as their amphibious dexterity), were part of the enchanted river frontier explored as farce epic in the Mike Fink legend and the Crockett almanacs and later satirized in the work of Mark Twain.95 The exaggerated characters of the West, whom Audubon partly channeled through his own carefully crafted woodsman persona, were in every sense “larger than life”—​ and the tales spun about them were self-conscious about their having gotten that way by being passed along through space as periodically and progressively amplified narrative transmissions. Travel itself (especially river travel, in which heterogeneous social classes interacted to an unprecedented degree) was associated with exaggeration and deception in storytelling. Tales like T. B. Thorpe’s “Big Bear of Arkansas” and novels like Melville’s Confidence Man explored the convergence of travelers on different itineraries, covering great distances, moving through space, and perpetuating the exaggeration (or decay) of narrative elements. The entire discourse of western exaggeration, in other words, tapped into the difficulty of transporting actuality through space and time. The further a tale had traveled, the taller it was likely to have grown. Audubon understood that his own work, emerging as it did from the American frontier, would be measured against this culture of exaggeration. He noted in his journal in August 1826, after arriving in Liverpool to seek a publisher for the Birds and beginning to attend dinners and parties, that the reputation of the western woods had preceded him: “They [his Liverpool hosts] all Appear very much surprised that I have no Wonderful Tales to relate—​t hat for Instance I so much in the Woods have not been devoured at least 6 times by Tigers, Bears, Wolfs, Foxes or—​a rat.”96 It is in this context, where an aura of hyperbole clung to all accounts of the distant American woods, that Audubon’s

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insistence on actual size must be analyzed.97 Audubon’s work belonged to a transatlantic history of formal transmission where scaling was associated with informational decay). Scale, like insects or mildew, attacked actual-size objects in transmission. Given this situation, Audubon seems to have intuited that actual-size representation might function as a preservation technique: a strategy for communicating over long distances without distortion or loss.

The Size of Life Audubon’s actual-size drawings, in their connotations of preservation, engaged the early nineteenth-century romantic themes of the uncanny double and the “living image.” Audubon conceived and produced his pictures as superspecimens, charged with a life impervious to decay, their perpetuity ensured by their status as “the size of life.” Because of the eerily lifelike quality of Audubon’s images (“quickened with a life that is real, peculiar, trans-Atlantic”),98 widely noted at the time, the images were often described as if they literally contained, and held in suspension, the lives of the original birds. In 1827 Blackwood’s Magazine went so far as to describe Audubon’s art as a form of embalming. Audubon “slaughter[ed] only to embalm his prey by an art of his own, in form and hue unchanged, unchangeable.”99 Audubon explicitly linked his drawing technique to the restoration of liveliness to the dead specimen. His earliest drawings had failed spectacularly in this regard, and his oft-cited descriptions of the morbid awkwardness of these images would have been right at home in an early chapter of Frankenstein: My pencil gave birth to a family of cripples. So maimed were most of them, that they resembled the mangled corpses on a field of battle, compared with the integrity of living men.100 The moment a bird was dead, however beautiful it had been when in life, the pleasure arising from the possession of it became blunted; and although the greatest care was bestowed on endeavours to preserve the appearance of nature, I looked upon its vesture as more than sullied, as requiring constant attention and repeated mendings, while, after all, it could no longer be said to be fresh from the hands of its Maker. I wished to possess all the productions of nature, but I wished life with them.101

Audubon eventually developed techniques of composition and coloration that significantly increased the vivacity of his productions. His pinned-up bird bodies, arranged into poses that accorded with the habits of movement Audubon had carefully observed, avoided the stiff artificiality of drawings from stuffed specimens. (Natural language philosophy’s emphasis on the transparency of gesture also informed his emphasis on habitual posture.) The brilliant color of Audubon’s drawings, produced with an array of innovative multimedia techniques blending gouache, watercolor, and graphite, was

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also both a code for and a performance of the specimen’s liveliness. As Wilson had suggested in lamenting the discoloration of specimens in transit, color was one of the least portable qualities of ornithological specimens. The colors of the bill, feet, legs, and cere faded quickly after death, the feathers lost their brilliancy with preservation and transit, and the eyes (with their own characteristic colors) were removed entirely.102 Brilliant and accurate hues in a bird illustration were thus associated with the blush of true organic animation. Although technically Audubon’s drawings could not capture color indexically, nonetheless color in these works carried indexical connotations of adjacency and immediacy because it could be recorded only on the spot, while the bird was still fresh.103 But for Audubon, the actual size of the illustrations, not the color, best guaranteed their status as near-living doubles. Audubon drew as if to displace life directly from the bird to the drawing, a new, more durable vessel of the same compass that might precisely contain the original quantity of animation. This logic of plenary, eidetic transmission asserted itself at every step of the drawing process. Audubon, in his mature drawings, for example, often tried to delineate each barb of each feather separately, as if building the bird anew by graphic means.104 Audubon had to work quickly when drawing, because he needed to finish his work before the pinned bird decomposed. He often completed an image just when the carcass had putrefied beyond the point of formal integrity or olfactory endurance. (“Drawing nearly all day I finished the Carrion Crow, it stunk so intolerably, and Looked so disgusting that I was very glad when I through it over Board”; “Regret Much that I Cannot Save the Skin but the Weather being Warm and My Drawing having taken Nearly Two Days it was not possible to Skin it.”)105 Fixing the colors on his page as they drained from the specimen, he might be forgiven for feeling, from time to time, as if he were actually succeeding in drawing the life out of the body of the bird, filament by feathery filament, into the covalent body of the drawing. Precisely as the body dissolved, so the drawing evolved, securing ever more fully a sense of physical presence. This dream of the exchange of life without remainder or loss lends Audubon’s work its subtext of gothic horror.106 The Birds of America neatly prefigures an 1850 story by Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” in which an artist unwittingly kills his wife by painting a stunningly lifelike portrait of her: “The tints which he spread upon the canvas were drawn from the cheeks of her who sat beside him.” Upon finishing the portrait, “For one moment, the painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud voice, ‘This is indeed Life itself!’ turned suddenly to regard his beloved:—​She was dead!”107 Poe’s story directly expresses the uncanny logic of representational inherence that Audubon’s art implies: the deathly truth behind the living image. The bodies of birds do not easily shed images, as if representation were simply a form of molting. There is a sense in Audubon’s work that representation wholly eclipses the referent, destroying

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it in the process. The life of the bird seems to shift from one body to another; the image is not an immaterial copy that goes out into the world, but the original referent itself, transmitted to the page, with its old organic body left behind to decompose.

Panic and Pictures The Birds of America, then, was produced at the intersection of transatlantic natural history, western tall-tale narrative, and the gothic “living image”: three discourses that wrestled explicitly with scale variation as a symptom of the decay of actuality in longdistance representation. For Audubon, working within and against these traditions, the translational fixity of actual size gained heightened significance as a method of pictorial preservation. Another field of reference, however, similarly concerned with transit, scale, and preservation, had an even more immediate impact on Audubon’s life and work: commerce. Audubon turned to The Birds of America full-time after the Panic of 1819, when his mercantile enterprises failed. His transition from merchant to bird illustrator after the panic has usually been interpreted as a clean and salutary break between two mutually exclusive activities. Audubon’s financial embarrassment, the story goes, allowed him to follow his true calling as a naturalist. It has become almost a truism to say that Audubon failed as a businessman because he was too distracted by his love of drawing and natural history.108 This interpretation neatly confirms Audubon as an essentially natural man, protects him from close association with financial life in America by proclaiming that he was congenitally averse to business matters, and shields The Birds of America itself from the material relations that sustained it. The Panic of 1819 was not merely a financial panic. It also reflected anxieties about geography, circulation, scale, and representation and thus intersected at multiple points with the work Audubon took up in its wake. The Panic of 1819, as the first widespread financial crisis suffered in the United States, was, to quote David Anthony, “a watershed moment in the nation’s growing awareness of its own complex and often uneasy relationship to commerce.”109 In the early nineteenth century, the United States was among the first modern societies to struggle on a national scale with the credit bubbles that can occur in an economy where banks issue paper notes for far more specie than they actually have in their vaults. The bank of the town of Henderson, Kentucky, where Audubon was living before the panic, for example, was authorized in its charter to circulate paper currency three times the value of the specie capital it held. Complicating matters, hundreds of banks and other institutions (not to mention counterfeiters) printed and issued their own notes; each of the forty different banks chartered in Kentucky had its own paper bills (fig. 50). An early historian of Henderson County described the scene as a “dreadful monetary derangement”: “Paper money of all kinds and denominations began to flood the country, worthless bank-notes, private bills, and other shin-plasters, seemed determined to

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Figure 50 Banknote from Henderson, Kentucky, 1818. Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library. Audubon was living in Henderson in 1818.

crowd out the specie currency, that had been in common use.”110 The rapid expansion of unsupported credit—​manifested in dubious paper banknotes and rampant speculation in public lands in the West—​began to collapse in 1818, when the national bank called in its loans to other banks, demanding that they be paid in specie. Those banks, to cover their loans, then called in the loans they had made to individuals, and so on down the line as creditors chased debtors, who chased their debtors, all in search of nonexistent specie; in the end thousands were imprisoned for debt and thousands of businesses and households were liquidated. Audubon, like so many other western merchants, had overextended himself in the years before the panic, investing, on credit, in real estate and the expansion of his retail operations (as he put it, “the Purchasing of Too Many goods sold on Credit of Course Lost”).111 When the contraction came, Audubon, to pay his own creditors, tried desperately to redeem the debts owed him—​he even stabbed a man (who, granted, had bludgeoned him first), in an attempt to collect on one promissory note worth four thousand dollars.112 But he could not collect, and he lost everything to his creditors—​his stores, his land, his mills, and his household goods. Before the panic he had been among the richest men in Kentucky; afterward, as he put it, “I parted with every particle of property  . . . keeping only the clothes I wore on that day, my original drawings, and my gun.”113 He was thrown into debtors’ prison in Louisville and released only when he officially declared bankruptcy. His insistence on the bulk and materiality of his images, understood in this context where Audubon, like so many others, had suffered a direct demonstration of the fungibility of value under the regime of credit, seems less outrageous, and the relationship between his mercantile career and his career as the producer of these images makes more sense.

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Audubon’s life as a merchant has been described as “a brief entrepreneurial career” amounting only to a series of “crazy business schemes.”114 But Audubon spent fully thirteen years as a merchant, and his operations appear to have been typical of antebellum entrepreneurship in the interior at the time. Success as a western merchant during these years depended on a wide array of skills and, most important for my purposes, an expansive awareness (conceptual and experiential) of economic geography. Coordinating and prosecuting the distribution and exchange of goods in the early nineteenthcentury interior was a complex and delicate operation. Merchants had to understand fluctuating freight charges that varied with direction, distance, modality, and season; to organize the intricate mechanisms of forwarding and trans-shipment; and to arrange shipping insurance, constantly weighing the value of objects against the risks of moving them through the landscape. Merchants like Audubon also had to straddle barter and money economies: they kept monetary accounts with suppliers on the East Coast and buyers in New Orleans, but most of their own customers paid for goods with produce, furs, and skins. These had to be gathered and shipped to New Orleans for conversion to cash to pay for goods purchased in the East. (Audubon’s construction of two mills in Henderson was related to this geography of barter-to-money conversion: it was common for merchants along the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio Rivers to own mills and other processing facilities because, having received produce from local farmers as barter for their merchandise, they needed to reduce its bulk and increase its value so that it could better bear the cost of shipping to wholesale markets in New Orleans.) Merchants engaged in the long-term “triangular trade” of the interior were always aware of the temporal distension of value: the long credit horizon surrounding all goods, the delays involved in every economic transmission, and the consequent incompleteness of any economic transaction. Such total reliance on the geographic transmission of credit helped contribute to Audubon’s ultimate financial downfall: indeed, merchants like him were among the most vulnerable to fluctuations in credit because they were the figures around whom the expanding and heterogeneous economic flows swirled and converged.115 The Birds of America, in its bulky actuality and its corresponding rhetoric of honesty, self-evidence, and immediacy, responded directly to Audubon’s experience of the instabilities of modern monetary culture. Audubon’s project after the panic was compensatory: to rebuild his own shattered economic life and to imagine a form of representation, exchange, and distribution that would be immune to the ills of the market as he knew it. As Mary Poovey has argued in her work on literature and credit, crises in the paper economy always call into broader question the problematic of representation itself.116 All credit economies work on the “deferral, slippage, substitution, and obscurity” of value, and when those economies fail or default, the gap between the portable instruments/significations of value and their material grounding becomes conspicuous and open to debate and analysis.117 Marc Shell has shown that these problems extend naturally and necessarily to art and aesthetics, especially in nineteenth-century America:

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“The paper money debate was concerned with symbolization in general, and hence not only with money but also with aesthetics.” 118 Keeping this broader problematic of representation in mind, I conclude this chapter by placing Audubon’s watercolors and prints in tension with the banknotes and other paper credit instruments that were among the most conspicuous, contested, and widely disseminated “works on paper” in America at the time.119 In the early nineteenth century, and especially in the years clustering around the Panics of 1819 and 1837, public discourse in America was consumed by the dubiousness of modern financial representation: common themes in political and literary discourse included the disconnection of real value from its speculative image in banknotes and other paper credit instruments, and the deceptiveness, volatility, and mystery of the operations of credit. A primary quality attributed to paper credit was elasticity, or, to press the point, its capacity to vary in scale. “The value of Bank medium,” claimed one 1833 tract, “consists in its elasticity—​in its power of alternate expansion and contraction to suit the wants of the community.”120 As David Hume had already mused in the eighteenth century, credit had a way of “increasing money beyond its natural proportion to labor and commodities.”121 Although this elasticity was frequently expressed in abstract philosophical models of large-scale financial systems, it was also an inescapable characteristic of everyday financial transactions on the ground. Banknotes, the workhorses of the paper economy, were perpetually subject to scalar variation and correction; their value in exchange almost never matched the value printed on their faces. Each bank’s notes fluctuated relative to the profusion of bills from other states and banks and to the perceived soundness of the institution in question. The real value of a bill had to be recalculated and recalibrated with nearly every transaction. In this chaotic currency environment, merchants like Audubon, to determine the current value of any bill offered them in exchange for goods, relied on the ubiquitous “Counterfeit Detectors”: weekly or monthly journals that published the discount rates of currencies in circulation and listed all known counterfeits.122 The value of banknotes also fluctuated with distance: generally, the value of a note would be “discounted” progressively as it traveled away from its home bank. In this way and others, the variability or elasticity of currency functioned in an acutely geographic manner in early America. That is, the inflations and contractions of paper were closely bound to geography and distance, like the narrative and natural-historical adventures in scale discussed above. Today, the uniformity of currency and the instantaneity of electronic financial transactions have obstructed and even obliterated any awareness that the circulation of money was once a physical operation that had to obey geographic limitations. But the geographic contingency of exchange was highly conspicuous in the monetary culture of early America, and money developed its own geographic models and metaphors. The redemption of banknotes for specie, for example, was closely associated with tropes of domesticity and intimate contact. The true and ultimate test of a banknote—​its

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redemption as plenary representation—​required that it be “returned home,” or presented at the exact location of its issue. Redemption required a quasi-indexical adjacency: walking into this bank, presenting this piece of paper, receiving in return this much specie. Verification of a bill’s full value could be made only when the paper reference was brought back into physical contact with its local source. Audubon’s insistence that his representations would always “correspond with nature when brought into contact” seems to derive from a desire to guarantee a similar form of plenary redemption. Bills that had “traveled” over a great distance became much more difficult to verify and redeem. A Bostonian holder of a bill that had made its way to Boston from a remote bank in, say, Kentucky, would be extremely unlikely to redeem it because it would cost more to travel to Kentucky to present the bill than the bill would be likely to bring, even presuming that specie existed there to redeem it. (Generally it did not.)123 Jane Kamensky has written eloquently of the “reformulation of distance” that emerged from this misalignment of the mobility of paper and that of persons.124 As Kamensky shows, unscrupulous bankers quickly learned to exploit geographic distance by printing far more bills than they would be able to redeem. Andrew Dexter, founder of the ill-fated Boston Exchange House in the first decade of the century, helped theorize the importance of distance as a way of evading redemption: “As he told the officers of one country bank in which he took a large interest, bills sent ‘to distant parts’ might be ‘disposed of in such manner that they cannot return to injure the bank.’ ”125 One of the key implications of this calculus of redemptive travel was that the most exaggerated speculative inflations of currency were associated with the far edges of the Republic. So-called wildcat banks, banks located in remote, difficult-to-reach areas (especially along the western frontiers) that printed paper money without any concern for adequate backing in specie, counted on the improbability that individuals would actually haul themselves across the backcountry to redeem their bills for gold or silver.126 Concerns about these banks (and their failure in the Panic of 1819) reinforced, in the financial realm, existing concerns about authenticity-over-distance that already governed the perception of the American periphery. Kentucky wildcat banks and Kentucky tall tales shared a language of unregulated amplification. Economic discourse aligned with much broader cultural stereotypes about the West as a territory of dubious measurement. Here, too, Audubon’s actual-size project can be seen as a form of intervention in the prevailing relationship between remoteness and scale: it was incumbent upon Audubon, as a scientist and a citizen, to devise a form of long-distance representation that would not be “discounted” or dismissed as mere speculation. The system of credit in this period was often described as an aerial system. Speculative paper credit, having broken the bonds of direct sociable exchange and evaded the imperative of local verification, peeled away from the circulatory patterns of people and freight and created its own phantasmatic “financescape.”127 Although paper was in reality confined to ground transportation like everything else, its itinerary was processed in metaphors of flight or flotation. Tract after tract, article after article described the

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movement of paper credit as an aerial displacement, difficult to track or control. As early as 1786, Thomas Paine had written of “the airy bubble of paper-currency,”128 and Adam Smith, of paper money’s “Daedelian Wings” and its capacity to forge “a sort of waggonway through the air.” Specie, in contrast, had a “ponderous gravity.”129 Here emerges the aerial metaphor of finance—​the notion of “free-floating capital” that has become so common today as to be almost totally naturalized. Finance capital, in our day as in Audubon’s, “like the butterfly stirring within the chrysalis  . . . separates itself from that concrete breeding ground and prepares to take flight.”130 Given the airiness, elasticity, and mobility of paper money in the antebellum period, Audubon’s Birds of America deserves to be counted as an exemplary artifact of the American financial imaginary. It is more monitory than celebratory, however. Precisely because Audubon’s project so thoroughly inhabits the place where period economic metaphors intersect (flight, representation, migration), it can be as strenuous and pointed as it is in the alternative it offers to a monetary logic of reference. The Birds of America resists the fiduciary virtualization of space and of things; it performs what Bill Brown has called “redemptive reification.”131 A common period admonition against speculation was the phrase “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Audubon’s birds are emphatically birds in the hand. Audubon worked in a world where birds could come perilously close to symbolizing, not so much the wilderness the new market economy was displacing, as the abstraction, placelessness, inscrutability, and rapaciousness of that market itself.132 To shoot these birds, draw them at actual size, and encase them in ottomans—​to take them, as it were, out of circulation—​was a way of protecting both himself (as an artist) and the birds from these threatening associations. It was a way of responding both to the apparitional qualities of the economy and to the way credit had discredited representation. To depict these birds at actual size was to insist on an unwavering link between referent and reference, a link that had been spectacularly broken by the speculative bubble. To distribute them at actual size was to demonstrate that the veracity of representation does not fluctuate or decay as it passes through time and space, as it did in the paper economy. And to drag them across the surface of the earth as cargo was to draw them down from the inscrutable migratory patterns they shared with paper money to insist that their worlds could still be knowable and navigable as real. The violence and even the agony of Audubon’s project—​so many difficult miles traveled, so many birds slaughtered, pinned, and contorted—​attests above all to the enormousness (the actual size) of that task.

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3 GATHERING MOSS Asher B. Durand and the Deceleration of Landscape

On Christmas Eve 1837, Asher B. Durand had a dream about a “new style of painting.” Having abandoned a successful career in engraving two years earlier, he was busy at this time establishing himself in New York as a painter of portraits and genre scenes. But his imagination was increasingly captured by landscape. He had befriended Thomas Cole, accompanying him on several landscape-sketching excursions in the Catskills and keeping up a frequent cross-Hudson correspondence about everything from equestrian sculpture (Cole needed models for the horses in his Course of Empire series) to the best place to find art supplies in Manhattan to the role of reverie in the production of studio landscapes. On Christmas Day he wrote to Cole about his dream of the night before: I have dreamed of you, I think more than once, but particularly last night. Among other things, I thought myself at your place, and being in good haste as usual, lest the steam boat should [leave] me, I felt extreme impatience to see some of your works but you were very tardy + only gratified me after all, with a sight of what you introduced as a new style of painting, which consisted of a folding screen painted in part + the rest covered with actual leaves + flowers, profusely interspersed with a variety of doll babies + so much of attraction did it posses, that I could hardly get a view in consequence of the crowd of Ladies that were visiting you and expressing their admiration, and withal, the Dolls and Ladies were so mixed together, that I could scarcely tell which were the living ones. I thought to myself, that I would rather see your composition of Schroon Mountain, which you have cut in two, but somehow or other, you were not disposed to show it to me and so

117

it ended. Now the only interpretation that I shall offer to said dream is that you have not been out of my thoughts, if I have deferred writing.1

That’s quite a dream—​one that, Durand’s own hesitation to interpret it notwithstanding, could generate several pages of analysis. But I will not linger here on its every psychoanalytical detail. I want to focus on the qualities of the “new style” of landscape that Durand (1796–​1886) represented to himself in the dream—​or rather, given that the actual shape of the dream is irrecoverable, in the letter. He imagined this new style of landscape as a folding screen, an obstructing rather than a conducting surface that blocks rather than opens views, and placed its primary mode of operation in real rather than virtual space.2 He imagined a work so profoundly material that it even captures natural matter (the leaves and flowers on its surface). It was a work bound up with desire, fecundity, and the ambiguously animated bodies of women. And it was an instrument of delay, fixation, and even entrapment, in contradistinction to the haste and hurry of modern transportation technology (the steamboat). Durand’s dream landscape may seem a wholesale anachronism—​after all, American art would have to wait for Robert Rauschenberg’s Combine paintings of over a century later before seeing anything quite as radical as his imaginary painterly assemblage. But Durand’s dream belonged, in its own way, to 1837. His weird doll-and-leaf-encrusted screen embodied principles of delay, materiality, and entrapment that he had been cautiously rehearsing in his engraving work—​principles that would become increasingly important in his paintings in the years ahead. Taken together, these principles characterize Durand’s experimentation with what I call the non-conducting image. This chapter explores Durand’s articulation of the non-conducting image, arguing that the shifting relationship between space and transmission in antebellum America motivated its development. Durand witnessed the ascension of new transmission methods that reconfigured the landscape of communication in the mid-nineteenth century. These included the spread of immensely accelerated reproductive technologies (photography, lithography, steam-powered presses) and, more important, the advent of the telegraph and its relatively dematerialized, de-spatialized structure of instantaneous communication. Durand’s work provides an unparalleled perspective on the challenges visual artists faced in this period of rapid social and technological change. Durand might seem a poor exemplar of an artist tuned to such changes. Best known as the preeminent American landscape painter of the mid-nineteenth century, he has a reputation today as a stodgy, conservative artist prone to formulaic, boosterish reworkings of Cole’s more troubled and skeptical landscape paintings.3 Even in his own time, he was perceived as indifferent at best, and at worst oblivious, to the accelerations of modern life. A critic writing in Putnam’s Monthly lamented in an 1853 review that although new technologies had proliferated in America (the many examples he cited included the telegraph, the railroad, and the clipper ship), Durand’s painting had not advanced with the times: “There is still

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[in the exhibition’s checklist] the ‘Landscape—​Durand.’ The same birch tree, the same yellow sky, the same amiable cattle, the same mild trees and quiet water. What a mild, quiet, and amiable world is this to Durand!”4 Yet even if his official exhibition landscapes seemed oblivious to the themes and structures of transmission technology, Durand engaged them actively throughout his career. To perceive this engagement requires a look beyond the exhibition landscapes that seem so unaware of the “go-ahead” age, to examine his other work more closely. As an engraver, particularly an engraver of banknotes, Durand confronted the foundational problem of circulation. As a close associate of Samuel F. B. Morse and Morse’s successor as president of the National Academy of Design, he was well placed to ponder the impact of telegraphy on traditional notions of time, space, and communication in the arts. And, finally, as a landscape painter, Durand worked in the genre most intensely invested in problems of motion and migration in nineteenth-century America. He was an artist who could not escape the implications of the period’s Copernican revolution in the relationship between images, matter, and transmission.

