Unpublished portions of Chapter 1 of The Politics of Art Criticism
On James Shegogue and other Knickerbocker artists--C. C. Ingham, F. Anelli, and also JK Fisher (chapter 1):
But it was not just the Herald who in 1838 had begun to sound the drums about illiberality amongst the managers of the National Academy; the Whig penny Age (run by men of ‘family and property’) attacked the Academy members for refusing works of surprising beauty in order to give their own botches a place, singling out Charleston-born James Shegogue as an example of the latter. The $3 a year Ladies Companion editor didn’t name names, but urged its readers to frown down the managers of the Academy for their selections. The penny Daily Whig refused to offer a criticism of the art, but cheerfully joined the chorus about the Academy’s bad management and recommended judges with no connection be appointed, if indifferent work by celebrities like Cole were to ever be refused.[1] The Mirror, under subeditor Epes Sargeant, dismissed George Linen’s peculiarly realistic portraits in favor of genre paintings by Mount and even Quidor, but had only brief comments for most of the senior Academicians; Inman’s portrait of actor Edwin Forrest--or perhaps Forrest himself--was gross. The American Monthly Magazine thought Shegogue's work (along with ones by some Academicians) should be hidden.[2]
The Evening Post, an ally of the Academy, in a note on the opening likely written by Bryant (though Parke Godwin had joined as an editor in 1836), by contrast praised Academy stalwarts Cole, Durand, Inman (for his portrait of Bryant's friend, Edwin Forrest), William Page and Charles Ingham, and in a later review sent by an anonymous contributor added to the list Shegogue and some students of Inman.
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The Post’s tactful suggestion for reform was echoed by other allies. ER in the Commercial Advertiser organized the review by artist's rank, which though seemingly deferential, operated to suggest a falling off in quality of the officers’ work. But he lavished praise on James Frothingham’s (a Council member) nine portraits, including one of a Whig politician, Joe Hoxie, and liked Inman’s “usual captivating style,” which some critics saw as slipping that year. The Whig Express had two contributors, one of whom who positioned a somewhat younger generation (Daniel Huntington and William Page) against the more established Cole and Inman. Neutral Tint, a name that recalls an earlier critic hostile to the Academy's governing officers, Middle-Tint, was the Express’s second critic. He preferred the generation of Trumbull and Vanderlyn to the present officers, and attacked the members of the current establishment, though with a defense of Shegogue, a favorite of the paper.[3]
James Hamilton Shegogue, a student of Vanderlyn and a future Academy officer, though financially successful, would continue to be controversial. Receiving a commission for a portrait of Whig mayor Aaron Clark (who also sat to Henry Inman) later that year, probably increased suspicions that he benefitted from political and insider favoritism. His picture of Clark was lavishly praised by Whig journals like the Express and the Sunday Morning News, the latter of which had recommended that the National Academy be replaced by a university, as a classical education would help remove artists from the trickeries of trade. The Sunday Morning News described the presentation of Shegogue’s “splendid painting” at Clark’s home, the picture itself showing Clark public-spiritedly addressing an assembly in a finished but "modest" composition. The “scurrilous” Truth-Teller, a Democratic Irish Catholic weekly, explained that in fact it showed Clark resting his hand on the official documents in which he recommended an armed police force control Wild Strangers (Irish) and Foreigners. The Truth-Teller recommends Shegogue arrange the details in better keeping with the truth, showing the Mayor balancing on a Lottery Wheel while directing a crew of brutal police officers to execute cruel and barbarous abuses.[4]
Shegogue's patrons (who would include both Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, William Townsend of the Express, and Moses Beach, editor of the Sun) and his style, which the Express critic, probably James F. Otis, praised as abounding in sentiment and grace, may have turned the Herald against him (terrible; a failure; Tom Thumbish).[5] (fig. 14) But the future Academy officer's style, which was not too different from Inman's and other popular portraitists in the Academy, also caused him trouble with the influential editor and critic Charles F. Briggs, who though initially an ardent Whig, became an advocate of generational revolt in successive journals (Broadway Journal, Putnam’s, Harper’s, Times), and as early as 1845 bruisingly said that every visitor felt Art had been done wrong by allowing Shegogue (by then a neighbor of Durand’s) to exhibit. In 1850, Shegogue was still being singled out by a Democratic paper (Dispatch) for his poor pictures, in part because he joined Ingham, a senior academician, in gaining a court injunction against the election of new members to the Academy. By then his style was even more clearly marked with what the Tribune’s critic (George William Curtis) would call, in an echo of
Figure 14. James Hamilton Shegogue, Charles Yale Beach and His Sister Emma Beach, 1854, oil on canvas, Bartow-Pell Mansion Museum. The children's grandfather, Moses Yale Beach, married Benjamin Day's sister, and took over the Sun, followed by his son, Moses Sperry Beach.
