Unpublished portions of Chapter 5 of The Politics of Art Criticism
Writers at the Times (ch 5):
For example, Irish playwright and poet Fitz James O’Brien, who wrote art criticism for the Times in 1852 (and perhaps later), roomed with illustrator Frank Bellew, and like him contributed to magazines such as Irish actor John Brougham’s Lantern, which satirized anti-slavery zealots.[1] Art collector (with six works by George Inness) William Henry Hurlbert would join Briggs at the Times around 1857, and despite being a Unitarian minister, like the other contributors for the Times satirized “moral twaddle.” He supported Stephen Douglas and later joined Evening Post editor Manton Marble at the by-then Democratic World.[2]
…
Fuller separated the Putnam’s clique from the Harper’s one, though Curtis would take over as editor of the Easy Chair for Harper’s in 1854. The Harper’s clique (Harpies, to the Herald) was more strongly linked to the Times, as Democrat Fletcher Harper was one of its funders, and Raymond (and George Ripley of the Tribune) had been a manuscript reader for them. Like the Times, Harper’s was understood to have a toast-and-water morality, timid and hesitating, to avoid offending any of its fabulous circulation. But though Fuller was critical of Raymond for abandoning Webster’s conservative Whigs for the anti-slavery Seward, they both endorsed Young America, especially its support for European revolutionaries like Lajos Kossuth of Hungary.[3]
…
Cook also reviewed the National Academy for the penny Times in 1856 and 1857. Briggs was an editor there by 1855, and having known Cook at Putnam’s, may have brought him in. Cook was harder on Durand than Stillman had been, grouping him with Tribune and Post favorites Kensett and Cropsey as smothering truth and beauty under the dreary compositional formulas of a dead past. H. K. Brown’s striking Indian and his student J.Q.A. Ward’s Daniel Boone, by contrast, captured the spirit of the age. Huntington, like Lockwood, degraded himself in his religious pictures: if he wanted to paint a great lesson, to move heart, soul and conscience, Cook said, then he must paint what he sees, and find subjects in the streets, houses and shops of today, while leaving dead churches and a false society in the past.[4] Cook’s rhetoric at the Times owed more to Young America than to the style of Whig advocates of the old masters.
On Louis Lang (ch 5):
This was indirectly evident in the coverage of Louis Lang’s Fourth of July (1850), a companion to his previous year’s Carnival of Venice. Both, done in a German or “finished” style sometimes compared to Spencer’s, were shown but not bought by the Art-Union. However, city alderman and hotelier William Cozzens hired Lang to design tableaux for a West Point masquerade ball along the carnival theme. And Lang, a friend of Durand and a studiomate of Kensett, did both the decorations for the Century Club’s twelfth night ball, and a painting that included some of the 700 artistic and literary celebrities in attendance.[5] Lotsa Nuffin, a female writer for the Home Journal, described the Century’s balls as a royal court, where painter Thomas Rossiter was a noble earl, and Kensett, Church and others were all elevated to the peerage. The Irish Vindicator and Daily News agreed that the Club was overly fond of genuflecting to crowned heads. The Herald suggested that Lang resembled Thomas Lawrence, a favorite of aristocrats with opulent and British taste.[6] The Century Club, a reconstituted version of the old Sketch Club, chose its members for their artistic achievements, not their wealth, making it an honor to belong; but of course this policy also reinforced its cliquish character. The testimony of disgruntled clerk Joseph Monk in the Art-Union investigative hearings targeted Abraham Cozzens and other managers as favoring Century Club members.[7]
As the Evening Mirror explained, Lang’s Carnival of Venice, in something of the spirit of Lessing’s Bohemian peasants, showed a moment when society en masse threw off Italy’s crushing despotism and surveillance, to breathe the air of freedom. But in Lang’s companion Fourth of July “carnival,” the similarly “motley crowd” of sailors, women, negroes, soldiers and little boys, shown following a triumphal car that carried the goddess of liberty, met a less favorable response. The firemen in the painting, Company no. 42, complained because Lang had shown them eating ice cream, which associated them with a carnival sexuality (fig. 43). The Sunday Mercury, which dedicated a weekly column to the firemen, called ice cream shops the “worst assignation places in town,” while the Herald argued that despite patronage from the highly respectable, they led to shameless infamy. N.P. Willis, a writer associated with the upper class and its more daring social behavior, described in the New Mirror the fashionable ice cream stores (he denied getting paid for these promotions), associating them with the manners and morals of upper tendom. For the Herald, and the penny press generally, especially in the wake of the Edwin Forrest divorce trial’s exposure of high society, these manners and morals smacked of Fourierist free love.[8]
When the firemen supposedly threatened to vandalize Lang’s picture, the Evening Post accused them of becoming a mob and—referring to the recent Astor Place theater riots—urged the Whig city mayor to prevent it, though presumably not by shooting them. By contrast, HWB in the Tribune said such ideas of riotous firemen are taken from the stage; go to the American Institute fair and examine the paintings for the fire engine backboards, or the paintings, engravings and statuary in company meeting rooms, or see how many fire companies subscribe to the Art-Union, to see the truth.[9] Lang resolved the issue by removing the fire company’s identifying number from the painting, but the Post’s criticism of the firemen indicates some hostility toward its former democratic allies. The Tribune, however, kept a statue of a stalwart and manly New York fireman, with his trumpet in his right hand, in its counting room.[10]
[1] O’Brien in these years also wrote for the Picayune, Evening Post, Putnam’s, Vanity Fair, Home Journal and the Saturday Press. See Francis Wolle, Fitz-James O’Brien: A Literary Bohemian of the 1850s (Boulder: University of Colorado, 1944) and Wayne R. Kime, ed. Fitz-James O’Brien: Selected Literary Journalism 1852-1860 (Susquehanna University Press, 2003). Brougham’s adaptation of H.B. Stowe’s novel Dred (1856) made African Americans the target of the jokes, William L. Van Deburg, Slavery & Race in American Popular Culture (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) pp. 46-47. George W. Flagg, who was involved with organizing Walcutt’s Artists Association as a counter to the Art-Union, would paint John Brougham and his wife in 1851; Walcutt and Brougham were both New York Sketch Club members. On New York’s bohemian circles, see especially Joanna Levin and Edward Whitley, Whitman Among the Bohemians (University of Iowa Press, 2014), Justin Martin, Rebel Souls: Whitman and the First Bohemians (Da Capo Press, 2014), and Mark Lause, The Antebellum Crisis and America's First Bohemians (Kent State University Press, 2009). Times’ city editor Nehemiah Palmer had been at the Herald; drama critic Charles Seymour wrote for the satirical Saturday Press; and assistant commercial editor (from a Young Ireland family) Michael Hennessey had a brother who exhibited at the National Academy.
[2] William Henry Hurlbert was in England in 1856 and traveling in Europe in 1858, but from 1857 to 1860 he contributed editorials to the Times, joining the World in 1862. He was a drama critic for the Albion as well as Putnam’s. His collection included Art-Union favorites Kensett, Cole, and J.W. Glass, as well as Fagnani, a favorite of the Home Journal, and many European artists.
[3] Evening Mirror, September 11, 1854, p. 2. M. Edmund Farrenc, “Young America: Its Doctrines and Its Men,” Times, April 1, 1854, p. 8. In 1859, Edward Farrence started a Republican paper called L’Epoque.
[4] “National Academy of Design – 31st annual exhibition, 3rd article,” Times, April 12, 1856, p. 4; “National Academy of Design, concluding article,” Times, April 21, 1856, p. 4.
[5] Holden’s Dollar Magazine, February 1848, at the time edited by Charles W. Holden, a good friend of Sun editor Alfred E. Beach, described the Century Club as chiefly small artists with great pretensions and small authors with great reputations. The original seven founders of the Century Club included Durand, Kensett, Bryant, Bryant’s friend Charles Leupp, William Appleton (publisher for many Tribune writers, and who was in Lang’s painting), William Kemble and Gulian Verplanck. Many of the early Sketch Club members also joined, as did chemistry professor Oliver W. Gibbs.
[6] Lotsa Nuffin, New York correspondence, Home Journal, February 6, 1858. “Art News,” Herald, January 24, 1857, p. 3. Evening Post, February 7, 1859, p. 2.