Durand as Banknote Engraver Growing up on a small farm in New Jersey in the early 1800s, Durand was fascinated by the engravings he saw in books. “On examining these with a strong magnifier,” he later wrote, “I could not refrain from trying to imitate their, to me, wonderful mechanism.”5 He fashioned his own engraving tools and taught himself the rudiments of the art from scratch.6 Already something of a prodigy when he was apprenticed to an engraver in Newark in 1812 at age sixteen, he came to be recognized as the most talented engraver in the United States before he switched to painting in the late 1830s.7 Durand was closely involved in the production of banknotes during most of his career as an engraver (fig. 51). In 1824 he co-founded a firm with his older brother Cyrus and a friend, Charles Cushing Wright, that became the leading banknote firm in the United States and set new artistic and technical standards for the practice.8 Although many studies of Durand bypass this work or treat it as unrelated to his later production, it is central to my argument here. As an engraver of banknotes Durand developed a sensitivity to problems of visual transmission, and he continued to work through them in his later fine-art engraving and painting. In the banknote partnership Durand’s primary responsibility was to design and engrave the pictorial vignettes for the currency. He devised a wide range of commercialallegorical tableaux for this purpose, derived largely from his study of the set of classical casts at the American Academy of the Fine Arts, many of which were copies of the Vatican sculptures Napoleon had recently rerouted to the Louvre.9 It is easy to dismiss these vignettes today as banal specimens of a vast field of neoclassical banking clichés. But Durand invented and was the first to deploy such figures on American banknotes. His vignette work was seen at the time as an elevating influence on banknote design

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Figure 51 Asher Brown Durand, specimen sheet, 1827. Engraving. New York Public Library. Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. Photograph courtesy of the New York Public Library.

and a means of aesthetic education for the banknote-wielding public. His engravings “carried so much taste into the work, as to place the note among the works of the fine arts—​a work in which beauty now blends with utility, and that to a degree that makes paper currency an instrument for refining the public taste” (fig. 52).10 Durand’s brother Cyrus produced the elaborate machine-engraved ornamentation surrounding the vignettes that was intended primarily to combat the perpetual threat of counterfeiting.11 Cyrus was one of a handful of American inventors who perfected the geometric lathes that made possible these anticounterfeiting patterns, now ubiquitous on currency (fig. 53). He also developed and patented transfer presses and chemically inalterable inks that exponentially improved the efficiency and security of banknote production and circulation.12 The burin on his lathes, driven along the plate by mechanical motion, produced an exact, denatured, unmodulated line that a handheld burin could not replicate. Period sources gush over the fineness, exactitude, and continuity of these machine-lathed lines, which were valued for the patience and stamina no human

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Figure 52 Asher Brown Durand, Banknote Vignette, undated. Engraving, 45⁄₁₆ × 4⅛ in. (11 × 10.4 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harvey D. Parker Collection, P12401.2. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

engraver could approximate. The burin moved endlessly through the pattern, cutting a perfectly uniform line without a break or waver, the perpetual rotations of its mechanical joints subject to none of the fatigue or asymmetry of human wrists or knuckles. And the sheer intricacy of the designs, produced with encrypted combinations of compound geometric formulas set by interlocking cams whose configuration only the engraver knew, was meant to foil the would-be counterfeiter with veritable labyrinths, whose contours resisted any efforts to decode their construction (fig. 54).13 Cyrus’s lathe work, with its “obsessive multiplication of superhumanly neat and microscopic detail,”14 established the standard for future banknote engraving, and the modern descendants of his lathes are still used today for security printing.15 Banknotes like those made by the Durand brothers, the most technically and aesthetically accomplished steel engravings produced in early America, also reveal important broader implications of print reproduction and transmission in the early nineteenth century. The most influential discussions of nineteenth-century mechanical reproduction focus on the breach of aura resulting from the separation of original and copy (Benjamin), the generative space of difference that opens up between equivalent iterations (Deleuze), and the translational complexities of the shift between painting and engraving (Bann).16 The imperatives of banknote engraving highlight a different but

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Figure 53 Cyrus Durand, geometrical lathe, 1823. Brass, steel, ivory, 9¼ × 14¾ × 6¾ in. (23.5 × 37.5 × 17.1 cm). Collection of the New-York Historical Society, 1863.15. Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions.

equally salient cluster of problems—​t he challenges involved in the simultaneous origination and termination of reproductive chains. The banknote engraver must produce a large series of identical reproductions—​“exactly repeatable pictorial statements,” in William Ivins’s phrase—​while also ensuring that those reproductions cannot be further reproduced (counterfeited).17 Each note must be identical but also inimitable, a nonreproducible reproduction. The paradoxical imperative of the banknote designer is to devise a visual form that both produces and confounds its own replicability.18 Cyrus’s machine ornaments embody these contradictions. The anthropologist Alfred Gell’s writing on ornament is useful in thinking through the workings of Cyrus’s remarkable designs. Gell describes ornament as a “topological snare.”19 Confounded by the pattern, unable to replicate, trace, or “solve” the design, viewers are trapped in and along the material plane of the inscription. More generally, decorativeness, for Gell, creates adhesions between persons and things—​it is “tacky,” enforcing a delay or lag in the negotiation of the object.20 In the case of banknote engraving, this slowness, this refusal or retardation, was not merely metaphorical; it was essential to the purpose of the engravings (to stop counterfeiters in their tracks). Stoppage or entrapment was also embodied in the very production of lathe engraving. Many of the radially symmetrical patterns in Cyrus’s designs, for example, were produced by the cycloidal motion of the lathe. Period sources on banknote design repeatedly analogize

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Figure 54 “Compound of Cycloidal and Wave Oval of the Geometrical and Rose Engine Combined,” Illustrated Magazine of Art, 1854. Photograph by the author.

this action to “that of a nail in the hub of a carriage in motion.”21 But the actual “carriage” in question (the lathe) was spinning in place. The pattern of the lathe work, in other words, evoked a mechanism of transportation—​the wheel—​but derived from the neutralization of its forward motion. A motive force is turned in and over, folded upon itself. The designs make visible the values of dynamism in a contained or domesticated state. Asher’s representational vignettes, which function perspectivally, drawing the eye back into the space “behind” the surface of the note, participate less fully in the values of labyrinthine surface entrapment that Cyrus’s ornament so perfectly performs. But the figural engravings have their own latent ornamental qualities, and they, too, were understood to participate in the project of counterfeit deterrence. Asher’s well-developed skills as a figural engraver meant that his vignettes could convey the fine flesh tones that were the most difficult to engrave in line (and thus to copy). Indeed, as the century progressed, the importance of flesh tones as anticounterfeiting measures became more widely recognized. Allegorical figures became ever more popular on banknotes

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because, clothed as they were in minimal classical garb, they offered the engraver opportunities to produce large areas of counterfeit-resistant flesh tone engraving.22 Images of faces were especially valuable because any deviation from the original design in a counterfeit note would immediately be apparent in such a semiotically sensitive area of the composition.23 Asher’s figures, then, though directed primarily to securing referential meaning, also harbored the potential to function as ornamental labyrinths. He would more fully exploit this ornamental potential in his later work. Meanwhile, Cyrus’s abstract lathe work was also prone to slip from the surface to the register of figural depth. For although the patterning was oriented to the material surface, it was hardly “flat.” The overlapping lines of each ornamental element created vertiginous optical effects, so that the pattern seemed to oscillate above and below the material support (fig. 55). Indeed, period discussions of Cyrus’s designs noted their near-pictorial status: “That lonely point, obeying the impulse of wheels, concentrics, and chucks, and working endless combinations of lines, produces the most correct geometrical figures, adorned with, or rather composed of, a tracery of lines, that give to them the perspective and beauty of a picture.”24 The ornaments achieved these pictorial effects because their curving, overlapping lines directly recalled the techniques of crosshatching that had been part of the perspectival toolbox of line engravers for centuries. Moreover, the turnings of the mechanical lathe were closely related to the traditional production techniques of figural line engraving, in which the arcs and curves making up the image emerge from a lathe-like operation in which the artist rotates the plate beneath the burin.25 Thus Cyrus’s curvilinear lathe work often sparked optical illusions of depth, even flesh-like swellings (fig. 56). The Durand banknotes, then, produced complex and pervasive tensions between surface and depth, ornament and meaning, labyrinth and legibility. Figures and ornaments were mutually entwined, both visually and functionally. In general, the vignettes designed by Asher engage depth, drawing the viewer’s eye back into the virtual space “behind” the picture plane of the note, whereas the ornaments designed by Cyrus occupy and emphasize the note’s material surface. But both forms of engraving exhibit hybrid tendencies, and the note ultimately plays undecidably between depth and surface. This play between surface and depth had deep ontological relevance for banknote design and serious implications for the function of paper money. Each banknote needed to testify to contradictory forms of value: reference value and object value. The banknote had to produce a credible reference to the ground of its value—​either the exact quantity of specie that it supposedly represented or, more generally, the solidity of the political body that guaranteed that representation. The reference was necessary in Durand’s day because in the heated debates about monetary standards, it was evident to all that paper bills themselves were worthless—​”insubstantial” or “insensible” tokens of some other value to which they could only gesture referentially.26 From this perspective, it was imperative that the paper—​the pulpy material support of the note itself—​be as

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Figure 55 Cyrus Durand, geometrical lathe work proof, PR 221, undated. 8 × 9⅝ in. (20.3 × 24.4 cm). Asher B. Durand Collection. Collection of the New-York Historical Society, 83415d. Digital image created by Oppenheimer Editions. Figure 56 Attributed to Cyrus Durand, Lathe Design, undated. Machine engraving, platemark 313⁄₁₆ × 25⁄₁₆ in. (9.7 × 5.9 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Charles Pelham Greenough, M22274. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

transparent as possible to the values “behind” it. Thus the reference value traveled illusionistically along the depth axis of the notes, signifying something beyond the material surface of the note itself. Asher’s allegorical figures, scenes of landscape and industry, and founding-father portraits provide this reference value. But in the early nineteenth-century, as the profusion of non-uniform paper currency made counterfeiting an increasingly intractable problem, it became clear that a strong reference axis was not enough to secure the value of a banknote. Each individual banknote also needed to attest to its status as a unique material object, a thing in itself. The holder of a banknote had to be confident that the bill was not a counterfeit, which is to say that it was the very same, unique banknote that was first issued by the faraway bank, not an unauthorized copy. Thus, if on the one hand it was necessary that the tangible, sensible note-as-object be downplayed in favor of the symbolic value “behind” it, on the other hand the note needed to announce itself as a unique material thing. This object value, and the negotiability it guaranteed, were secured by the abstract, labyrinthine qualities of the mechanical interlace (as well as the anticounterfeiting potential of the flesh tones), which highlighted the surface materiality of the note and guaranteed its singularity. The object value assured that the note had passed through real space as a unique thing whose continuous propagation had not been hijacked by unauthorized replication. It had moved continuously, unbrokenly, through the world, without having been decoded or replicated. The tensions I describe here—​between surface and depth, ornament and reference—​ are present in all forms of two-dimensional visual culture. All intelligent images play, to a greater or lesser degree, upon their own capacity to shuttle between the referential quality of virtual space and the self-reflexivity of surface pattern. That said, banknote design exacerbates this tension to an exceptional degree, rendering it fully conspicuous at the level of inscription and hitching its paradoxical dynamics to serious real-world consequences. Durand spent his formative years as an engraver negotiating these tensions every day. Working on banknotes increased his sensitivity to graphic oscillations between surface and depth, to the balance between the values of virtual reference and adhesive materiality, and to the tension between the real and virtual displacement images might enable. He had to perceive the potential of every arc and dot he cut with his burin as both reference and labyrinth, image and object, decoded and undecodable mark. These sensitivities had a profound impact on his response to communications technology and on his conception of landscape in the 1830s, 1840s, and beyond.

Durand’s Ariadne Durand’s most ambitious engraving project, one that marked both the apogee and the conclusion of his career as an engraver, was his reproductive engraving of John Vanderlyn’s painting Ariadne Asleep and Abandoned by Theseus on the Island of Naxos (figs. 57 and 58).27 Vanderlyn had painted the original Ariadne in Paris, exhibiting it at the Salon

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of 1812. But when he brought it back to the United States in 1815, the public received it with a mixture of squeamishness about the nudity of the figure and skepticism about academic history painting generally. Vanderlyn was unable to sell the work, and the painting has ever since been emblematic of the difficulties academically ambitious painters faced in early America. Even so, in 1831 Durand stepped in, purchased the painting directly from Vanderlyn for six hundred dollars, and spent the next four years painstakingly preparing an engraving of the work.28 From a few feet away, the print faithfully mimics the painting on which it is based and seems to require little further investigation. Up close, however, the technical brilliance of the image reveals itself, demanding its own act of apprehension and appreciation. As was typical of fine reproductive engraving in the nineteenth century, the landscape was etched and the human figure was engraved in line. Durand, using the etching process first to create the grasses, trees, rocks, and other landscape elements, coated the plate with a thin layer of waxy ground and drew into the wax with a delicate needle. The plate was then dipped in acid, which bit the plate in the areas incised with the needle, creating hollows that would hold the printing ink. Durand’s technical method here was similar to that of line drawing on paper, with a relatively unfettered movement of the hand. For Ariadne’s body and the robe on which she reclines, however, Durand turned to the traditional mark-making system of line engraving that he had been practicing since childhood; it had served as the basic grammar of his banknote engravings. With the consummate strength and control of a skilled and experienced engraver, Durand gouged incisions directly into the printing plate with a burin, producing a network of arcing lines that rendered Ariadne’s body in a conventionalized graphic language. In figural line engraving, the path of the burin does not always follow the contours of the body but rather establishes a grid or net of marks whose intersecting lines, along with slight variations in pressure and direction, conjure the illusion of modeled form (fig. 59). Every fleshy swell and hollow in Ariadne’s body is summoned from these gradations. Among the lines and arcs of the engraved network, Durand also inserted “interdots,” traditionally used to soften the grid-like appearance of the engraving and to permit further subtleties of tone and texture. As John Ruskin put it in the 1870s, describing this technique: When the essential lines are thus produced in their several directions, those which have been drawn across each other, so as to give depth of shade, or richness of texture, have to be farther enriched by dots in the interstices; else there would be a painful appearance of network everywhere; and these dots require each four or five jags to produce them; and each of these jags must be done with what artists and engravers alike call “feeling”—​t he sensibility, that is, of a hand completely under mental government.29

Ruskin calls attention to the manual and mental skill required to produce the encoded forms of line engraving, and indeed it is difficult to ignore the independent beauty of

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Figure 57 John Vanderlyn, Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, 1809–​1 4. Oil on canvas, 68½ × 87 in. (174.1 × 221.0 cm). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison Jr. Collection). 1878.1.11.

Durand’s workmanship. A viewer might look through Durand’s marks to the flesh they evoke or might just as easily be transfixed by the marks themselves, getting lost in the meandering filigree and in the effort to trace or reconstruct the logic and order of the figure’s mysterious construction. Although Durand’s Ariadne is now widely recognized as one of the most ambitious and accomplished engravings of the early nineteenth century, a “masterpiece in line,”30 scholars have nonetheless puzzled over Durand’s seemingly inexplicable devotion to the project. His purchase of Vanderlyn’s original painting was quite risky; six hundred dollars was an enormous sum (roughly equivalent to fifteen thousand dollars today) for a young engraver still in a tenuous financial position. Durand could not have considered his engraving a good financial investment, given the demonstrated nonfungibility of the original. In fact, not only did he know that Vanderlyn had been unable to sell his original, but he himself had already had difficulty selling a nude-in-the-landscape image. In 1825 Durand had published an original composition, Musidora, which had

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Figure 58 Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1835. Etching and engraving, with chine collé, third state. 24⅞ × 1715⁄₁₆ in. (63.2 × 45.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Miss Mary Woodman, M28143. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

been such a failure commercially that the proceeds did not cover even the costs of paper and printing.31 The Ariadne print, although much admired by Durand’s friends and critics, also failed financially, becoming a burden to Durand in later years. Durand’s son later described the difficulties of storing Vanderlyn’s original painting: “The picture, always a ‘white elephant’ subject above all other mishaps to that of fire, [was] on that account kept stored for years in the Historical Society building, [a] fireproof [structure].”32 Durand’s unsold copies of the engraving, too, became a burden. He hauled a huge box of them to England and Europe in 1841, paying various duties and baggage charges, in hopes of selling or exchanging them, but to little avail.33 Why, then, did Durand invest so much time and energy in the production of this particular print? The standard answer to the question is to cite Durand’s “poetic” nature and his desire to work with elevated subject matter. As Alice Newlin put it in 1943, “Buying a huge painting he could ill afford and engraving two nude prints seem aberrations from Durand’s long career of rather literal industry, but in his youth he wrote

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Figure 59 Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne (detail of fig. 58).

poetry. . . . ”34 And although the Ariadne gave Durand the opportunity to work with prestigious academic subject matter, that motivation in itself would have been insufficient given the drawbacks noted above. Durand appears to have had two more compelling reasons for the urgency with which he threw himself into the Ariadne project. The first was the painful personal resonance for him of the abandoned-woman theme. Here, a quick review of the Ariadne legend is in order: Ariadne was the daughter of King Minos of Crete, whose labyrinth contained the Minotaur (fig. 60). When the Athenian Theseus was brought there to be thrown into the labyrinth as a sacrifice to the monster, Ariadne fell in love with him. She gave him a sword with which to kill the Minotaur and a thread that gave him the means to mark his path and escape from the labyrinth. Upon escaping, Theseus sailed with Ariadne to the island of Naxos, later abandoning her there while she slept. (In the background of Durand’s print, Theseus is in the process of getting into his bark to sail away.) The tale has a happy ending—​A riadne is later discovered by Dionysus and becomes his bride—​but Vanderlyn’s painting and Durand’s print after it feature the moment of abandonment. In 1823 Durand’s beloved sister Elizabeth had been deserted by her new husband, Joseph Mountjoy Manners, who, it turned out, had previously abandoned a wife and children in England. Durand, in pursuit of revenge and justice, published and distributed a portrait engraving of Manners, along with a text exposing him as a fraud: “He

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Figure 60 The Labyrinth from Emblemata Nicolai Reusneri, 1581. 60–​474, Houghton Library, Harvard University.

is Classically educated & in appearance a gentleman, but in fact a most accomplished Hypocrite” (fig. 61). The engraving was produced hastily and disseminated broadly in the hopes that it might precede Manners wherever he went next, preventing him from perpetrating further deceptions. According to Durand’s son, the engraving had the intended effect—​discrediting Manners and ruining him financially. He apparently died penniless in a mental institution.35 This remarkable episode demonstrates Durand’s investment in his sister’s plight, as well as his awareness of engraving as a powerful tool of communication. In particular, it showed him that engraving could play a role in a drama of differential “speed”: as replicated information on paper that could be distributed in many directions at once, an engraving could potentially overtake a traveling person (who could move in only one direction at a time). Although the literature on Durand does not discuss the Manners incident in connection with the Ariadne print, it was related, both in the abandonedwoman theme and, more broadly, the complex interconnectedness of speed, space, and reproduction during this period. The second explanation for Durand’s investment in the Ariadne print is that the Ariadne story may also have helped him work through the tensions and contradictions of his own practice as a line engraver. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a myth more serviceable as a master legend for the themes of linearity, replication, decoding, and negotiability that govern the practice of line engraving. From an early age, Durand had understood the “wonderful mechanism” of line engraving as a process of decoding by translation and replication.36 Similarly, the skein of thread (or line) Ariadne gives Theseus allows him to negotiate the maze by simultaneously translating, replicating,

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Figure 61 Asher Brown Durand, Joseph Mountjoy Manners. Etching, etc. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Harvey D. Parker Collection, P12377. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

and escaping it. As Theseus unravels the thread, it copies the figure of the labyrinth in linear form; as he retraces his steps, he follows the line of thread to the place of entry, where he separates himself from the labyrinth and escapes. The line of Ariadne’s thread is an analogue for the adventure of reproductive engraving, which translates and copies artworks in line, permits the separation of those copies from the body of the original, and thus allows the transmission of the original image by reproductive delegation. J. Hillis Miller has argued, in the context of narrative studies, that Ariadne’s thread is indeed a motif of interminable repetition and displacement. The line that replicates and defeats the labyrinth creates a replica labyrinth ready to be replicated and defeated in turn. Many versions of the myth clarify this process by stipulating that after Theseus has escaped Ariadne’s labyrinth, he sails to the island of Delos, where he institutes the ritual performance of a dance that “in its intricate turnings is another  . . . copy of the labyrinth.”37 Durand highlights this endless redoubling-and-separation process by matching the contour of the island of Delos in the background of his print to the contour of Ariadne’s left breast. Vanderlyn’s original painting had already engaged these themes to some extent; as David Lubin has pointed out, Vanderlyn presents Ariadne’s body as a defeated labyrinth. As she sleeps, her crooked finger gestures at her own ear and its inner cochlear labyrinth, and also echoes the larger spiraling configuration of her arms.38 But Vanderlyn’s labyrinth motif reaches its full potential only when it is taken up by Durand’s burin, which inscribes it into the deep structure of the image as engraving.39 Because his own engraving work so clearly adopts the patterns of the labyrinth (see fig. 59), Durand’s Ariadne superimposes the qualities of line engraving as a medium on the larger drama of materiality and abandonment in the image. His engraving both performs and analogizes the propulsive force of decoding that Ariadne’s thread (and the line-engraving process itself) could set in motion. It also grapples, far more directly than Vanderlyn’s painting, with the implications of its own technique, for it showcases the worry as well as the wonder of its “wonderful mechanism.” Once Ariadne has provided Theseus with the linear code for his escape, she becomes the victim of its powers. She helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth, and now Theseus escapes from hers. Ariadne is a cautionary figure who makes decoding possible but cannot stop the chain of further decodings she puts into play. Her tragic status ensures that she cannot fulfill the usual function demanded of the academic nude in the early nineteenth century. Unlike her innumerable mythological sisters in France and elsewhere during this period, she is decidedly not a figure of primordial origin, but rather an object lesson in abandoned or arrested reproduction. Although I may seem to overdraw the conceptual ambition of Durand’s engraving, Durand had many reasons to produce just such a self-reflexive, intensely thoughtful work with the burin. In the 1820s and 1830s, while he matured as an engraver, Durand was working in and around New York as it became a center of earnest discussion about the arts in the young Republic. He was immersed in a discourse devoted above all to

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promoting and measuring the progress of the fine arts in a nation known better for its commercial, mechanical, and practical pursuits. Reproductive engraving, because it bridged the defining polarity of art and mechanics, occupied a deeply ambiguous position in this discourse. Although it was associated metonymically with the elevated intellectual work of painters, its reproductive mission made it subject always to the dread charge of being “mechanical.” Yet even if it was tainted with a shade of mechanicity, commentators were loath to dismiss it altogether, frequently noting its intellectual potential and aesthetic worth in ways that undoubtedly encouraged a young and ambitious engraver like Durand. Gulian C. Verplanck, in his 1824 address to the American Academy of the Fine Arts, although he claimed that engraving was “an art of less dignity and fame” than painting, went on to qualify that claim: “But when I consider  . . . the various and very peculiar excellencies of which it is susceptible, I can scarcely call it an inferior one; for it is not, as the uninformed are apt to suppose, a purely mechanical occupation.”40 Verplanck followed by praising Durand’s engraving of John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence—​public adulation that must have been hugely gratifying to Durand. Moreover, Morse, in his Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, delivered in New York in spring 1826 at the National Academy of Design, intimated that reproduction might attain a conceptual prestige of its own. (Durand, one of the founders of the NAD with Morse that year, almost certainly attended.) Countering his idol Joshua Reynolds’s largely pejorative, conventional view of copying, Morse claimed that not all imitation was mechanical; if properly pursued, it could be “intellectual”: “There is then an Imitation which copies exactly what it sees, makes no selections, no combinations, and there is an Imitation which perceives principles, and arranges its materials according to these principles, so as to produce a desired effect. The first may be called Mechanical and the last Intellectual Imitation.”41 Durand’s Ariadne can be understood as an experiment in engraving as a deeply intellectual imitation, inasmuch as it probes the very “principles” of the Vanderlyn painting it reproduces. In Durand’s metacritical image, Ariadne’s plight reflects upon the condition of engraving itself. There is no certainty that Durand consciously thought about Ariadne as a figure of engraving or about Theseus as an analogy for the forces of unchecked decoding and transmission, nor can it be proved that he consciously connected Theseus and the man who had abandoned his sister. Nonetheless, his print works hard to secure the viewer’s sympathy for the abandoned Ariadne. The composition—​while always acknowledging the inevitable pull of reference and replication into Theseus’s background space, focuses on Ariadne’s abandoned form and emphasizes the foreground and surface of the picture plane—​recommends that viewers not follow Theseus so quickly into the background but linger awhile in Ariadne’s labyrinth, which is to say Durand’s labyrinth, this labyrinth of lines, this wonderful mechanism of Durand’s own work. To understand Durand’s hesitations about disseminative replication and his empha-

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sis on the ornamental qualities of the print’s material plane, consider how the dynamics of the Ariadne print both derive and depart from the tensions animating his banknote work. Compare the Ariadne to the banknote vignette discussed earlier (see fig. 52). The comparison is salient, even inevitable, because the banknote figure is based on the famous classical sculpture of the sleeping Ariadne (fig. 62). Both Durand’s Ariadne and his earlier Ariadne-based banknote allegory are supine seaside figures with sailing ships behind them. The banknote figure sets up symbolic and pictorial resemblances that activate the depth axis of the note: Ariadne is connected to the ship behind her because the tilt of her body matches that of the ship; because she lounges on bales of commodities like those that presumably fill the ship; and because, as an allegorical figure, she has a generalized body and a codified, transferable meaning, just like the commodities she supervises. As a figure, she authorizes the project of departure, exchange, and propagation. In the Ariadne, however, the same symbolic and pictorial relationship between foreground and background, body and ship, has been fragmented. Ariadne’s body, in its foreground materiality as flesh, fails to attain allegorical transcendence. She is an obstruction rather than an abstraction. She sleeps through the sailing that her banknote counterpart perkily supervises. Relative to the banknote figure, Ariadne is a non-conducting figure.42 Indeed Durand’s project of reproducing Vanderlyn’s Ariadne might be understood as an opportunity to shut down or slow down the referential energies of his banknote vignettes, with a concomitant emphasis on the material singularity and surface qualities of the engraving. We have seen that banknote engraving, as is evident in the spatial oscillations of Asher’s vignettes and, even more, of Cyrus’s ornaments, is always already teetering between referential signification and mute, undecodable ornament. Fine reproductive line engraving, too, was a rich field for such ambivalence about surface and depth, ornament and meaning. Ruskin later articulated this ambivalence directly, defining ornamentality as the essence of line engraving that always had to be transcended to produce significance: On any surface of metal, the object of the engraver is, or ought to be, to cover it with lovely lines, forming a lacework, and including a variety of spaces, delicious to the eye. And this is his business, primarily; before any other matter can be thought of, his work must be ornamental. You know I told you a sculptor’s business is first to cover a surface with pleasant bosses, whether they mean anything or not; so an engraver’s is to cover it with pleasant lines, whether they mean anything or not. That they should mean something, and a good deal of something, is indeed desirable afterwards; but first we must be ornamental.43

In his work after Vanderlyn, Durand had an opportunity to imagine the body of Ariadne resisting the work of meaning, remaining a beautiful “lacework  . . . including a variety of spaces, delicious to the eye.” Although once a figure meaningful for her

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Figure 62 Hellenistic sculpture, Sleeping Ariadne, ca. 240 bce. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican State. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York.

powers of transmission and signification, now, like a rock gathering moss, she reverts to mere ornament—​from decoded to unsolved labyrinth, from transfer to close tactile adhesion. She has taken on more of the ornamental functions of the machine-lathed filigrees that had surrounded her banknote antecedents, with their associated powers of non-conduction, singularity, slowness, and resistance to decoding. Even so, Theseus remains in the background, reminding us of the demand that Ariadne serve ultimately to propel the movement of signification; that she “mean something, and a good deal of something” (to quote Ruskin again). Ultimately, Durand’s deeply intelligent investigation of the implications of line engraving helped expose its fundamental melancholy. His Ariadne reveals the self-defeating properties of engraving as an aesthetic production. Engraving, with its material beauty and workmanship, neutralizes its own recognition because its replicative code always moves the viewer elsewhere—​back to a referent or forward into an endless chain of replication. It is the plight of beautiful code that it be decoded and abandoned. It is not surprising, then, that during precisely the years when Durand was working on his Ariadne, he was beginning to distance himself from the engraving profession and to pursue a career in painting.44 That Durand’s Ariadne was his “valedictory to the burin” is true in the deepest sense,

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Figure 63 Asher B. Durand, Rocky Cliff, ca. 1860. Oil on canvas, 16½ × 24 in. (41.9 × 61 cm). Courtesy of Reynolda House Museum of American Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

for the work embodies a full theoretical awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of the art.45

Ariadne in the Landscape In the mid-1840s, Durand began producing a strange series of nature studies that had no precedent in American art. Painted through the summers into the 1860s, they are the first—​or at least among the first—​finished plein air paintings produced in America and the first series of American paintings to promote a systematic model of close-range landscape observation.46 Although during these years Durand also produced grand showpiece studio landscapes following conventional Claudean formulas, his studies cannot be dismissed as subsidiary or preparatory to those more traditional paintings. He considered the studies unique—​finished works in their own right—​and exhibited them as such at the National Academy of Design and elsewhere. As Eleanor Jones Harvey has shown, during precisely these years the term study, as opposed to sketch, began to denote “a work whose creation used the intellect, reflection, and aesthetic judgment.” Durand, as president of the NAD after 1845, arranged for special exhibition spaces for his studies and those of other artists.47

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Figure 64 Asher B. Durand, Landscape: Creek and Rocks, 1850s. Oil on canvas, 1615⁄₁₆ × 24 in. (43.0 × 61.0 cm). Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Charles Henry Hart. 1915.9.