the Herald’s view of romantic sentiment in 1838, too much resemblance to stories in Ladies Repositories and Mantua-Making Magazines.[6]
By 1839, the Herald had increasing competition from its Whig rivals for biting commentary on both the National Academy and the typically romantic style of its officers. Horace Greeley’s weekly Whig New-Yorker in 1838 had a review by editor and “celebrated forger” (as the Herald and the Sun called him) W. Matlock Eldridge, which except for calling Inman’s portrait of actor and Democrat Forrest unmanly, was mostly blandly supportive, to which Greeley added praise of the public service the Academy had performed for art. In 1839, though, the unnamed New-Yorker editor writing on art has turned on the Academy as feeble and inefficient, and cites the new Apollo Association, founded by an artist on the plan of an art union, as promising to curb the “shabby genteel” Academy.[7] The New-Yorker emphasized that year's exhibition’s overly-democratic character, its “crowd of ugly phizzes” and “tavern signposts;” that a sailor was given the dignity of a full-length portrait is wrong; that (Democratic) Governor Stevens Mason of Michigan (painted by Academician Allan Smith Jr.) is wearing a flannel shirt is indecent, and even Henry Inman tends to paint people who need to be washed. The good-looking Colonel William Stone (fig. 16), editor of the Commercial Advertiser, looks up in astonishment at a "vile daub” of popular novelist Professor Joseph H. Ingraham (painted by newcomer D. Bronson) above him, whose head is pregnant with horrible ideas. Durand ought to return to engraving, Ingham’s effort at a wilderness landscape looks like uncut velvet, and the critic lists other caricatures of nature—though Mount (truth truth truth) and Robert Weir (impressive) escape censure.
The Whig Sunday Morning News complained about the dullness of having two hundred portraits out of three hundred paintings, perhaps hinting at concern about artists’ too business-like practices and imitation of commercial styles, and warned that the plethora of portraits offers ample scope for sarcasm and abuse, which, as will be seen, was true. But editor Samuel Jenks Smith goes on to more or less agree with the New-Yorker about the bad taste of allowing sailors and flannel shirts in, while still defending the Academy’s mainstay artists. The much abused C.C. Ingham’s Great Adirondack Pass is to Smith very tasteful (most critics complained that for a picture painted on the spot—it included the painter in it—the effect was manicured, rather than sublime), Weir excellent (opinions on his Indian Captive mostly hinged on the question of how defeated and miserable, or noble and stoic, the Indian warrior portrayed in it ought to be), Durand and Inman are effective; Browere (associated with critics of the Academy) poor and Mount chose an unattractive subject (his Boys Trapping was a jab at the Whigs).[8]
The New-Yorker’s Whiggish concern about the breach in aristocratic standards at the Academy was reiterated, albeit from a different angle, in that year’s Knickerbocker. Editor Lewis Gaylord Clark usually penned National Academy reviews, but that year he turned the columns over to John Kenrick Fisher, a landscape painter who had studied at the Royal Academy. By 1835, Fisher was in New York and already critical of the Academy, as in a “letter” to American artists in the Mirror that proposed a cooperative exhibition plan that would destroy the Academy’s essentially “aristocratick” aping of British models. Fisher in the Knickerbocker argued that American artists had been corrupted by European influence, particularly the modern Italian manner of excessive brightness, smoothness and minuteness, a style that for him seemed aimed at commercial success. (fig. 15) Durand and Weir get the gentlest treatment from him, joined by landscape painters Thomas Doughty and English artist Andrew Richardson, who were also popular with the Herald; the rest of the artists, mostly portrait painters, were unhealthy, infected, and degenerate.[9] The Sun, perhaps in accord with his dislike of a smooth and minute style, scolded lady and gentlemen spectators for crowding too close to the paintings and rubbing their noses against them (the New-Yorker had in fact suggested doing just this for inspecting Ingham’s portraits), as it did not improve their finish. A more "radical" contributor to the Evening Post, Ultra Marine, like Fisher wrote detailed reviews in which he condemned placing the “most gaudy subjects,” evidence of artistic presumption, side by side with “modest and far superior works of true genius.”[10] Though Ultra Marine thought the Academy was trying to turn the multitude's natural inclinations for tinsel and vicious displays toward something holier, purer and nobler, his dislike of the mixed display is akin to the New-Yorker's discomfort with sailors or to Fisher's hostility to Italians.
