Unpublished portions of Chapter 3 of The Politics of Art Criticism
On the True Sun (chapter 3):
The penny True Sun, which claimed in 1845 to have the second widest circulation in the city, joined in Briggs’ sentiments. Its editors had ties to Young America, and the penny American Republican, the nativist party organ, praised the paper. Editor Simeon De Witt Bloodgood, as his name suggests, was from an aristocratic Knickerbocker family, and though a Harrison and Tyler Whig, was a friend of Bryant, and supported the New-York Gallery of Fine Arts. Like Briggs and Duyckinck he was a patron of William Page (and a cousin of Herman Melville), and he was friendly with Henry C. Watson and Park Benjamin, the editor of the New World. But Bloodgood had partnered with artisan printers on the paper, and their influence may’ve pushed the paper toward Young America. Eight former compositors and a foreman at Moses Beach’s Sun had left in 1843 after a pay cut, to start their own paper. The True Sun accordingly was Whig in the way that the Herald (former Herald editor Thomas Kettell worked at the True Sun) was: it opposed the Tammany organization still under Van Buren’s control, but its Washington correspondent was a Democrat, it endorsed Polk on expansion and the war, it had a regular column from a Democrat who wanted land reform, and it was hostile to the Clay- and Seward-supporting Tribune and abolition. Strongly favoring what it called the Anglo-Saxon race, the True Sun praised Mayor Harper and supported both the Art-Union (where Briggs was a manager from 1842-1845) and the Gallery of Fine Arts. For the latter, like Briggs, they earnestly hoped that the Gallery would acquire a complete series of pictures from the American school of art, but departing from Briggs, they proposed buying from Inman's student Daniel Huntington, a specialist in Protestant religious painting, as well as the more impassioned (forward, invincibly forward, as the Home Journal put it) historical painter Emanuel Leutze. By contrast, the rival Sun argued that in the present age “sacred and profane” history and myth were unavailable to American artists, whose good modern art transcended the “so-called” masters anyways.[1]
The True Sun’s art critic in 1845, ADC, attended the National Academy exhibition with three lady friends, and joined Briggs in wishing that Cole would give up historical landscape and return to his “earlier manner” of actual American landscapes. ADC praised the wealthy for giving up auction speculations in Raphaels and Correggios and instead buying original and better paintings; the lesson learned from would-be connoisseurs and mushroom critics who rely on words like “clever” (associated with British art) and “forcible” is that one should patronize American artists and found galleries of American masters.[2] A.H. Wenzler, a controversial portraitist, because of the way his pictures resembled daguerreotypes in their exactness and sharpness, violating “certain rules of art,” to ADC seems to make his women alive, as if they are passing across his vision.[3] Movement, violating the rules of art memorized by mushroom critics, like turning to the Staten Island ferry for models, these are the hallmarks of Young America. When Bloodgood left the True Sun to start the twopenny Morning Telegraph in 1846, his art critic at the new paper, though at times admiring Leutze, reverted to praise of poetic conceptions and moral lessons in landscapes, and dislike of Wenzler’s daguerreotype-style.[4]
[1] "New York Gallery of Fine Arts," True Sun, March 16, 1845. Sun, May 3, 1849. The Sun had taken this position at least since 1837, under then editor Benjamin Day and city editor Edwin W Davis (Davies). In 1847, Carlos D. Stuart became principal editor, replacing M.M. Noah.
[2] ADC, "National Academy for the True Sun," True Sun, April 28, 1845. True Sun, September 25, 1844, p. 2, and "Old Pictures," True Sun, November 11, 1844, commented on the systematic deception of New Yorkers by Italian artists copying in the Louvre by urging them to buy modern and American.
[3] ADC, "National Academy," True Sun, May 21, 1845.
[4] "National Academy of Design," Morning Telegraph, May 4, 1846, and May 5, 1846. Among Anthon H. Wenzler's portraits were Zachary Taylor Whigs Hugh Maxwell and Mayor William V. Brady, and Bryant in 1861.