Durand’s studies are intensely particularized images of rocks, trees, creeks, and moss, arranged on his canvases as if found that way in nature, without evident compositional forethought or adjustment (figs. 63 and 64; see fig. 73). The aleatory rhetoric of these studies—​their apparent unstudiedness—​has guided their interpretation for decades, by scholars who account for them by appealing to Ruskin’s calls for truth to nature and by those who attribute them to Durand’s quintessentially American “need to draw on the experience of nature, rather than on pictures.”48 But the studies, in fact, draw heavily on pictures, especially pictures Durand had already made. In Rocky Cliff (fig. 63), as in many of the studies, the rocks recline in suggestively figurative postures, recalling classical sculptures and the engravings Durand had made after them. Indeed, consider the uncanny alignment between Landscape: Creek and Rocks (fig. 64), painted in plein air sometime during the 1850s, and the Ariadne composition. Both Ariadne and her sandstone substitute are recumbent figures whose upward torsion addresses the picture plane. Both stretch out to occupy almost the entire horizontal extent of the picture surface, intercepting the connection between foreground and background and establishing the essentially horizontal stratification of the composition. The figures lie in similar relationship to the shallow embankment of a creek running in front of them

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Figure 65 Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1835. Etching, before engraving and chine collé, early state, 14⅛ × 17⅝ in. (35.9 × 44.7 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of John Durand, M6249. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

and a forested area behind. The lower left corner of each image, similarly darkened, hosts a virtually identical spray of foliage. Given these similarities, the differences between the print and the painting are all the more significant. The painting differs most from the print in its near-total suppression of the depth axis—​t he “Thesean” axis, with its connotations of decoding and transmission. There is the slightest hint of an opening to depth as the background sky brightens in the far upper-right-hand corner of the canvas, where the Ariadne gives a view of Theseus’s departing bark—​but it is canceled by a tangle of trees (another kind of bark, we might say). If the Ariadne print explores the reversion of code to ornament, Landscape: Creek and Rocks takes the process of de-signification further, showing the petrified Ariadne in a condition of obdurate, silent materiality. Much of the silencing effect of Creek and Rocks as a commentary on the Ariadne (beyond the obvious switch to inanimate subject matter) derives from the change in medium from reproductive engraving, which is always already coded and thus com-

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municative, to painting, which has a greater claim to primary materiality.49 But Creek and Rocks also borrows a form of particularly printerly blankness and silence from the Ariadne engraving, derived from the process of its making. Consider an earlier state of the print, where the relatively blank block of space that will become Ariadne and her robes has an especially stark contour (fig. 65). The compositional continuities between this state of the print and the landscape study are striking here: the similarity of the stepped upper contour of the boulder to the rise and run of the robe as it drapes over and deviates from the shape of Ariadne’s hip, feet, and ankles; the hook-like pattern of the light as it strikes the largest boulder at left, and a similar point in the edge of Ariadne’s blanket; and the dark diagonal striations in the small rock at left, with its lighter face turning leftward, and Ariadne’s hair and crooked forearm. The boulder in the painting reiterates the blank space in the early proof. The boulder thus substitutes not for Ariadne’s body alone but for the empty bodyblanket contour that was a temporary artifact of the engraving process. Durand, when he worked on the printing plate at this early stage, reserved this space for Ariadne by keeping it covered with the waxy ground (resist) that protected it from the acid used to bite the etched landscape around it. This was a standard procedure at the time for engravers, who commonly etched background areas first, holding spaces open for the figures to be line-engraved later.50 In all his projects Durand, like other printmakers, pulled proofs from plates in these early stages, repeatedly confronting weird images like that in the Ariadne proof: otherwise intelligible scenes interrupted by severe white forms with strange contours and only the slightest indication, if any, of interior detail. Although the public did not see these near-surrealist blobs, they were central artifacts of the visual and temporal thinking of printmakers, for whom the blank spaces signified bodies-to-come. More generally, they were the very form and manifestation of a principle of delayed articulation and selective silence in the printmaking process that Durand seems to have preserved by translating it to his painterly geologic forms. In Landscape: Creek and Rocks, Durand transfers this printerly artifact of delay and resistance to the medium of painting (which has no true analogue in its own production process). If the boulders in this and other landscape studies are analogous to human figures, they must be understood as the unarticulated, resistant, pre-figurations that were an important part of the printmaking process. In an engraving process devoted to reproduction, communication, and code, Durand exploited the stages that articulated silence, blankness, and resistance.

Ariadne and the Telegraph Some twenty years separate the Ariadne print and Landscape: Creek and Rocks. What might account for the persistence of the earlier picture in the later one, despite the shift in genre, medium, and sensibility?51 Ariadne’s uncanny return in Durand’s land-

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scape studies suggests that the problems Durand had engaged originally in the Ariadne print—​the relationship between materiality and transmission, the connections between reproduction and abandonment, and the oscillation of graphic inscriptions between transparent code and ornamental pattern—​were still worth engaging in the 1850s. And indeed, the development of communication technologies, especially telegraphy, in the 1840s ensured that the core theme of the print—​the conundrum of coded transmission—​would become a national and indeed world-historical preoccupation, absorbing Durand’s attention in newly urgent ways. In 1837, two years after Durand completed the Ariadne print, Samuel F. B. Morse began constructing models of his electromagnetic telegraph. The cosmic impact of the telegraph was evident as soon as Morse successfully demonstrated the apparatus in 1844. Both popular and literary outlets began musing on “the epoch of annihilated space.”52 The New York Herald announced that the telegraph had “originated in the mind an entirely new class of ideas, a new species of consciousness.”53 By 1858 the Atlantic Monthly assured its readers that the telegraph was “removing so much time and space out of the way,—​t hose absorbents of spirits,—​and bringing mind into close contact with mind.”54 The advent of the telegraph opened a new nonabsorbent world of dematerialized, detemporalized, and de-spatialized transmission. Information could now move more quickly than matter. Prior to the telegraph, the words transportation and communication were effectively synonymous; afterward, for the first time, long-distance communication was dissociated from the physical movement of material bodies, and the two concepts diverged.55 Despite the palpable sense of astonishment about the telegraph that emanated from nineteenth-century publications, the invention received little scholarly attention in the twentieth century. As recently as 1983, the communications theorist James Carey lamented that the telegraph was the least studied communications technology, and its intersection with modernity had “scarcely been explored.”56 Since the 1980s, and particularly in the past decade, however, this neglect has begun to be redressed. Historians, media theorists, and literary scholars have demonstrated the profound and sweeping impact of the telegraph on nineteenth-century literature, politics, and informatics. In media studies, scholars have emphasized how the telegraph dissociated communication from transportation, reorganized social relationships, and provided the first effective model of a corporate information monopoly. Literary scholars have begun to show how the telegraph brought unprecedented attention to the materiality and contingency of signification and thus opened the way to the development of modernist literature.57 That art historians have yet to address the relationship between telegraphy and the visual arts during this period is unsurprising, for the telegraph, at the time it was introduced, had virtually no direct impact on images. For all its radical reorganization of spatiotemporal syntax, its transformation of financial markets, and its immediate intervention in systems of written language, telegraphy simply could not “reach”

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pictures. Although Morse’s apparatus could translate and transmit verbal inscriptions instantaneously and almost immaterially over vast distances, it was impotent in the face of visual inscriptions—​it could not separate the information in them from their material qualities; it could not translate the visual field into its ribbons of code. Prior to the telegraph, pictures and letters had moved along the same routes, at the same speed. With the telegraphic transformation, however, images were, for all practical purposes, left behind. Rather than engage the visible, telegraphy abandoned it. The seeming irrelevance of telegraphy to the visual arts is only confirmed by period art writing—​most painters and other visual artists at the time seem not to have taken up (at least not in writings preserved in the archival record) their relation to the new conditions established by telegraphy. Durand was no exception—​I am aware of no documents explicitly stating his response to the technology. Although this state of affairs seems to preclude any further investigation, probing further into the productive nonrelation between telegraphy and painting may expose the deeper implications of the non-negotiability of the visual arts in the face of the telegraphic apparatus. Indeed, an analysis of the recalcitrance of images to telegraphic coding in the nineteenth century opens new perspectives on the broad problems of reproduction, transmission, and embodiment during this period. Stephen Bann has explored “the discursive space opened up by the parallel practices of printmaking, painting and photography, and their shared involvement in image reproduction” in the nineteenth century.58 What if we were to pry open that discursive space still further by introducing the telegraph? Even if telegraphy could not “reach” pictures, how might it have intersected with existing problems in visual reproduction and transmission? If we accept that the telegraph altered the ecology of media in the nineteenth century, what reconfigured niche would images occupy in that new system? The best way to answer these questions is not to locate some direct causal impact of telegraphy on picture making, and not to limit analysis to the iconography of telegraphs as they were depicted in paintings, but rather to delineate concerns about coding, replication, and transmission shared by both telegraphy and visual media. Durand’s work is not “about” telegraphy in any obvious way, but there are multiple contact points between his engravings, his paintings, and what we might call the telegraphic imaginary. Because these contact points are not immediately evident, I begin by establishing the intersection of art and communication technology in the period more generally. By the second quarter of the nineteenth century, the visual arts were closely tied to the development of technologies of transportation, communication, and exchange. A surprising number of the monumental figures of the American transportation/communication revolution in this period were also artists. Morse, as I have noted, was the president of the National Academy of Design and a professor of painting at New York University before devoting himself to the development of the electromagnetic telegraph. Robert Fulton, who invented the steamboat and the submarine, was a miniaturist and art entrepreneur. (He was responsible for bringing the first panoramas to Paris.)

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The role of itinerancy in antebellum American art also determined the coincidence of the concerns related to art and those of transportation technology. Rufus Porter, an itinerant painter and a publisher of well-known art instruction texts, was the founder of Scientific American and the inventor of a series of bizarre transportation devices that came to be known as “Porter’s Portables,” including a fanciful airship designed to ferry gold hunters to California.59 Morse himself, in his 1826 lecture to the National Academy of Design, laid the early groundwork for conjoining art and technology. Although he placed some elements of cultural production beyond the realm of art (ridiculing the idea that the “printing and coining of money” was a fine art),60 he was devoted to an expansive definition of the fine arts and the notion that shared rules and codes linked seemingly unrelated areas of inventive endeavor: “There is to [the superficial observer] but little resemblance among things so opposite as a page of verse, the sounds of an instrument, a colored canvas, a pile of buildings, a statue, and a decorated pleasure ground. But let him not judge too hastily from this seeming dissimilarity.”61 Moreover, to clarify his points, Morse frequently used the steam engine as an example—​like the fine arts—​of an art of intellectual imagination, implicitly equating artistic and technological invention.62 Morse left behind many suggestive artifacts that embody the fusion of art and mechanical innovation during this period. He built his first working model of the telegraphic receiver (1837), for example, into a canvas stretcher (fig. 66). The device raises many questions—​most of which remain unanswered—​about the confounded relationship of painting and telegraphy in mid-nineteenth-century America. But Morse himself never fully confronted those questions as an artist, for he essentially stopped painting when he turned his attention to the development and marketing of the telegraph in the 1840s.63 Durand, in contrast, kept working through the telegraphic transformation of the 1840s and 1850s and was thus compelled to respond at the pictorial level to the new conditions. Moreover, when Morse stepped down as the president of the NAD in 1845 to pursue his telegraphic activities, he passed the baton to Durand, who, in a very real sense, inherited Morse’s position and also, perhaps, Morse’s unresolved relationship to the visual arts. Durand could not have avoided the telegraph and its implications, especially because the advent of telegraphy reactivated and amplified problems already present in his work. As Morse’s technology seized the imagination of the world in the 1840s, it rapidly generated among the scientific and general press a discursive field eerily similar, in its thematic and technical concerns, to the questions of coding, transmission, flight, and materiality Durand had grappled with in his Ariadne engraving. In early discussions of the new technology, for example, the telegraph was frequently associated with the printing press and described as if it were a miraculously long-range printing press.64 Morse’s receiver worked by producing indentations or gouges on the strip of paper, just as in relief and type printing processes.65 In the court cases adjudicating Morse’s patents, his telegraph was commonly compared to the printing press to

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Figure 66 Diagram of Samuel F. B. Morse’s first recording telegraph machine, facsimile taken from the sketch in his notebook. Photograph: Culver Pictures / The Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.

establish a precedent for Morse’s invention.66 More generally, the telegraph was compared to the printing press in its revolutionary impact on society.67 The technology evoked not only the printing of text but also, specifically, reproductive line engraving in the visual realm. Although Morse code may have seemed alien to some, it would have had a familiar air to anyone involved in line engraving. Just as the line engraver translates a pictorial prototype into lines and dots, so the telegrapher translates a verbal prototype into lines and dots (figs. 67 and 68).68 From the outset, moreover, the telegraph, like the Ariadne print, was linked to themes of flight and escape. Information, for the first time, could move more quickly than material bodies, a phenomenon soon dramatized in narratives of flight and capture that explored the newly conspicuous ponderousness of the human body and its traditional modes of transportation. With the new interest in differential speed, narratives proliferated about the capture of fleeing criminals with the aid of the telegraph. “Hitherto it has been thought that a man having the start for any object by railway was secure from pursuit, but now this new agent will arrest his progress or anticipate his arrival at any point with more ease than a man on the fleetest horse could overtake another on foot.”69 Every day, it seemed, a spectacular demonstration proved that material bodies would now forever lag behind the pace of information—​abandoned or overtaken by more rapid transmission. Finally, the telegraph, besides being linked in discourse to print and to flight, was

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Figure 67 Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1835 (detail of fig. 58). Figure 68 Morse alphabet, illustrated in Edward H. Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary, 1877. Wood engraving. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–​110409.

frequently connected to the labyrinth and to ornamental patterning, as the agent of their undoing. The technology was hailed, for example, as an anti-labyrinthine force in the field of language. “Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature,” an article published in 1848 in the United States Democratic Review, predicted that the terse, condensed, and economical form of telegraphic communication would allow literature to escape the digressive labyrinths of ornamental rhetoric and achieve its immaterial destiny as the vehicle of pure thought. Language, for the article’s author, had too often “been beguiled from its direct course into some untrodden bye-path”; its “every useless ornament  . . . [was] but a troublesome encumbrance.” 70 The telegraph would free written language from the tangles of rhetoric that had long ensnared it. The telegraph, to conceptualize it in the vocabulary of the Ariadne print, was a superThesean force, infinitely accelerating and attenuating the powers of decoding, dematerialization, and displacement articulated by the myth and Durand’s anxious mediation of it. Inasmuch as the telegraph was imaginable as a faster variant of reproductive engraving, as a principle of the bypass or abandonment of matter, and as a force that untangled labyrinths, it was a technology whose implications were continuous with the drama of displacement on Durand’s Island of Naxos. The shared territory of telegraphy and Durand’s line engraving only made the radical implications of the differences between them more evident, however. For telegraphy was not simply faster and more efficient line engraving. Because telegraphy carried its codes instantaneously over long distances by electricity, it obliterated the indexicality ascribed to printing. Thus the spatial contiguity of original and copy could no longer be presumed.71 The telegraph, in producing an inscription at one point in space that was copied at an immense distance without the need of a traditional press (the telegraph wire providing the only material connection), raised the specter of a total deracination of communication and the disembodiment of the reproduction process. Despite striking similarities between the visual forms of Morse code and line engraving, the two systems were not similarly transmissible in the nineteenth century. The telegraph simply could not exercise its dematerializing powers in the sphere of the visual. Morse code could not decode and transmit images. Actually, the basic outlines of the scanning fax machine had already been imagined by 1848, the year Alexander Bain announced his Copying Telegraph, capable of transmitting and reproducing line drawings as well as text: “The ‘Copying Telegraph’ is capable of transmitting the fac simile of any communication in writing or printing, or of any other figure, including a profile of the ‘human face divine,’ so that the physiognomy of a runaway could be sent to all the outposts of the kingdom in two or three minutes.” 72 But this technology remained undeveloped in the United States and did not come into wide use, even for specialized purposes, until the turn of the twentieth century. Before then, telegraphic technology was unable to engage with the visual arts. Its failure to do so had enormous significance for the history of media in the nineteenth century. For Durand and his colleagues, it indicated that although in theory the new systems of dematerialized transmission could

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threaten the integrity of images, for the moment images were secure, their resistance to these systems confirmed. Given the opacity of visual information to telegraphic coding and decoding, the drama of abandonment, already overdetermined for Durand in the Ariadne project, acquired another layer of significance. For after the telegraph, it was possible to understand all images, engraved or otherwise, as having been left behind by the latest form of code. After the telegraph, the “Ariadne complex”—​the imagination of a material body abandoned or bypassed by transmission, could be said to characterize not just reproductive engraving but all the visual arts: painting, engraving, photography, and other forms. Now all these forms were “left behind” by the telegraph, unified in their resistance to the incursions of telegraphic code. The materiality of visual configurations, crystallized and highlighted by their recalcitrance to electronic translation, suddenly became conspicuous in a new way.

The Telegraph in the Landscape Along with the retroactive hypermaterialization that the new technology visited upon all images, the telegraph had potentially drastic implications for American landscape painting. It redefined the material form of painting generally, as ruin or remainder, and annulled the spatiotemporal structures that had motivated the production of American landscape paintings since Cole. The antagonism between telegraphic space and landscape representation is evident in the famous satiric cartoon, published in 1846 in the first volume of Yankee Doodle (fig. 69). Key to the satire of the image is the caustic way the telegraph consumes and overwrites the landscape. The landscape is barren—​ reduced to a virtually notional or cartographic status—​as if the telegraph had erased it, which, given the telegraph’s instantaneous bypass, in a sense it had. The annulled landscape was actually a common trope at midcentury for the status of both nature and vision in the era of accelerated commerce and exchange. In 1855, on the first page of the initial issue of The Crayon, just inches above Durand’s first letter on landscape painting, the editors chastise men of business, asking, “Does the world of nature absolutely lie around them a waste desert—​only so much space to be got over, where they travel with blinded eyes?” 73 Early publications about the telegraph wrestled with the difficulty of picturing its spatial range and instantaneity using available conventions of landscape painting. The February 1, 1848, issue of the Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine and Fireside Companion depicted the landscape between Boston and New York as a bridge-like span along the left-hand margin of the page, perpendicular to the text. The telegraphic apparatus and operators on either side of the line were joined by an imaginary, schematic landscape, lifted above the cities as if in some heavenly electrical realm (fig. 70). As the writer admitted, “I cannot represent this great space upon one page, so you must imagine it.”

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Figure 69 “Professor Morse’s Great Historical Picture,” Yankee Doodle, October 10, 1846.

Durand’s own large-scale landscape paintings of this period were known for their innovations in spatial structure, yet even he struggled to incorporate telegraphic space into his work. Nowhere is the complicated relationship of telegraphy to the pictorial strategies of landscape painting better indicated than in Durand’s own grand allegorical painting Progress of 1853 (fig. 71). Durand, in the painting, uses Claudean devices to present a triumphal parade of American transportation technology that seems to conflate the spatial and temporal meanings of the term progress. In the foreground is a pedestrian, then a wagon making its way along a dirt road, which crosses over a canal, which is then superseded by a train making its way toward a luminous horizon ornamented by the puffy exhalations of steamboats. The painting is the quintessential example of what Angela Miller has described as the “composed sequential landscape” or the “spatiotemporal landscape mode” that dominated mid-nineteenth-century aesthetics in America.74 The painting endorses a model of gradual, sequential time, naturalized by the image of nature as well as by the illusionistic recessional space of the painting itself. Linear time follows linear perspective. Time and landscape are inseparable: time itself is like a landscape painting. It is traversable, at least imaginatively; it glides gradually away into the distance and is continuous and homogeneous. The painting defines progress as something that can be tracked in a sequential and orderly way through space; the frontier of civilization moves with the same predictable action as any material body.

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Figure 70 Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine and Fireside Companion, February 1, 1848. Photograph courtesy Brown University Library.

Figure 71 Asher Brown Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853. Private collection.

Durand’s Progress has featured prominently in scholarship tracing the problem of the “machine in the garden,” or the impact of technology on conceptions of American landscape in this period. These accounts have focused on the intrusion of the railroad and its disruption of pastoral modes.75 But Progress actually demonstrates the ease with which the image and the idea of the railroad were assimilable to standard Claudean formulas. In fact the railroad might just as easily be seen to have brought the sequential landscape to fruition, or to have encouraged its adoption in the first place. The image of the railroad suggested a smooth and easy passage from foreground to middle ground to background that endorsed the tripartite structure of the landscape through which it passed. The railroad’s glide through space reinforced not only Claudean formats but also other common elements of landscape rhetoric like those found in Archibald Alison’s writings on associationism, which endorsed the capacity of landscape paintings to send the viewer off on “trains of thought.” 76 The telegraph, however, is another matter. Of all the technologies appearing in the lower right corner of Durand’s painting, the telegraph is treated most ambivalently (fig. 72). The telegraph poles, for example, are out of sequence with the rest of the technology. Although the telegraph had been introduced more recently than any of the other vehicles in the picture, Durand has left it, anachronistically, in the foreground, with the log cabin and the herd of cattle in the general zone of antique pedestrian locomotion. Of

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Figure 72 Asher Brown Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853 (detail).

course he could not very well have painted telegraph poles to scale in the far distance, where they would have belonged chronologically, because then they would have been too small to see. Even so, having decided that the poles must be visible and therefore anachronistically displayed, Durand has included them only ambivalently. Note the odd way in which the poles swerve suddenly away to the right and almost immediately disappear.

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The telegraph poles oddly mirror the position of the Native American figures in the lower left corner of the canvas, who represent a “vanishing race” that can only observe melancholically the progress of technology as it leaves them behind. Like the Native Americans at left, the telegraph seems to be present in the painting only to indicate its misalignment with the other technologies on parade and its noninterference with the pictorial space of the spatiotemporal landscape. Indeed the two lower corners of the picture are parenthetical foils to progressive space: if the Native Americans represent a form of time existing before the sequential space-time structure of Progress, the telegraph represents a new form of time to come after. The quick exit of the telegraph lines in Progress attests that telegraphic transmission was essentially unpaintable. Although any painter could represent telegraph wires and poles, the real spatiality of the telegraphic message countered the gradual space constructed and sustained by grand-manner landscape paintings. Whereas the railroad might destroy, or threaten to destroy, the pastoral content of landscape painting, the telegraph destroys its very structure. As the Yankee Doodle cartoon suggested, the telegraph’s temporality—​which is to say its instantaneity—​could have no place in a national landscape model based on temporal flow and gradualism. Whereas Durand’s painting leans heavily on atmospheric perspective to evoke the model of gradual sequence over distance, the telegraphic network disregarded all such diminution effects, as contemporaneous publications noted. The Trumpet and Universalist, reporting on an early telegraphic communication, marveled that it “could have been made just as quickly, if the distance had been one thousand or five thousand miles. Distance makes no difference, when the communication is once established.” 77 Other early reports noted that “contrary to all other modes of communicating intelligence, the difficulty to be overcome decreases in proportion to the distance.” 78 Such enthusiasms eventually had to be modified, but overall the telegraph continued to seem a freakishly antiperspectival technology to which the concept of diminution over distance was irrelevant. As David Harvey and others involved in critical globalization theory have argued, geographic development or “progress” in the modern era cannot be described by appealing to simple diffusionist geometries, as if market relations gradually advanced, step by step, through the wilderness.79 With the advent of railroads and especially of electromagnetic communication systems, the geography of capitalism took on a patchier, less picturable character. Period commentaries frequently marveled (whether in a celebratory or an anxious tone) at the unevenly pinched form of space that new communications technologies allowed: as Israel Washburn of Maine explained in a speech to the House of Representatives, in 1854: “When Louisiana was purchased, Fulton came with the steamboat, and made New Orleans nearer to Washington than Savannah had been before. When Texas was annexed, the railroad had been introduced; and now, practically, her capital is nearer that of the Union than St. Louis was. . . . And when California added another star to our banner the telegraph was ready to announce the fact from the

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Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Mexico in less time than Puck agreed to put a girdle around the earth.”80 The telegraph’s collapsing of space and time belonged to a spectrum of spatial anxieties elicited in antebellum America by the speed and abstraction of commercial exchange, the erosion in a democracy of social distinctions and gradations, and the figuring of unnatural sociabilities by practitioners of mesmerism and magnetism (themselves inspired by telegraphy). The telegraph here, then, names not just a technology but the entire problem of a society struggling with rapidly disintegrating distances and differences. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Sphinx” is one of the most telling and imaginative expressions of the collapse of gradualist spatial structure in period literature, with clear implications for landscape painting. First published in Arthur’s Ladies’ Magazine in 1846, two years after Morse’s successful test of the telegraph, Poe’s tale, set in summer 1832, imagines an instance of morbid spatial implosion that occurs during the cholera epidemic that killed three thousand people in New York City. The narrator has been invited by a relative to take a fortnight’s refuge in his Hudson River cottage, where the two men try to distract themselves from the ever more horrifying news arriving daily from the city by rambling in and sketching the landscape. “We learned to expect daily the loss of some friend. At length we trembled at the approach of every messenger. The very air from the South seemed to us redolent with death.”81 In setting this scene where deathly messengers from the city intrude upon the country landscape, Poe equates transmission with an unhealthy collapse of distance and conflates the spread of information with that of disease. The central episode of the tale then crystallizes this theme of morbid transmission by imagining it in terms of a monstrous vision of landscape: “Near the close of an exceedingly warm day, I was sitting, book in hand, at an open window, commanding, through a long vista of the river banks, a view of a distant hill. . . . Uplifting my eyes from the page, they fell upon the naked face of the hill, and upon an object—​upon some living monster of hideous conformation, which very rapidly made its way from the summit to the bottom, disappearing finally in the dense forest below.”82 The conformation of the monster was hideous indeed: “The mouth of the animal was situated at the extremity of a proboscis some sixty or seventy feet in length, and about as thick as the body of an ordinary elephant. Near the root of this trunk was an immense quantity of black shaggy hair—​more than could have been supplied by the coats of a score of buffaloes; and projecting from this hair downwardly and laterally, sprang two gleaming tusks not unlike those of the wild boar, but of infinitely greater dimension.”83 Not until the end of the story do readers learn that the monster was conjured by a spatial and optical misjudgment. The narrator actually saw an insect, a sphinx (or death’shead) moth, dangling from an indoor spider web, less than an inch from his eye—​not a monster on a distant hillside. The monster was born, in other words, of a misreading of scale and distance, which Poe described as a “misadmeasurement of its propinquity.”84

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Poe’s story frames this strange disturbance in space by plotting it within a familiar landscape setting. The narrator sits in an ornate Hudson River cottage. The scene of misrecognition takes place before a window and a distant twilight vista of river and hillside. Poe settles the reader into these familiar landscape conventions to express their failure more effectively. The pathological landscape seen by the narrator arises from the unmediated overlap of extreme foreground—​the moth dangling in front of the eye—​ and extreme background. In this flattened scene, the cushioning middle ground, along with its calibrating, orienting gradations, is destroyed. Poe’s vision of landscape in the twilight of gradualism is disastrously anti-pictorial. The protagonists escape to the Hudson River landscape to take advantage of its salutary atmosphere and, in aesthetic terms, its salutary cushion of atmospheric distance. But in the era of the communications revolution that atmosphere can no longer be assured, and monstrosity and pestilence come to the landscape.