[7] Art-Union managers who were members of the Century Club included William Appleton, editor William J Hoppin, auctioneer George W. Austen, George Allen, William A. Butler (a writer for the Bulletin and Literary World), Daniel Eliot, John R. Bartlett, James W. Beekman, Bryant, F.W. Edmonds, Frederick Coe, David Colden, A.M. Cozzens, George Curtis, Charles Daly, John Gourlie, Townsend Harris, Robert Kelly (a Fernando Wood ally; Huntington painted his portrait), William Kemble, Charles Leupp, John R. Murray, Samuel Ward, Daniel Seymour, Eleazar Parmly, H.J. Raymond, M.O. Roberts, Charles Stetson, Jonathan Sturges, Benjamin R. Winthrop. Associates of the Art-Union included Century Club members H.W. Bellows, Sidney Brooks (agent for Hiram Powers), Frederick Cozzens, and publisher J.C. Derby. See Nichols, “Merchants and Artists,” 188.
[8] “Lang’s Roman Carnival,” Evening Mirror, October 23, 1849, p. 2, “An Artist and the Firemen, from the Evening Post,” Sunday Mercury, November 3, 1850, R. Cornell White, letter from foreman of no. 42, Sunday Mercury, December 1, 1850. Sunday Mercury, June 13, 1852. Herald, June 10, 1852. Willis, “Chit Chat,” New Mirror, January 27, 1844.
[9] HWB, “The Firemen of New York,” Tribune, September 19, 1848. The writer (ministers Henry W. Bellows and Henry W. Beecher had these initials) was responding to G.G. Foster’s “Slices of New York, XXIV.”
[10] “City Items: Works of Art,” Tribune, September 16, 1853, p. 7. The sculptor was Charles Muller, a German immigrant artist whose Minstrel’s Curse had been extensively praised by the Tribune for its scene of a bard hurling a curse at the king who had killed an innocent boy.
On the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, Stillman and Palmer (ch 5)
The divide between the two journals was both political and gendered. For example, Stillman, when appointed as consul to Rome, was dismissive of the women sculptors in the circle of actress Charlotte Cushman—Louisa Lander, Emma Stebbins and Harriet Hosmer especially. These sculptors were profiled in the Cosmopolitan Art Journal. Lander, who stayed with Chauncey Derby (the owner of the Cosmopolitan Art Association) when she visited New York, had family connections to the Buchanan Democrats. She also received admiring reviews in the Evening Post, which retained ties to Democrats, though the Tribune was unenthusiastic. William C.H. Hosmer, the poet and lawyer, was a Democratic appointee to the customs house in New York, though Hosmer herself seemed to fall into the moderate Whig camp. On her 1858 trip to New York, she stayed with Unitarian minister and editor Henry W. Bellows, who profiled her for Frank Leslie’s, which cheerfully called Stillman’s style the “Black Joke School of Art.”[1] Democratic politician and New York parks commissioner Henry Stebbins was Emma’s brother; the Express (by this time in desperation a Democratic paper) and the Herald, where the Cosmopolitan Art Association advertised heavily, endorsed Stebbins as an example of American genius. As both papers wanted Lincoln to agree to a peaceful settlement with the south, the subject of her sculpture—a youthful nude male Lotus Eater—may have had some bearing.[2]
At the same time, there was overlap between the Crayon and the Association’s Art Journal. Erastus Palmer was of interest to both. Palmer’s artworks were purchased by the Cosmopolitan Art Association, and they profiled him, but he was also an agent for and contributor to the Crayon, at least until he was “excommunicated” by the editors. In 1859, his White Captive was too naked for John Durand.[3] Bohemian writers at Vanity Fair, Home Journal (where Cosmopolitan Art Journal editor Metta Victoria Fuller got her start, but which under co-editor Thomas Bailey Aldrich had a special offer to bundle issues with the Crayon), Herald, Leader, and Saturday Press defended its nudity. The Saturday Press proposed that the real figures requiring condemnation were the moralizing nudes like those in Rossiter’s and Huntington’s allegories, or even the “moral soap” of Greenough’s Washington in the Capitol. The soap reference points to 1853’s New York Crystal Palace, which, under a mostly Democratic administration, had been widely condemned for featuring too many fathers of the country molded in lye-based materials. Adam Badeau, the Vagabond of the Sunday Times, who wrote enthusiastically of the pleasures of bathing nude with male friends, endorsed the White Captive’s purity and embraced nakedness generally, for the vitality gained by its freedom from conventional restraint.[4] While the Cosmopolitan Art Journal was nowhere nearly as bohemian as this, it did not reject sexuality or Palmer.
In 1859, the Cosmopolitan Art Journal’s reviewer called Stillman’s landscape at the Academy exhibition a mere burlesque, but they published his article on American sculpture. The editors noted that they disagreed with his estimate of the American school, but wished to give “this class of art judges” a hearing. In it, Stillman dismissed Thomas Crawford and Greenough as too classicizing. Stillman acknowledged Powers’ naturalism, and that in his time he defied all conventionalism and canons of classical art, but argued that his work still lacked expressiveness. He was all surface, no Idea—it was the false sentiment of fanciful commentators that disguised his art’s lascivious nature. Stillman concluded that Palmer, who like Powers sculpted the female nude, promised more beauty, grace and deeper feeling than any of them, though he was still an actualist. The editors, who had invested in Powers and Palmer, promised to demonstrate why Stillman was a sophist, but they left the task instead to a Boston paper.[5] The Saturday Press in turn came to Stillman’s defense, but took his argument even farther.[6] They agreed that Crawford’s reclining mechanic was no mechanic, and his Indian no Indian but rather were graceful commonplaces, and that Powers’ Greek Slave was too literal. But they dismissed Palmer’s statues as also insufficient in feeling, merely pretty drawing room girls, undressed. For the Saturday Press, the future lay with H.K. Brown’s student J.Q.A. Ward, whose Indian statue’s rudeness and wildness resembled the style of their contributor Walt Whitman. Launt Thompson, an apprentice of Palmer and fellow bohemian, had his American Trapper compared to Whitman’s ruggedness too.[7]
[1] Triangle [Frank Bellew], “Five Minutes in the National Academy,” Frank Leslie’s, June 3, 1857, p. 14. In July, a more serious review credited his composition with having the most mind of any, and Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism,” credits Stillman with collaborating with Bellew on the satire.
[2] “Art—Miss Stebbins’ Lotos Eater,” Express, March 28, 1861, p. 2.
[3] See the excellent account in J. Carson Webster, Erastus D. Palmer (University of Delaware Press, 1983).
[4] “The Nude,” Saturday Press, May 26, 1860, p. 2; “Art and Politics,” Saturday Press, July 14, 1860, p. 2, Badeau, “American Art,” p. 125, and “The Country,” pp. 174-177, in The Vagabond.
[5] “National Academy Exhibition,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, June 1859, p. 134. Church’s Heart of the Andes by contrast was the finest landscape ever painted in the country. William Stillman, “American Sculpture,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, March 1860, p. 35. Among those commentators was nativist poet Augustus Duganne, whose poems appeared in the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, and had earlier won a prize for his ode to the Greek Slave, selected by the editors of the Evening Mirror and Home Journal.
[6] Saturday Press, May 19, 1860. Stillman’s opponent was the Boston Transcript, edited by former New Yorker and anti-slavery Whig Epes Sargeant.
[7] “Art about Town,” Saturday Press, May 12, 1860, p. 2; “Art Items,” Saturday Press, January 1, 1859, p. 2; “Art Items,” Saturday Press, November 12, 1859, p. 2. On bohemian writers for the Saturday Press, Herald, and Leader, including Henry Clapp, Jr., Edward G.P. Wilkins and William Winter, see Tice Miller, Bohemians and Critics: American Theatre Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1981)
On Curtis, Cropsey, Healy, Webster and Durand:
Curtis started publishing his series of reviews on April 10th, not long after one of the Evening Post editors had announced in the usual bland promotional style that Durand had exquisite quiet landscapes, Edmonds characteristic humor, Rossiter a remarkably brilliant painting, and Church a prominent Deluge. For Curtis, this was a chance to challenge the Post’s taste and politics. Cropsey’s Southern Italy (lost) was the more luminous and powerful counterpart to Durand’s staid trees; Huntington and Talbot (the latter had just started a drawing school that advertised in the Post) were doing clichéd and unnatural (or studio) pictures; Church, who, like Cropsey, was in Cole’s lineage of Idealism, nevertheless had a commonplace Deluge; John Casilear, closely linked to Durand, had Summer feeling but was too clean and parklike, and Whitley not transparent enough.