On the old masters at the Apollo gallery (ch 3):
But Wall Street presses like the Commercial Advertiser were pleased to see old masters loaned to the Apollo, and though its reviewer agreed with Briggs that because art, like nature, appealed to the heart, appreciation for it was inborn and accessible to those without knowledge of technique, nevertheless, the presence of old masters would help those with little experience recognize “gems of art.” Or as the Mirror put it, they would correct public taste by directing it away from flashy effects, violent contrasts and intensely bright colors. The paper’s multi-part review in fact described the old master copies almost to the exclusion of the Americans. The danger to established hierarchies of hanging together modern and old master paintings, however, was also evident in their articles, as when the Advertiser appraised a Murillo as not as good as several still-lifes by members of the Peale family, and the Mirror compared "daubs of lampblack" (Murillo, Guido and Teniers; dirty Holy Families) to living American artists.[1] But comparisons to old masters nonetheless helped weight the scales and Art-Union purchases in favor of selected contemporary artists who did not fit the Young America model, just as Briggs' rejection of old masters served William Page's color experiments. The New Mirror’s house artist, John G. Chapman, was neat and delicate, and favorite landscapist Thomas Doughty was chaste, cool, and pearly, subdued qualities, and editors Morris and Willis praised the Art-Union for purchasing their pictures.[2] Bennett, in his letters from Europe in 1847, promoted Doughty's pleasing, mellow landscapes, with their absence of intrusive “bold touches” and gaudy coloring, as well as the copies of old masters in the Louvre that he was bringing to New York to sell, while Doughty's own letters to Morris' and Willis' journal indicate his increasing anxiety about the Art-Union, which he complained demanded cheap potboilers, rather like artists producing bright pictures for auctioneers.[3]
The Apollo Association, not long after Bryant became president in 1844, changed its name to the American Art-Union, and mostly stopped exhibiting loaned old masters, leaving them to the auction houses and the Gallery of Fine Arts. The New York Gallery of Fine Art’s largely static exhibition, in combination with its twenty-five cent admission, meant it struggled to survive. Kicked out of the Rotunda, it tried in 1848 to re-establish itself in rooms lent by the National Academy, where Durand was President and Cummings was treasurer. But its new position was compromised by heightened tensions between the National Academy and the Art-Union, in part due to changes in the latter's administration from the venerated Bryant (1844-46), close friend of Academy officers like Durand, to the Democratic politician and poet Prosper Wetmore (1847-49). When Bryant left office in 1846, he was accompanied out by art patrons and Gallery supporters Jonathan Sturgis, Charles M. Leupp, and artist Francis W. Edmonds (in 1847), as well as Briggs. Wetmore brought new patrons in with him, who were often politically active and whether Whig or Democrat were associated with expansion westward. It was probably Wetmore’s regime that allowed the penny press to give the Art-Union and its free public gallery a Young America character; when Abraham Cozzens became President, it took on different associations.
The phrase Young America was to some extent by the early 1850s a joking term, often used to describe actual children (fig. 26). The youthful “Webster Jr.” published a series of satirical definitions from a “Young American Dictionary” in the cheap weekly Universe, but the humor still points to Young America as a progressive political stance that had advocates in both parties.[4] Webster’s original dictionary, as an "American Dictionary of the English Language," had been nationalist, and the Evening Post among other old fogies (in the terms of Young America) had resisted its novel spellings, though the Tribune and Harper's adopted them. Webster Jr.'s dictionary, albeit facetiously, jibed at the English (whose votes in New York often aligned with the nativists, because of anti-Irish sentiment), describing a banquet where politicians got drunk, as the "English" mode of settling State questions. The Young America dictionary attacked Wall Street and banks, defining credit as a machine for manufacturing bankrupts, and the New York Custom House, the great source of political patronage, which was then in the control of the Democrats, as an asylum for demagogues employed to hoodwink the people. A critic was a writer for the papers, hired to soft soap or slander people according to their attentions to the editors. Naturally a cynic was one who tells the truth.
The Sunday Dispatch, which shared editors with the Universe, had offered mild support of the “meritorious” New York Gallery in 1847, contrasting it with both the National Academy’s swindling exhibitions (the editors recommend an exhibition of what the Academy rejected), and the American Art-Union, where every man in it is subject to indictment. That last bit of sarcasm was aimed at the idea that the Art-Union was a rich man’s lottery in a time when Whig and nativist mayors inaugurated their terms by cracking down on small-time gambling.[5] If the Art-Union's free gallery fit the Dispatch's democratic goal of bringing art to the people, its management (and so its taste) was questionable, like the American Institute, similarly run by (Whig) merchants supposedly for the “benefit” of artisans. So despite an occasional attack on the clique running the National Academy, the Dispatch gave more credit to artists’ judgments than to their wealthy patrons, pointing to the latter's self-interested motives, often revealed in their collection of old masters.
[1] "Apollo Gallery," Commercial Advertiser, July 8, 1839. "National Academy of Design," Mirror, May 29, 1841, p. 175. That year's reviews were not written by an artist, nor by the editors.
[2] "Apollo Gallery," Mirror, October 20, 1838. Doughty received a series of negative reviews in the Mirror in 1840.
[3] "Art and Artists," Home Journal, June 21, 1851. Doughty resorted to raffles in Paris to make money.
[4] Webster, Jr., "Young America Dictionary," Universe, January 25, 1854.
[5] The Peoples’ Art Union on Broadway advertised in the Dispatch in 1847 that a ticket for their lottery cost only 50 cents (versus the Art-Union’s $5), and there are no blanks; a friend got an oil painting in a beautiful frame worth $10.
On Whitman, Jesse Talbot, the Sunday Dispatch, G. Curtis, the Cosmopolitan Art Association (chapter 3):
Walter Whitman, as he was known in the years before Leaves of Grass, was one of the art critics and authors associated with Young America in its cultural nationalist sense, and in its Democratic-tilting politics; no nativist, he was, like most of his anti-clerical friends, as critical of Bishop John Hughes as of Protestant blue laws.[1] In Whitman’s art criticism for the Dispatch he used the familiar contrast between the fraudulent old master art auction, and contemporary American landscape painters in the Cole lineage, to promote one of his friends, landscape painter Jesse Talbot. Talbot was a Brooklyn artist for much of his career, which is likely how Whitman encountered him, though Park Benjamin, who in 1842 encouraged Whitman to write a temperance novel and who published an early Whitman poem in the New World, also promoted Talbot. Talbot hailed from Paterson, New Jersey, where factory owner Samuel Colt was a patron, and he seems to have been known to fellow Patersonian and editor Parke Godwin (who published a Whitman poem on Bryant in 1842) and to Paterson resident and artist T.W. Whitley. In addition to the Dispatch, Whitman wrote about Talbot for Bryant and Godwin's Evening Post and Fowler’s Phrenological Journal, and possibly (without signature) in other papers.