Durand’s Landscape Studies and the Disavowal of Distance The gradual-sequential mode of landscape painting in midcentury America arose just as new transmission technologies called gradual-sequential space into question. Durand’s studies reveal his uncertainties about this mode in the face of the new complexities, for they reject the depiction of distance altogether and develop a model of landscape apprehension based in slowness, fixation, and materiality. Durand continued to produce long-view landscapes in the Claudean mode for the remainder of his life. But in his studies, as well as the full-sized paintings of closed forest interiors that later became trademarks of his mature style, he produced a countervailing strand of landscape that insistently questioned the validity of sequential space. Most of Durand’s landscape studies follow the pattern exhibited in Landscape: Creek and Rocks: geologic subject matter in the extreme foreground, suppression of depth, intensely particularized detail, found rather than composed arrangements, and plein air production. As I suggest above, the landscape studies were born of Durand’s own earlier work in engraving and were linked to the problematics of code, ornament, and surface fixation, to which his engraving work had sensitized him. By the 1840s the telegraph had exacerbated these problematics, particularly inasmuch as it compromised the representation of distance, which could no longer be taken for granted but instead was always prone to collapse. Although the advent of the telegraph newly exaggerated the scope and shape of these problems, Durand had already rehearsed strategies for addressing them in his Ariadne project, where he had worked with the depth axis of the image as the axis of coded transmission. In the ornamental patterns that countered spatial and symbolic recession in his banknotes, he had a means to suppress that axis. He had already experimented with it in the Ariadne engraving, counterposing the labyrinthine, foreground body of Ariadne with the path of Theseus into the background. The land-

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scape studies can be understood as continuing this transition from code to ornament, exploring the possibilities of a purely foregrounded landscape that resists spatial and semiotic conductivity—​a labyrinth that cannot be escaped. Durand, in his “Letters on Landscape Painting” (the writings he produced that most closely approximate a theoretical platform), published in The Crayon in 1855, establishes the close study of foreground elements as the founding process of all landscape painting.85 Artists may tackle distances step by laborious step, but only after grounding perception in the study of the foreground. “The study of foreground objects,” he claims, “is worthy whole years of labor.”86 Indeed Durand, who himself spent “whole years of labor” experimenting with techniques in these studies, found innovative ways to neutralize the perspectival indicators and spatial illusions of landscape painting by holding them in the foreground, in a state of material suspension. The paintings are not just passive foreground studies but evince an active process and principle of foregrounding. In Study of a Wood Interior, painted about 1855 (fig. 73), Durand focuses exclusively on textures and surfaces encountered at close range. The heap of boulders blocks the viewer’s imaginary path into the space, the branches and brambles tangling across the picture plane keep the eye close to the surface of the painting, what passes for a background is an undifferentiated mass of feathery brushstrokes, and the netlike or lattice-like disposition of the main compositional lines, which fall in chiastic patterns, seem designed to cancel forward movement. The facture also has a strangely unfocused quality, its even, soft brushwork lending all objects an equivalent focal weight. There is no sense of a focal plane or point, no sharpness that might suggest an object sitting at any precisely measurable distance. Moreover, the painting’s geologic subject matter (common to most of the studies) permitted Durand to develop what we might call a foreground temporality, an exploration of duration that depends upon an evocation of deep time within the rocks themselves rather than on processional sweeps and atmospheric perspective.87 The mosses and lichens, indicating that the rocks have been undisturbed for a while, add a layer of biological time to the mineralogical. This materialist foregrounding operates even in studies that allow a peek into the background, a glimpse of atmosphere. In Landscape with Birches (fig. 74), for example, the mountains in the background are painted with a vaporous touch indicating distance, but so—​oddly—​are the mosses in the near foreground. No matter how close one gets to the painting, the mosses do not come into focus; they remain as elusive and atmospheric as the vegetation along the distant horizon. They are both densely material and aerial (as Robert Morris said of Cézanne’s paintings)—​a materialization of air, a tactile version of aerial perspective.88 In a picture like this Durand conflates distal and proximal phenomena, bringing aerial perspective into the foreground, challenging its unquestioned role as a signifier of distance, and transforming it into the additive, material, sedimentary principle governing the rest of the painting. Not once does Durand use the word telegraph in the “Letters on Landscape Paint-

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Figure 73 Asher Brown Durand, Study of a Wood Interior, ca. 1855. Oil on canvas mounted on panel, 16¾ × 24 in. (42.6 × 61 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, gift of Mrs. Frederic F. Durand, 1932.1.

ing”—​but the language of the telegraph and its associated challenges loom everywhere. (He never mentions Ruskin either, but Ruskin’s influence on Durand has been exhaustively traced.) For example, tropes of slowness and gradualism and their associated values of material presence recur, compulsively, in the letters. These tropes emerge primarily in Durand’s discussion of building depth slowly from foreground study, but they appear elsewhere as well. For example, he writes about preferring the slow gathering of light in a landscape to the instantaneous effects of lightning: “The faint blush of morning light that calls up the sleeping mists of the valley, may declare its presence as surely as the lurid flash.”89 Lightning was also a common term for the action of the telegraphic message, and Durand, like many others, referred to the telegraph as a lightning machine and Morse as a lightning man.90 The letters also suggest that Durand conceived these studies as related to the problem of dematerialized language. In them Durand compares close, foreground nature study to an alphabetic exercise, suggesting that the elemental details of these studies provide a primer of letters for landscape painters who have lost the capacity for proper syntax. As Durand phrased it: “There can be no dissent from the maxim, that a knowledge of

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Figure 74 Asher Brown Durand, Landscape with Birches, ca. 1855. Oil on canvas, 24¼ × 18⅛ in. (61.6 × 46.0 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mary Fuller Wilson. 63.268. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

integral parts is essential for the construction of a whole—​that the alphabet must be understood before learning to spell, and the meaning of words before being able to read—​not to admit this would be absurd; yet many a young artist goes to work in the face of an equal absurdity—​filling a canvas just as an idle boy might fill a sheet of paper with unmeaning scrawls, occasionally hitting the form of a letter, and perhaps, even a word, so that the whole mass, at a little distance, may have the semblance of writing.”91 For Durand, close attention to species of rocks and trees is like learning the alphabet slowly and properly rather than, as he puts it, filling “a sheet of paper with unmeaning scrawls.”92 The rocks in these studies are for Durand akin to alphabetic blocks, individual atomic units of language, authenticated by nature but (and this is crucial) not yet assembled into a legible symbolic code.93 Responding to a perceived haste and degradation in contemporary language, Durand advises a return to the woods to learn the natural alphabet again, from scratch, step by step. Few factors were more instrumental in degrading language than the compression, acceleration, and general violence done to it by the telegraph and the telegram. As Jerusha Hill McCormack has shown in her study of Emily Dickinson and the telegraph, the passage through barely literate telegraph operators and the translation in and out of Morse code often garbled and compressed the original message, so that punctuation and pacing were altered, and erratic capitalization confused distinctions between parts of speech. Unpunctuated texts took on a rushed, hurried air that aptly mirrored their actual speed through the wire.94 Inasmuch as Durand’s letters prescribe a reanchoring of language in the material earth, they insist that the semiotic portions of objects remain stubbornly laminated to their material portions. In such requirements Durand implicitly contests the telegraph as one of the forces responsible for separating language from material embodiment. The telegraph divorced language from the earth. Language zipped about above the landscape rather than emerging organically from within it. And the telegraphic voice was understood as a weightless utterance uncannily liberated from any material anchorage. Adam Frank has pointed out in his study of Poe’s story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” that the “clattering tongue” of the telegraph was consistently understood as a voice “uttered in the absence of the body that is its source.”95 Durand’s studies, in the insistently tangled materiality of their surfaces and their remedial, prediscursive language metaphors, replicate in the landscape genre the entrapment of the ornamental labyrinth. Instead of a visual rhetoric of conductivity, Durand substitutes a visual rhetoric of insulation, adhesion, and gathering (as in gathering moss). The boulders provide a perfect geologic analogue to the glaciated or precipitated or diluviated matter that is now also painting. As Karen Georgi has pointed out, Durand’s studies were often discussed as objectionably and “impertinently eyecatching.”96 As the rocks gather moss, the painting gathers viewers. In Landscape: Creek and Rocks (see fig. 64), Ariadne’s qualities as material territory, as labyrinth, as delay and diversion, all tied to a principle of foregrounding, surface address, and refusal of

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the turnstile function of the depth axis, are made coterminous with painting itself. We might even say that these nature studies borrow from photography—​not because they look like photographs but because they act like cameras. Viewers are meant to stand still before this sensitive surface and register themselves there—​to be absorbed into the shallow surface, to be captured. In his letters Durand wrote of good landscapes as absorbing the viewer: his paintings are closer to fixative devices, bringing viewers into the shallow space of the painting and holding them there. This logic of adhesion would have been further reinforced for Durand in the very act of painting outdoors. As Eleanor Jones Harvey has explained, there was a literal adhesiveness to plein air paintings during these years. Sketches stuck together if they were not completely dry before packing. “The result was a solid block of sketches cemented together as the paint dried.”97 Moreover, she noted, “Insects, leaf matter, other windborne debris, and fingerprints often mark the surface of plein-air paintings as additional trophies from the field.”98 In Durand’s studies, landscape painting has shifted, then, from transitive recession to fixative surface. The domestic connotations of the paintings only reinforce this fixative quality. In Study of a Wood Interior (see fig. 73), for example, the rocks create a hollow or enclave, with nooks and crannies to entrap the gaze. The carpet-like mosses and reclining rock forms suggest the charms of domestic seclusion and intimate sociability. Every noun in the title—​Study of a Wood Interior—​ evokes spaces of domestic contemplation, material richness, absorption, and retreat. Durand’s studies are insulators, non-conductors, like the ornamental lathe work on the banknotes of Durand and Company. Many theoretical vocabularies might be deployed to engage the qualities of fixation and petrifaction in Durand’s studies—​but perhaps fetishism is the one indispensable language. The studies exhibit virtually all the general historical characteristics of the fetish as enumerated by William Pietz in his seminal articles on the history of the concept. Durand’s studies work like fetishes in their material irreducibility, their resistance to reference, their apparent randomness, and their strongly locative or territorial quality.99 One thing is certain: these geologic formations are also wish formations and compromise formations. Against their threatened dematerialization and deterritorialization in code, Durand highlights and preserves the materiality of both landscape and painting, literally present as and in real space. As Pietz writes, “The fetish is precisely not a material signifier referring beyond itself, but acts as a material space, gathering an otherwise unconnected multiplicity into the unity of its enduring singularity.”100 The painting provides this material space. Durand developed a veritably materialist painterly practice at the dawn of the era of dematerialized transmission. His studies respond to the newly conspicuous materiality of the visual arts in this era. If the telegraph gathered verbal language up into a realm of instantaneous and disembodied transmission but left pictures—​especially paintings—​ behind; if paintings were abandoned remainders of this telegraphic rapture, objects that still needed to be hauled physically from place to place; if paintings now seemed heavier,

Ga t he ri n g Moss    •   159

slower, and, for lack of a better term, “stickier” than they had before, then Durand’s studies imagine how painting might unapologetically celebrate this weight, slowness, and fixity. It is significant that the studies were completed as plein air paintings. The development of plein-airism in nineteenth-century painting is normally associated with technological advancement, and particularly with speed, inasmuch as it was encouraged by advances in paint formulation and packaging and rapid rail travel to and from the countryside in France and elsewhere. But in Durand’s practice it serves more emphatically as a mark and strategy of deceleration. Durand’s plein air landscape studies promised the direct physical transmission of the completed painting from the wilderness to the gallery. These images have been gathered on site and then carried back, along the ground, their configurations intact as a material transmission. However swiftly the diffusionist model of landscape was crumbling around them, the landscape studies themselves traveled in a gradualist, physical manner. Unlike telegraphic messages, they were brought to the receiver without interruption, translation, or electronic vaporization. Like the boulders in Durand’s paintings, carried to New England by ice age glaciers, the paintings hold and tell their history, binding time and space in their bodily structure. These paintings preserve, in other words, the reality of distance—​not the mystical, idealizing illusion of distance that Benjamin names the aura, but real distance, the real space between things, the delay and opacity built into the communication of matter. This principle of delay had been embodied by the labyrinth in Durand’s banknotes and in his Ariadne—​now it is both embodied and performed by the slow movement of his undecodable paintings through space. And in this spirit of delay, blockage, opacity, and fixation (recall the leaf-encrusted folding screen that blocked the view of Cole’s paintings in his 1837 letter) Durand makes real the “new style of painting” he had once merely dreamed about.

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EPILOGUE Material Visual Culture

As the stray references to the likes of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg throughout this book might suggest, my approach to the question of mobility and transit has been shaped profoundly by contemporary art. Partly to correct for the unilateral opticality of modern image theory, much art of the past half century has pointedly attended to its own literalism and objecthood. It has also commonly used spatial displacement to generate meaning. Readymades, commodity sculpture, minimalism and postminimalism, land art—​indeed nearly all forms of contemporary installation art—​acknowledge that transport inheres in art objects. These works, whether by taking themes of emplacement and displacement into and out of the gallery as a core project (as in Duchamp’s Fountain or Robert Smithson’s Nonsites), or simply by highlighting the weight of the work and the contingent peculiarity of its gravitational position (as in Eva Hesse’s latex droops or Richard Serra’s barely balanced lead plates), call attention to their itinerancy, their having-arrived-from-elsewhere. Similar comments might be made about every work created in the past fifty years under the wide banner of institutional critique, site specificity, or performance art. And here and there in contemporary art, one can find works that powerfully exemplify the critical aims of any transit study (certainly of this one): Gabriel Orozco’s 1992 Yielding Stone, for example, a 132-pound ball of plasticine whose movement through real space is directly recorded on its surface by imprint and material adhesion (fig. 75). Orozco’s work demonstrates the sensitivity to transit I have defined for early American painting and printmaking. But however vivid Orozco’s ball of plasticine might be as an emblem or mascot of

161

Figure 75 Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone, 1992. Plasticine, 14 × 17 × 17 in. (35.6 × 43.2 × 43. 2 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.

my approach in this book, its lessons cannot be applied wholesale to the pictures I have discussed in these pages. Yielding Stone (like the other contemporary works mentioned above) gains much of its geographic immediacy through abstraction. Evading pictorial representation, it retains an inherent physicality unleavened by virtual space. I have attempted to demonstrate how, by contrast, something like Yielding Stone’s geographically indexical capacity also functions in representational paintings like Durand’s Study of a Wood Interior (see fig. 73), where illusionism combines with material qualities. Each of the pictures I have discussed performs an unexpected interfolding of illusion and materiality. Because they all do this, they suggest conceptual models for the relationship between art and transport that also illuminate the undertheorized intersection of visual and material culture. Modern Western art history has for many years been consumed by its anxious relationship to visual culture. But its relationship to material culture is a more urgent question. Art history needs to look beyond the theories of illusion, representation, and iconography that underlie its formation as a modern discipline and confront the unavoidable material basis of its referential operations, the weight and heft of the stuff of which its images are made. Likewise, although material culture offers inroads to the interpretation of things, it reaches a methodological impasse with representation, which by definition signifies something beyond the material specificity of the work.

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The transport of pictures interests me precisely because it forces attention to the materiality of illusionism and also to the illusionism (the evocation of something absent or distant) in materiality. Movement materializes images—​not only, as I mention in the introduction, because their weight thereby becomes conspicuous, but also for reasons central to the long history of global art and material culture. Alois Riegl argued in the early twentieth century that the perception of an artifact as a pure image rather than a material thing is closely tied to its positional stability. As Christopher S. Wood explains, “The surrounding space is the first frame of the work of art, for the space serves as an insulating or buffer zone against the outside world and allows the artifact to emerge as an image, perhaps the apparition of an alternative world.”1 Riegl and other early theorists of modern Western art argued that the modern tableau, with its privileging of illusionistic values, could have been devised only by metropolitan cultures that could provide stable, permanent sites for the installation of objects. Cultures defined by migratory or nomadic patterns of existence, with their “portable arts,” were by definition bound up in tactile, haptic, material interactions with their artworks. They were, by definition, art handlers. Stasis is correlated with “apparition quality,” movement with “object quality.” (These terms are Wood’s.) To follow a picture as it travels outside its static buffer zone of museum or gallery installation, then, is to observe the procedures by which its object qualities interrupt and intrude on its apparition qualities. The precise mechanisms of this interruption vary from picture to picture, but the very amalgamation of the two modes constitutes a basic thematics of the transitdirected pictures I have analyzed in this book. Wood insists that despite the dominance of illusion in Western art since the Renaissance, “The distanced or optical reception of the artifact includes and also conceals within it the empathic or haptic reception.”2 The two are “always folded onto one another.”3 Analyzing transit can reveal how these two qualities, folded into the single artifact, are unavoidably co-present. The chapters of this book trace how object value and apparition value interact in the work of Copley, Audubon, and Durand. Of the various ways they do so, I would emphasize three. First, a picture’s own status as transported material thing often sneaks into the illusionary register at the level of iconography. Most of the pictures I address in this book work through their own mobility either by reinforcing it or contesting it in allusive or allegorical content. Thus Copley’s Watson and the Shark, with its themes of the perils of seafaring and the struggle to save an overboard figure, comments allegorically on Copley’s own career sending figure paintings back and forth across the Atlantic (some of them lost overboard). Audubon’s birds function similarly as complex commentaries on the migratory capacities of Audubon’s drawings themselves. Durand’s mossy, preternaturally still forest enclaves in his landscape studies comment, alternatively, on the slower, more material movement that was left to visual images once the telegraph had made possible the swift communication of verbal texts. These images proffer no programmatic, consistent “allegories of transportation.” They might better be described as permeated

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with allegorical “hot spots” or resonant details, like the boy’s hand spanning the water glass, a visual metaphor for oceanic crossing and empiricist questions about distance perception, in Copley’s Boy with a Flying Squirrel. The role of scale in mediating between real and illusionary space when object and apparition fuse has also emerged repeatedly in this book. The challenge of transit often divulges itself in these pictures in perturbations in the system of scale and measurement—​what we might call a drama of calibration. Pictures in transit must balance two forms of space: the internal, imaginary space they depict and the actual space they occupy, and through which they must pass, as objects. The picture may depict a boundless illusionary space, but in transit that illusionary space must always be measured against the real dimensions the picture occupies in its crate or box or tube, and against the real space through which it travels. The pictures in this book often exhibit double or ambivalent systems of measurement. One (usually a perspectival system) demarcates the fictive distances “within” the pictures; the other demarcates the real space the picture itself occupies in the actual world. These two measurements apply to all pictures. But in pictures where transport is at issue, the relationship between fictive and actual metrics, overtly problematized, is often a central theme of the work. Pelham’s hand over the water glass in Boy with a Flying Squirrel oscillates strangely as it measures the span of the water glass between incompatible dimensions: the actual surface size of the painting’s canvas and the perspectivally inflected scale of the glass as it sits “behind” the picture plane in illusionary space. Audubon’s actual-size birds forever resist their own shrinkage into a diminished pictoriality. Third, just as every transported picture connects real and fictive space, it also straddles two systems of delivery: physical and perceptual. Pictures, as shipped objects in their own right, are subject to various systems of material transport: strategies of packing and unpacking cargo, geometries of stowage, and so forth. As representations, they simultaneously partake of another set of packing and storage traditions (although they are not usually described that way) that include the composition of illusionary objects and geometries of perspective.4 These illusionistic methods, as delivery systems, suggest another way of understanding how real and illusionary transport might emerge as parallel or analogous concerns in works of art. Many of the pictures I discuss in this book evoke multiple structural parallels between physical and perceptual delivery. They perform their relationship to “space” not simply by deploying the perspectival alchemies they inherit as Western paintings but also by nodding to the configurations that real things assume as they are conveyed through real space—​folded and unfolded, compressed and decompressed, packed and unpacked. The pictures, for example, repeatedly represent mobile or transported objects as surfaces in states of involution, compression, or release: the papers, fabrics, and leaves in Copley’s portraits; the pressure-packed stratifications of the boulders displaced by glaciation in Durand’s landscape studies; the flattened and folded surfaces of Audubon’s birds, whose winged forms mirror the books in which they are encased.

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Such attention to the topological configuration of surfaces signals an analogously complex treatment of the surface of the canvas itself. Copley, Audubon, and Durand each reveal a basic skepticism about perspectival space and a preference for experimental spatial topologies. And each shows evidence of a persistent effort to bring the image to the material surface in points of lamination or adhesion and thereby to fold the distal spaces of optical illusion into the proximal surfaces of tactile adjacency. This occurs in Copley’s tabletop paintings as he models the empiricist tactility of distance perception; in Audubon’s prints as the actual-size birds necessarily cling to the surface of the page; in Durand’s forest studies as they perform a new foregrounding of landscape. The material flatness in these pictures is complex and ambivalent and always alloyed with illusion. This is why these pictures and others like them are worthy of continuing investigation as models for an art—​and an art history—​t hat can account for the complex intersection of object quality and apparition quality, thing theory and picture theory, visual culture and material culture. The analysis of pictures in transit is one way to bring these difficult intersections—​and many others—​into view and into consideration.

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NOTES

Introduction

1. This is Jacques Derrida’s phrase for the fate of nonideal objects of “mundane spatiality.” See Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 75. 2. I borrow the term preprocessing from T. J. Demos, who uses it to denote the formal anticipation of exile in the work of Marcel Duchamp. See Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 28. 3. David Joselit, “Painting beside Itself,” October 130 (Fall 2009): 126. Joselit uses the phrase to define “transitive painting” in contemporary art. 4. The most apposite art-historical models for thinking about pictorial portability (and concomitant concerns about materiality, sensory apprehension, and transmission) have been developed outside of the field of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting and visual culture. I am thinking particularly of studies of early modern prints, Netherlandish diptychs, Byzantine icons, Islamic “portable arts,” and Spanish Colonial religious imagery as transmission technologies. See, for example, Rebecca Zorach and Elizabeth Rodini, eds., Paper Museums: The Reproductive Print in Europe, 1500–​1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); John Oliver Hall and John Spronk, eds., Essays in Context: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Bissera V. Pentcheva, “The Performative Icon,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (December 2006): 631–​55; and Eva Hoffman, “Pathways of Portability: Islamic and Christian Interchange from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century,” Art History 24 (Febru-

16 7

5.

6.



7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

ary 2001): 17–​50. Much contemporary art, in its insistence on materiality, network, and emplacement, also touches on these problems. (I discuss this issue in the epilogue.) Amy Powell begins to address these questions from a slightly different perspective, tracing the connection between the iconography of the Deposition of Christ and the literal deposability of easel paintings as things that can be removed from the wall and potentially transported. See Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (New York: Zone Books, 2012). See also her important article “Painting as Blur: Landscapes in Paintings of the Dutch Interior,” Oxford Art Journal 33, no. 2 (2010): 143–​66. Several art-historical studies address the codes and conventions by which representational programs may refer to the materiality of their own support; although crucial for my project, these studies generally do not address the special material constraints of transmission. See especially David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003); and Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta-Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For concise histories of the origins of easel painting, see Jonathan Stephenson, “Canvas” and “Easel painting,” in Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. http://www.oxfordart online.com (accessed June 3, 2013). On perspective as a portability strategy, see Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–​68. For the portability inherent in the easel picture (and its attendant anxieties), see Powell, “Landscape as Blur.” Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to the Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 230. Thanks to Robin Kelsey for drawing this passage to my attention. See note 4. On geographical challenges to empire- and nation-building during this period, see Daniel Walker Howe, “The Continental Setting,” and “Overthrowing the Tyranny of Distance,” in What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–​1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 19–​50, 203–​42; Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–​1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); John D. Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755–​1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–​1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On space-binding communication, see Harold A. Innis, Empire and Communications ([1950] Toronto: Dundurn Press, 2007), 28. On the intersections of distance, credit, and temporality, see Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Steele, The English Atlantic. John Singleton Copley to Francis M. Newton, Boston, November 23, 1767, Letters and

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13. 14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–​1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914) (hereafter Copley-Pelham Letters), 63. Copley to Benjamin West, Boston, January 17, 1768, Copley-Pelham Letters, 67. Ibid., 68. See Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–​1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–​1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). Taylor’s focus on transportation was essentially also a focus on communications. Indeed, however counterintuitive it may seem now, the word communication was synonymous with transportation until the mid-nineteenth century. (A shipment of lumber could be communicated from Boston to London; a bottle of bourbon could be communicated from Louisville to New Orleans.) This synonymy changed with the introduction of the telegraph. (I examine the impact of this change in chapter 3 of this book.) See John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5. Daniel Walker Howe has argued for “communications revolution” as the best term to encapsulate the transformations in early nineteenth-century America. See Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 5. See Bronislaw Malinowski, “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” in The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, ed. C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949); and Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 130–​44. Helena Pelham to Peter Pelham Jr., October 3, 1748, Copley-Pelham Letters, 16. Bernhard Siegert, “Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies,” Grey Room 29 (Winter 2008): 33. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). The term phatic image, currently in limited circulation in theories of the spectacle and advertising, is invoked in an extremely narrow sense, deriving from a single passage in Paul Virilio’s Vision Machine. For Virilio, the phatic image, a highly focused, intensified image, reaches its apogee in totalitarian spectacle and mass advertising as a tool for hijacking the viewer’s attention: it is “a targeted image that forces you to look and holds your attention.” This concept of the phatic image is valid inasmuch as it acknowledges the image’s concern with establishing contact with a viewer, but it ultimately strips the concept of all its social and perceptual complexity. Virilio sees the phatic image only in a pejorative light, as an aggressive and totalitarian form of image to hypnotize helpless viewers with its communicative intensity. Virilio’s reading belies the uncertainty that is integral to the phatic mode, which derives not from the power of an utterance to reach its audience but rather from the powerlessness of messages and the anxieties attending their transmission. Similarly problematic is Virilio’s apparent belief (inherent in his denigration of the phatic tout court) that there was once a time when images did not need to behave em-phatically; when they did not need to establish themselves in the real material and spatial world. See Paul Virilio, “The Public Image,” in The Vision Machine (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). For the term’s usage in cur-

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20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

rent theories of advertising and the culture industry, see Ray Hudson, Economic Geography: Circuits, Flows, and Spaces (London: Sage, 2005), 68. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, 129–​60. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 4, 2, 9. On projection in art history, see Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 414–​34. See Alex Potts, “Artworks, Utterances, and Things,” in Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 91–​110; and Henri Zerner, “Malraux and the Power of Photography,” in Sculpture and Photography: Envisioning the Third Dimension, ed. G. A. Johnson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 116–​30. This goal is also articulable as a general need in the discipline of art history to revamp its methods so that it can attend more closely to materiality. “By imagining the history of art as the history of vision, the danger that the image shall become detached from its material transmitter, and from the materialist contexts of its viewing, is great.” Michael Yonan, “Toward a Fusion of Art History and Material Culture Studies,” West 86th, no. 2 (Fall–​Winter 2011), 232–​48. Jasper Johns, quoted in Jeffrey Weiss, Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–​1965 (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2007), 29. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1975), 19. Nathan Stolow, Conservation Standards for Works of Art in Transit and on Exhibition (Paris: UNESCO, 1979), 13. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–​16. See Arjun Appadurai, introduction to The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3–​63. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W. D. Halls (Norton, 1990); Jacques Derrida, “Given Time: The Time of the King,” in The Logic of the Gift: Toward an Ethic of Generosity, ed. Alan Schrift (New York: Routledge, 1997), 121–​47; Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 6–​10; and Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 105. See, for example, Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2005); Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (New York: Clarendon Press, 1998).

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33. Latour, Reassembling the Social, 70. 34. Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995). 35. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 36. Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 199.