The Post editors said they hadn’t been planning a critique, but after Curtis’ first two essays on landscape, a Post writer intervened to defend the Dusseldorf school, to amplify their praise of genre painters Edmonds and Mount as homely yet powerful, to wish for more American subjects in art, and to defend Stearns and other painters whom Curtis had dismissed. Whitman added a separate endorsement of Talbot.[1] Other papers responded too. The Albion’s review appeared in between Curtis’ opening slam of Durand and his defense of Cropsey. Though the Albion echoed Curtis’ dismissal of Durand’s pretty but repetitive scenes, the author attacked Cropsey as a Cole imitator who was only admired by a small circle, and whose painting of Southern Italy was un-Italian and destitute of excellence.[2] The Courier and Enquirer, in its initial review, loved Spencer’s Jolly Washerwoman for its fine expression, the embodiment of good nature and content, with its knubby flesh and stout arms, and Church’s Deluge had an anthropomorphic power; the waves meet in terrific conflict, seeming to stretch out huge wrestling arms to each other. The Courier and Enquirer, in its second criticism, after Curtis’ had appeared, defended its lack of comment on technique and its preference for the “lively truth” of sentiment. So Cropsey’s Southern Italy to them lacked the unity that Curtis had found, while Huntington’s landscape, despite its unnaturalness, embodied sentiment and poetry; Ruskin was wrong.[3]
Curtis’ elevation of Cropsey and Ruskin over Durand and Cole attracted a correspondent of the Evening Mirror, a paper that had been quite supportive of Cropsey, even to a promotional studio visit from an editor.[4] The Evening Mirror advocated the Compromise of 1850, which expanded the national territory but required the free states to acknowledge states’ rights to keep slaves. As conservative “national” Whigs (who closely resembled national Democrats) or Unionists, they preferred Compromise promoters like Fillmore and Webster to the Tribune’s Seward. But most of these Webster Whigs followed Seward in supporting Winfield Scott in the 1852 presidential election, perhaps assisted by Scott’s old ties to nativism. These papers liked Miner Kellogg’s portrait of General Scott conquering Mexico City; Curtis thought Kellogg’s portrait was overly heroic. The Tribune opposed the Compromise, and Scott was the last Whig candidate they would back. So when Evening Mirror correspondent R asked why “newspaper critics” laud Jasper Cropsey’s painting of Italy, he was thinking of Curtis at the Tribune. But by opening his article with this rhetorical questioning of a supposed critical consensus on Cropsey, R in the penny press style spoke for the outsider (the excluded faction of a party), who constructs differences to position himself as representing the public—a public that lacked sympathy with revolutionaries who resisted compromise.
Curtis had praised Cropsey’s Southern Italy for conquering his earlier manner, with its ambitious but restless profusion of brilliant bits and points, making his pictures extravagant in detail but lacking focus. In Southern Italy, though, he had achieved profound repose and breadth, the visible spirit of every Italian landscape, but especially the luminous languor of the South, and its “dying, dying, dying,” ruins. Curtis acknowledged it was a composition, but found it acceptable because it did not seem forced or artificial, as Cropsey had fused the “beautiful bits” into a new whole. By contrast, R argued that in this large and ambitious painting. Cropsey had created only leagues of flatness and vacuity, with no life to address the mind or affect the heart. His figures resembled Thom’s, a self-taught sculptor who specialized in comic types. R imagines that Cropsey’s supporters would argue that in this very abandonment of particulars (Curtis’ rage against Dusseldorf particularity) consists unity. R contradicts this idea: is our great Republic any less a Union, because every State is a little Republic in itself? The true idea of unity, in art or government, is not a homogenous mass; such unity is death. R finds in Cropsey’s foreground a potential apostle of a more diverse unity: a great tree is the nearest and most prominent object, but it is so artificially made distinct, that (like another tree that embodies sublime inflexibility) it becomes a supernatural vegetable. The effect is to emphasize that this “Italy” is a composition, with all the remarkable and beautiful unity of a pedlar’s bag.
Not just an attack on Cropsey, then, R tried to undermine the false republican principles of Curtis and the Tribune, albeit projected onto Italy. Like the southern United States, southern Italy with its agricultural or “backward” (not industrialized) economy had a landed elite that practiced secessionist and separatist politics, and in doing so fueled the Piedmont’s (the North’s) later war for a unified nation. But in 1851, the restoration of the monarchy after the fall of the Roman Republic had led to forced pacification in southern Italy, as in the rest of the country, halting the Risorgimento. The Tribune had been a vigorous supporter of Young Italy, helping to raise funds, and shared Cropsey’s dismay at the dismal repression of that Republic.[5] Margaret Fuller had idolized Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the heroes of the Republic, in the Tribune, and his fellow revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi received an enthusiastic welcome in New York in July of 1850 before leaving for South America in 1851. Cropsey, who had traveled throughout Italy in 1848 with Hicks and Cranch, had described another painting of Italy (fig. 44) with ruins, stagnant water, and religious symbols as evidence of Italy being moribund. The expansionist, southern-sympathizing, and Democratic Irish News described a Cropsey southern Italian landscape similarly: the glorious ruins of a city, now an expanse of stagnation, weeds, and “brooding” marshes, were full of suggestiveness and a significant eloquence.[6] As a political statement of democratic nationalist movements, it might have suggested to exiled Irish nationalist Thomas Meagher’s Irish News the fate of Young Ireland too.
Whig papers not as liberal as the Tribune were often still—like Protestants generally—hostile toward the Pope, and so supported republican Italy, blaming the ruins of nationalism on the repressive influence of the Catholic church; Mazzini and Garibaldi were themselves anti-clerical, as was Meagher. Irish papers in New York that followed the lead of Bishop Hughes, however, supported the Pope and condemned the Risorgimento and its leaders as traitors, and even Meagher’s paper, as the Herald put it, was eventually crushed into obedience to the
Figure 44. Jasper Cropsey, Evening at Paestum, 1856, oil, 10 x 40 in., Frances Lehman Loeb Center, New York.
church.[7] Democratic papers that depended on Irish Catholic votes (Italians were less than a thousand in the city), had a finer line to walk. Bennett of the Herald, though almost always at war with Hughes, supported the Pope in 1849, at the same time that the paper supported popular movements for liberty in Europe. Interestingly, Italian editor and Hughes enemy G.F. Secchi de Casali’s 1848 Awakening of Italy was dedicated to Mrs. J.G. Bennett.[8] But by 1852, in the wake of the visit of anti-slavery and Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth, Bennett tarred the “wild conceits” of democrats in Europe as similar to the socialism, atheism, abolitionism, disunion, and spiritualism of the Seward Whigs; it was now the abolitionists at the Tribune and Times, not National Whigs or Democrats, who favored foreign intervention.[9] The Herald frequently wondered where the money raised by Greeley for revolutionaries in Ireland, Italy and elsewhere, had gone.