As this suggests, Whitman was well-connected to Democratic newspaper editors in both Brooklyn and New York. As early as 1842 the Herald had pointed him out as a penny a liner, bohemian loafer and even as a speaker at a mass political meeting. He edited or contributed to such Democratic organs as the Atlas, Aurora, Subterranean, New Era, and the Sunday Times. Hiram Fuller (a cousin of Margaret Fuller) at the nominally Whig Evening Mirror (as the Dispatch jibed, the Evening Mirror was “out and out Whig,” as it goes for free trade and the war with Mexico, traditional Democratic positions) knew him too.[2] Whitman perhaps knew William Burns, the main editor of the Dispatch, from when they both worked for the Sunday Atlas, but they also shared numerous colleagues who might have performed an introduction. Thomas L. Nichols, a reformer with bohemian tendencies who worked at the Dispatch, the Atlas, Aurora and the Herald, may have been a connection, as might politician Mike Walsh, who wrote for the Dispatch and the Herald and who Whitman knew at the Aurora; Whitman contributed a poem to Walsh’s Subterranean. George W. Curtis, an editor and art critic at the Tribune, also wrote for the Dispatch, and the Tribune would publish an unusually thoughtful review of Leaves of Grass; Curtis, like Burns and Godwin was an Associationist (Fourierist) and both the Dispatch and the Tribune were sympathetic to free soil, as had been Whitman's short-lived Brooklyn Freeman.
After the untimely death of Burns in 1850, his partner the Whig politician Amor J. Williamson (in 1858 a fusion of Republicans and Americans or Know-Nothings agreed on him as a Congressional candidate) continued to publish Whitman, and Dispatch critic and editor Charles Burckhardt, a bohemian with leaning toward nativism, also continued to advocate for Young America and notice Whitman.[3] The ties between Whitman and the Dispatch in any case were not solely partisan. As was often the case, there was instead a shared interest in egalitarian, artisan-based social reform and tolerance for difference. Indeed, by 1848, the Dispatch editors had announced that they were “radical in the extremest degree,” the sort of claim that terrified the Albion, the Express, and even the Musical Times into the embrace of the Old Masters.
...
Whitman then, in promoting Talbot, moved away from the earlier Young America position favoring "copying" American nature. He embraced Cole’s historical and allegorical landscapes, as did the Democratic and free soil papers like the Evening Post and Globe, and like the Art-Union, which not only offered Cole's pictures as a prize, but bought ambitious religious and allegorical paintings by Huntington, Leutze, Gray and other artists. Jessica Routhier suggests that Talbot got caught in the ongoing conflicts between the National Academy, headed by landscape painter Durand, and the Art-Union; certainly Whitman’s commentary for the Dispatch on the 1852 Academy exhibition in effect accused the Academy of partiality (for excluding Talbot) in its role as “artistical steward” for the city. Talbot found a warmer reception at the Art-Union, which bought approximately 24 of his landscapes including one of his Pilgrim’s Progress scenes, Christian and the Cross.
...
In embracing Talbot’s spiritual idealism (and Elliott’s luxuriance) while still relying on Young America’s language of fervor and anti-academic standards, Whitman like other members of literary Young America arguably was turning away from the sort of idealism that had aimed at bringing the low and the “real’ into art. Religious paintings like Talbot's Christian and the Cross, with their strongly aspirational character, their sense of forward progress, appealed to Young America proponents of a native art. The Literary World under Young America editor and Art-Union supporter Evert Duyckinck cited the unusual "vigor" of Talbot's Christian at the Cross and a contributor praised his Warriors of Uncas (based on Democratic stalwart Cooper), while Stuart at the Sun admired his Bunyan scenes. This resembled the conservative Whig response, which had always wanted more noble scenes; Clark of the Knickerbocker, an antagonist to Young America, but a friend of Elliott, hailed Talbot’s Christian and the Cross (fig. 28) as the best picture in the Academy exhibition.[4] The Sunday Mercury, a Hunker (conservative) Democratic paper, mocked the Whig Day Book, then edited by former Tribune writer G.G. Foster, for praising a Talbot picture as “representative of the soul of a landscape.” The Mercury said this sort of foggy criticism would be more germane had the critic been operating on a picture of a pair of boots.[5] The anti-slavery Mercury—often at odds with the increasingly Republican Dispatch, though its editors liked Whitman—argued less poetically and more politically that Young America is republicanism in literature, life, the pulpit, the press and labor, and the foe of aristocracy and pretension; Young America (unlike Raymond's Republican penny Times) prints everything, even things shocking and shameful, because newspapers have come to represent the people.[6]
George W. Curtis in some ways took up the Mercury's position, skeptical of the spiritual. Just returned from a tour of Europe, when he reviewed the 1851 National Academy in the reforming Tribune, he found Talbot unnatural, and disapproved of Cropsey, Church and Durand adopting Cole’s mode of allegorical landscape too. When Curtis reviewed Bryan’s Gallery of Christian Art the following year, another gallery of old masters, acknowledged the collection's superiority to picture auctions that create a false taste (preventing the purchase of American artists), following the Gallery catalog, which was written by Courier and Enquirer critic and Art-Union publicist Richard Grant White. Curtis explained, however, that even genuine old masters are most valuable for the historical record they provide of the “ruling idea” and degree of civilization at the time they were produced. In a lecture attended by the artists of the city, he reiterated that the principle and end of art is to express the thought of its age, so it is folly for the present to overestimate the old masters. He accordingly criticized William Page's Holy Family, commissioned by the Art-Union, as having an old master tone that was not in tune with the spirit of the age.[7] In Huntington’s lecture to the same audience at the Academy of Design, the month after Curtis, he described the aims of art rather differently, giving more credit to the religious message of art; the Evening Post said he assigned an “exceedingly narrow and barren sphere” to art, and “consciously didactic and ecclesiastical” aims, that had the advantage of falling in with the prevailing sentiments of the public.[8] Despite these differences, the merging of the religious reformers with the social reformers is clear in publisher George Putnam's 1852 Home Book of the Picturesque, which featured the old Knickerbocker circle, Cooper and Bryant, as well as Cole, Durand, Huntington and younger artists whose American landscapes resembled them, like Cropsey and John Kensett. A romanticized railroad scene by Talbot was the frontispiece.[9]