1. Dilemmas of Delivery in Copley’s Atlantic 1. The painting was first exhibited under the title A Boy with a Flying Squirrel. It was known simply as Boy with a Squirrel for several decades, but the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has officially reinstated its initial title. For a general introduction to the painting, see Carrie Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 214–​19. Copley’s knowledge of European painting derived primarily from the prints and books of his stepfather, the engraver Peter Pelham (father of Henry Pelham, the sitter in Boy with a Flying Squirrel). Copley also had frequent access to the paintings, books, drawings, prints, casts, and other artistic paraphernalia in the studio of Pelham’s close associate John Smibert, a painter who had emigrated from London to America in 1728 and had then lived in Boston until his death in 1751. Copley’s letters indicate familiarity with such French, British, and Italian writers on art as Charles du Fresnoy, Roger de Piles, Horace Walpole, and Francesco Algarotti. For details on Copley’s reading in art theory, see Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 1:16–​17; and Susan Rather, “Carpenter, Tailor, Shoemaker, Artist: Copley and Portrait Painting around 1770,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 2 (June 1997): 273. On the Society of Artists, a precursor of the Royal Academy, see Matthew Hargraves, Candidates for Fame: The Society of Artists of Great Britain, 1760–​1791 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); and Mark Hallett, “Reynolds, Celebrity, and the Exhibition Space,” in Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity, ed. Martin Postle (London: Tate Publications, 2005), 35–​54. 2. Joshua Reynolds, quoted in Captain R. G. Bruce to Copley, August 4, 1766, in Letters and Papers of John Singleton Copley and Henry Pelham, 1739–​1776 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1914), 41–​42 (hereafter Copley-Pelham Letters). Emphasis in original. 3. For “unspoiled vision,” see James Thomas Flexner, John Singleton Copley (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 13. For examples of these founding narratives of American art, see especially Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience ([1969] New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1–​23; John Wilmerding, American Art, Pelican History of Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 38; Paul Staiti, “Accounting for Copley,” in Carrie Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 37–​38; and Rather, “Carpenter, Tailor, Shoemaker, Artist,” 275. In consumption-oriented Copley studies, Boy with a Flying Squirrel has generally relinquished its central status in the artist’s oeuvre because its role as an uncommissioned painting undermines its usefulness for exploring questions of class and self-fashioning related to patronage.

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4. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 4, 2, 9. 5. Although art historians have only begun to explore this oceanic interval, a growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship seeks to account for its imprint on the material and textual world of the long eighteenth century. Mary Poovey, for example, in an essay about the correspondence of the British East India Company, insists that the time spent on long oceanic crossings must not be seen as a “negative space” or mere intermission between successful communications and exchanges: “The East Indiamen were neither simply sites of attrition or loss nor vehicles that rendered some communications obsolete. For the ships—​and the temporal dimension they inscribed in the everyday workings of empire—​were also sites of production.” Mary Poovey, “The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project: British India and the East Indiamen,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004), 199. 6. See David Harvey, “Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition,” in The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 284–​307. 7. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). 8. Allan Sekula, Fish Story, 2nd ed. (Düsseldorf: Richter Verlag, 2002), 48. In 1764 in London, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce held a major competition “for the best original Painting of a Sea Piece.” On the sea piece genre, see Sarah Monks, “Fishy Business: Richard Wright’s The Fishery (1764), Marine Painting, and the Limits of Refinement in Eighteenth-Century London,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 41, no. 3 (Spring 2008): 405–​21. 9. The vehicular function of painting was widely assumed at the time; one of the first sentences in Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1725) introduces the art of painting as “one of the means whereby we convey our Ideas to each other” (2). The English were also aware of the marine connotations of canvas—​ originally developed and used for ship’s sails—​as a support. John Denham’s Directions to a Painter for Describing Our Naval Business in Imitation of Mr. Waller (London, 1667), a long poem in book form, plays on the word canvas in its denotations as both a painterly support and the material used for sails; it includes verses on ultramarine, moreover, as both the name of a pigment and as a term for something that travels over the sea. My thanks to Jason LaFountain for bringing this source to my attention. 10. The term “New Thalassology,” derived from ancient Greek thalassa, “sea,” has emerged to denominate a growing focus on oceans as areas of historical determination. See Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, “The Mediterranean and the ‘New Thalassology,’ ” American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (June 2006): 722–​40. 11. Copley, writing November 12, 1766, to Benjamin West, explains that the overprecise paint handling of Boy with a Flying Squirrel derived from the great “timerity” he felt while painting a picture for “the inspection of the first artists in the World.” CopleyPelham Letters, 50. 12. On the exceptional quality of the painting, see Alfred Frankenstein, The World of Copley, 1738–​1815 (New York: Time-Life Books, 1970), 60; and Wilmerding, American Art, 37.

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13. Copley to Henry Pelham, Parma, August 22, 1775, Copley-Pelham Letters, 355. 14. Flexner, John Singleton Copley, 1. 15. The only earlier profile Copley had done was the 1760 oil sketch of Pelham that became the basis for Boy with a Flying Squirrel. On the rarity of profiles in Copley’s work, see Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America, 214; on that in mid-eighteenth-century portraiture more generally, see Marcia Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 46. 16. See Staiti, “Accounting for Copley,” 64; Roland Fleischer, “Emblems in Colonial American Painting,” American Art Journal 20 (1988): 3–​35. 17. See, for example, shipping notices in the Boston Evening Post, July 1, 1751, and December 4, 1752; Boston Weekly News-Letter, March 9, 1758; and Boston News-Letter and NewEngland Chronicle, March 7, 1765. 18. For additional biographical background, see Staiti, “Accounting for Copley,” 26. 19. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 5. 20. On the duration and frequency of ships’ voyages and the editorial strategies of colonial newspaper editors in contending with delays, see Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic, 1675–​1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 58–​61; 151. On shipping practices, see Ralph Davis, The Rise of the English Shipping Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1962); and Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seaman, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World, 1700–​1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 21. John Hurd to John Singleton Copley, April 17, 1770, Copley-Pelham Letters, 84. 22. Susannah Clarke Copley to Elizabeth Copley Greene, ca. 1801, in Martha Babcock Amory, The Domestic and Artistic Life of John Singleton Copley, R.A. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 195–​96. My thanks to Katherine Rieder for drawing this reference to my attention. 23. On the possibility of colors changing en route, see Copley to R. G. Bruce, September 10, 1765, Copley-Pelham Letters, 35. 24. Captain Peter Traille to Copley, March 7, 1765, Copley-Pelham Letters, 34. Traille did not specify whether the “barbarous Inhabitants” were people or sea creatures. 25. Steele, English Atlantic, 215; Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 129, 170–​71. 26. References to shipped paintings in Copley’s letters mention boxes, crates, and cases as containers, and discuss their packing in such a way as to indicate that the paintings were stretched before shipping. See for example R. G. Bruce to Copley, June 11, 1767, Copley-Pelham Letters, 52–​53. 27. Copley to R. G. Bruce, September 10, 1765, Copley-Pelham Letters, 35. 28. See Mungo Campbell, “ ‘Lord Cardross’ and the ‘Boy with a Squirrel’: Sir Joshua Reynolds’s First Encounter with the Earl of Buchan and John Singleton Copley,” Burlington Magazine 129, no. 1016 (1987): 730. 29. Flexner, John Singleton Copley, 2–​4; Amory, The Domestic and Artistic Life of Copley, 17; Frankenstein, The World of Copley, 60–​62.

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30. Prown, John Singleton Copley, 49. 31. Joshua Reynolds, Discourse IV (1771), in Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 70. 32. See Martin Postle, ed., Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (London: Tate Publications, 2005); and Hargraves, Candidates for Fame. 33. Observing the fortunes of his stepfather, Peter Pelham, the first mezzotint engraver in North America, had repeatedly reinforced this principle for Copley. Pelham profited from his engraving trade only when he had portraits of esteemed figures (e.g., ministers) to print. See Andrew Oliver, “Peter Pelham, Sometime Printmaker of Boston,” in Boston Prints and Printmakers, 1670–​1775 (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1971), 133–​73. 34. Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 1–​25. See also Pointon, Hanging the Head, 13–​14, on portraits having “a longer and less disturbed life than other kinds of household objects.” On the liquidity of silver, see Richard Bushman, “The Complexity of Silver,” in New England Silver and Silversmithing, ed. Jeannine Falino and Gerald W. R. Ward (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2001), 1–​15. On “terminal commodities” see Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 75. 35. Copley based the painting on an oil sketch of Pelham reading—​now also at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston—​that he had made in about 1759. 36. On children in eighteenth-century genre painting as markers of liminality or separation from the “continuum of history,” see Katie Scott, “Child’s Play,” in The Age of Watteau, Chardin, and Fragonard: Masterpieces of French Genre Painting, ed. Colin Bailey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 90–​105; and as embodiments of synthetic or generalized time, see Edgar Wind, Hume and the Heroic Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 22–​28. 37. To my knowledge, the only other profile portraits Copley made were William Vassall and His Son Leonard (1770–​72; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), in which Leonard is painted in profile, and Mrs. John Montresor (Frances Tucker) (1776–​80; Diplomatic Reception Rooms, Department of State, Washington, DC), painted after Copley had left the colonies. 38. Chardin’s House of Cards (fig. 5), now in the National Gallery, London, was probably in England by 1762, and an engraving of it was distributed along with the January 1762 issue of British Magazine. A Boy Building a House of Cards (now in the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor) was sold in 1765 in London, having most likely circulated there already as an engraving by Pierre Filloeul. John Faber had engraved Chardin’s Young Draughtsman in 1740. See Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1979), 231–​33; and David Carritt, “Mr. Fauquier’s Chardins,” Burlington Magazine 116, no. 858 (September 1974): 502–​9. See also Ellis K. Waterhouse, “English Painting and France in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 15, nos. 3–​4 (1952): 122–​35. 39. On the deindividuating function of the profile, see Pointon, Hanging the Head, 95: “A

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40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49.

50.

schematic rendering of the human head, the profile has often been employed to effect distance between subject and viewer (as with the medals of Antiquity and the Renaissance) and thus to suggest immortalization.” Susan Rather mentions the detachment of Pelham’s profile in her discussion of the painting; see Rather, “Carpenter, Shoemaker, Tailor, Artist,” 275. Richardson, Essay on the Theory of Painting, 209. On the imago clipeata see Pointon, Hanging the Head, 65–​66. On Hurd, see Ellen G. Miles, Saint-Mémin and the Neoclassical Profile Portrait in America (Washington, DC: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1994), 46–​47. Pointon, 66. Robert Rosenblum notes that during the mid-eighteenth century, textual accounts of Pliny’s story were common, but visual illustrations before the 1770s were rare. Robert Rosenblum, “The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,” Art Bulletin 39, no. 4 (December 1957): 279–​90. See James H. Bunn, “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism,” New Literary History 11, no. 2 (Winter 1980): 304. I do not mean that Boy with a Flying Squirrel functions like coinage or in complicity with it. Any overt allusion to specie would have been anathema, in the British ­eighteenth-century context, to the proper practice of fine art, which defined itself in polar opposition to vulgar commercial interests. On the problematic commodity status of paintings and their market distribution in the context of civic humanism, see David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Stephen Copley, “The Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Polite Culture,” in Painting and the Politics of Culture, ed. John Barrell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 13–​37; and Louise Lippincott, “Expanding on Portraiture: The Market, the Public, and the Hierarchy of Genres in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–​1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London: Routledge, 1995), 75–​88. The debate was also active in America. See Jennifer J. Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). David Alvarez, “ ‘Poetical Cash’: Joseph Addison, Antiquarianism, and Aesthetic Value,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 38, no. 3 (Spring 2005): 513, 516–​17. See also John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1980), sec. 47: “And thus came in the use of money, some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling, and that by mutual consent men would take in exchange for the truly useful, but perishable supports of life.” David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature ([1739] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), bk. 2, pt. 3, sec. 8. See Joseph Addison, “Adventures of a Shilling,” in The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator, ed. Erin Mackie (Boston and New York: Bedford / St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 183–​87. For circulation narratives, see Christopher Flint, “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-Century Prose Fiction,” PMLA 113, no. 2 (March 1998): 212–​26;

N o t e s t o P a g e s 2 6 – 2 9    •   1 7 5

51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

and Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 119–​28. Addison, “Adventures of a Shilling,” 184. For analysis of the conversational mode in painting, see Solkin, Painting for Money, 27–​77. Copley, “Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century Polite Culture,” 35. The conversation piece has most influentially been discussed as a style of complicated political mediation, associated with the criticism of Addison and Steele, in which the ideal of polite sociality served to temper, regulate, and in some sense disavow the anonymous and fragmented sphere of abstract capitalist exchange. The weight of contemporary politics and commerce was transmuted into an aesthetic of easy, enlightened civility, and the cultural performance of polite sociality. “Whig spokesmen abandoned sectarian polemic in favor of politeness as the very stuff of their politics, as its stylistic means as well as its social and moral end” (Solkin, Painting for Money, 29). This show of mannered conviviality was at the same time exclusionary. Usually, exclusion from the polite public sphere is described as class- and ethnicity-based. (The conversers in question, however disjunct politically, never include people of color or representatives of the lower classes.) Copley’s situation raises a question: Was geographical exclusion not also a primary effect of conversational aesthetics? Although, as Terry Eagleton has noted, conversation culture provided a “respite from sectarian truculence,” did it not also draw out, indeed create, a newly agonistic relationship between those at the center of intimate culture and those—​the exiled, the belated—​at the peripheries? If live interaction was a precondition of politesse, if the play of polite manner and gesture depended on physical proximity and reciprocal performance, how could Copley (or any other far-flung colonial) have possibly participated in this public sphere? Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 2005), 26. It also mirrors the delicate crook of the boy’s forefinger, the curve of his lower palm, and even the ruffle of his sleeve. For Pelham’s reverie, see Trevor Fairbrother’s entry for Boy with a Squirrel, in A New World: Masterpieces of American Painting, 1760–​1910, ed. Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), 195. See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 44–​53. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 65–​68; and Daniel Webb, An Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting, and into the Merits of the Most Celebrated Painters, Ancient and Modern (London, 1761), 108. Barbara Novak, Voyages of the Self: Pairs, Parallels, and Patterns in American Art and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7. Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 7, 4. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.7. See, for example, Charles W. J. Withers, Geography, Science, and National Identity: Scotland since 1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hume, Abstract, para. 35, in A Treatise of Human Nature, 417. See John Greenwood to Copley, March 23, 1770, Copley-Pelham Letters, 81–​83.

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65. See Ann Gibson and Lucia Palmer, “George Berkeley’s Visual Language and the New England Portrait Tradition,” Centennial Review 31, no. 2 (1987): 122–​45. 66. George Berkeley, “An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,” in Works of George Berkeley, ed. G. N.  Wright (London: Thomas Tegg, 1843), 1:263. 67. See Gibson and Palmer, “George Berkeley’s Visual Language.” On Berkeley’s impact on British painting, see Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson, Gainsborough’s Vision (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999), 105–​27. On Berkeley and Smibert, see Richard Saunders, John Smibert (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); and Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution, 185–​95. 68. Michael Baxandall’s reading of the shared “brief” of the painter and the philosopher, and thus the shared “awareness of the complexity and even the fragility of the act of perception” among Chardin, Locke, and Newton, has inspired the present reading. See Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 76. 69. Berkeley, “Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,” 254. 70. Berkeley, 252. 71. Nudging the glass to the left or right would break the formal connection between the spread of the thumb and finger and the lip of the glass, and the glass would immediately be perceived as occupying a plane in front of the hand. 72. Berkeley, “Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,” 256. 73. John Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding, 4th ed. (London, 1700), bk. 2, chap. 9, sec. 8. 74. Berkeley, “Essay towards a New Theory of Vision,” 253. 75. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1.1.1. 76. Hume, 1.1.3. 77. Ibid. 78. “I will not contend with those that say a man may paint from his Ideas only, for I will admit it; I will admit that all men do; only I will observe that the memory of all men is not equilly retentive. One man shall see an object, and twelve months after shall have as perfect a knowledge of it as another that has seen the same object only a few Days; but yet the man who would see an object with an intention to paint it in a few Days still paints as much from Idea as the one who retains a remembrance of it a year. [F]or all our Ideas of things is no more than a remembrance of what we have seen” (CopleyPelham Letters, 302). 79. Reynolds, Discourse IV, Discourses on Art, 69. 80. Roger de Piles, The Principles of Painting (London, 1743), 60. 81. R. G. Bruce to Copley, London, June 25, 1767, Copley-Pelham Letters, 59. 82. Copley to Pelham, London, August 17, 1774, Copley-Pelham Letters, 240. 83. Wolfgang Iser has famously discussed the work of reading as an active process of reception that involves the concretization, in and through the body of the reader, of information presented schematically in the text. See Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), and Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

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84. Copley’s sitters who had accounts with Pico included Epes Sargent, John Hancock, Benjamin Gill, and Daniel Sargent. Joshua Pico Account Books, 1764–​1790, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MsN-711. 85. On Copley’s use of prints as infrastructures for his paintings, see Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America. 86. Paul Staiti, “Mrs. John Winthrop,” in Carrie Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 316. 87. I share the reorientation of scholars like Carrie Rebora Barratt and Emily Ballew Neff on Copley that softens the break between his American and British styles. See Emily Ballew Neff and William L. Pressly, John Singleton Copley in England (Houston, TX: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1995); and Rebora et al., John Singleton Copley in America. 88. For the historiography of Copley, see Carrie Rebora, “Copley and Art History,” in John Singleton Copley in America, 3–​24; and Neff, introduction to John Singleton Copley in England, 12–​21. 89. For sources treating Copley’s reading in art theory, see note 1. Here I extend the important suggestion in Gibson and Palmer, “George Berkeley’s Visual Language,” 145: “We may wish to reassess our present understanding of the lack of theoretical foundations in American Colonial painting.” Although I would not say, as they do, that Copley’s work is a “rigorous representation of a technical philosophical theory at the forefront of eighteenth-century scientific thought” (145), as if he were simply applying a fully internalized series of empirical rules, I would suggest that Copley’s painting, by virtue of his general awareness of such theories and the alignment of his own material task with such theories, actively works through the same problems that technical philosophical theory confronts. 90. See Georgia B. Barnhill, “The Markets for Images from 1670–​1790 in America,” Imprint 25, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 15–​16. 91. Copley had access to Smibert’s studio, which seems to have remained more or less intact after that artist’s death, with Smibert’s copies of old-master paintings as well as voluminous portfolios of mezzotints. He also saw copies after old-master paintings in New York and Philadelphia, particularly in the home of William Allen, where many of West’s copies were located. 92. Copley to Pelham, Parma, June 25, 1775, Copley-Pelham Letters, 334. 93. Ibid., 335. 94. Copley to Pelham, Rome, March 14, 1775, Copley-Pelham Letters, 299. 95. Ibid., 306. 96. Ibid., 305. 97. See Irma B. Jaffe, “John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” American Art Journal, 9, no. 1 (May 1977): 15–​25; Ellen Miles, entry for Watson and the Shark, in American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Ellen Miles (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995), 54–​71; Roger Stein, “Copley’s Watson and the Shark and Aesthetics in the 1770s,” in Discoveries and Considerations, ed. Calvin Israel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1976), 85–​130; Ann Uhry Abrams, “Politics, Prints, and John Singleton Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” Art Bulletin 61, no. 2 (June 1979): 265–​76; Albert

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98. 99.

100.

101.

102. 103.

104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109.

110.

111.

Boime, “Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters: Visual Encodings of Racism in Copley and Homer,” Smithsonian Studies in American Art 3, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 19–​47; and Hugh Honour, The Image of the Black in Western Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), vol. 4, pt. 1, 37–​41. For basic information on the painting see Miles, entry for Watson and the Shark, 54–​71. For a concise account of the exhibition of the painting, see Miles, ibid. The original is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; Copley made an exact copy for himself that is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The similarities between Watson and the Shark and Raft of the Medusa have occasionally been mentioned in the literature but never thoroughly explored. Copley’s painting was widely distributed as an engraving (Valentine Green, 1779) that Géricault would surely have seen. See Francis S. Drake, Tea Leaves: Being a Collection of Letters and Documents Relating to the Shipment of Tea to the American Colonies in the Year 1773, by the East India Company (Detroit: Singing Tree Press, 1970), xxiii; and Benjamin Woods Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 25. Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 110–​14. For Copley’s attempts at arbitration in the days leading up to the Tea Party, see Copley to Jonathan and Isaac Winslow Clarke, December 1, 1773, in Copley-Pelham Letters, 211–​ 13; Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 119–​20, 123–​24; Drake, Tea Leaves, 320–​30; and Abrams, “Politics, Prints,” 267. Henry Pelham to Copley, Boston, October 10, 1775, Copley-Pelham Letters, 362. Copley to Pelham, Parma, August 6, 1775, Copley-Pelham Letters, 348. Copley saw The Death of Wolfe for the first time in the company of his brother-in-law Jonathan Clarke, who had also been intimately involved in the tea crisis. See Miles, entry for Watson and the Shark, 56. Copley to Richard Clarke, February 15, 1774, Copley-Pelham Letters, 213–​14. See Miles, entry for Watson and the Shark, 55, and, for details on Watson (including his probable activities as a spy), see Abrams, “Politics, Prints,” 268–​69. Geoff Quilley has reconstructed the significance of the Havana setting for Watson and the Shark, discussing the importance of Havana to the British at this time and particularly its resonance as a symbol of the threats to British commerce in the West Indies that might follow from American independence. He notes the inbuilt ambivalence of the setting: Havana Harbor easily invited “a recollection of Boston as the most notorious scene of American colonial merchant rebellion.” Geoff Quilley, “Questions of Loyalty: The Representation of the British West Indian Colonies during the American Revolutionary War,” in Conflicting Visions: War and Visual Culture in Britain and France, c. 1700–​1830, ed. John Bonehill and Geoff Quilley (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 117–​28. See Labaree, Boston Tea Party, 8; and Drake, Tea Leaves, lxiii, lxxix. The angles assumed by the harpoonist and black figure in Watson and the Shark might be said to resemble the geometry of the block-and-tackle system, in which a compound pulley was used, akin to the wound rope in the hand of the black sailor. Labaree, 144; Drake, Tea Leaves, lxxxi.

N o t e s t o P a g e s 5 2 – 5 8    •   1 79

112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

Drake, lxxix, lxxx, lxxxviii. See Stein, “Copley’s Watson and the Shark,” 103. Richardson, Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1725), 57. John Singleton Copley to Susannah Copley, Florence, June 9, 1775, in Amory, The Domestic and Artistic Life of Copley, 53. Amory, 54. Public Advertiser, April 28, 1778, and St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, April 25–​28, 1778. General Advertiser, and Morning Intelligencer, April 27, 1778. St. James’s Chronicle; or, British Evening-Post, April 25–​28, 1778. Morning Chronicle, and London Advertiser, April 25, 1778. Boime, “Blacks in Shark-Infested Waters,” 35, 36. On the importance of sympathy in British history painting at this time see Solkin, Painting for Money, 157–​213. See Miles, “Watson and the Shark,” 62. Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm for a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Steven Rendell (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 47.

2. Audubon’s Burden 1. For an analysis of Audubon’s attempt to straddle the divagating systems of scientific illustration and fine art, see Ann Shelby Blum, Picturing Nature: American NineteenthCentury Zoological Illustration (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 88–​ 118. For the psychobiographical approach, see Albert Boime, “John James Audubon: A Birdwatcher’s Fanciful Flights,” Art History 22, no. 5 (1999): 728–​55. For the most thorough analysis of Audubon’s art-historical sources, see Linda Dugan Partridge, “From Nature: John James Audubon’s Drawings and Watercolors, 1805–​1826” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1992). The view of American ornithological illustration as a didactic field for modeling political and domestic comportment is widespread in the literature on Audubon and other natural history artists. See, for example, Laura Rigal, The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 145–​78; and David Brigham, “ ‘Ask the Beasts, and They Shall Teach Thee’: The Human Lessons of Charles Willson Peale’s Natural History Displays,” in Art and Science in Early America: Issues of Representation, ed. Amy Meyers (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1998), 11–​34. 2. Soon after securing the Audubon job, Havell engaged his son, Robert Havell Jr. (1793– 1878) to do the engraving and manage the coloring of the prints for Audubon. 3. Some two hundred full copies of The Birds of America were eventually printed. Subscribers could arrange with Audubon or his agents to have their prints bound into volumes or could bind them independently. For basic background on the project, see Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., eds., John James Audubon: The Watercolors for “The Birds of America” (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1993); Waldemar H. Fries, The Double Elephant Folio: the Story of Audubon’s “Birds of America”

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(Amherst, MA: Zenaida Publishing, 2006); Susanne M. Low, A Guide to Audubon’s “Birds of America”: A Concordance (New Haven, CT: Reese and Heald, 2002); Linda Dugan Partridge, “By the Book: Audubon and the Tradition of Ornithological Illustration,” in Art and Science in America: Issues of Representation, ed. Amy Meyers (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1998), 97–​129; Boime, “Fanciful Flights”; and Gregory H. Nobles, “Ornithology and Enterprise: Making and Marketing John James Audubon’s The Birds of America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 113, no. 2 (2005): 267–​302. 4. “C’est le monument le plus magnifique qui ait encore été élevé à l’ornithologie.” Audubon included a long extract of Cuvier’s report to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris as an appendix to the first volume of his Ornithological Biography. See “Extracts from Reviews,” in Ornithological Biography, vol. 1 (Philadelphia and Edinburgh, 1831), app., 8. 5. Edinburgh Journal, quoted in the Louisiana Advertiser, February 15, 1827, 3. 6. Audubon, “My Style of Drawing Birds,” in Audubon: Writings and Drawings, ed. Christoph Irmscher (New York: Library of America, 1999), 760. 7. Audubon himself was ambiguous in describing the configuration of the specimens, leaving open the possibility that he created three-dimensional bird sculptures, skewered with wire and set as free-standing sculptures in front of a gridded board. The pinto-board method is confirmed in a little-known account by Dr. William Ingalls, who accompanied Audubon on one of his expeditions: Audubon “had his chalks upon the table and upright in front of him was a pine board upon which was secured in position by means of long thin pins, the bird whose likeness he was transferring to the cardboard before him.” From a letter published in Ruthven Deane, “Audubon’s Labrador Trip of 1833,” Auk 27 (January 1910): 47. 8. Audubon, “Account of the Method of Drawing Birds employed by J. J. Audubon, Esq. F.R.S.E.: in a Letter to a Friend,” in Audubon: Writings and Drawings, 756. 9. Audubon, “My Style of Drawing Birds,” 759. Audubon was not entirely consistent in his standards and drew many profiles—​rather stiff ones at that, especially during the earlier years of the project (see Partridge, “By the Book,” 110–​11). And as the Birds of America wound down in the late 1830s, with Audubon under intense pressure to finish the final volume, he increasingly drew from skins sent to him in casks of rum by other naturalists or even from stuffed specimens in museums. For a review of his compromises at this time, see Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., “Audubon’s Drawings of American Birds, 1805–​38,” in John James Audubon: The Watercolors for “The Birds of America,” ed. Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1993), 21–​22. 10. On the relationship between naturalists and illustrators at this time, see Peter Galison and Lorraine Daston, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 84–​90. 11. Harper’s 19, no. 113 (October 1859): 619. 12. Amy Meyers, “Observations of an American Woodsman: John James Audubon as Field Naturalist,” in John James Audubon: The Watercolors for “The Birds of America,” ed. Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1993), 44. See also Boime, “Fanciful Flights,” for Audubon’s early self-fashioning.