Figure 15. Francesco Anelli, Portrait of Garret Decker Hasbrouck, c. 1838, oil. Gerlando Marsiglia and Spiridione Gambardella are the other Italian artists to whom Fisher seems to refer; Gambardella emigrated to Britain, but Marsiglia would later partner in Clark's Old Master gallery. Shegogue painted a portrait for A.B. Hasbrouk in 1845.
The comic and usually more Democratic papers instead took up the position that the Academy both let in trash and excluded merit, because of its aristocratic bent. Paul Pry, a weekly (“Hope I Don’t Intrude” was the facetious motto) edited by a former Herald contributor, published by Herald engraver Elton and printed by Applegate (who competed with Snowden of the Courier and Enquirer for theater printing), had an extended review of the Academy’s “enormous quantity of rubbish.” The writer was ruthless, dismissing younger artist Christian Mayr as an imbecile, Andrew Richardson’s landscapes as frightful, Ingham as a wretched abortion, Oddie the amateur as crude, Browere wrong to think himself humorous, and on in that vein. Thomas Sully’s portrait of Mrs. Wood, an actress who had been embroiled in a dispute with the Courier and Enquirer editor but who was favored by Bennett, and Weir’s Indian Captive, are the only saving graces. T.W. Whitley, a landscapist who like J.K. Fisher would become a gadfly in the art world, had a view in New Jersey that was “shocking, absolutely shocking.” Elbridge Paige’s Sunday Morning Visiter, another comic weekly, concurred that both the Academy and the newspaper criticism of it was “rather an aristocratic concern” (about 112 artists contributed about 296 paintings) and any obscure artist will suffer accordingly.[11] Fisher too had suggested that American artists were dependent on puffs.
[1] Lewis Lewis and William M. Watt, 131 Nassau St., edited the Whiggish Age, May 19, 1838; on Shegogue, May 15, 1838, p. 2. "Editors' Table," [William W. Snowden] Ladies Companion, 9 (June 1838) 100; "Exhibition of Pictures-Criticism," Daily Whig, May 23, 1838, p. 2, eds. Rufus Dawes and S.J. Burr.
[2] "The Fine Arts: National Academy," Mirror, June 9, 1838, p. 398; June 23, 1838, p. 414, July 7, 1838, p. 15. "Exhibition of National Academy," American Monthly Magazine (May 1838) p. 469. Park Benjamin's co-editor was Robert Walsh.
[3] An editor, "Diogenes and his Lantern," Commercial Advertiser, May 1, 1838, p. 2, had dismissed Frothingham's spiritless portrait of Daniel Webster. ER, "National Academy of Design No. 1," Commercial Advertiser, May 11, 1838, p. 1, "National Academy of Design No. 4," May 22, 1838 p. 2, "National Academy of Design No. 5," May 25, 1838, p. 2. IK, "For the New York Express--Academy of Design," Express, May 4, 1838, p. 2. IK probably wasn’t IK Marvel, New Englander Donald Grant Mitchell, who H.J. Raymond recruited to write about Saratoga and other resorts for the Courier and Enquirer in 1847, though he described himself humorously as a dab at crayon drawing, and in 1858 was lecturing on “How to Look at Pictures.” He didn’t graduate from Yale until 1841. Neutral Tint, "National Academy," Express, May 11, 1838, p. 2. Thomas S. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy, (Philadelphia: G.W. Childs, 1865) p. 76, 81, identified Middle-Tint the Second, who preferred Quidor and Mount to Inman, as sculptor John H.I. Browere, whose wife, daughters and sons were artists; a daughter painted a portrait of editor Noah. Cummings, p. 154, suggests another "Middle-Tint" (Browere's son, Albertus?) wrote a later attack on Inman, “National Academy: The Tee-Total Depravity School of Painting,” Herald, May 22, 1839, p. 2.