The Protestant religious fervor in Talbot's art was useful to nativists as well as expansionist and reforming Young America. Whitman, for example, described as "vast and grand" Talbot's great cycle of paintings depicting the empires of the Sons of Noah. Whitman avoided naming the actual subject or describing it in detail, perhaps because it was still in embryo; Talbot was still working on it in 1858. The subject was the “progress” of the civilizations of the “three races” of Noah's sons, in Asia (Assyria), Africa (Egypt at her glory but under attack by King of Babylon) and Europe (Greece at the height of her refinement). The idea may have stemmed from one of Samuel G. Goodrich's (Peter Parley) popular universal histories—Hawthorne wrote one for him, and Goodrich did one himself in 1850, about the time Whig President Fillmore, later a Know-Nothing candidate, appointed him consul to France. The histories started with Creation, tracked Noah’s sons to empires that symbolized the Old Testament and Christian eras, and concluded with the discovery of America, the Protestant Reformation under Luther and Cromwell, and then the American and French revolutions; a sequence that also outlines the most popular historical subjects at the Art-Union. Talbot's subject, with its comparison of the progress of the three races, was praised by Thomas Tileston at the evangelical anti-slavery Independent in 1854 and Charles Burckhardt in the Dispatch in 1857. Burckhardt had mostly taken over editing the Dispatch (Williamson was still on the masthead but busy in politics), and though he was critical of newspaper editors who “write for a class,” a method that just confirmed readers in their errors, while drawing sectarian, class or party lines that interfered with national unity and progress, he supported the nativists and Young America.[10]
Nativists had since the 1840s been in a tenuous alliance with Young America, and Talbot's piety (he was a secretary for the American Tract Society; even Whitman would be an agent for the Christian Commission during the Civil War) perhaps made him attractive. In 1844, at the height of the party’s activity, the party-paper American Republican urged patronizing Talbot—all he needed was encouragement to be in the first rank; the Herald, a fan of the third party movement, endorsed him, too, describing him familiarly in 1846 as a gaunt figure, with his hand at his mouth, sensitively alive to every expression of opinion about his art, but pointing out the beauties in others.[11] Carlos Stuart, who at the Democratic Sun had liked Talbot’s scenes from Bunyan, as did the Herald (“one of the best ever on the walls of the academy”), was a contributor to Know-Nothing politician and editor Thomas R. Whitney’s Republic, as was painter William Walcutt. Stuart identified Talbot with an American School of Art; the Herald critic who adored Talbot’s Bunyan pictures also thought Walcutt’s Battle of Monmouth was “one of the best ever seen in the hall.”[12] George Copway, an Ojibwe who courted the nativists in his paper the American Indian, praised Talbot as well as Sketch Club member and by then nativist (former Young American) Cornelius Mathews.[13] And in the 1850s Talbot was embraced by the Cosmopolitan Art Association, an art union tied to the Derby publishing empire.
There were four Derby brothers, who all collaborated to various degrees, but it was the Ohio branch that was most involved with art.[14] Episcopalian Henry W. Derby had moved to Ohio and while in Cincinnati owned a share in the Cincinnati Enquirer, an influential Democratic paper. In 1854 he formed a partnership with New York publisher Fletcher Harper, and in 1856 bought into the exceedingly nativist Cincinnati Times.[15] In 1858 he received a political appointment from Democratic President James Buchanan, who sent him to Dusseldorf. He bought the New York Dusseldorf Gallery and collaborated with his brother Chauncey, who also moved from Ohio to New York, on the Cosmopolitan Art Association, which incorporated the Dusseldorf Gallery. The Cosmopolitan Art Association Journal editors, Orville Victor and his wife Metta Victoria Fuller, had a strong vision of an advancing and domestic, Christianizing American civilization. Orville was a theologian—Emerson spoke "On Beauty" at an early Cosmopolitan Association meeting—and Metta wrote for the Home Journal, which as its title suggests, supported cultural nationalism in art. As the Victors wrote, art in our century must “have dominion over the passions of the masses of the body politic,” not by imitating the old masters, but by emulating—in landscape—the sentiments of Protestant martyrs like Huss.[16] Under Derby and the Fullers, German religious painters found advocates, while Huntington was praised and reproduced (his Lady Jane Grey would also be reproduced at the United States Journal, a newspaper where Metta Victor later worked), as was William Sonntag, who had painted for Baptist minister and Art-Union advocate Elias Magoon a series on the Progress of Civilization. Though the Cosmopolitan Art Association mostly bought small landscapes from Talbot (albeit quite a few), their praise of him as one of America’s best landscape painters and their support for a series of paintings that would compare black, brown and white civilizations fit expanding Young America as well as nativist agendas.