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13. For Audubon’s biography, and his elaborate attempts to disavow his illegitimate birth, see especially Boime, “Fanciful Flights”; see also Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Knopf, 2004), 3–​6. 14. Audubon did not dwell on the Terror in his later writing. In his short memoir, “Myself,” originally drafted in the form of a letter to his sons, he wrote: “The thunders of the Revolution still roared over the land, the Revolutionists covered the earth with the blood of man, woman, and child. But let me forever drop the curtain over the frightful aspect of this dire picture. To think of these dreadful days is too terrible, and would be too horrible and painful for me to relate to you, my dear sons.” (Audubon, “Myself,” in Writings and Drawings, 769). The possible impact of the Terror on Audubon’s own work—​the violence inherent in it—​has not yet received a sustained analysis in the scholarly literature. 15. Although Audubon’s claims to have studied in David’s atelier have often been dismissed as preposterous, Albert Boime has argued convincingly that Audubon had some French academic training. Although Boime agrees that Audubon most likely did not study literally with David, he points out that the artist could well have been allowed to enter the studio for basic drawing instruction without having been officially admitted (by examination) to the École des Beaux-Arts. He notes that Audubon’s chalk portraits (many done in profile, in a style nearly identical to those routinely produced in the French academy), as well as his frequent allusions to specific tricks and techniques of delineation, betray some training in an academic setting. See Boime, “Fanciful Flights,” 731–​33. See also Partridge, “From Nature,” for a detailed discussion of Audubon’s possible academic education in France, and Stebbins, “Audubon’s Drawings of American Birds,” 3–​5, for the possibility that he studied art closer to home, in Nantes. 16. Audubon, “Myself,” 783. 17. Audubon to Claude Rozier, April 24, 1807, quoted in Rhodes, John James Audubon, 39. 18. Lewis Eldon Atherton, The Frontier Merchant in Mid-America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1971), 82. 19. The Navigator was a seminal text because Cramer was the first to provide maps and a full description of the course of the rivers. The full text (with illustrations) is available online at the Library of Congress website. On Zadok Cramer, see Thomas Ruys Smith, River of Dreams: Imagining the Mississippi before Mark Twain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 57–​60. 20. For river transportation in the early nineteenth century, see Robert L. Reid, ed., Always a River: The Ohio River and the American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); John D. Seelye, Beautiful Machine: Rivers and the Republican Plan, 1755–​ 1825 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Kim M. Gruenwald, River of Enterprise: The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley, 1790–​1850 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Leland D. Baldwin, The Keelboat Age on Western Waters (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1941); George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–​1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). 21. See Rhodes, John James Audubon, 91–​92. 22. The episode is described in painstaking detail in Audubon, “Breaking Up of the Ice,”

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in Ornithological Biography (Philadelphia and Edinburgh, 1835), 3:408–​10. See also Audubon, “Myself,” 787. 23. Audubon, “1826 Journal,” in Writings and Drawings, 160. 24. Rhodes, John James Audubon, 44, 105. 25. Audubon, “Myself,” 790–​91. 26. Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steven Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 40. 27. Michael Lynch, “Discipline and the Material Form of Images: An Analysis of Scientific Visibility,” Social Studies of Science 15, no. 1 (February 1985): 37–​66. 28. Ornithological Biography, vol. 5 (Edinburgh and Philadelphia, 1839), 291. 29. Nobles, “Ornithology and Enterprise,” 275. 30. The drawings (as opposed to the prints) were done on three different sizes of Whatman paper (each sized to fit the bird in question): generally, Audubon would draw large birds on double elephant size, medium birds on elephant size (23 × 28 in.) and small birds on medium size (17½ × 22 in.). Reba Fishman Snyder, “Complexity in Creation: A Detailed Look at the Watercolors for The Birds of America,” in The Watercolors for “The Birds of America,” edited by Annette Blaugrund and Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1993), 56. 31. Rhodes, John James Audubon, 223. 32. Monthly American Journal of Geology and Natural Science 1, no. 10 (April 1832): 463. 33. William Swainson, “Some Account of the Work now publishing by M. Audubon, entitled The Birds of America,” Magazine of Natural History and Journal of Zoology, Botany, Mineralogy, Geology, and Meteorology 1, no. 2 (May 1828): 45. 34. Cuvier, in Audubon, “Extracts from Reviews,” Ornithological Biography, vol. 1, app., 8. 35. Virginia Herald, May 20, 1829, 2. 36. William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States ([1834] New York: Dover, 1969), vol. 2, pt. 2, 402. 37. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:xvi. 38. Audubon to William Rathbone, November 28, 1826, quoted in Christoph Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History: From John Bartram to William James (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 221; and Audubon, journal entry for November 24, 1826, in Audubon and His Journals, ed. Maria Audubon (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1897), 1:163. 39. Although Audubon often traveled with assistants who helped with the baggage, he also traveled alone, on foot, either to draw birds or to seek subscriptions. He had owned nine slaves before beginning work on the project; he sold all of them when his financial troubles began. On Audubon’s slaves, see Rhodes, John James Audubon, 115, 140–​41. 40. Daily National Journal, October 11, 1831, 3. 41. Audubon, “Mississippi River Journal,” entry dated December 31, 1820, in Writings and Drawings, 64. 42. Rhodes, John James Audubon, 178. 43. Edward A. Muschamp, Audacious Audubon: The Story of a Great Pioneer, Artist, Naturalist, and Man (New York: Brentano’s, 1929), 263.

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44. Alexander Wilson to Daniel Miller, October 26, 1808, quoted in Rigal, American Manufactory, 150. 45. For the most extensive discussion of the transit of the images during print production, see Joseph Goddu, John James Audubon and Robert Havell, Jr.: Artist’s Proofs for “The Birds of America” (New York: Hirschl and Adler Galleries, 2002), 26. See also Snyder, “Complexity in Creation,” 64–​66, on the damages to the drawings incurred during transportation. 46. Robert Morris, “Size Matters,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 474–​87. 47. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:xii. 48. Lawrence Hott, director, John James Audubon: Drawn From Nature, an episode in the American Masters series, 2006. 49. Audubon did take standard measurements of the birds he shot; he listed them along with his narrative descriptions in the Ornithological Biography. But these measurements were totally disconnected from the process and practice of visual representation. They were not published with the images in the Birds of America volumes. Moreover, they were all standardized dimensions, taken by stretching the bird into extensions that bore no resemblance to the poses in the drawings. For Audubon’s description of the process of measuring the birds, see Ornithological Biography, 5:xxiii. His resistance to measurement and scaling as representational processes is most evident in his use of transfer grids. He used a traditional academic technique, squaring for transfer, to produce his drawings: he gridded both the board to which he pinned the birds and the drawing surface, to map out the precise details and contours for transfer from the bird to the page. But whereas the virtue of this technique (or machine, in French parlance) was to allow for shifts in scale between the gridded surfaces (one surface having a smaller or larger grid unit than the other), Audubon always worked with the grids in a 1:1 relationship. 50. David Summers, Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise of Western Modernism (London: Phaidon, 2003), 35. 51. Ibid., 317. 52. Ibid. 53. In fact it is difficult to find reproductions of Audubon’s pages that respect Audubon’s concerns about actual size. Nearly all reproductions in the scholarly and popular literature crop away the white margins surrounding the smaller birds that revealed the size variations in the project. 54. Waldemar Fries, in Double Elephant Folio, 257–​59, claims that the ottoman belonged to Euphemia Gifford. The Field Museum, however, later determined that the actual owner had been Dr. Benjamin Phillips of London. See Benjamin W. Williams, “Audubon’s The Birds of America and the Remarkable History of Field Museum’s Copy,” Field Museum of Natural History Bulletin 57 (1986): 7–​21. 55. On this desk, see Catherine L. Whalen, “From the Collection: The Pickman Family Vues d’Optique,” Winterthur Portfolio 33, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 75–​88. I thank Wendy Bellion for bringing this particular piece to my attention. 56. On these perspective devices as used in America, see Wendy Bellion, “Pleasing Deceptions,” Common-Place 3, no. 1 (October 2002); Barbara Stafford and Frances Terpak,

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57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66. 67.

68.

69. 70.

Devices of Wonder: The World in a Box to Images on a Screen (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001); and Dennis Carr, “Optical Machines, Prints, and Gentility in Early America” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1999). S. T. Prideaux, Aquatint Engraving: A Chapter in the History of Engraving (London, 1909), 296–​97. Audubon’s careful attention to the relationship between page size and bird size is also conspicuous in his sequencing strategies for The Birds of America. The order of plates was determined by size, not Linnaean classification or geographical distribution. Generally, two medium and two small birds follow every big bird. Hooping Crane in the caption for figure 39 reflects the spelling on Havell’s print before it was corrected to Whooping Crane. Audubon, “Account of the Method,” in Writings and Drawings, 754. Cuvier, in “Extracts from Reviews,” Ornithological Biography, vol. 1, app., 8. My translation. Ornithological Biography, 3:ix. On the inconsistent use of size and scale in early nineteenth-century ornithological illustration, see Christine Jackson, Bird Etchings: The Illustrators and Their Books, 1655–​ 1855 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 25, 234, 238. For Audubon’s access to European and American ornithological traditions see Partridge, “By the Book.” Coenraad Jacob Temminck, Nouveau Recueil de Planches Coloriées d’Oiseaux, pour Servir de Suite et de Complément aux Planches Enluminées de Buffon (Paris, 1838). Alexander Wilson, American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 9 vols. (Philadelphia, 1808–​14). The exception mentioned is the ivorybilled woodpecker illustration in vol. 4, plate 29, discussed below. Wilson, American Ornithology, vol. 6. The most notable exceptions to this rule are the foldout pages sometimes inserted into French volumes. (The Description de l’Égypte, most famously, had several foldout double-folio pages.) Foldouts occasionally occurred in the Temminck volumes so that certain newly discovered (for the French) pheasant species could be represented at actual size. These expansions in page size, however, were not undertaken out of concern for the haptic immediacy or evidential authenticity of the images. The foldouts were generally reserved for birds with extremely long tails. I believe the reason was that these birds, unlike big birds with shorter tails, would have had bodies so small, if reduced to the point that their tails would fit within the page area, that distinguishing details and significant information would have been difficult to see. In such illustrations the proportion of the bird, rather than its raw actuality, was preserved by representing it in natural size. On the disunified field of presentation of diagrammatic space, see Michael Marrinan and John Bender, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 19–​52. Audubon, “Account of the Method,” in Writings and Drawings, 754. See Carol Armstrong, “Cameraless,” in Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature, ed. Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher (New York: Drawing Center; Princeton, NJ:

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Princeton University Press, 2004), 108–​11. “Alaria esculenta  . . . is folded over on itself in a backwards S-form that simultaneously belongs to a tradition of drawn botanical illustration and demonstrates the fitting of the life-size specimen to the uniformly sized sheet of cyanotype paper—​hence its particular, photographic requisite of having been there” (108). 71. Robert McCracken Peck has analyzed the afterwork of the Marchioness of Hertford and three other enthusiasts on Audubon’s published volumes: John Gould, Thomas Campbell Eyton, and Lord Edward Smith Stanley. Gould (who traded his own ornithological books for Audubon fascicles) assembled a comprehensive concordance of all known birds by disassembling multiple texts, including Audubon’s (cutting apart the prints into manageable sizes as he did so). Stanley inherited this volume and continued Gould’s work. Eyton produced a similar concordance, which John Ruskin later purchased. See Robert McCracken Peck, “Cutting Up Audubon for Science and Art,” Antiques, October 2003, 104–​13. 72. Theodore Stebbins has speculated that Audubon’s work may have had some direct connection to Japanese printmaking of the nineteenth century, although, as he acknowledges, a great deal of research would be required to substantiate it. See Stebbins, “Audubon’s Drawings of American Birds,” 15–​16. A copy of the double elephant folio and the full set of volumes of the Ornithological Biography were given to Japan by Commodore Perry’s expedition in 1854, but the current location of those volumes is unknown. (Fries, Double Elephant Folio, 189). Whether or not any direct connection exists between Audubon’s birds and those of, say, Hiroshige, later American artists perceived and processed the connections between Audubon’s work and Japanese prints. Winslow Homer’s Right and Left of 1909 was closely based on Audubon’s Common Goldeneye; see Nicolai Cikovsky Jr. and Franklin Kelly, Winslow Homer (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 388. In the painting Homer associates the surface decorativeness of the Japanese art he had studied with the violent immediacy produced by the gun and distills the violence of that immediate representation into the terror and reality of the decorative. 73. Assistants did most of the landscapes, especially the teenager Joseph Mason, who did backgrounds for about fifty of Audubon’s watercolors between 1820 and 1822. George Lehman (after 1829) and Maria Martin added botanical backgrounds to about thirtyfive of the drawings. Havell (the printer) added many landscapes during the printing process as well. See Stebbins, “Audubon’s Drawings of American Birds,” 14–​15, 19–​21. This is not to say that Audubon was ignorant of landscape conventions. Just the opposite: in the introduction to volume 5 of the Ornithological Biography, for example, he included a long description of a picturesque tour of the Scottish Highlands, evincing a thorough familiarity with landscape convention—​and with landscape convention as convention. In a brilliant comic send-up of the picturesque craze, he filled the passage with incidents like the following: “Emerging from the wood, we were surprised to see some hundreds of cows, all belonging to the village below, grazing on what might well be called the finest of fore-grounds” (Ornithological Biography, 5:xv–xvi). Note that this passage plunks the literal down in the realm of the ideal in the same way that Audu-

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74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79.

80.

81.

82. 83.

bon’s images (less comically) interrupt the pictorial purity of landscape with actual-size specimens in the foreground. See Stebbins, “Audubon’s Drawings of American Birds,” 9, for more on the original drawing. Meyers, “Observations of an American Woodsman.” See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1970): 130–​32. Michael Gaudio has brilliantly examined the surfacedepth tension in earlier American natural history illustration as part of the struggles for republican self-evidence. See Gaudio, “Surface and Depth: The Art of Early American Natural History,” in Stuffing Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730–​1860, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003), 55–​73. The exception is the late nineteenth century’s detour into trompe-l’oeil. Mel Bochner, quoted in Scott Rothkopf, Mel Bochner Photographs, 1966–​1969 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Art Museums, 2002), 37–​38. See also Yve-Alain Bois, “The Measurement Pieces: From Index to Implex,” in Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible, 1966–​1973, ed. Richard Field (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 167–​88. Jeffrey Weiss, in his otherwise excellent discussion of the issue, claims that Johns’s exploration of actual size “previously had no place in painting and drawing” (26) and played “virtually no role in art-making after the late medieval period.” See Jeffrey Weiss, Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 26, 30. Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages are also relevant here. For this work, Duchamp dropped three meter-long threads from a height of one meter, then produced new “standard” units of measure out of the curves they made by chance as they landed. In its own way, this work also defines measurement as something local, contingent, and particular rather than abstract. See Rosalind Krauss, “Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image,” Artforum 13, no. 4 (December 1974): 36–​43; and Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with ­Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 86–​93. Jonathan Crary, “Memo from Turner,” Artforum 46, no. 10 (Summer 2008): 200. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” in Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 325. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: Norton, 1970), 158, explains his actual-language society as follows: Many of the most Learned and Wise adhere to the new Scheme of expressing themselves by Things; which hath only this Inconvenience attending it; that if a Man’s Business be very great, and of various Kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater Bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among us, who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.

84. T. J. Demos, The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 17.

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85. Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, “Of Animals Common to Both Continents,” in Natural History, General and Particular, 9 vols., 3rd ed., trans. William Smellie (London, 1791), 5:129. Audubon knew Buffon’s volumes well. See Partridge, “By the Book,” 98–​ 100. Buffon’s degeneracy theory, however preposterous in itself, was based on innovative models of species mutability and environmental determinism that provided an important counterpoint to the fixed, arbitrary, and absolute Linnaean system and helped spur the development of evolutionary biology and biogeography. 86. Ibid. 87. Wilson, American Ornithology, 1:153. 88. Ibid., 1:22. 89. For the complex relationship between Wilson and Audubon, see especially Partridge, “By the Book,” 101–​4; and Rigal, American Manufactory, 167–​68. 90. Wilson, American Ornithology, 1:51. 91. The Anarchiad, from the Early Americas Digital Archive: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/ eada/html/display.php?docs = barlow_anarchiad.xml&action = show. Accessed July 15, 2008. For an exhaustive review of the degeneracy debates, see Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750–​1900, rev. and enl. ed., trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). 92. Martin Brückner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 79. Such amplification backfired—​it was perceived as shrill in London. 93. Alexander Nemerov, Mammoth Scale: The Anatomical Sculptures of William Rush (Philadelphia: Wistar Institute, 2002): 6–​31. 94. Rigal, American Manufactory, 89. 95. See Michael Allen, Western Rivermen, 1763–​1861: Ohio and Mississippi Boatmen and the Myth of the Alligator Horse (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994); and Smith, River of Dreams, 45–​78. 96. Audubon, “1826 Journal,” in Writings and Drawings, 171. 97. All American expedition reports and natural history illustrations of the period should be considered in this context of inflationary rhetoric. 98. Victor Philarète-Chasles, a French critic commenting on Audubon’s exhibition in Edinburgh, 1826. Quoted as translated in Rhodes, John James Audubon, 279. 99. Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1827, 105 and 112. 100. Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:viii. Audubon had also practiced postmortem portraiture, having survived difficult financial periods in his career by painting portraits and miniatures, many of them postmortem and produced in appalling circumstances: “A clergyman residing at Louisville  . . . had his dead child disinterred, to procure a fac-simile of his face, which, by the way, I gave to the parents as if still alive, to their intense satisfaction” (Audubon, “Myself,” 792). 101. Audubon, Ornithological Biography 1:vii. 102. Jackson, Bird Etchings, 28. 103. On the complications of color in natural history representation, see David Freedberg, “The Failure of Color,” in Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E. H. Gombrich at 85, ed. John Onians (London: Phaidon, 1994).

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104. As Reba Fishman Snyder explains in her essay on Audubon’s drawing techniques, “Audubon’s most characteristic use of graphite was the drawing of hundreds of short, repetitive lines over the dried watercolor form of each bird. These lines were used to define the shape and direction of the feathers and were most often drawn on a diagonal, so that each set of lines would catch the light from a different angle. The metallic sheen of graphite was used to great effect in these instances” (Snyder, “Complexity in Creation,” 58). 105. Audubon, “Mississippi River Journal,” entries dated December 21, 1820, and December 2, 1821, in Writings and Drawings, 55, 142. 106. The performance of life and death in Audubon’s drawing takes place even without reference to the suggestive links between his pinning technique and the complex of themes surrounding the Crucifixion and Resurrection. 107. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Oval Portrait,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), 292. 108. Audubon himself contributed to this impression of cause-and-effect relationship, though it may well have been part of his own later mythologizing. See “Myself,” 784–​ 86. Later scholars have taken Audubon at his word: Christine Jackson, one of the foremost experts on bird illustration, for example, states that Audubon “failed as a businessman because his interests and inclinations lay in the field of natural history” (Bird Etchings, 230). 109. David Anthony, “ ‘Gone Distracted’: ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ Gothic Masculinity, and the Panic of 1819,” Early American Literature 40, no. 1 (2005): 112. 110. Edmund L. Sterling, History of Henderson County, Kentucky (Henderson, KY, 1887), 150, 148. 111. Audubon, Mississippi River Journal, entry dated November 28, 1820, in Writings and Drawings, 31. 112. The man had purchased a steamboat from Audubon and his business partner, but the note he had used to pay for it was worthless. Audubon had chased the man up and down the Mississippi for several months, attempting to force him to surrender the value of the note, before meeting him back in Kentucky, whereupon the violence described ensued. 113. Audubon, “Myself,” 791. See also Rhodes, John James Audubon, 142. 114. Irmscher, Poetics of Natural History, 198. 115. Atherton, Frontier Merchant in Mid-America, 13–​26. 116. My understanding of the “paper economy” and “paper geography” of late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century America derives primarily from the following: Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Jennifer Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (New York: Viking, 2008);

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117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122.

123.

124. 125. 126.

127.

128. 129. 130.

and Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). My sources on the economy in Kentucky include Stephen Aran, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Allan Kulikoff, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” William and Mary Quarterly 46, no. 1 (January 1989): 120–​44; Elizabeth A. Perkins, “The Consumer Frontier: Household Consumption in Early Kentucky,” Journal of American History 78, no. 2 (September 1991): 486–​510; and Craig T. Friend, “Merchants and Markethouses: Reflections on Moral Economy in Early Kentucky,” Journal of the Early Republic 17, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 553–​74. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy, 90. Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 6. I am treating paper and credit as synonymous—​a move that seems strange only because the equation of paper money with material value has become naturalized in our own economy. (We now associate plastic with credit.) Paper money in early America was always a form of credit, because it entailed a promise to redeem the bill for specie at a later time or in a different place. William H. Gouge, A Short History of Paper Money (Philadelphia, 1833), 62. David Hume, “Of Money,” in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, new ed. (London: 1758), 166. See Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters; and William H. Dillistin, Bank Note Reporters and Counterfeit Detectors, 1826–​1866, with a Discourse on Wildcat Banks and Wildcat Bank Notes (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1949). Given that it needed to be transported to be redeemed, and that it lost value as it traveled, paper money had not yet escaped the weight-to-value ratios that governed the transmission of objects and commodities more generally. Kamensky, Exchange Artist, 60; for the analysis of distance, see 52–​61. Ibid., 72. Michael O’Malley, “Specie and Species: Race and the Money Question in NineteenthCentury America,” American Historical Review 99, no. 2 (April 1994): 375; Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters, 8; and Kamensky, Exchange Artist, 72. I borrow the term “financescape” from Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 27–​47. Thomas Paine, Dissertations on Government, the Affairs of the Bank, and Paper-money (Philadelphia, 1786), 44. Adam Smith, quoted in Kamensky, Exchange Artist, 8, 54. Fredric Jameson, “Culture and Finance Capital,” in The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 260. This vocabulary of unregulated flight has also long been associated with images, at least since Aristotle described “visible species” as transmitted images that fly off their originals and into the mind, propagating freely, abstracted from size (quoted in Summers, Real Spaces, 318). Given this parallel, we might say that Audubon’s project attempts to equate bird species with specie in the numismatic rather than the Aristotelian sense. Audubon hoped that his

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bird pictures might function like gold coins rather than paper tokens—​so that, as they were transmitted through space, their essence might hold steady as embodied and intrinsic, knitted into the substance of their support. His pictures refuse to be classified as the “specie” associated with Aristotle’s breezy realm of visual (and the panic era’s financial) representation. See Shell, Money, Language, and Thought, 12–​15; and W. J. T. Mitchell, “What Is an Image?,” in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 13–​14. 131. Bill Brown, “Materialities, Matter, and the New Materialism,” lecture, Modern/Age Symposium, Harvard University Art Museums, April 5, 2008. 132. In the Ornithological Biography, Audubon frequently describes bird behavior in ways that eerily recall contemporary commentary on economic matters. He stresses, for example, the fickle and irrational relationship between the bird world and the world of human production. Sounding a lot like the moralists who derided the hysterical qualities of the credit economy, Audubon often dwells on the inscrutable behavior of bird flocks, which are capable of showering down miraculous excessive abundance upon mankind one day and of visiting total ruin upon its material livelihood the next. I’m thinking here of his unforgettable description of the flocks of billions of passenger pigeons that fed starving farmers in Kentucky after a summer of widespread crop failures, and his description of birds like purple grackles that would strip an entire cornfield in a matter of hours. Birds in Audubon’s writings, like credit, coming from nowhere, have the power to confer or remove material wealth without apparent logic. See Audubon, Ornithological Biography, 1:35–​40, 319–​23.