[4] “National Academy,” Sunday Morning News, May 13, 1838, p. 1; “Mayor Clark and His Portrait,” Truth-Teller, September 29, 1838. “The Presentation of the Mayor’s Portrait,” Sunday Morning News, September 23, 1838, p. 2. The locofoco New Era, March 31, 1841, called banker Aaron Clark a “thing who sold lottery tickets for a living.”
[5] [James F. Otis?], “Art Matters,” Express, March 17, 1847, p. 2. "National Academy," Herald, May 8, 1843, p. 2, "National Academy," Herald, May 26, 1844, p. 1; "National Academy," Herald, April 21, 1845, p. 2; "National Academy," Herald, April 22, 1845, p. 2, "National Academy," Herald, May 4, 1845, p. 2. By " The Fine Arts: National Academy," Herald, March 24, 1855, p. 8, the critic classes him (like Mount, Flagg and numerous others) as worthy of notice.
[6] [Charles F. Briggs] "20th Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design," Broadway Journal, April 26, 1845, p. 257. Charles Loring Elliott had emerged by the 1850s for the Dispatch and Tribune as the preferred realist counterpoint to the style of Shegogue and his generation: [Walt Whitman?], "National Academy," Sunday Dispatch, June 2, 1850, p. 4. G.W.C., "The Fine Arts: Exhibition of the National Academy, part VI," Tribune, June 21, 1851, p. 6. See also Stephanie W. Fay, “American Pictorial Rhetoric: Describing Works of Art in Fiction and Art Criticism, 1820-1875,” (PhD diss., U.C. Berkeley, 1982).
[7] Greeley (*) refused to publish a letter from Enzel attacking the Academy, New-Yorker, June 2, 1838 p. 173; "Fine Arts," New-Yorker, February 2, 1839, "Apollo Association," New-Yorker, February 16, 1839; "Exhibition at National Academy," New-Yorker, April 28, 1839, p. 109; "Exhibition at National Academy," New-Yorker, May 11, 1839, p. 125. Dr. W.M. Eldridge’s (also spelled Eldredge) signature was a dagger. He did the city department until he retired in 1838; the Courier and Enquirer cites the American that he was also a contributor to “infamous" print accounts of “fashionable” entertainments. In 1839, given contributor Henry J. Raymond’s involvement with the Apollo Association, he might be a candidate for a review so critical of the Academy, but his style was usually more measured. Park Benjamin, a Mount enthusiast, was an ascerbic writer and in charge of the literary department until October 1839. Elbridge G. Paige (aka Dow, Jr.), an editor at the New Yorker and the Sunday Morning Visiter in 1839, does not seem to be involved in writing about art. O.A. Bowe was also on staff, as was E. Burke Fisher.
[8] [Samuel Jenks Smith?], "National Academy of Design," Sunday Morning News, May 5, 1839, p. 2, and May 12, 1839, p. 2.
[9] J.K. Fisher, "Letter to American Artists," Mirror, April 4, 1835, p. 318. JKF, "The Fine Arts: The National Academy of Design," Knickerbocker, June 1839, p. 545; see also p. 553. American artists, according to Fisher, a self-proclaimed outsider, have also been spoiled by uncritical puffs by their friends, with Inman’s student William H. Powell is singled out as an example. In "The Fine Arts in the U.S.," Knickerbocker, July 1839, p. 39, Thomas R. Hofland seems to agree with Fisher, insofar as he suggests that one can find untainted American artists free from these diseases (imitation of European models) in the west, though the editor, Lewis Gaylord Clark, would continue to resist such (mostly Democratic) cultural nationalist arguments.
[10] "Looking at the Paintings," Sun, May 17, 1839; Bryant’s initial notice of the exhibition, Evening Post, May 3, 1839, was genially approving. Ultra Marine, "For the Evening Post--National Academy of Design," Evening Post, May 14, 1839, p. 2.
[11] The 3-cent weekly was edited by Wardle Corbyn, 104 Nassau St, though it advertised for a "fighting editor," who must be 6-foot tall, know low slang and be unmoved by obscenity, in order to show up the vices and peccadilloes of backsliding gentry. "National Academy," Paul Pry, May 18, 1839, p. 2, May 25, 1839. Paul Pry in 1840 was considerably less satirical and covered the exhibition in more depth, as part of a campaign for a public (paid for with tax money) museum, a movement that several of the Democratic papers (or their contributors) took up. "National Academy of Design," Sunday Morning Visiter, May 12, 1839, also a 3-cent weekly.