[1] See Ruth L. Bohan's groundbreaking Looking into Walt Whitman: American Art, 1850-1920 (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006).
[2] Dispatch, November 28, 1847.
[3] Williamson’s acceptance speech said he was opposed to the extension of slavery into new states and territories, in favor of a protective tariff, of land reform, and of a Pacific railroad not in the hands of monopolists. An advertisement supporting him listed Germans, Old-Line (conservative) Whigs, Workingmen’s Organizations, and Anti-Lecompton Democrats (free soil Democrats) in his favor. His Democratic opponent, General Daniel Sickles, won.
[4] "The Art-Union," Sun, November 26, 1847, p. 3. In Duyckinck’s Arcturus, CW’s review of the Academy exhibition, June 1841, p. 59, called Happy Valley bold and skillful, but hardly answering to Samuel Johnson’s description. "Fine Arts: Exhibition at the National Academy," Literary World, May 15, 1847, p.347; Literary World, February 21, 1852, p. 140. Elliott painted Clark’s family’s portraits. Clark, "Editor's Table," Knickerbocker, June 1847, p. 567, says of the Academy exhibition that nothing compared to Talbot’s Christian and the Cross, though he warned that no matter what critics and artists say, Talbot should avoid imitation and “give ‘em Jesse,” and that will suffice.
[5] Sunday Mercury, September 1, 1850. In September, Elbridge G. Paige left the Mercury and William Cauldwell, for many years with the (Democratic) Atlas replaced him.
[6] Sunday Mercury, January 22, 1854, p.1. The Mercury hated Republican pretensions to morality, represented by Henry Raymond's Times, whose slogan was “all the news that’s fit to print.” “Criticism,” Mercury, March 20, 1853, p. 2, also disliked the Times’ art critic, calling him wooden, gross and heavy in his notions of decorum, and recommended that he confine himself to criticism of sign painting.
[7] [G.W. Curtis] "Mr. Bryan’s Gallery," Tribune, November 22, 1852, p. 6. “Mr. Curtis’s Lecture,” Evening Post, January 28, 1851. Bryan was educated at Harvard and his collection included some authentic Old Masters. George W. Curtis?, “The Fine Arts—Pictures in Town,” Tribune, October 30, 1851, p. 6.
[8] “Lecture on Christian Art,” Evening Post, February 25, 1851.
[9] Widmer, Young America, 52.
[10] Dispatch, January 6, 1856. Burckhardt was now publisher and proprietor, and had been an editor since late 1848.
[11] "National Academy," American Republican, May 20, 1844, p. 1. The senior editor was James W. Green (Thaddeus W. Meighan and Mary Meighan contributed; he wrote for the Aurora under Thomas Dunn English) and the editors also praised Whitman, Willis, Inman, Bryant and the Knickerbocker editor, Clark, and Noah; allies included the Metropolitan Magazine and the Journal of Commerce; their enemies were the Herald, Tribune, Sun, Freeman's Journal and the Plebeian. "Exhibition of the National Academy of Design," Herald, April 20, 1846, p. 1.
[12] "National Academy of Design," Herald, May 1, 1849, p. 7.
[13] "Art News," Copway's American Indian, September 6, 1851, p. 3. The news emphasized members of the New York Sketch Club, e.g. Cafferty and Kyle doing portraits of editor M.M. Noah, Blauvelt's emigrants and Kossuth, and Dallas illustrating Cornelius Matthews' Chanticleer.
[14] James Cephas Derby was the most successful, hiring Associationist and Tribune editor George Ripley as a manuscript reader, and publishing bestsellers by Henry Wikoff and Goodrich, including the latter’s History of All Nations. When J.C. Derby’s firm failed in 1861, Seward gave him a political appointment. Though he published abolitionist tracts and political books from all the parties, in 1854 he put out a Know-Nothing gift book that advertised heavily in the by-then sympathetic Dispatch, Express, Day Book and Evening Mirror. The ad highlighted the gift book’s reproduction of Democrat and painter Tompkins Matteson’s Spirit of ’76; Matteson's painting bore the same title as at least two Nativist newspapers.
[15] Day Book, March 15, 1856.
[16] “American Painters,” Cosmopolitan Art Journal, June 1857, p. 116.
On Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (chapter 3):
Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress could satisfy both constituencies (Young America and nativists). It was strongly tied to Protestant martyrdom (Bunyan was jailed with a copy of Fox’s Martyrs), and his hero Christian had to overcome Catholics, but Bunyan's own example could serve as a figure of tolerance, opposed to persecution of dissenters. Pilgrim’s Progress of course had been widely influential on art, both in the many engravings, paintings, and illustrations based on it, but also because of its contributions to the emblematic and allegorical tradition behind popular paintings like Cole’s Voyage of Life. In 1850, theatrical scenic painters Joseph Kyle and Jacob Dallas (a cousin of James Polk’s vice-president George M. Dallas), historical painter Edward Harrison May and his teacher Daniel Huntington, with Frederic Church (a Sabbatarian and Cole student), Jasper Cropsey (who like Talbot was often accused of imitating Cole), F.O.C. Darley, Paul Duggan, and H.C. Selous produced a terrifically successful panorama of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.[1] Kyle and Dallas, with James Cafferty and Charles Blauvelt (who did a painting of the first vote of an “adopted citizen,” or immigrant, as well as one of Hungarian leader Louis Kossuth, and humorous city scenes featuring the Herald) were at the heart of a “new” Sketch Club, not the one presided over by Bryant and the other Knickerbocker literati. Their meetings, after some prompting by the Sun, included women (especially Kyle’s daughter Mary, who married Dallas), and were regularly promoted by the Herald, Home Journal, Atlas, Mercury, Evening Mirror (Mary Kyle often published her poetry in that paper), and Dispatch (critic Charles B. Burckhardt was an honorary member since 1849), all of whom employed the language of Young America and sometimes of nativism. Honorary member and literary Young America standard-bearer Cornelius Mathews (Dallas illustrated one of his books) spoke to the club (as did art critic James F. Otis of the Express), and they picked subjects for sketching like “liberty.”[2]
[1] Jessica Skwire Routhier, Kevin J. Avery and Thomas Hardiman Jr., The Painters’ Panorama: Narrative, Art and Faith in the Moving Panorama of Pilgrim’s Progress (Saco, ME: Dyer Library and Saco Museum, 2015).
[2] In Charles Gaylor, “A Night With the Sketch Club,” Evening Mirror, February 28, 1854, p. 1, among the members drinking whisky and eating oysters under copies of old masters including a Virgin and Child, and busts of Clay and Webster, are sculptors Thomas D. Jones, Thom (son of the famous sculptor), T.A. Richards, J.D. Blondell, John McLennan, J.C. Hagan, Mrs. Greatorex (then the only female member), with honorary members Ohio poet W.W. Fosdick and former Sun editor Carlos D. Stuart. In 1849, members met at Burckhardt’s home, with 30-40 members, including Walcutt, Richards, and Irish actor and editor John Brougham.
On George Flagg, Elliott, and the Evening Mirror (ch 3)
Luman Reed’s collection, the core of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts, in addition to “Protestant painter” Cole—the nativist-tilting Commercial Advertiser called his sublime conceptions a glorious triumph, teaching a lesson Americans should heed for all time--featured the Protestant subject of the Death of Lady Jane Gray, by George Flagg (who also painted a nun for Reed). Reed had been an extensive patron of Flagg, a nephew of Washington Allston; Flagg's brother and fellow painter Jared would become an Episcopalian minister. Reed had received thirteen paintings as recompense for funding Flagg’s trip to Europe. Flagg specialized in historical paintings in a style that the Herald and Briggs had dismissed as “too old masterish.”[1] Morris and Willis praised him in the Mirror and New Mirror for endowing portrait sitters with an aristocratic character—giving them a wonderful ladylikeness and gentlemanly bearing, free from awkwardness and vulgarity—suggesting his kinship to romantically idealizing artists like Inman. The Mirror also admired Cole’s poetical conceptions. But shortly after Hiram Fuller joined Morris and Willis at the Evening Mirror in November 1844, the paper claimed the mantle of representing Young America rather than the upper ten thousand, and its tone changed.[2]
Fuller was a cousin of Margaret Fuller, and ex-Tribune editor George G. Foster in his satirical magazine John-Donkey called Fuller the “universal genius” of “Our Granny’s Mirror,” an adjective that emphasizes the expansive thinking of Young America supporters.[3] Perhaps under Fuller’s influence—Willis lived outside the city, where he wrote for several papers, and Morris was mainly the business partner—the 1845 Evening Mirror review of the Academy exhibition was quite hard on Cole’s religious and allegorical painting. The critic accused him of being soulless in the Course of Empire and the Voyage of Life, and described his newer religious landscape, Elijah, as having the melancholy deficiency of being cold throughout, showing Cole to be incapable of feeling or at least not having felt the glory of Scripture. The Aristidean, a weekly edited by Thomas Dunn English (a former Aurora and Evening Mirror writer and future John-Donkey editor), in its review of the New York Gallery of Fine Arts that same year similarly dismissed the copies of old masters, thought Flagg’s Nun was in bad taste, and Cole’s Course of Empire lacking reality and nature.[4] For Young America proponents, it was Cole’s realist not his religious paintings—in style and feelings of sublimity--that bespoke cultural nationalism. For Fuller's Evening Mirror, Flagg’s pictures too are seen differently than in the past, as either too aristocratic, or too vulgar. No well-bred boy, the critic says, would take such a position of premeditated rudeness as he does in a Flagg portrait, one leg on a chair, in the presence of his elders (presumably the viewers of the portrait); he is taking it a little too easy. Other Willis and Morris favorites get equally cavalier treatment—there is always something to wonder at in Chapman, such as his limbs of mahogany in a religious painting, and George Harvey has the worst landscape in the exhibition.[5]
The twopenny Evening Mirror also took a Young America (critical of religious hypocrisy and intolerance) position in regards to Charles Loring Elliott’s portrait of Reverend Thomas House Taylor. Taylor was an Episcopalian low church rector at Grace Church, where the painter Jared Flagg would become a minister, and one of high church Bishop Onderdonk’s accusers in the controversy over Onderdonk's sexual misbehavior. Onderdonk was often defended by penny press proponents of religious tolerance, and Taylor had recently funded a new missionary venture. The Evening Mirror began by praising Elliott, a favorite of Young America, for reflecting the individual like a mirror, in a style that is rich and brilliant to gorgeousness (if that sounded dangerously gaudy, the critic quickly added that the color is harmonious and the composition subdued). But then he pointedly added that he sees in this picture the extreme refinement of Christianity, the impressive exhibition of the fruits of piety that will convert the wretched infidel, ragged scoffer and starving heathen. The Minister of Christ (Taylor) is clad in purple linen, at a desk resplendent with crimson velvet, gold fringe, books rich in gold and cobalt, vases of burnished silver, an altar of costly wood richly carved, and even the light of heaven falls through painted glass, onto the Law, which blazes in letters of gold from a tablet of Prussian blue. The critic adds that the imagination can furnish the Parisian millinery of the worshippers at Grace church, their Sybarite forms and hired choristers; the upholsterer and the gilder are the chief agents of Protestant propaganda. The Evening Mirror’s frequent ally, the Dispatch similarly described New York’s new Church of the Puritans as an aristocratic gewgaw palace that contrasted in an un-Christian manner with the miserable cellars and garrets of poverty and misery around it.[6]
...