3. Gathering Moss 1. Asher B. Durand to Thomas Cole, New York, December 25, 1837, Asher B. Durand Papers, Archives of American Art, reel N19, frames 1141–​42. 2. Note especially that Durand imagines this folding-screen landscape as preventing him from seeing the Cole landscapes he had come to examine. 3. See Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825–​1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 93–​95, 154–​65. 4. Review of the 1853 National Academy Exhibition, in Sarah Burns and John Davis, American Art to 1900: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 220–​21. 5. Asher B. Durand, “Autobiographical Fragment,” in John Durand, The Life and Times of Asher B. Durand, ([1894] Hensonville, NY: Black Dome Press, 2007), 21. 6. Ibid. 7. On Durand’s engraving background see Barbara Dayer Gallati, “Asher B. Durand’s Early Career: Portrait of the Artist as an Ambitious Man,” in Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, ed. Linda S. Ferber (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007), 45–​81; Wayne Craven, “Asher B. Durand’s Career as an Engraver,” American Art Journal 3, no. 1 (Spring 1971): 39–​57; Alice Newlin, “Asher B. Durand, American Engraver,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, n.s. 1, no. 5 (January 1943):

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

165–​70; and Catalogue of the Engraved Work of Asher B. Durand, Exhibited at the Grolier Club, April 1895 (New York: Grolier Club, 1895). This firm, A. B. & C. Durand, Wright & Co., operated from 1824 to 1827. Following its dissolution, Asher Durand was affiliated with Durand, Perkins & Co. from 1828 to 1831. Barbara Dayer Gallati, Asher B. Durand, An Engraver’s and a Farmer’s Art (Yonkers, NY: Hudson River Museum, 1983), 16, 50. Newlin, “Asher B. Durand, American Engraver,” 168; Craven, “Asher B. Durand’s Career,” 45. The American Academy of the Fine Arts was founded in 1802 as the New York Academy of the Fine Arts with an imported group of plaster casts and copies of old-master paintings. In 1816 it moved to new quarters, where its collections, “drawn from their obscure receptacles,” gained wider audience and use. It is here that Durand most likely studied the casts. (De Witt Clinton, “A Discourse Delivered before the American Academy of the Arts,” New York, 1816, in Burns and Davis, American Art to 1900, 164). In 1825, Morse, Durand, and several other artists splintered off from the American Academy to found the National Academy of Design. “Cyrus Durand, the Machinist and Bank-Note Engraver,” Illustrated Magazine of Art 3 (1854): 270. On Cyrus Durand, see Alan A. Siegel, Out of Our Past: A History of Irvington, New Jersey (Irvington, N.J.: Irvington Centennial Committee, 1974); “Bank-Note Engraving in America” and “Cyrus Durand, the Machinist and Bank-Note Engraver,” both in Illustrated Magazine of Art 3 (1854), 308–​12, and 267–​70; and “History and Progress of Bank Note Engraving,” Crayon 1, no. 8 (1855): 116–​17. For general discussions of anticounterfeiting patterns in banknote engraving, see Frances Robertson, “The Aesthetics of Authenticity: Printed Banknotes as Industrial Currency,” Technology and Culture 46 (January 2005): 31–​50; Stephan Wilkinson, “Designed for Security,” Connoisseur 210 (April 1982): 24–​26; Basil Hunnisett, “The Quest for the Unforgeable Document,” Engraved on Steel: The History of Picture Production Using Steel Plates (London: Ashgate, 1998), 30–​62; and Granville Sharp, The Gilbart Prize Essay on the Adaptation of Recent Discoveries and Inventions in Science and Art to the Purposes of Practical Banking, 3rd English ed. (London, 1854). Although Cyrus’s machines were clearly mechanical contrivances, he was credited as their artistic author and even granted a sort of genius: “Before dismissing the geometrical lathe, we may remark that there is only one man living who can work that machine, and that man is Cyrus Durand.” His machines, which were also seen as direct manifestations of his higher conceptual activities, elicited a comparison of his creative work to that of the poet. “No poet has ever been able to create so sensibly the plan of the poem as Cyrus Durand calls up before the eye of his mind the principles of his machines. They appear in embodied machinery” (“Cyrus Durand, the Machinist and Bank-Note Engraver,” 270). For more specifics, including details on the operation of the transfer press, see “Bank-Note Engraving in America,” 310, and Siegel, Out of Our Past, 88–​90. Period sources noted the engraver’s impotence in the face of the superhuman perfection of the geometrical lathe: “The engraver cannot imitate the labour of the geometrical lathe” (“Bank-Note Engraving in America,” 310). The only way to counterfeit these

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notes was to get hold of the original plates—​or the lathe itself and its encoding combinations. This did happen occasionally; an early biographer of Cyrus Durand notes that when one of Durand’s firms went out of business in 1844, the plates and dies were sold at auction (Siegel, Out of Our Past, 91). See also Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 270–​74. As Frances Robertson points out, in the long run this “doctrine of inimitability” was flawed—​the image was eventually shown to be forgeable (“Aesthetics of Authenticity,” 47). The most reliable guarantor of banknote security turned out to derive from the industrial standardization of the paper. 14. Robertson, “Aesthetics of Authenticity,” 47. 15. Siegel, Out of Our Past, 87. 16. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael William Jennings et. al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 19–​56; Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Stephen Bann, Parallel Lines: Printmakers, Painters and Photographers in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001). 17. William Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1953), 3. 18. Banknote engraving, which stood at the center of developments in reproduction generally in the nineteenth century, complicates Benjamin’s dictum that reproduction evacuates the singular aura of the work of art. The guarantee of authenticity, singularity, and originality in any individual banknote is secured not despite but precisely by virtue of its mechanical standardization. See Robertson, “Aesthetics of Authenticity, 48–​49. 19. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 85. 20. Ibid., 82. 21. “The introduction of the cycloidal motion, a motion like that of a nail in the hub of a carriage in motion, and the improvements on it, have added much beauty to the lathe-work. We regard this work as supplying the only happy and just illustration of what constitutes the beauty of lines and forms, the flexible play of life” (“Bank-Note Engraving in America,” 312). 22. See Mark Tomasko, The Feel of Steel: The Art and History of Banknote Engraving in the United States (Newtown, PA: Bird and Bull Press, 2009), 83–​86. 23. By the twentieth century, the anticounterfeiting powers of traditional line-and-dot flesh tone engraving had been formalized and even legislated by bodies such as the New York Stock Exchange. As Stephan Wilkinson explains, “The NYSE  . . . demands that each piece of stock include one human face in at least a three-quarter front view—​ no profiles—​since the delicate depths and shadings of flesh tones and lifelike features disappear when they are copied photographically. The illusion of life is the product of varying pressure from the engraver’s hand creating lines of subtly different width and depth, plus ‘interdotting’ between the lines. No method of photographic reproduction

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has grain fine enough to keep the lines from breaking up and to prevent the disappearance of the minute interdots” (Wilkinson, “Designed for Security,” 26). 24. For the quotation describing the mechanical stylus of Cyrus’s lathe, see “Bank-Note Engraving in America,” 310. 25. My interpretation of the engraving process (and indeed much of my inspiration in thinking about engraving) is indebted to Michael Gaudio’s Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 26. See Marc Shell, “The Issue of Representation,” in The New Economic Criticism, ed. Marc Osteen and Martha Woodmansee (London: Routledge, 1999), 53–​55. 27. On Vanderlyn’s painting, see William Townsend Oedel, “John Vanderlyn: French Neoclassicism and the Search for an American Art” (Ph.D. diss., University of Delaware, 1981), 365–​409; and David M. Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 1–​53. 28. Durand purchased the painting along with another unfinished oil study of the same subject by Vanderlyn. The study is now at the New-York Historical Society, and the original painting is at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. On Durand’s difficulties producing the print (problems finding a qualified printer, trashed impressions, etc.), see Newlin, “Asher B. Durand, American Engraver,” 170. 29. John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina: Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving, with Appendix; Given before the University of Oxford in Michelmas Term, 1872 (New York, C. E. Merrill, 1892), 118–​19. 30. Newlin, “Asher B. Durand, American Engraver,” 169. 31. Durand, Life and Times, 75–​76. 32. Ibid., 77. 33. See Barbara Dayer Gallati, “ ‘A Year of Toilsome Exile’: Asher B. Durand’s European Sojourn,” in Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape, ed. Linda S. Ferber (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007), 97–​98. 34. Newlin, “Asher B. Durand, American Engraver,” 170. 35. On the Manners affair, see Gallati, An Engraver’s and a Farmer’s Art, 30; and Durand, Life and Times, 83–​84. 36. Durand, Life and Times, 21, 24. Later Ruskin connected line engraving obliquely to Ariadne’s labyrinth. (The title of his 1872 lectures on engraving was Ariadne Florentina.) 37. J. Hillis Miller, “Ariadne’s Thread: Repetition and the Narrative Line,” Critical Inquiry 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1976): 62, 64–​65. 38. Lubin, Picturing a Nation, 8. 39. Like Durand, Ariadne occupies the “technical” function as Bruno Latour formulates it: “Technical people, objects, or skills are at once indispensable (since the goal is unreachable without them)  . . . and inferior, (since the main task will eventually be resumed).” Bruno Latour, “A Collective of Humans and Nonhumans: Following Daedalus’s Labyrinth,” in Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 191. 40. Giulian C. Verplanck, An Address Delivered at the Opening of the Tenth Exhibition of the American Academy of the Fine Arts (New York, 1824), 30–​31.

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41. Samuel F. B. Morse, Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Fine Arts, ed. and introd. Nikolai Cikovsky Jr. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 59. 42. This overmaterialization partly accounted for the composition’s problematic reception in the United States—​the nudity of the figure was unacceptable because of the incompleteness of its allegorization and the insistence on its bare materiality. 43. Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina, 127. 44. Durand’s letters of the early 1830s frequently allude to his declining relish for engraving. He had already stopped engraving banknotes and was also hesitating to take on new reproductive commissions. By 1835 he seems even to have begun refusing highly prestigious commissions from artists at the pinnacle of fame: Washington Allston wanted him to engrave his Bloody Hand, but as Durand’s pupil and friend John Casilear remarked in a letter of June of that year, Durand was now “successfully [installed in] a branch of art so much more congenial to your tastes to say nothing of your talents.” Casilear to Durand, June 17, 1835, Durand Papers, reel N19, frame 937; see also Durand to Casilear, June 14, 1835, reel N19, frames 926–​28. 45. As an 1895 exhibition catalogue described it, “He fully reached the pinnacle, when the Ariadne came from his hand. It was his valedictory to the burin, which he then forsook for canvas and color, and is as fine an example of line engraving as this century has produced” (Catalogue of the Engraved Work of Asher B. Durand, 6). Art critics were sorely disappointed by this career change as they considered the quality of his first exhibited paintings: as the New-Yorker put it in 1839, “The sooner this gentleman returns to his old profession of engraving the better.” New-Yorker 7, no. 8 (May 1, 1839): 125; quoted in David B. Lawall, Asher B. Durand: His Art and Theory in Relation to His Times (New York: Garland, 1977), 29. 46. For John Durand’s description of these excursions, see Durand, Life and Times, 183–8 ​ 9. 47. Eleanor Jones Harvey, The Painted Sketch: American Impressions from Nature, 1830–​ 1880 (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1998), 18, 64. 48. Durand had gone to England in 1840–​41 and had seen the plein air sketches of Constable, and he had read Gilpin’s Forest Scenery (Lawall, Asher B. Durand, 337, 347). He was also responding to the growing influence in America of Ruskin (particularly his notion of “artistical geology”). For Durand’s “need to draw on the experience of nature, rather than on pictures,” see Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience ([1969] New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241. By this account, the death of Thomas Cole, Durand’s friend and mentor, in 1848, left Durand free to jettison his Claudean shackles and get back to a direct and spontaneous response to nature, to “the weight of objects in reality” (Novak, 239). 49. Indeed, Creek and Rocks revisits not only the Ariadne print but also the lovingly painted copy of Vanderlyn’s work Durand made during the same years he was busy with the engraving. As Catherine Holochwost shows in a groundbreaking analysis of this previously obscure work, Durand’s painted copy diverged from Vanderlyn’s original in significant ways that corroborate my argument about Durand’s interest in suppressing the abstraction and narrativity of Vanderlyn’s original: the paint handling is creamier; the color, richer and warmer; and the figure of Theseus, strongly deemphasized. See

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Catherine Holochwost, “ ‘A Pretty Good Grahamite’? The Paradoxical Pleasures of Asher B. Durand’s Ariadne,” American Art 27, no. 3 (Fall 2013). 50. See Theodore Henry Fielding, The Art of Engraving (London, 1841), 35. 51. Although I pose this question about a single pair of works by a single artist, it opens on to many broader queries about the relationship between media and landscape in the nineteenth century. It provides a starting point, for example, for reconsidering the relationship between line engraving and landscape painting—​particularly banknote engraving (as the ultimate origin of Ariadne‘s rhetoric) and landscape painting. Several important landscape painters of the mid-nineteenth century in addition to Durand began as banknote engravers, among them John Frederick Kensett and John Casilear. Although some scholars have noted the iconographical continuities between the landscape backgrounds on banknotes and later painted versions, Durand’s work opens up an analysis of these links at a structural level, where deeper connections between banknotes and landscapes underlie their iconographical similarities. One essential deep connection was the engagement of each medium in the representation or activation of distance. 52. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance ([1852] New York: Penguin, 1983), 195. Richard John points out that the metaphor of annihilating distance had already been used to describe the national mail and the optical telegraph, but the metaphor gained currency after the advent of telegraphy. See John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 12–​13. 53. New York Herald, May 30, 1844. The article went on to say: “Never before was any one conscious that he knew with certainty what events were at that moment passing in a distant city.” 54. “An Evening with the Telegraph-Wires,” Atlantic Monthly 2, no. 11 (September 1858). 55. For a discussion of this etymological shift, see John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 5; and Richard Menke, Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 72. 56. James W. Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph,” in Communication as Culture (Winchester, MA, and London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 201. 57. See Menke, Telegraphic Realism; Paul Gilmore, Aesthetic Materialism: Electricity and American Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Laura Otis, Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); and Matthew Tiews, “Arcana of Modern Communication: Telegraphy, Cryptography, and Artificial Languages” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 2004). 58. Bann, Parallel Lines, 11. 59. See Jean Lipman, Rufus Porter Rediscovered: Artist, Inventor, Journalist, 1792–​1884, rev. ed. (New York: C. N. Potter, 1980). 60. Morse, Lectures, 48.

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61. Ibid., 47. 62. Ibid., 59. 63. Because Morse made this fairly blunt transition in his own career, scholarly approaches to his work have tended to divide between those based in the history of art and those based in the history of technology. Although important studies exist of Morse as an artist, and many more, of Morse as a telegraphist, there are no sustained studies of how these two roles intersected. For art-historical treatments that begin to address this gap, see Jean-Philippe Antoine, “Twisted Sisters: Imitation and Reproduction in the work of Samuel F. B. Morse,” manuscript-in-progress; and Sarah Catherine Gillespie, “Samuel F. B. Morse and the Daguerreotype: Art and Science in American Culture, 1835–​55” (Ph.D. diss., CUNY, 2006). 64. “By its iron nerves the mind, in one second, can impress its dictates on a strip of paper a thousand miles distant” (Scientific American, September 30, 1854, 18). 65. “At every passage of the fluid, the pen, by the attraction of the iron bar to the ends of the magnet, is brought up against the paper with such force as to indent it, and instantly recedes” (Friend, June 29, 1844, 318). See also American Journal of Science and Arts, January 1848, 57. Messages were frequently copied, in duplicate or triplicate, upon reception, by a pronged stylus (similar to a pantograph). “In the American telegraph the intelligence is written down, and any thing expressed by ordinary written language, letters, figures or ciphers, may be instantaneously transmitted and recorded even in duplicate, triplicate or quadruplicate, if desirable. The absence of an attendant, therefore, makes no difference in the reception of intelligence.” Niles’ National Register, October 28, 1843, 139. 66. For discussions of patenting, see, for example, Scientific American, January 6, 1849, 123; June 30, 1849, 325; February 12, 1853, 170; March 19, 1853, 214; New York Daily Times, January 7, 1853, 2; and January 31, 1854, 5. 67. “At first view we wonder what connection a mere machine has with literature. At the second thought we recall the astonishing intellectual revolution which followed the invention of the printing press, and we blush at our forgetfulness” (“Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature,” United States Democratic Review, May 1848, 411). 68. Line engraving, as noted in the text of this chapter, is actually dot-and-line engraving, because engravers insert small “interdots” between lines. Durand himself used the term “lines and dots” when discussing the marks made in printmaking: “I discovered, in the course of examining prints, that there were lines and dots produced by some other means” (Durand, Life and Times, 21). 69. Anglo American, May 31, 1845. See also Niles’ National Register, June 1, 1844, 211 (“Travelling, no matter how expeditious, is outwinged so far, that a writ may be ready to secure the fugitive, fly as swift as he will.”); “In fact, by means of this and railway and steamboat communication, the escape of culprits, which is every day becoming less practicable, will soon be rendered next to impossible—​a fact that will tend powerfully to lessen the amount of crime; the certainty of detection being one of the most potent means of prevention” (Spirit of the Times, October 3, 1846, 382). But the telegraph allowed crime as well as preventing it. It could give those with access to it an unfair market advantage because it provided distant pricing information more quickly

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than the regular mails—​it was, in other words, a vehicle of insider information. This problem haunted all discussions of communication technology at the time and helps account for Morse’s insistence that the telegraph be federalized and democratized (John, Network Nation, 21). 70. “Influence of the Telegraph upon Literature,” 410–​11:”Now the desideratum of the Telegraph—​the great question most important to all who have any connection with it, is this—​How can the greatest amount of intelligence be communicated in the fewest words?” 71. Of Ariadne, it might be said that the disembodiment of telegraphic transmission would dissolve the erotic subtext of copulation and departure, impress and release, that links the story to reproductive engraving and printing. 72. “This Telegraph has not yet been put in practice, from the circumstance of its requiring greater accuracy in the machinery, and more perfect insulation of the wire, than has yet been attainable for great distances; but these [difficulties] are not insurmountable, and daily progress is making towards the necessary perfection in this department of the yet infant science of Electric Communication” (Alexander Bain, letter to the editors, Scientific American, July 29, 1848, 357). The fascinating history of nineteenthcentury attempts to transmit facsimile images electronically, though outside the scope of this chapter, is in dire need of scholarly attention—​especially that of art historians. Some basic historical reference points: Bain never performed a fax transmission. Frederick Bakewell demonstrated a related machine at the 1851 World Exhibition in London. Giovanni Caselli followed up on the idea and developed an eight-foot-high “pantelegraph” that was used by the French Post and by Napoleon III in 1856–​70, but the technology was used only sporadically, primarily to transmit signatures rather than images per se. Each of these technologies used pendulum devices, one on the sender’s end and another on the receiver’s, that scanned metallic text (or non-conducting text on metallic plates). Most of the technical problems arose from the effort to synchronize the two distant pendulums. 73. Crayon 1, no. 1 (1855): 1. 74. Miller, Empire of the Eye, 79, 83. 75. Durand’s painting, like those of many other painters at the time—​for example, George Inness and Thomas Cole—​harbors, in such interpretations, an essential ambivalence toward its subject matter, compelling the pastoral and technological to compromise, forcing them to coexist unnaturally in the middle landscape. See especially Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830–​1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Kenneth W. Maddox, “Thomas Cole and the Railroad: Gentle Maledictions,” Archives of American Art Journal 26, no. 1 (1986): 2–​10. For the most trenchant, rigorous, and refreshingly critical discussion of these interpretations, as well as the historiography of American railroad landscapes generally, see Allan Wallach, “Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills as Antipastoral,” Art Bulletin 84, no. 2 (June 2002): 334–​50. 76. Archibald Alison, quoted in Lawall, Asher B. Durand, 242. 77. Trumpet and Universalist, October 19, 1844.

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78. Niles’ National Register, October 28, 1843, 139. 79. David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 32. 80. Thanks to Wendy Ikemoto for drawing this passage to my attention. Quoted from the speech of Israel Washburn on the Sandwich Islands, January 4, 1854, Congressional Globe, House of Representatives, 33rd Congress, 1st session (Washington, DC: Blair and Rives, 1854), 58–​59. 81. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Sphinx,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Vintage, 1975), 471. 82. Ibid., 472. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 473. 85. Durand’s nine “Letters on Landscape Painting” were published in separate issues of the Crayon between January and July 1855. They have been reprinted as an appendix in Ferber, Kindred Spirits, 233–​51. The conceit of the letters is that Durand is offering instructions and principles to young artists who want to paint landscapes. But inasmuch as the letters emerge from the development of his own plein air techniques and thus describe his own redoubled efforts to produce finished studies from nature, the letters speak most clearly to his own apprenticeship in the landscape. They describe his own remediation. 86. Durand, Letter III, Crayon 1, no. 5 (1855); 66. 87. For more on the role of geologic science in Durand’s work, see Rebecca Bedell, The Anatomy of Nature: Geology and American Landscape Painting, 1825–​1875 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 46–​65. 88. Robert Morris, “Cézanne’s Mountains,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (Spring 1998): 816. 89. Durand, Letter VIII, Crayon 1, no. 23 (1855): 354. 90. “Morse is gone to Washington with his thunder + lightning jimcrack” (Durand to Cole, February 7, 1838. Durand Papers, reel N19, frame 1158). 91. Durand, Letter III, 66. 92. Ibid. 93. Morse’s alphabet was not the first mechanization of language that Asher Durand would have known. His brother Cyrus had invented and built a grammar machine. But “Durand’s Improved Grammatical Mirror” (patented in 1818) was in fact a machine for learning grammar by manipulating physical objects: mirrors, wheels, levers, and so on. By demonstrating grammar in object relations it naturalized grammar in a way that Morse code refuted and that the “Letters on Landscape Painting” seems to recall. On this machine, see Durand, Life and Times, 20; and Siegel, Out of Our Past, 85. 94. Jerusha Hill McCormack, “Domesticating Delphi: Emily Dickinson and the ElectroMagnetic Telegraph,” American Quarterly 55, no. 4 (December 2003): 576. 95. Adam Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy,” ELH 72, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 636. 96. Karen Georgi, “Defining Landscape Painting in Nineteenth-Century American Critical Discourse; or, Should Art ‘Deal in Wares the Age Has Need Of’?” Oxford Art Journal 29 no. 2 (June 2006): 240. 97. Eleanor Jones Harvey, Painted Sketch, 27. For more on Durand’s use of foregrounding as an adhesive strategy, see Daniel H. Peck, “Unlikely Kindred Spirits: A New Vision

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of Landscape in the Work of Henry Thoreau and Asher B. Durand,” American Literary History 17, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 687–​713. 98. Ibid. 99. William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (Spring 1985), 5–​17. 100. Ibid., 15.

Epilogue

1. Christopher S. Wood, “Riegl’s Maché,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (Autumn 2004): 162. 2. Ibid., 168. 3. Ibid., 169. 4. See Bruno Latour, “Drawing Things Together,” in Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 19–​68, on perspectival representation as a packing strategy.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1. John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765 14 2. John Singleton Copley, Nicholas Boylston (1716–​1771), 1767 18 3. John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Theodore Atkinson (Frances Deering Wentworth), 1765 19 4. James Carwitham after William Burgis, A South East View of the Great Town of Boston in New England in America, ca. 1764 21 5. Jean-Siméon Chardin, The House of Cards, 1737 25 6. Nathaniel Hurd, Britons Behold the Best of Kings, 1762 27 7. Joseph Wright, The Corinthian Maid, 1782–​84 28 8. Royal Mint, London, half guinea with laureate bust of George III, 1765 29 9. Sir Godfrey Kneller, Bt, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle-underLyne; Henry Clinton, 7th Earl of Lincoln, ca. 1721 31 10. John Singleton Copley, A Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765, detail 33 11. John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell), 1772 37 12. John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Humphrey Devereux, 1771 38 13. John Singleton Copley, Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwait (Elizabeth Lewis), 1771 42 14. John Singleton Copley, Young Lady with a Bird and Dog, 1767 45

2 15

15. Northern flying squirrel (Glaucomys sabrinus) gliding, controlled conditions, native to North America 47 16. John Singleton Copley, Mrs. John Winthrop, 1773 48 17. The able Doctor, or, America Swallowing the Bitter Draught, illustration from London Magazine, 1774 52 18. John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778 53 19. Americans throwing the Cargoes of the Tea Ships into the River, at Boston, illustration in W. D. Cooper, History of North America, 1789 54 20. Howard G. Laskey, The Boston Tea Party, illustration in The Beginner’s American History, 1902 58 21. John Singleton Copley, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (Jemima Debuke), 1773 60 22. John Singleton Copley, Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (Jemima Debuke), 1773, detail 61 23. John Singleton Copley, Watson and the Shark, 1778, detail 61 24. Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), The Transfiguration, 1520 63 25. Laocoön 64 26. John Singleton Copley, Rescue Group, 1777/78 66 27. Fred Tomaselli, Old World Warblers, 2000 70 28. John James Audubon, Carolina Parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis, ca. 1825 72 29. John Syme, John James Audubon, 1826 74 30. Zadok Cramer, The Navigator, 1814 75 31. Jules-César Savigny, black ibis and white ibis from Description de l’Égypte, 1809–​22 77 32. Illustration of Birds of America in use 79 33. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Louisiana Tanager, Tanagra ludoviciana / Scarlet Tanager, Tanagra rubra, 1837, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 82 34. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Snowy Owl, Strix nyctea, 1837, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 83 35. Custom ottoman made for Dr. Benjamin Phillips 85 36. Tambour desk made by Edmund Johnson, 1793–​1811 86 37. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, American Flamingo, Phoenicopterus ruber, 1838, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 87 38. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Great Blue Heron, Ardea herodias, 1834, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 88 39. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Hooping Crane, Grus americana, 1834, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 89

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40. Alexander Wilson, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker from American Ornithology; or, The Natural History of the Birds of the United States, 1808–​14 92 41. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, Picus principalis, 1829, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 93 42. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Mocking Bird, Turdus polyglottus [sic], 1829, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 94 43. John James Audubon and Lady Hertford, a pair of magpie jays, cut from The Birds of America and pasted onto hand-painted Chinese wallpaper, 1827 96 44. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Roseate Spoonbill, Platalea ajaja, 1836, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 97 45. Robert Havell Jr. after John James Audubon, Goshawk, Falco palumbarius / Stanley Hawk, Falco stanleii, ca. 1832, from The Birds of America, 1824–​38 98 46. John James Audubon, Common Tern (Sterna hirundo), ca. 1834 100 47. Mel Bochner, Actual Size: Hand, 1968 101 48. Jasper Johns, Device, 1962 102 49. Charles Willson Peale, Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806–​8 105 50. Banknote from Henderson, Kentucky, 1818 111 51. Asher Brown Durand, specimen sheet, 1827 120 52. Asher Brown Durand, Banknote Vignette, undated 121 53. Cyrus Durand, geometrical lathe, 1823 122 54. “Compound of Cycloidal and Wave Oval of the Geometrical and Rose Engine Combined,” Illustrated Magazine of Art, 1854 123 55. Cyrus Durand, geometrical lathe work proof, undated 125 56. Attributed to Cyrus Durand, Lathe Design, undated 125 57. John Vanderlyn, Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, 1809–​14 128 58. Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1835 129 59. Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1835, detail 130 60. The Labyrinth from Emblemata Nicolai Reusneri, 1581 131 61. Asher Brown Durand, Joseph Mountjoy Manners 132 62. Hellenistic sculpture, Sleeping Ariadne, ca. 240 bce 136 63. Asher B. Durand, Rocky Cliff, ca. 1860 137 64. Asher B. Durand, Landscape: Creek and Rocks, 1850s 138 65. Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, etching, early state, 1835 139 66. Diagram of Samuel F. B. Morse’s first recording telegraph machine, facsimile of sketch in his notebook 144 67. Asher Brown Durand after John Vanderlyn, Ariadne, 1835, detail 145

I l l u s t r a t i o n s    •   2 1 7

68. Morse alphabet, illustrated in Edward H. Knight’s American Mechanical Dictionary, 1877 145 69. “Professor Morse’s Great Historical Picture,” Yankee Doodle, October 10, 1846 148 70. Boys’ and Girls’ Magazine and Fireside Companion, February 1, 1848 149 71. Asher Brown Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853 150 72. Asher Brown Durand, Progress (The Advance of Civilization), 1853, detail 151 73. Asher Brown Durand, Study of a Wood Interior, ca. 1855 156 74. Asher Brown Durand, Landscape with Birches, ca. 1855 157 75. Gabriel Orozco, Yielding Stone, 1992 162

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. abolitionism, 65 abstraction, pictorial, 77, 81, 84 actor-network theory, 10 Addison, Joseph, 27, 29, 30, 50, 176n54 aerial perspective, in art, 155 aerial system, financial credit as, 114–​15, 191n132 agency, concept of, 10 Algarotti, Francesco, 49, 171n1 Alison, Archibald, 150 Allen, William, 178n91 Allston, Washington, 195n44 Alvarez, David, 27 American Academy of Fine Arts, 119, 134, 192n9 Anthony, David, 110 Appadurai, Arjun, 9–​10 Ariadne, Durand’s engraving and etching of, 129, 130, 139, 145; abandonment thematized in, 130–​31, 133, 134, 136, 147; based on Vanderlyn’s painting, 126–​27, 133, 134, 135, 195n49; coding and decoding thematized in,

131, 133, 136, 139, 154; compared to banknote engraving, 135, 136; compared to Durand’s landscape paintings, 137–​41, 154, 195n49; and differential speed of information, 131, 144; and Durand’s ownership of Vanderlyn’s painting, 127, 128, 129, 194n28; labyrinthine aspect of, 133, 134, 154; landscape etching in, 127; mechanical reproduction thematized in, 131, 133, 134, 136, 139; mythic narrative represented in, 130, 133, 134; as non-conducting image, 135, 136; ornamental aspects of, 135–​36, 139; as reflection on engraving art, 133, 134, 136–​37; salability of, 129; spatial configuration in, 134–​35, 154; techniques used in, 126–​29, 140; and telegraphy, 143, 144, 145, 146–​47, 198n71 Aristotle, 81, 190–​91n130 artificial intelligence, 10, 11 Atlantic Ocean. See transatlantic passage Audubon, John James: art education of, 73, 76, 182n15; backwoodsman image of, 73, 74, 107; childhood of, 73; European travels of, 73, 107;