The repose of Southern Italy, to Cropsey and Curtis, truthfully showed the dismal quiescence of Italian nationhood. Though R nods to this interpretation (the bent cross in the painting indicates the state of present-day Romanism, and certainly the Evening Mirror believed Catholicism was an impediment to forming a Republic), R redirected the image toward state’s rights in the United States. To pro-Webster and pro-Compromise papers, for whom a harmonious union had to allow slavery, Cropsey’s imposed and deathlike unity was unsatisfactory. Similarly, when in November of 1850 Hiram Powers’ statue of John Calhoun was rescued from a shipwreck, W reported for the Evening Mirror that though the Compromise politician’s hand had been broken, the Constitution it held was uninjured, an omen of the triumph of the Union over fanatics—that is, abolitionists.[10]
In the fall of 1851, G.P.A. Healy’s much ballyhooed painting of Webster Replying to Hayne was exhibited in the Academy rooms. Twenty-eight feet long with 130 figures, it tapped into this question of how to achieve unity as well. Webster, like R’s apostle tree in Southern Italy, was not a powerful enough figure to unify a painting whose very subject, as the Evening Post said, misrepresented the anti-slavery movement as questioning the perpetuity of the Union.[11] It depicted an 1830 Senate debate over Robert Hayne’s assertion that because the union was a collection of sovereign states, those states could nullify federal laws. Webster argued that it was not an association of states but a popular government, closing with “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” Webster, ever since his decision to stay in John Tyler’s cabinet with nullifier John Calhoun, had been beloved by the conservative Whig press. His advocacy of the Compromise of 1850, though a betrayal to free soilers and abolitionists, was understood by conservatives of both parties as necessary to save the Union. Tompkins Matteson’s Union Portrait of 1850 (fig. 66) featured Webster and Calhoun in a very stiff and un-unified composition, but with both resting their hands, sternly, on the binding constitution. By 1855, conservative Democrat William S. Mount was portraying Webster as a popular hero, giving a speech “among the people.” Accordingly, the pro-Webster and pro-Compromise Express thought Healy put the hero too much in repose, and made his later partner Calhoun too repulsive and forbidding. But the real problem was that Webster, as the Commercial Advertiser wrote, was no George Washington Crossing the Delaware—Healy couldn’t show him as forceful enough to pull the nation along with him.[12]
The wish R expressed in the pro-Webster Evening Mirror for an apostle of Union, a great tree for the landscape, reflects the weakness of the Whigs, especially after the deaths of Clay and Webster. In 1852, Ohio poet and painter Thomas Buchanan Read wrote a poem for the Post on the fallen patriarchs of the forest: Carolina mourned her steadfast pine (Calhoun) and Ashland her stately elm (Clay), but it was Webster, Marshfield’s “giant oak,” who had “oft turned the ocean tempest from the west,” and whose death now left the eagle (of the nation) nowhere to rest. Read’s placement of the ocean tempest west rather than east of New Hampshire suggests that the storm was slavery’s expansion in the new territories. But the association of patriarchs, oaks and a unified nation capable of resisting that tempest dates to the first emergence of Young America and its saplings in the 1844 election between Clay and the expansionist Polk. Or as the Herald said after the Whigs lost that election, the old timber must go downstream, and new trees, fresh from the forest, must take their place.[13]
Asher B. Durand’s 1844 Solitary Oak had powerfully evoked the idea of the uncompromising Whig statesman, be it Clay or Webster. The painting had first been heralded by Nathaniel P. Willis in early 1844, as a glorious painting of a sunlit oak, dominating 20 miles of landscape. Willis’ comments on Durand’s painting came in the context of his New York correspondence, or “chit-chat,” for the Washington, D.C. National Intelligencer, whose slogan was Webster’s motto “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” National Intelligencer editor Joseph Gales appeared in Healy’s painting, as it was Gales’ version of the Haynes speech that became famous; Bennett suspected that the National Intelligencer, a Whig party paper, had a secret bias for Webster even though Clay was the official Presidential candidate. Bennett knew that Willis, whom he called an “author of slip-slopperies,” wrote the “gossip” that passing for correspondence in the Intelligencer.[14] He dismissed it as a mercenary $5 column, puffing oyster cellars (places in New York that paid Willis to be mentioned), and written in a perfect diarrhea of twaddle, nonsense, puerility and egotism. Willis himself was a Clay supporter, though with a soft spot for Webster, praising the latter for doing his own grocery shopping for meats and vegetables, a theme of an 1854 Lilly Martin Spencer painting.[15]
But the Herald, despite like the Democrats advocating annexation of the whole continent, joined Willis in praising the painting at the National Academy (the “bold novelty” of putting the oak in center gives it grandeur).[16] Bennett had preferred Webster in the 1844 election. Like Webster, the Herald had supported Tyler, and Bennett thought Webster only feigned reluctance to annex Texas in order to keep the anti-slavery vote from going to Clay. To Bennett, only Seward, the abolitionists and the British were truly opposed to annexation. But whether one saw Clay (the popular tune for the Brave Old Oak was remade into a campaign song for Clay that summer) or Webster in Durand’s painting, it marked Whig statesmanlike adherence to a constitutional ideal (fig. 45) that would defy both disunion and popular sentiment. The New World, whose art critic had voted for Seward, saw the Solitary Oak as the gem of the exhibition.[17] Henry Ward Beecher would summon it in 1850 as a symbol of the Compromise that saved the Union: the noble oak and its mightiest branches will survive the storm to stand in the sun.[18] Durand donated it to the New York Gallery of Fine Arts.
Figure 45. Asher B. Durand, An Old Man’s Reminiscences, 1845. Durand’s follow-up to the previous year’s successful Solitary Oak, though it sidelined the majestic tree, reinforced its identification with a hero who looks to the lessons of the past. The Art-Union offered him $500 for his Old Man’s Lesson in 1846.
The motif of a magnificent spreading oak against a landscape was anchored to New England, reinforcing a Webster connection. Webster was particularly identified with New England and its interests, including cotton. Connecticut’s Charter Oak, where local Whigs held meetings, was a symbol of the country’s founding that evoked the Pilgrims as well as the monarchs and patriarchs of old and new England respectively.[19] Pro-British artists and papers reinforced this; Willis sarcastically recommended an American architectural order for the columns at the Capitol to be composed of inverted trees, with roots up, to express the republican principle of lowering the upper class. George Harvey, a British landscape painter whose work was regularly puffed by the Post and Mirror, described the old oaks of England, including one for Queen Elizabeth preserved with a picket fence, as like monuments. The Albion frequently ran items on oaks with wide branches, that could ill brook the sight of puny men. Knickerbocker correspondent Ione admired mighty oaks for defying change amid the screaming, wild, urchin rout, and said that kindred souls shared their sorrows. The conservative Democratic Sunday Mercury called the Webster Whig Knickerbocker—the oldest literary magazine in town, and one that rejected Young America cultural nationalism—a beautiful oak amid a forest of saplings. Knickerbocker editor Lewis G. Clark naturally described Durand’s Solitary Oak as a noble subject, withstanding the storm (though any actual storm is difficult to discern in the picture).[20] The Anglo-American endorsed the way Durand’s Solitary Oak stood isolated in broad and prominent relief, perhaps in relief from Young America, as incarnate in the editor of the New York Screamer. Even the Times would pick up on the character of Durand’s trees when it compared their mossy, beard-like respectability, old fogies of sorts, to Kensett’s merry, rustling striplings.[21]
However, the Irish Catholic and Democratic Truth-Teller’s poems emphasized the falsity of a design centered around a patriarchal tree: “Hollow! Hollow!: I stood beneath a hollow tree--…The hollow Tory but betrays/The hollow dupes who heed him…Whate’er I see is like this tree, All hollow.” The Truth-Teller hated Clay, and feared that Webster served the British. And Henry Wikoff and Duff Green’s penny Republic—Green was an anglophobe Whig who, like Bennett, returned to the Democratic fold with Polk rather than support Clay—thought Durand’s oak was not very happily managed, though the sunset was. The Courier and Enquirer, which if not for editor Webb’s personal friendship with Seward would have been a conservative Whig paper, thought Durand was “clever” in this painting, though the more energetic conical hills in the distance detracted from the scene’s quiet. Perhaps the tree’s distance from those far-off heights was also disturbing; the Spirit of the Times would mockingly write of how admirably the idea of distance was conveyed in a “view” of the White House by unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass.[22]
The Tribune, a Clay stalwart, was lukewarm: Durand’s Solitary Oak was just “pretty good.” Curtis in 1851 was still faulting Durand for his characteristic qualities of pastoral repose. Though Curtis admitted that Durand’s Two Oaks (Clay and Webster both died in 1852) were trees, just as his water was water, his summer-y pictures were filled with qualities that while agreeable were perhaps too restful: drowsily winking, musily dreaming, aimless reverie, quiet haze, silence, and an English air of cultivated repose.[23] Curtis would write a book called Lotus-Eating describing his travels to various summer resorts (illustrated by his friend John Kensett), in which he was critical of Young America’s pretensions, but Whiggish repose was not always Curtis’ or the Tribune’s artistic or social ideal. The Evening Post indeed, if mockingly, called Curtis a Young New Yorker who was growing Wide Awake, and Evert Duyckinck at the Literary World cautioned him about being an Experimenter in Style.[24]
Curtis occasionally brought the values of Young America (warmth, movement, or as the Tribune said in 1853 fresh, bold, and questing for novelty and new territory) to landscape, if not to history painting. Curtis scolded George Inness for imitating the old masters and producing scumbled wool, but his extended notice of the young painter—who Curtis knows can do better—itself gave Inness some celebrity; S.R. Gifford is warned of the lack of sincerity (perhaps his imitation of Durand and Kensett) in the dreamy hazy atmosphere of the Lotus in his summer landscape, but the young George A. Baker’s Summer Hours is compared to the fresh, vivacious, rejoicing heart, with its red blood and sumptuousness, evoking Young America critical tropes, albeit in moderation—Baker’s triumph is his danger, too. Curtis similarly admired the Pre-Raphaelites’ earnestness, intensity and pathos, but wanted them to stop avoiding conventionally graceful compositions on the (false) grounds that the artist should paint Nature as she is, as such conventions had a good basis in art.[25] That belief in conventions kept Curtis and the Tribune apart from Democratic critics. Even after Curtis became an editor at Putnam’s and author of the Easy Chair for Harper’s Monthly, the Tribune continued to dismiss Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, from the School of Mr. Dusseldorf, as pleasurable in its stirring electricity, its causing the blood to flow quicker, and its sense of go-ahead movement but faulty in its conception of Washington as a “dashing and slashing” leader rather than the graver and more tree-like one favored by the Whigs.[26] The old masters (or their compositions) like the old trees were a tranquilizer or a compass to the rushing onward of the ship of art and the city.