Pro-British journals were accordingly not only usually Whig, but hostile to Young America. A.D. Paterson, a Scotsman who wrote on art for expatriate journals the Albion and his own Anglo American, thought Flagg’s portrait of a boy easy and graceful, Cole’s religious and historical pictures a perfect revel of delight in his embodiments of sublime conceptions magnificently carried out, and found Huntington's Lady Jane Gray a masterly composition, with Jane having a beautiful expression at her devotions as the friars come to torment her. William Young at the Albion loved the look of the friars--"repulsive to the last degree." Paterson, who published his journal out of the conservative Democrat True Sun office, supported the city giving the Rotunda to the Gallery of the Fine Arts in order to elevate the multitude. The arts must instruct the public taste, not the other way around; artists must stop alarming the public’s feelings with vulgar elaborations of the merely matter of fact. Thomas Doughty’s chaste placidity is once again held up as the ideal from which the impure taste “of the age” has turned. Paterson also endorsed the American Art-Union, which gave Durand, Cole and Huntington $500 commissions, had purchased Cole’s Voyage of Life as a prize, and engraved Huntington’s Lady Jane Gray and Mercy’s Dream.[7]
Charles Fenno Hoffman’s Literary World, loyal to the Knickerbockers, like the Anglo-American praised the way that one with Christian Faith could meditate on Huntington’s Lady Jane Gray for hours, though his celebratory picture of children bringing flowers to the Protestant Queen Elizabeth, despite fine feeling, lacked nature. But the Literary World also reprinted an American-authored review of the Academy exhibition from a London paper that commended Page while attacking Huntington for painting showy and commonplace subjects like Pilgrim’s Progress, Lady Jane Gray, and an Old Man Reading from the Bible, that only please a half formed popular taste. The Art-Union Bulletin, edited by former Knickerbocker author William J. Hoppin, included the Literary World's defense of Huntington against this improper attack, but the Evening Mirror, always a Page backer, pointed out that the London critic was right. After Duyckinck took over the Literary World, Huntington’s style would be attacked as devoid of thought and purpose.[8]
[1] "The New York Gallery of the Fine Arts (from the Commercial Advertiser)," Evening Mirror, November 15, 1847, p. 2. "National Academy of Design," Herald, May 4, 1843, p. 2.
[2] New Mirror, July 13, 1844; Evening Mirror, December 6, 1844.
[3] John Donkey, February 26, 1848, p. 152.
[4] "Exhibition at the Academy," Evening Mirror, April 26, 1845, p. 2. Thomas Dunn English? “Our Pigeon Holes,” Aristidean, March 1845, p. 79. Contributing authors included Edgar Allen Poe, Walter Whitman, Mrs. E.F. Ellet, and others with an interest in art.
[5] "National Academy," Evening Mirror, April 24, 1846, p. 2.
[6] "National Academy," Evening Mirror, April 24, 1846, p. 2. Dispatch, November 28, 1847. "National Academy of Design continued," Evening Mirror, May 7, 1852, p. 2, dislikes the pompous portrait of a Bishop, but suggests Huntington's style is better suited to such pictures than to producing soft and sickly Christs.
[7] "Fine Arts: Cole's Pictures at the National Academy," Anglo American, December 23, 1843, p. 214, and "Second Notice,"Anglo-American, December 30, 1843, p. 238. "Fine Arts," Anglo American, May 8, 1847, p. 69. X, "Influence of the Fine Arts upon the Condition of Society," Anglo-American, April 19, 1845, p. 617. "National Academy of Design," Albion, May 6, 1848 p. 225. William Page was also commissioned for a Holy Family.
[8] Literary World, July 3, 1847; Evening Mirror, July 3, 1847 p. 2; "National Academy of Design no 1," Literary World, April 24, 1852. On Duyckinck's career, see George Edwin Mize, "The Contributions of Evert A. Duyckinck to the Cultural Development of America," (PhD diss., New York University, 1954).