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Audubon, John James (continued) French Revolution witnessed by, 73, 182n14; and losses in financial panic, 76, 110, 111; memoir written by, 182n14; as merchant, 6, 73–​74, 76, 110–​12, 189n108; as portrait artist, 188n100; portrait of, 74; as slaveowner, 183n39. See also Birds of America (Audubon) aura, Walter Benjamin’s concept of, 121, 160 Bain, Alexander, 146, 198n72 Bakewell, Frederick, 198n72 banking system, 110–​1 4 banknotes, 6, 110–​15, 111, 119–​2 4, 120, 121, 126, 160, 190nn119,123, 192–​93n13, 193n18 Bann, Stephen, 121, 142 Barlow, Joel, 106 Baxandall, Michael, 177n68 Bellamy, Liz, 29 Benjamin, Walter, 121, 160 Berkeley, George, 35, 39–​41, 43 birds: categorized by book sizes, 91; economic relations symbolized by, 69, 71, 115, 190–​ 91n130, 191n132. See also Birds of America (Audubon); ornithological illustration Birds of America (Audubon): actual-size policy of, 5–​6, 78–​79, 80, 84, 86, 90–​92, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 108–​10, 115, 187n73; afterwork on, 95, 96, 186n71; artistic materials and methods used in, 71, 73, 78, 81, 108–​9, 181nn7,9, 183n30, 184n49, 189n104; and Asian art, 95, 186n72; compared to modernist art, 99, 101, 103; compared to Savigny’s work, 77; compared to Temminck’s work, 90, 91; compared to Wilson’s work, 77, 90–​91; containerized representation in, 86, 90; Cuvier’s response to, 71, 78, 90, 181n4; dead birds as models for, 71, 73, 108–​10; economic relations as context for, 110, 115, 190–​91n130, 191n132; and gothic literature, 71, 109; Homer’s work influenced by, 186n72; indexicality of images in, 71, 73, 78, 81; landscapes represented in, 95, 97, 186n73; order of plates in, 185n58; Ornithological Biography as supplement to, 80–​81, 90, 184n49, 186nn72–​73, 191n132; picture plane in, 91, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103; printing of, 71, 78, 180nn2–​3; reception of, 71, 78–​79, 85; scale of images in, 81, 90, 184n49; shipping and distribution of, 5–​6,

2 2 0    •   I n d e x

71, 79–​80, 103, 115, 163; size of volumes of, 78, 79; spatial structure of images in, 91–​92, 95, 97, 99, 164–​65; storage and display of volumes of, 84, 85, 85, 95, 96; subscribers of, 71, 80, 180n3; translational quality of images in, 81; visual-tactile synthesis in, 84, 97, 165; wallpaper images from, 95, 96; weight of volumes of, 78 Blumenberg, Hans, 66–​67 Bochner, Mel, 99, 101, 101 Boime, Albert, 65, 182n15 Borges, Jorge Luis, 103 Boston: Copley as resident of, 20–​21, 51, 55; Copley’s artistic activity in, 13, 55; Copley’s departure from, 13, 52, 55; Copley’s political activity in, 51–​52, 55; depicted as tropical zone, 54, 57; Tea Party crisis in, 51–​52, 52, 54, 55–​57, 58; as transatlantic port, 20–​21, 21, 49 Bourdieu, Pierre, 7–​8, 10, 15–​16 Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham) (Copley), 14; compared to Chardin’s work, 25, 33; compared to Copley’s Young Lady with a Bird and Dog, 44; as conversation piece, 30–​ 32; and empiricism, 15, 34; European art as influence on, 15, 23, 34; generality as aesthetic criterion in, 24, 29–​30, 32; iconography of, 17, 20, 49; London art world’s response to, 13, 17, 23, 44; portability represented in formal aspects of, 24, 26–​27, 32; and portrait genre, 13, 14, 17, 20, 23–​27; profile format of, 17, 24–​34, 173n15, 175n39; reflection represented in, 17, 20, 41; Reynolds’s response to, 13, 15, 23; as sea piece, 16–​17; sensory experience represented in, 32–​34, 36; size of, 17; space represented in, 17, 20, 30, 32–​34, 36; and status as uncommissioned painting, 171n3; as tabletop picture, 20, 30; title of, 20, 171n1; transatlantic passage of, 13, 15, 16, 22–​23, 31, 49; transit represented in formal aspects of, 26–​27, 29, 30, 31–​32, 49, 164; transit represented in title of, 20 British Empire, 27, 35, 51 Brown, Bill, 9, 11, 115 Buffon, comte de, 104, 188n85 Bunn, James, 26–​27 capitalism, 4, 152, 176n54. See also commodity relations

Carey, James, 141 cargo, 76, 80; transatlantic, 22–​23, 46, 51 Carwitham, James, 21 Caselli, Giovanni, 198n72 Casilear, John, 195n44, 196n51 Cézanne, Paul, 155 Chardin, Jean-Siméon, 25, 25, 33, 174n38, 177n68 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René de, 73 children, portraits of, 24, 188n100 Christian art, 26 Clarke, Jonathan, 179n106 Clarke, Richard, 55, 56 clipeus format, 26–​28 coding and decoding: in Durand’s art, 131, 133, 136, 139, 141, 154; and Morse code, 143–​4 4, 145, 146 Cole, Thomas, 117, 118, 147, 160, 191n2, 195n48, 198n75 commodity relations: Appadurai’s anthropology of, 9–​10; and Audubon’s mercantile activity, 73–​74, 76; birds as symbol of, 69, 71; and empiricist philosophy, 35, 46–​47, 49; fine art defined in opposition to, 175n45; and monetary circulation, 27–​29, 30; and Tea Party crisis, 51; thematized in Durand’s banknote art, 135 communication, telegraphic. See telegraphy Constable, John, 195n48 conversation piece, as portrait convention, 30–​32, 176n54 Cooper, James Fenimore, 73 Copley, John Singleton: artistic education of, 13, 39, 44, 49–​50, 171n1; as Boston-based artist, 13, 55; in Boston shipping milieu, 20–​21, 55; Boston Tea Party’s effect on artwork by, 51–​52, 54–​55, 57–​59, 66; Boston Tea Party’s effect on life of, 51–​52, 55–​57; and correspondence with Henry Pelham, 46, 50, 55, 177n78; and departure from Boston, 13, 52, 55; elected to London Society of Artists, 4; empiricism in artwork of, 5, 15, 34–​36, 39–​41, 43–​4 4, 46, 59, 165, 178n89; European art theory read by, 23, 25, 34, 44, 49–​50, 171n1, 178n89; European art viewed by, 49, 50, 56, 62, 179n106; history painting by, 13, 51–​52; as London-based artist, 13, 15, 51; and marriage to Susannah Clarke, 20–​21; political aspects of artwork by,

51–​52, 55, 56–​59, 65–​66; portrait painting by, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 23–​27, 35–​36, 37, 38, 39–​ 40, 41, 42, 43–​4 4, 45, 46, 48, 49, 174n37; as printmaker, 44; and travels in Italy, 50, 51, 56, 62; works by; John Bee Holmes, 20; Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Winslow (Jemima Debuke), 35, 60, 60, 61; Mr. and Mrs. Ralph Izard, 35; Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (Sarah Morris), 35; Mrs. Dorothy Quincy, 35; Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwait (Elizabeth Lewis), 35, 41, 42; Mrs. Humphrey Devereux (Mary Charnock), 35, 36, 38; Mrs. John Montresor (Frances Tucker), 174n37; Mrs. John Winthrop (Hannah Fayerweather), 35, 48, 49; Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell), 35, 36, 41; Mrs. Theodore Atkinson, 19, 20; Nathaniel Allen, 20; Nicholas Boylston, 17, 18; Paul Revere, 35; Samuel Phillips Savage, 20; William Vassall and His Son Leonard, 174n37; Young Lady with a Bird and Dog, 44, 45. See also Boy with a Flying Squirrel (Henry Pelham) (Copley); tabletop portraits, Copley’s; Watson and the Shark (Copley) Copley, Stephen, 30 counterfeiting, 110, 113, 120–​2 4, 126, 192–​ 93n13, 193n23 Courbet, Gustave, 101 Cramer, Zadok, 74, 75, 182n19 Crary, Jonathan, 103 credit, financial, 110–​15, 190n119 Cuvier, Georges, 71, 78, 90, 181n4 David, Jacques-Louis, 73, 182n15 decoding. See coding and decoding deferral: and financial credit, 112; as productive effect, 7–​8, 15 degeneration debates, 104–​6, 188n85 delay: and Bourdieu’s work, 7–​8, 15; and Durand’s engraving process, 140, 160; and empirical perception, 35; entailed by transport, 1, 2, 7, 15, 21, 22, 112; and myth of Ariadne, 158; and non-conducting image, 118; and ornamental pattern, 122–​23; as productive effect, 3, 4, 5, 7–​8 Deleuze, Gilles, 121 dematerialization, 9, 57, 78, 86, 118, 141, 146, 156, 159 Demos, T. J., 103 Denham, John, 172n9

I n d e x    •   2 2 1

depth, perspectival (depth axis), 32, 124, 126, 135, 139, 154, 159 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 10 distance, spatiotemporal: and discourse of scale, 105–​8; and empiricist discourse, 35; and historical interpretation, 15–​16; and monetary circulation, 27–​29, 113–​14, 190n123; and narrative exaggeration, 107; and rhetorical amplification, 106–​7; and social relations, 32; and telegraphy, 4, 141, 144, 146, 147, 153, 196n52 Duchamp, Marcel, 161, 187n80 Dunlap, William, 79 Durand, Asher B.: artistic education of, 119, 195n48; as banknote engraver, 6, 119–​20, 120, 121, 123–​2 4, 126, 195n44, 196n51; childhood of, 119; dream of, 117–​18, 191n2; “Letters on Landscape Painting” by, 147, 155–​56, 158, 199n85; Manners poster engraved by, 130–​31, 132; Musidora engraving by, 128; as National Academy of Design leader, 119, 134, 137, 143, 192n9; and partnership with brother Cyrus, 119, 120, 121, 123–​2 4; and relations with Thomas Cole, 117, 191n2, 195n48; and relations with Samuel Morse, 119, 143; and relations with sister Elizabeth, 130–​31; Trumbull’s painting engraved by, 134; visit to England by, 195n48. See also Ariadne, Durand’s engraving and etching of Durand, Asher B., landscape painting by, 117–​ 19; adhesive aspect of, 6, 158–​59; alphabetic aspect of, 156, 158; and Claudean principles, 137, 148, 150, 154, 195n48; compared to Cole’s work, 118; compared to Durand’s Ariadne engraving, 138–​41, 154, 195n49; compared to Rauschenberg’s work, 118; and depth axis, 135, 139, 154, 159; and dream narrative, 117–​18; foregrounding in, 155, 156, 165; labyrinthine aspect of, 155, 158; and materiality, 139, 141, 143, 147, 154, 155, 158, 159, 162; and non-conducting image, 118, 155, 158, 159; and plein air paintings, 3, 6, 137, 154, 159, 160; reception of, 118–​19, 195n45; and sequential gradualism, 148, 150–​52, 154; and telegraphy, 6, 118, 147–​48, 150–​52, 154, 155–​56, 158, 159, 160; transmission thematized in, 118, 119; visual-tactile synthesis in, 6, 159–​60, 165; by title: Landscape: Creek and Rocks, 138–​40, 138, 154, 158, 195n49; Landscape with Birches, 155,

2 2 2    •   I n d e x

157; Progress, 148, 150, 150–​52, 151, 198n75; Rocky Cliff, 137, 138; Study of a Wood Interior, 155, 156, 159, 162 Durand, Cyrus, 119–​2 4, 122, 125, 135, 192n12, 193n13, 199n93 Eagleton, Terry, 176n54 East India Company, 20–​21, 55, 172n5 economic relations: and banking system, 110–​1 4; and empiricist philosophy, 35, 46–​47, 49; and financial panics, 76, 110–​13; and monetary circulation, 27–​29, 30, 110–​15. See also capitalism; commodity relations empiricism: and Berkeley’s philosophy, 35, 39–​ 41, 43; and Copley’s art, 5, 15, 34–​36, 39–​41, 43–​4 4, 46, 59, 165, 178n89; and Hume’s philosophy, 35, 43, 44; and Locke’s philosophy, 35, 41, 43; transatlantic relations as context for, 35, 46–​47, 49 engraving: aesthetic status of, 133–​34; of banknotes, 6, 119–​2 4, 120, 121, 126, 192–​ 93n13, 193n18, 196n51; compared to Morse code, 143–​4 4, 145, 146. See also Ariadne, Durand’s engraving and etching of exaggeration, narrative, 107 Eyton, Thomas Campbell, 186n71 fax machine, prototypical, 146, 198n72 fetishism, 159 Fleischer, Roland, 20 Flexner, James, 17, 23 Ford, Walton, 81 Foucault, Michel, 99 Frank, Adam, 158 Fresnoy, Charles du, 49, 171n1 Fried, Michael, 7, 33 Fulton, Robert, 142 furniture, optical, 84, 85, 85, 86 Gainsborough, Thomas, 36 Gaudio, Michael, 187n76 Gell, Alfred, 122 Georgi, Karen, 158 Géricault, Théodore, 53, 179n100 Gibson, Ann, 39, 178n89 gift exchange, 8, 10 Gill, Benjamin, 178n84 Gilpin, William, 195n48

globalization, 16, 27, 152 Goodman, Nelson, 2 gothic literature, 71, 109, 153–​54 Gould, John, 186n71 gradualism: and Durand’s art, 148, 150–​52; and Poe’s fiction, 153–​54 grammar machine, invented by Cyrus Durand, 199n93 Greenberg, Clement, 2 Greenwood, John, 36 Hancock, John, 20, 178n84 Harvey, David, 16, 152 Harvey, Eleanor Jones, 137, 159 Havana, Cuba, 52, 55, 57, 179n109 Havell, Robert, Sr. 71, 180n2 Havell, Robert, Jr. 80, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98, 180n2, 186n73 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 11 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 16 Hertford, Lady, 95, 96, 186n71 Hesse, Eva, 161 history, spatiotemporal distance as factor in, 8, 15–​16 history painting: and Copley’s work, 5, 13, 51–​52, 53, 56; and Vanderlyn’s work, 127 Hogarth, William, 50 Holbein, Hans, 36 Holochwost, Catherine, 195n49 Homer, Winslow, 186n72 Honour, Hugh, 65 Horden, Peregrine, 16 Hume, David, 28, 35, 43, 44, 113 Hurd, John, 22 Hurd, Nathaniel, 26, 27 Hutchins, Edwin, 10 illusionism, 2, 30, 34, 41, 99, 126, 148, 162, 163, 164 indexicality: and Audubon’s art, 81, 92, 97, 109, 114; and Copley’s art, 33, 43; and Orozco’s art, 162; telegraphic abolition of, 146 Ingalls, William, 181n7 Innes, George, 198n75 innovation, technological, 142–​43 Iser, Wolfgang, 177n83 It-narratives, 11, 29, 30 Ivins, William, 122

Jackson, Christine, 189n108 Jakobson, Roman, 6 Japanese art, 186n72 Jefferson, Thomas, 104 John, Richard, 196n52 Johns, Jasper, 9, 99, 101, 102, 161, 187n79 Kamensky, Jane, 114 Kant, Immanuel, 2 Kensett, John Frederick, 196n51 Kentucky: Audubon’s activity in, 73, 76, 107, 110; mastodon fossil exhumed in, 104 Kneller, Godfrey, 30, 31 Krauss, Rosalind, 101, 103 labyrinth, figure of: and Durand brothers’ banknote design, 123, 124, 126, 133, 134; and Asher B. Durand’s art, 133, 134, 154–​55, 158; telegraphic economy contrasted with, 146 landscape painting. See Birds of America (Audubon), landscapes represented in; Durand, Asher B., landscape painting by Laocoön group, 62, 64 Latour, Bruno, 10, 77, 194n39 Lehman, George, 186n73 Linnaean taxonomy, 99, 188n85 Locke, John, 28, 35, 41, 43, 175n47, 177n68 London: Audubon’s volumes printed in, 71, 78, 80, 180n2; Copley’s art received in, 4, 5, 13, 17, 22–​23, 53, 65; Copley’s move to, 13, 15, 51; Society of Artists in, 4, 5, 13, 17, 22, 23, 36 Lovell, Margaretta, 24, 34, 47 Lynch, Michael, 77 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 6 Malraux, André, 8, 9 Manet, Édouard, 101 Manners, Joseph Mountjoy, 130–​31, 132 market economy, 27, 29, 73, 115. See also commodity relations; economic relations Martin, Maria, 186n73 mastodon fossil, exhumation of, 104, 105, 107 materiality, of visual art, 6, 8–​9, 162, 163, 168nn4–​5, 170n24; and Audubon’s work, 71, 84, 99, 103, 111; and Durand’s work, 118, 126, 133, 135, 140, 141, 143, 147, 154, 155, 158, 159, 162, 195n42; and resistance to telegraphic communication, 6, 147. See also dematerialization

I n d e x    •   2 23

Mauss, Marcel, 10 McCormack, Jerusha Hill, 158 Melville, Herman, 107 Miles, Ellen, 26 Miller, Angela, 148 Mitchell, W. J. T., 10 modernist art, 99, 101, 101, 102, 103, 118, 161 Molyneux’s Problem, 41, 43 monetary circulation, 27–​29, 30, 110–​15 Morris, Robert, 80, 155 Morse, Samuel F. B., 119, 134, 141, 142, 143, 144, 192n9, 197n63 Morse code, 143–​4 4, 145, 146, 199n93 museum without walls, Malraux’s concept of, 8, 9 National Academy of Design (NAD), 3, 119, 134, 137, 142, 143, 192n9 Native Americans, 152 Nemerov, Alexander, 106 Newlin, Alice, 129 New Thalassology, 16, 172n10 Newton, Isaac, 177n68 non-conducting image, 118, 135, 136, 155, 158, 159 Novak, Barbara, 34 numismatic profiles, 25–​30 ornamentality, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 135–​36, 139, 141, 146, 154 Ornithological Biography (Audubon), 80–​81, 90, 184n49, 186nn72–​73, 191n132 ornithological illustration: color in, 108–​9; by Savigny, 77, 77; scale in, 81, 90–​91, 104–​6, 109, 185n67; space in, 77, 81, 84, 91–​92; by Temminck, 90, 185n67; and Tomaselli’s art, 69, 70, 71; by Wilson, 77, 80, 90–​91, 104–​6. See also Birds of America (Audubon) Orozco, Gabriel, 161–​62, 162 ottoman, used to display Audubon’s book, 84, 85, 85, 184n54 Paine, Thomas, 115 Palmer, Lucia, 39, 178n89 panics, financial, 76, 110–​13 paper money. See banknotes Peale, Charles Willson, 104, 105, 107 Peck, Robert McCracken, 186n71

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Pelham, Henry, 24, 55, 171n1 Pelham, Peter, 39, 44, 171n1, 174n33 phatic image, 169n19 phatic language, 6–​7 Phillips, Benjamin, 84, 184n54 Pico, Joshua, 46, 178n84 picture plane: and Audubon’s bird illustrations, 91, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103; and Durand’s Ariadne engraving, 134; and tabletop portraits, 30, 60 Pietz, William, 159 Piles, Roger de, 44, 49, 171n1 plein air paintings, Durand’s, 3, 6, 137, 154, 159, 160 Pliny the Elder, 26, 175n43 Poe, Edgar Allan, 109, 153–​54, 158 Pointon, Marcia, 26 political relations: and Boston Tea Party, 51–​52, 54–​55; and conversation culture, 176n54; and Copley’s art, 51–​52, 55, 56–​59, 65–​66; and Copley’s response to Tea Party crisis, 51–​52, 55–​57; and rhetorical amplification, 106–​7 Poovey, Mary, 112, 172n5 Porter, Rufus, 8, 143 portrait painting: and Audubon’s postmortem portraits, 188n100; conversation piece as, 30–​32; and Durand’s work, 117; profile format in, 17, 24–​30, 173n15, 174–​75n39, 174n37; Renaissance, 36. See also Copley, John Singleton, portrait painting by postmodernity, 16 Powell, Amy, 168n5 profile format in portraiture, 17, 24–​30, 173n15, 174–​75n39, 174n37 Purcell, Nicholas, 16 Quilley, Geoff, 179n109 race relations: and cargo haulage, 80; and slavery, 11, 54, 65, 183n39 railroads, 4, 148, 150, 160 Raphael, 50, 56, 63 Rather, Susan, 175n39 Rauschenberg, Robert, 101, 118, 161 reproduction, mechanical, 121–​22, 131, 133, 134, 136, 139 Revolution, American, 13, 51, 52, 55, 56, 65, 66 Revolution, French, 73, 182n14 Reynolds, Joshua, 13, 15, 23, 36, 44, 134

Richardson, Jonathan, 26, 50, 172n9 Riegl, Alois, 163 Rigal, Laura, 107 rivers, transport via, 74, 76 Roach, Joseph, 21 Robertson, Francis, 193n13 romanticism: and Copley’s art, 67 Rosenblum, Robert, 175n43 Ruskin, John, 127, 135, 136, 138, 186n71, 195n48 Sargent, Daniel, 178n84 Sargent, Epes, 178n84 Savigny, Jules-César, 77, 77 scale: and degeneration debates, 104–​6; in ornithological illustration, 81, 90–​91, 104–​6, 184n49 sea piece genre, 16–​17, 172n8 Sekula, Alan, 16 sense perception: and Berkeley’s philosophy, 39–​41, 43; and Copley’s art, 32–​34, 35, 36, 39–​41, 43–​4 4, 49, 59–​60, 66; and Locke’s philosophy, 41, 43; and Molyneux’s Problem, 41, 43 Serra, Richard, 161 Shaftesbury, third earl of, 50 Shell, Marc, 112–​13 shipping and transport: of Audubon’s Birds of America, 5, 71, 79–​80; and Audubon’s mercantile activity, 73–​74, 76, 112; of Copley’s paintings, 3, 13, 15, 22–​23, 35, 49, 173n26; thematized in contemporary art, 161–​62; thematized in Durand’s art, 148, 150; and transatlantic trade, 3, 20–​21, 46, 51, 55; visual art in context of, 1–​3, 8–​9, 167n4 Siegert, Bernhard, 7 slavery, 11, 54, 65, 183n39 Smibert, John, 39, 171n1, 178n91 Smith, Adam, 115 Smithson, Robert, 161 Snyder, Reba Fishman, 189n104 social relations: and conversation culture, 176n54; and Latour’s work, 10; and spatiotemporal distance, 32; and telegraphy, 141, 144, 197– ​98n69 Society of Artists, London, 4, 5, 13, 17, 22, 23, 36 space, formal: and Audubon’s art, 91–​92, 95, 97, 99, 164–​65; and Copley’s art, 17, 20, 30, 32–​34, 36, 44, 46, 54, 59, 60, 164–​65; and

Durand’s art, 134–​35, 148, 150–​52, 154–​56, 164–​65 space, geographical: historians’ recognition of, 15–​16; and social relations, 32; telegraphic abolition of, 141, 144, 146, 147, 153. See also distance, spatiotemporal; globalization speed, differential, of information, 131, 142, 144, 146 Staiti, Paul, 20, 49 Stanley, Edward Smith, 186n71 Stebbins, Theodore, 186n72 Steele, Ian K., 21 Steele, Richard, 176n54 Steinberg, Leo, 103 Stolow, Nathan, 9 stoppage, 122, 187n80 Summers, David, 81, 84 surface and depth, play between, 124, 126, 135, 154 Swainson, William, 78 Swift, Jonathan, 103, 187n83 tabletop portraits, Copley’s, 20, 35–​36, 37, 38, 39–​40, 41, 42, 43–​4 4, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50–​51; compared to Copley’s Watson and the Shark, 51, 54, 59–​60, 62; and empiricist philosophy, 15, 34–​36, 39–​41, 43–​4 4, 46, 165; reflections represented in, 36, 41, 46, 59–​60; sensory impresions thematized in, 35, 36, 39–​41, 43–​4 4, 49, 50–​51, 59, 60; spatial configuration of, 44, 46, 54, 60; transtlantic relations thematized in, 36, 39, 46; upper vs. lower halves of, 44, 46; visual-tactile synthesis in, 40–​41, 43, 165 tabula rasa, Locke’s concept of, 43 tactility. See visual-tactile synthesis tall tales, 107 Taylor, George Rogers, 169n15 Tea Party. See Boston, Tea Party crisis in telegraphy: compared to printing press, 143–​4 4, 146, 197n67; and dematerialization, 118; and Durand’s engravings, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146–​47, 198n71; and Durand’s paintings, 6, 142, 148, 150–​52, 151, 154, 155–​56, 158, 159, 160; and literary practice, 141, 146, 197n67; and Morse code, 143–​4 4, 145, 146, 199n93; Morse’s work in, 141, 142, 143, 144, 144, 197n63; and Poe’s fiction, 158;

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telegraphy (continued) in popular media, 141, 147, 148, 149; scholarly studies of, 141; and social relations, 141, 144, 197–​98n69; spatiotemporal distance overcome by, 4, 141, 144, 146, 147, 153, 196n52; visual arts abandoned by, 6, 141–​42, 146–​47, 159; visual arts potentially transmitted via, 146, 198n72 Temminck, Coenraad Jacob, 90, 91, 185n67 temporality: as gradual sequence, 148, 152, 156; strategic, 7–​8 thing theory, 9 Thorpe, T. B., 107 time. See distance, spatiotemporal; temporality Titian, 50 Tomaselli, Fred, 69, 70, 71 transatlantic passage, 3, 21–​22; Audubon’s bird illustrations as objects for, 79, 80; Copley’s paintings as objects for, 3, 5, 13, 15, 22–​23, 35, 49, 173n26; Copley’s paintings’ thematization of, 15, 32, 36, 39, 46–​47, 49, 52, 54, 66; empiricist philosophy in context of, 35, 46–​ 47, 49. See also cargo, transatlantic; shipping and transport transmission: and degeneration, 105, 108; and empiricism, 35; and monetary circulation, 27, 112; and narrative amplification, 107; and profile portraits, 27, 29; and scale, 106, 108; telegraphic, 118; thematized in Audubon’s art, 76, 103, 108, 109; thematized in Copley’s art, 27, 29, 36, 49, 50; thematized in Durand’s art, 118, 119, 139, 141, 154. See also distance, spatiotemporal; shipping and transport; transatlantic passage transport. See railroads; shipping and transport Trumbull, John, 134 Turnbull, George, 50 Turner, J. M. W., 103 Vanderlyn, John, 126–​27, 128, 128–​29, 133, 134, 135

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Verplanck, Gulian C., 134 Virilio, Paul, 169n19 visual-tactile synthesis: in Audubon’s art, 84, 97, 165; in Copley’s art, 5, 40–​41, 43, 165; in Durand’s art, 6, 159–​60, 165 Walpole, Horace, 49, 171n1 Washburn, Israel, 152–​53 Watson, Brook, 52–​53, 56, 57 Watson and the Shark (Copley), 53, 61; black figure represented in, 11, 62, 65–​66, 179n110; Boston Tea Party as context for, 51–​52, 54–​55, 57–​59, 66; compared to Copley’s tabletop portraits, 51, 54, 59–​60, 62; compared to Géricault’s work, 53, 179n100; compared to Laocoön group, 62; compared to Raphael’s work, 59, 62; distributed as engraving, 179n100; and empiricist philosophy, 59; exhibited at Royal Academy, 53; Havana setting of, 52, 55, 57, 179n109; and history genre, 5, 51–​52, 53; reception of, 53, 62, 65; and romanticism, 67; and salvation narrative, 54; sensory impressions thematized in, 59–​60, 66; and shipwreck theme, 66–​67; and slavery, 11, 54, 65; spatial configuration of, 54, 59, 60, 62; transatlantic relations thematized in, 52, 54, 66, 163; upper vs. lower halves of, 59–​60, 62; Watson’s commission of, 56– ​57 Webb, Daniel, 34, 49–​50 Weiner, Annette, 10 Weiss, Jeffrey, 187n79 West, Benjamin, 4, 23 Wilkinson, Stephan, 193n23 Wilson, Alexander, 77, 80, 90–​91, 92, 104–​6, 109 Wood, Christopher S., 163 Wright, Charles Cushing, 119 Wright, Joseph, 28 Yonan, Michael, 170n24

Text: 9.5/14 Scala Display: Scala Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley Prepress: Embassy Graphics Indexer: Andrew Joron Printer and binder: QuaLibre