The argument over Cropsey and Durand, and by extension how to achieve a harmonious Union, continued in 1852. Though the Tribune and Post both abhorred that year’s Fugitive Slave Act’s encroachment on Northern liberties, they still diverged in their interpretation of a unified landscape. The Evening Post supported Democrat Franklin Pierce for President; the Tribune reluctantly backed General Scott and the Whig platform. Curtis opened his review of the Academy exhibition, printed on the same page of the Tribune as Karl Marx’s report on current affairs in Germany, with Cropsey’s large paintings Spirit of War and Spirit of Peace, observing that the latter occupied the same spot as last year’s Southern Italy. As successors to Cropsey’s panorama of repressed revolutionary struggle, though, their explicitly allegorical or artificial character doomed them as images of unity for Curtis, though the pro-Compromise Herald thought them magnificent. Cropsey’s aim, to represent an abstraction, led him in Spirit of Peace to compose an unreal and conventional landscape that was quiet but not soothing, unlike Kensett’s tranquil genius. Nor was it powerful, like H.A. Capellen’s Norwegian Forest, where the dank, slimy, rotting, torpid, aged, rank and loathsome life of the forest effectively, but without explicit allegory, conveyed the dying Norse king.
Perhaps thinking of the previous year’s criticism of Cropsey in the Evening Mirror, Curtis provided as an example of a graceful landscape the single tree, standing with the harmonious consent of many trees around it in bold, beautiful groups. The Dusseldorf school, with its democratic appeal, wrongly wanted a tree that was an aggregate of infinitely reticulated leaves, and so their landscapes lacked the spirit and emotional power of a unified impression. Durand’s God’s Judgment on Gog, for Curtis, also failed, because Durand incorrectly inspired sympathy for the thousands of victims of God’s judgment, rather than for his lone Prophet. Curtis rejected democratic markers in other ways: Leutze was commonplace, Huntington was trivial (his portrait a mass of haberdashery) and too physical: the contrast in Huntington’s Tribute Money of a lovely Christ with the low, cunning, brutal, brawny visage of the Jew, failed to excite intellectual (moral) repulsion.[27]
…
The preference for sleeping children over wide-awake fathers, for patriarchal trees dominating a vast, varied and unified region, was intensified by the arrival of these new critics who were more or less aligned politically as Republicans and aesthetically with Ruskin’s challenge to conventional styles of art. When M. Anthony’s Monarch Oak, a fourteen-foot tree that entirely filled the canvas, was shown in an exhibition of British art as an example of pre-Raphaelitism, the genteel bohemian Adam Badeau, writing for the Democratic weekly Sunday Times, rejected it along with the opinions of the Tribune, Curtis, and Ruskin.[28] But the generation of Republican newspaper critics and satirists who dominated the 1850s, advocated (like Curtis) for an ideal of truthfulness that took vehement issue with the materialism of artists like Spencer and the Dusseldorf school.
[1] “City Intelligence,” Evening Post, April 7, 1851. The Post had in the previous month given Curtis’ travel book (written under his pseudonym Howadji) a good review, despite its transcendentalisms. W, “Encampment of the Caravan,” Evening Post, April 21, 1851, p. 1; “Our Landscape Painters,” Evening Post, April 23, 1851, p. 2; “Exhibition of the National Academy,” Evening Post, April 28, 1851, p. 2; “Exhibition of the National Academy,” Evening Post, May 7, 1851, p. 2. A reporter, though not one who advocated bloomers, also covered Oakes Smith’s lecture on Dress and Beauty, Evening Post, June 4 and 6, 1851.
[2] [William Young?], “National Academy of Design,” Albion, April 19, 1851, p. 189.
[3] “National Academy of Design,” Courier and Enquirer, April 12, 1851, p. 2; “National Academy of Design,” Courier and Enquirer, May 2, 1851, p. 2. The defense of sentiment came in the extended discussion of DeWitt Clinton Boutelle’s Trout Stream, a picture that like Spencer’s Jolly Washerwoman would be bought by the Art-Union, albeit at a low price.
[4] R, “The Academy of Design for the Evening Mirror,” Evening Mirror, June 28, 1851, p. 1. He adds at the end, in the interest of “impartiality,” that he agrees with Curtis that Church’s Deluge is artistic quackery. Church and Cropsey were both seen as part of Cole’s lineage, and both were favorites of the Art-Union (which the Evening Mirror generally supported), and abolitionist editors.
[5] Cropsey hoped to sell $20 shares in the painting, which would be engraved.
[6] “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, No. 1,” Irish News, April 19, 1856, p. 27; T.F. Meagher was editor and proprietor. The paper was not pro-slavery like the Herald and Day Book but Hard Shell Democrat, a supporter of both Fremont, Buchanan and filibustering in Central America. Southern landscapist T.A. Richards’ view of the scenery near N.P. Willis’ house is noticed right after Cropsey. Meagher had previously worked with Irish exile and southern rights’ advocate John Mitchel on the Citizen. John Savage as literary editor and James Roche as associate editor were mentioned in February 1857; a London correspondent was Mark Tapley. Roche would later work at the 4-cent weekly Phoenix in 1859 under John O’Mahony, an almost entirely political paper. John Savage earlier had contributed to the Lantern, edited by Irish comedian John Brougham.
[7] In 1854, Meagher brawled with the editor of Hughes’ Freeman’s Journal. The Herald, June 21, 1852, referred to Thomas Darcy McGee, who with Meagher and Thomas Devin Reilly started the Nation, an anti-clerical paper (the Herald’s own position on Catholicism), and the attack on them by the Freeman’s Journal. See also John M. Hearne and Rory T. Cornish, eds., Thomas Francis Meagher, The Making of an Irish American, (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2006), and Paul R. Wylie, The Irish General: Thomas Francis Meagher (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007).
[8] Henrietta Bennett was a musician; the Awakening was an anthem translated by Bryant. Casali edited the 8-cent weekly L’Eco d’Italia, and later the New York Crusader, which supported the Risorgimento but not socialism or Mazzini. He favored the Whig party and the Compromise of 1850, but like the Herald his hostility to what he saw as political and religious fanaticism (abolition, for example) would lead him to become a Buchanan Democrat. In 1859, he published a memorial urn design for Cosmo Bennett, son of J.G. Bennett.
[9] Herald, December 20, 1851. The Herald’s editors and reporters had been deliberately excluded from the press banquet welcoming Kossuth.
[10] W, “Statue of Calhoun,” Evening Mirror, November 8, 1850, p. 3. W, the day before, had written a critique of the feeble and absurd American Whig Review. “The Arts,” Express, July 29, 1850, p. 1, worried, with some irony, that leaving Calhoun’s arm holding the Constitution at the bottom of the sea signaled that his home state of South Carolina’s politics were a little one-sided.
[11] X, “Washington Correspondence,” Evening Post, December 25, 1850.
[12] “Healy’s Webster,” Express, October 2, 1851, p. 2. Earlier the Express had suggested that whether Webster was shown defending a foreign treaty or debating Hayne made no difference to the meaning of the picture. “Home Department: Mr. Healy’s Picture of Webster,” Commercial Advertiser, October 15, 1851, and “Home Department: Washington Crossing the Delaware,” Commercial Advertiser, November 4, 1851, p. 2.
[13] T.B. Read, “Webster,” Evening Post, October 27, 1852, p. 1; Herald, June 14, 1848. The Evening Post aligned Young Ireland supporter Read with Young America in calling his poetry refreshing compared to the cold manufactures of his cotemporaries.
[14] Herald, January 14, 1844. Many of the sixpenny and penny newspapers had a column titled “Gossip”; the Dispatch had “Gossip with and for the Ladies,” the Home Journal and the Times had “Art Gossip,” Literary World had “Fine Art Gossip,” the Spirit of the Times had “Art and Literary Gossip” (its theater gossip was written by saloon owner and satirical paper editor Corbyn), the Sun had “City Gossip,” the Evening Post had “Table Talk” (close kin to the “Editor’s Table” of the Knickerbocker or the “Easy Chair” of Harper’s Weekly, a location where the editor put disconnected musings, many of them scissored from other papers; some mastheads, like Brother Jonathan’s, showed the editor at his table and in his chair, perhaps suggesting that the character of the whole paper was gossip; the Courier and Enquirer in 1848 sharply rebuked Knickerbocker editor Clark for making his Table into “scurrilous gossip”), European gossip, and so on. There was “Chit-Chat with our Readers” and “Topics Astir,” “Jottings and Anecdotes and Gossip,” and “Things in New York.” These columns were not aimed at women per se. The same columns were often called “Items,” “Matters” or “Intelligence,” as “in Art Items,” “City Items,” “Foreign Intelligence,” “Art Matters,” “Artistic Intelligence” etc. Often the City Items (or gossip) editor commented on art exhibitions in town, and the tone varied from flippant to serious; “twaddle” was a frequent term to describe it. Gossip was indeed quite close to criticism. It was shallow and ignorant, the familiar slam at the cheap papers, interested in exposing local scandals and elites. Papers in the early 1860s like the Leader and World switched to titles like “World of Art” for essentially the same column, perhaps for that reason, to signal a move away from the local character of gossip.
[15] “Chit Chat from the National Intelligencer,” New Mirror, February 14, 1844. Willis, Letter, Home Journal, January 22, 1859.
[16] “National Academy of Design,” Herald, April 27, 1844, p. 1.
[17] “National Academy of Design,” New World, May 4, 1844, p. 561; the paper also had a “Dottings” column on art. Park Benjamin had retired as editor at the end of March of 1844, though he would resume towards the end of the year, but the new editors had been contributing since the paper’s start. Benjamin in 1850 would write pro-Compromise poetry for the Evening Mirror. Charles Lanman, Webster’s future private secretary and a regular New World contributor since 1843, published his recollections of Webster with a frontispiece of the politician sitting under a Marshfield tree, perhaps to deliberately reinforce his “uncompromising” efforts to save the Union. He also wrote for the National Intelligencer and as a good friend of William Sidney Mount, advised him on his posthumous portrait of Webster. The 1844 Academy reviewer called Lanman’s landscapes pleasing.
[18] * (Henry Ward Beecher), Independent, February 21, 1850. The anti-slavery newspaper’s editors were very hostile to the Compromise, but Beecher initially supported it. When land reformer, Democrat (elected to the state legislature in 1855) and Young America nativist Augustus Duganne wrote the poem “The Story of an Oak Tree” in 1862 as an allegory of the Union, in which the tree as the government sheltered freeborn souls, the Oak, quite unlike the oaks in Durand’s and his peers’ paintings or poems of peaceful repose, becomes (with divine assistance) quite active, crushing those who would drive a wedge into it.
[19] Rossiter painted Puritan minister John Davenport holding forth under it. The Charter Oak was also the name of a steamship from Rhode Island to New York in 1842-3. In 1860, still a conservative symbol, a piece of Connecticut’s Charter Oak would be made into a cane as a gift for New York Democrat Fernando Wood, by the democratic factory operatives of Colt’s Armory, for his efforts in the recent election to stand by “the old landmarks.” “City Intelligence,” Herald, April 13, 1860.
[20] George Harvey, letter, Evening Post, September 7, 1852; “The Oaks of England,” Albion, April 6, 1839; Sunday Mercury, April 30, 1843; Ione, “An Oak by the Way Side,” Knickerbocker, January 1838, p. 1; Ione, Reply, Knickerbocker, July 1838, p. 62; “Editor’s Table—National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker, June 1844, pp. 595-8.The Herald said Durand was right to exclude men from his painting; there are only cattle.
[21] “Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Anglo-American, May 25, 1844, p. 116. Bon Gaultier, “Young Scotland,” Anglo-American, November 25, 1843, p. 105. The Screamer, a regenerator of the various countries of Europe, perhaps refers to the Tribune. The Herald argued that the Tribune embraced Young America to try to keep them in the Whigs. “National Academy of Design, No. 1,” Times, March 31, 1854, p. 5, referring to Kensett’s Adirondack Scenery. Kensett would in 1859 paint Old Father Oak.
[22] Truth-Teller, March 8, 1845, p. 75. “Fine Arts: National Academy,” Republic, April 24, 1844. “National Academy of Design,” Courier and Enquirer, June 5, 1844, p. 1; they didn’t much admire Talbot or Cropsey. Query (James T. Brady), “Our own Art-Union,” Spirit of the Times, June 2, 1849, p. 175.
[23] “National Academy—Second Notice,” Tribune, May 27, 1844, p. 2. Jesse Talbot’s White Mountains was given a rave, as were Cropsey and Elliott. On criticism of Durand’s Solitary Oak, see Karen Georgi, “Making Nature Culture’s Other: 19th Century American Landscape Painting and Critical Discourse,” Word & Image 19 (July-Sept 2003) 198-213, and Linda S. Ferber et al., Kindred Spirits: Asher B. Durand and the American Landscape (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2007).
[24] Angela Miller, Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875 (Cornell University Press, 1993) 13, argues convincingly that the landscape expressing repose also expressed an ideal Whig social order.
[25] “The Fine Arts: Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” Tribune, April 22, 1853, p. 6. “The Fine Arts: Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, IV,” Tribune, May 8, 1852, p. 5. “The Fine Arts: Pre-Raphaelitism,” Tribune, July 10, 1852, p. 6.
[26] “The Fine Arts: The Washington Gallery in the Art-Union Rooms,” Tribune, April 8, 1853, p. 6.
[27] The Tribune in 1852 had unkindly claimed that Fuller’s pro-Compromise paper had just 440 subscribers. On the controversies of this year, see Gail E. Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-Nineteenth-Century Painting (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000) 153-200, and Miller, Empire of the Eye, 107-136.
[28] Adam Badeau, “Pre-Raphaelitism,” The Vagabond (New York: Rudd & Carleton, 1859) 235-240. Badeau admired Edwin Forrest for his power, and was critical of Curtis’ political speeches on behalf of Fremont. See also Susan P. Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism and its Reception in the Nineteenth Century (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), David Howard Dickason, The Daring Young Men: The Story of the American Pre-Raphaelites (New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1970 reissue), Roger Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840-1900 (Harvard University Press, 1967).
On Church's Heart of the Andes and the press:
The future was encapsulated by Frederic Church’s Heart of the Andes, the sensation of 1859. Church, with his studio in the Tenth Street building, was ensconced at the center of the new art world. The painting’s basis in the writings of revered scientist Alexander von Humboldt was well known, and while von Humboldt’s anti-slavery views may have raised flags for some (as might Leutze’s lengthy endorsement of the painting in Home Journal before it was exhibited), Humboldt’s idea of a “kosmos” had an expansionist character that appealed to Young America democrats too. The Times literature and art editor gave an anecdote suggesting its call westward: a little group gathered in front of the painting that caused a watching Reverend to exclaim “What an age is this for young men!” The men in the group included Daniel Huntington and George W. Curtis, aged 44 and 36, respectively; literal youth was not required for a go-ahead man. The Times reviewer (who also admired the unclassical White Captive by Church’s close friend, sculptor Palmer) embraced the picture’s vastness and amplitude of nature in her grandest forms, without the minuteness of the “dead-alive pre-Raphaelites.” Cook too had compared Church in the Times to the Pre-Raphaelites: Church painted precisely what he saw, not what he thought he ought to see, and by doing this found the truth that has been made a lie by the Pre-Raphaelites, not the truth of a photograph but pure pictorial truth to the perceptions of a human being.[1]
The National (pro-southern) Democrat Leader, though one editor thought the color in the painting a touch too Northern, anointed Church as the best American painter. A Republican himself, Church’s patron and South America traveling companion Cyrus Field had influential Democratic allies, including artist-inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, who had run for Congress from New York in 1854 as a Democrat. The Leader noted that the artists who stand in front of Heart of the Andes talk of Church’s tricks, because they don’t understand how to achieve what he did. Blanche d’Artois’ description in the paper, however, rather than arguing like Cook for Church’s pure pictorial truth, more openly pointed to the composition. She singled out the spotlit oak tree for praise, and the way the water had a vital spirit that seeks of itself its proper level, without being pushed by obstacles; it was a grand National Poem. Church had claimed the whole continent for democracy’s manifest destiny. The Cosmopolitan Art Journal concurred. Though editor Orville J. Victor liked artists who brought out the gentle, harmonizing—even religious, and Church was deeply religious—repose of American scenery, including Huntington and Talbot, he agreed it was a Poem, and the finest ever painted in the country.[2]
Joining in this expansionist interpretation, the critic in the Lincoln-Republican religious penny paper the World (called by its political ally Vanity Fair “dismal and dreary” “in a coma” and “fossiliferous”), admired Church’s styleless style, his camera-like eye, that could so seemingly naturally unify whatever he saw. The World’s sentiments about territorial expansion (it very strongly backed Garibaldi in Italy, perhaps for anti-Catholic reasons as much as democratic ones) are indicated by their Washington correspondent’s condemnation of Powell’s portrayal of the Indians in his Capitol Rotunda painting as far too idealized, civilized and refined to represent actual untutored barbarians; these proud monarchs, lovely squaws, and timid chiefs are painted lies, and enlightened posterity will laugh at those who embraced them.[3]
Vanity Fair, though a Lincoln paper too, mocked this Young America expansionist interpretation. Instead of the Sunday Dispatch’s motto that “no pent up Utica contracts our powers,” they ran a story with the mocking opening tag “No pent up cuticle contracts our powers/For all we want we’ll grab—and call it ours.” Church’s Heart of the Andes, Vanity Fair predicted, will be followed by artists doing the Pericardium of the Alleghanies and the Lungs of the Windward Islands. Church himself will next be up in a balloon to paint the meteor for Lieutenant Matthew Maury, a protégé of Young America Democrat Stephen Douglas.[4]
The conservative Unionist Knickerbocker, which had called an Elliott portrait of a pro-Compromise Whig governor the epitome of a progressive, locomotive race, born for action, admired the “Progressive spirit” in Church mocked by Vanity Fair. A friend who “has written much upon art” had dismissed Church as lacking unity, frittering away his abilities on mere detail, but editor Clark was enraptured by Heart of the Andes. The Knickerbocker did not embrace annexing Mexico, Central America, or even Canada, but welcomed transcontinental expansion; gazing at the vastness of Niagara had similarly inspired such thoughts of the American republic’s aspiring, expanding youth, stretching forward in a career of moral, intellectual and territorial expansion.[5] The politically allied Spirit of the Times agreed that Church’s Heart of the Andes was a triumph, admired by both the cultivated and spontaneous.[6] Its editor’s own 1860 painting of Niagara, a subject previously tackled by Church to international acclaim, received enthusiastic endorsements from fellow Democrats the Herald and Express.
Thorpe took over Porter’s Spirit of the Times in early 1859.[7] He had been writing for Frank Leslie’s, which though it had bohemian contributors from the Saturday Press, like the Knickerbocker was unsympathetic to abolitionists.[8] Thorpe was critical of Curtis’ transcendentalist friends Cropsey, Cranch and Hicks for losing their originality, and even more so of Stillman’s absurd Pre-Raphaelitism, calling him a lunatic in an asylum (fig. 48). When describing the exhibition of British Pre-Raphaelites in New York, he squeezed terms like “insult,” “disgusting,” “brutalized,” “hideous,” “demoralization,” “depraved,” “decay,” “corruption,” “wretched,” and “repulsive” into comments on just one painting. Like the Saturday Press writers’ interest in natural bodies but from a more conservative point of view, he worried that Academy artists’ prettiness and delicacy threatened to emasculate American art.[9]
By contrast, the Republican Evening Post, with its ties to Durand and Stillman at the Crayon, had been critical of Church: in 1856 his South American landscapes were affected, superficial, finical, a clever sham from an artist who sees only the outside of outside things; in 1857 his Andes of Ecuador looked like a studio picture, with an unpleasantly overpowering dusty glare that choked and stifled. Durand, by contrast, had none of Church’s false style of fireworks and theatrical, tawdry spectacle. The Post in its review of 1859’s National Academy preferred pre-Raphaelite painter W.T. Richards’ blackberry bush. So not surprisingly, though enraptured (a common response) and intoxicated by the Heart of the Andes’ emotion and unity (odes to it appeared in the paper), the Post ended by rejecting the painting’s frame, meant to suggest a
window, as too theatrical, suggesting an inartistic pretense that a picture is “real.” In this it joined the anti-slavery and pro-British Albion and Home Journal. The Home Journal was also allied with the Crayon, and its critic had called Stillman an earnest searcher after truth. When the Times suggested the Post in its comments on Church was copying the staunchly British Albion’s ideas, the Post in turn accused the Times editor of being a follower of Daniel Sickles, a prominent Buchanan Democrat, whom Meagher of the Irish News had defended against murder charges.[10]
The critique of Church’s theatricalism was renewed later in 1859, after Church’s agent had successfully exhibited Heart of the Andes for months (earning up to $20,000). Church had exhibited the painting outside the National Academy because of its commercial potential, a decision that would have frustrated his Academy peers. An anonymous correspondent wrote to Porter’s Spirit of the Times, emphasizing the resemblance of the advertising mania that surrounded his picture to the other commercial exhibitions on nearby streets. The Spirit of the Times, like most of the weeklies, had various columns about walking down Broadway, or other neighborhoods, describing the sights. Before Curtis became stationary in Harper’s Easy Chair, he too was a Lounger (kin to a loafer) on the streets. The genre constructed an almost always male urban insider, privy to the secrets, high and low, of the city, like the style of the penny press itself. In one such Spirit of the Times series, the “Duke” admired a “splendid painting,” really a banner for General Tom Thumb, outside of Barnum’s Museum, suggesting it had more meaning than some pictures in the Art-Union.[11] In doing so, Duke establishes his own elite standing, even as he aimed to undermine the pretensions of the crowd’s connoisseurship, by arguing (sardonically) for the superiority of Barnum to the picturers admired by “down easterners” at the Art-Union. The paper’s correspondent in 1859 was still working this same line of attack.
Rather than identifying professional artists like Huntington or Elliott (who appears in the Knickerbocker’s account) as the painting’s audience, he described the crowd of admirers in front of Heart of the Andes as only having familiarity with newspaper critics’ jargon, rather than professional understanding. In tandem with approval from this unduly democratic audience, he pointed to Church’s failure to “harmonize” his sketches of individual parts; the Crayon (whose critique was reprinted in the Saturday Press) agreed it lacked unity. The Saturday Press, as it had for Stillman’s criticism of genteel sculpture, elaborated this argument: Heart of the Andes was a “sensation” picture, an inanimate body without soul and feeling, because “trifling incidents” dispersed its sublimity. In idealist reforming fashion, the Saturday Press critic preferred Tenth Street studio artist R.W. Hubbard’s Mount Mansfield, Vermont, which, according to the Evening Post, clothed material forms with thought.[12]
The issue of the commercial self-interest of artists, not just the commercialism of art institutions familiar in the rants in the penny press, had become a critical tool for bohemian radicals and pre-Raphaelites as well as conservative Democrats, who wanted to advance a political and aesthetic program that departed from the mainstream.[13] Painter-critic Eugene Benson offered a solution to the question of how to, with Whitman, defy genteel decorum while still preserving the artistic from taking on the too-democratic Nature of naked babies. Writing as Proteus for the Republican, anti-slavery and religious Commercial Advertiser, Benson argued Church’s wonderful powers of imitation and honesty were not purchased at the expense of depth of thought. Benson acknowledged that Church’s finical style was like needlework, which is most effective with ladies (who in their silks and satins dismiss thought; the Saturday Press had associated Church with the expansiveness of hoop skirts) and the masses, but the educated eye recognizes his subtleties. His originality was in his selection and treatment, which rivaled Turner’s in splendor, though his genius was not as lawless.[14] As the reference to Turner suggests, Benson was sympathetic to the pre-Raphaelites, but his endorsement of Church’s genius, a quality he also granted his friends Eastman Johnson and Sanford Gifford (whose style the Tribune compared to embroidery), rested on the artists’ appeal to corn-huskers—Johnson’s 1860 Corn-Husking featured Lincoln graffiti—as much as art critics.
[1] “Literary and Art Items,” Times, June 13, 1859, p. 2; “Pictures and Statuary on Exhibition in New York,” Times, November 24, 1859, p. 4; Cook, “National Academy Exhibition,” Times, May 27, 1857, p. 2.
[2] “Church’s Heart of the Andes,” Leader, May 14, 1859, p. 6. “Studies of Life—American Painters,” Leader, April 13, 1861, p. 3. “Church’s Heart of the Andes,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, June 1859, p. 133. O.J. Victor, “Character in Scenery,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, December 1858, 9-11. It was Kensett, a longstanding favorite at the Post and Tribune, who Victor identified as prone to repetition in his Catskill landscapes, with their everlasting stream and inevitable hill. “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, No. 1,” Irish News, April 19, 1856, p. 27, which dismissed Huntington, joked that Kensett must be a Hard (conservative) Democrat, because of his delight in rocks, but then explained that his devoted study of the actual, like Cropsey and Church, gave a poetry to his rocks, which underscores the falsity of the popular expression “more poetry than truth.”
[3] Manton Marble, formerly of the Evening Post, and two former Courier and Enquirer editors, R.G. White and Spaulding, as well as Cummings and Edmund Stedman (a Saturday Press writer) were in charge of the World. “Twilight in the Wilderness,” World, June 20, 1860; p. 5, “From our correspondent in Washington,” World, June 29, 1860, p. 2.
[4] Vanity Fair, July 7, 1860. “Boston and its Pictures,” Vanity Fair, December 8, 1860, p. 288. “Whereabouts and Whatabouts of our Artists,” Vanity Fair, August 25, 1860, p. 104.
[5] “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker, June 1852, pp. 563-568, and “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker, July 1853, pp. 93-97, “Gossip with Readers and Correspondents,” Knickerbocker, September 1859, p. 654. “Thoughts of Niagara,” Knickerbocker 22 (September 1843) 193-196, 194. A “correspondent fair,” a woman named JKL, had dismissed Spencer’s women as too low.
[6] “Church’s Heart of the Andes,” Porter’s Spirit of the Times, May 14, 1859, p. 1; “National Academy of Design, No. 3,” Spirit of the Times, May 14, 1859, p. 3. Editor William Porter’s portrait was painted by Charles L. Elliott in the same year Elliott did former locofoco mayor Fernando Wood; only Porter’s was shown at the Academy.
[7] In the 1850s, there were three different Spirits. William Porter, who had an early association with John Inman and N.P. Willis, had edited the original journal, but in 1856 he was bought out by printer John Richards, who kept the name Spirit of the Times. Porter and George Wilkes (of the National Police Gazette) then started a rival Porter’s Spirit of the Times, which kept that name after Porter died and Thorpe took over. When Wilkes left, he started Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times.
[8] His partner was Edward E. Jones, an early partner of William Porter’s. Ada Clare and A.F. Banks were contributors. Wilkes’ Spirit of the Times called his enemy and rival, Thorpe’s paper, a lumbering $5-a-year slow old coach, filled with lame passengers and old fogies; Wilkes’ paper was $3 a year. If Thorpe supported the old-line Whigs and the National Democrats, Wilkes like the Herald endorsed not just Buchanan but Fernando Wood, who like Wilkes had ties to the locofocos rather than the genteel Democrats. Wilkes in his letters from Europe (he visited to cover a boxing match between the American and British champions, and his letters were published in the Herald and Tribune, and cited elsewhere) condemned genteel rhetoric which insisted that the debaucheries of a profligate mythology or naked allegories in fine art were refined or elevated. In 1861, he favored peaceful secession.
[9] “National Academy of Design, No. 1,” Spirit of the Times, April 30, 1859, p. 133; “Fine Arts,” Spirit of the Times, October 15, 1859, p. 1.
[10] Evening Post, April 30, 1859, p. 2. “Characteristic,” Evening Post, May 3, 1859, p. 2. The Post had been accusing a Times sub-editor of favoring Sickles, who was allied with Buchanan and Bennett at the Herald. Henry Tuckerman wrote one poem to Church; T.B. Read's poem, p. 1, May 7, 1859. “Church’s Picture,” Home Journal, May 14, 1859, “National Academy of Design,” Home Journal, June 4, 1859.
[11] The Duke, “Broadway and its Sights,” Spirit of the Times, December 30, 1848; The Duke, “Broadway and its Sights,” Spirit of the Times, March 24, 1849, p. 54. G.G. Foster’s New York in Slices for the Tribune was an influential model, but it had a more reforming cast to it than most such accounts. Henry W. Herbert, an anti-slavery Whig and a regular contributor to the magazine as Frank Forester as well as an assistant to Porter before Wilkes joined in 1856, was well known to come from an aristocratic British family. He was a friend of James T. Brady, who contributed as Query, and who mocked the Art-Union’s own vehicle for advertising, the Bulletin, “Our Own Art-Union,” Spirit of the Times, June 2, 1849, p. 175. See also Dell Upton, “The Urban Ecology of Art in Antebellum New York,” in TransAtlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790-1860, ed. Andrew Hemingway and Alan Wallach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015) 49-66.
[12] The Saturday Press dismissed Richards’ blackberry bush as only a blackberry bush, and T.B. Read as painting monsters. “Heart of the Andes,” Saturday Press, May 7, 1859. “Art Items,” Saturday Press, May 28, 1859, p. 1, suggested hoop skirt vendor Douglas & Sherwood should buy the painting. “Imitation in Art,” Saturday Press, June 2, 1860, p. 2; “Imitation Again,” Saturday Press, June 9, 1860; “National Academy of Design,” Evening Post, May 15, 1860, p. 1.
[13] “Fine Arts in New York,” Herald, November 24, 1860, p. 6. “Fine Arts in New York,” Herald, November 24, 1860, p. 2, observed that leading painters like Church, Kensett, Durand, Huntington and Elliott enjoyed social positions equivalent to European artists, and an aggregate income of more than $300,000.
[14] Proteus, “Our Artists,” Spectator, March 19, 1861, p. 1; Proteus, “National Academy of Design, No. 3,” Spectator, April 5, 1861, p. 1. On Gifford, “World of Art,” excerpting Tribune, “Legitimate Art,” Leader, February 18, 1860. As Proteus, New Yorker Benson wrote on art for the Commercial Advertiser in 1861 (and probably earlier), as well as for other dailies. Robert J. Scholnick, “Culture or Democracy: Whitman, Eugene Benson, and the Galaxy,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 13:4 (1996) 189-198.