On Aspinwall's Murillo and Belmont (ch 3):
The 1858 exhibition of William H. Aspinwall’s painting by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo of the Immaculate Conception (fig. 29) brings together some of the strands of anti-Catholicism, skepticism about the old masters and Young America politics. Today it is considered the workshop of Murillo, but in 1858 almost everyone—contributors to the Congregationalist and very anti-Republican Journal of Commerce did not--accepted it as an original.[1] It had a good provenance. Aspinwall had purchased it from the King of Holland supposedly for $30,000 (the value given at customs). Murillo, understood to have a homely, realist style, was with Raphael one of the most admired of the old masters, a favorite of (among others), Mrs. James Gordon Bennett, so there was a great deal of excitement to see one of the very few authenticated pictures by him in the country. Aspinwall exhibited it for 25 cents at the Williams, Stevens and Williams gallery, with the proceeds given to charity. He was known as a collector of old masters—the next year he would add a semi-public gallery to his house on Tenth street—and the exhibition had a quasi-public benefactor quality, like Nye and Bryan, in bringing old world masterpieces to New York at their own expense. Though he showed it at a (free) commercial gallery, the donated proceeds differentiated it from the speculations of auctioneers or dealers. He had also lent old master paintings to the quasi-public New York Gallery of Fine Arts, where he had not himself profited from their exhibition.[2]
Figure 29. Workshop of Murillo, Immaculate Conception, 17th century.
Aspinwall's exhibition of his Murillo came at the same time as August Belmont, a leader of the Democratic party, exhibited his collection of contemporary European and (some) American art at the National Academy of Design, with the money also to go to charities.[3] To an extent, the two men's collections reflected the split between old fogies (conservative Whigs) and Young America. Aspinwall was a longtime Whig. In 1834, the Courier and Enquirer listed him as attending a meeting with Herald enemies and Whig politicians Joe Hoxie and art collectors Philip Hone and Moses Grinnell. Aspinwall had married into the Howland family and firm, and became involved in shipping and railroads, including the New York and Erie Railroad, whose bailouts from the New York legislature earned steady opposition from anti-corporate monopoly papers like the Evening Post and the Herald. He built a mansion in 1845, and by 1850 his art collection was being noticed for its “valuable” old masters as well as for Hiram Powers’ portrait of John Calhoun.
Belmont, a banker, agent for the Rothschilds, and art collector, should have been a Whig. As a Jew and a German immigrant, Whig nativism probably kept him in the Democratic party; when President Pierce nominated him in 1853 as charge d’affaires to the Hague, even the usually liberal Tribune campaigned against him as a Jew, an agent for a Jewish bank, and a foreigner, who could not represent American interests. When the Jewish (Whig) paper the Asmonean complained about bias, the Courier and Enquirer, which had agreed with the Tribune, corrected its position and said they would only object to him as a foreigner.[4] The Evening Post, however, which had supported Pierce’s candidacy, published Belmont’s rebuke of Greeley, and pointed out that Whig banker James G. King had been an agent for the British bank Barings at the same time he was appointed a consul, and Aspinwall was a vice-consul for Tuscany, without the Whigs being concerned about their loss of Americanness in serving foreign interests. Because Belmont stayed firmly Democratic—the Herald was even said to be his organ at one point; Belmont had helped with Fanny Ellsler's tour—his pro-Southern compromise politics moved him closer to conservative Whig/Republicans, including Aspinwall.
Aspinwall in 1850, for example, was vice-president of a mass meeting to support Clay’s compromise over slavery in the new territories, as was Bryant’s friend the art collector Charles Leupp, one of the men who invited Belmont to show his collection. As late as January 1861, Belmont joined Republicans Aspinwall, Grinnell, Hamilton Fish (also a nativist-leaning art patron), Peter Cooper, Robert Minturn, Robert C. Wetmore, and Alexander T. Stewart (who collected art with the help of H.W. Derby), in a Union meeting that memorialized for reconciliation with the South. Both Belmont and Aspinwall (along with Grinnell, Fish et al) funded Henry Kirke Brown’s statue of George Washington for Union Square, which helped consolidate that neighborhood for the bourgeoisie. But in the debate between the Republican design for Central Park by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Olmsted and the Democratic plan, Belmont was on the side of the Democrats.[5]
Though Aspinwall had a small collection of British and American (including two Huntingtons) art, he was associated with the Old Masters and the Gothic (his son-in-law James Renwick Jr., architect of the Smithsonian, designed the picture gallery Aspinwall added to his home in 1859). Belmont in contrast was associated with contemporary European art. While consul at the Hague, Belmont acquired the bulk of the paintings that he exhibited in 1857 and 1858, but he also bought foreign artists in New York like Regis Gignoux—he owned Gignoux’ Niagara in Moonlight, which to critics aligned with pro-Southern politics, was often preferred to Frederic Church’s version—as well as artists with extensive European training like Albert Bierstadt and Leutze, whose Maid of Saragossa evoked Young America sympathy for foreign revolutions. In 1852, he joined Democrat and former Evening Post editor Theodore Sedgwick (and Democratic banker and artist Francis W. Edmonds) as a director of New York’s Crystal Palace, which brought some 700 European paintings and sculptures to the city.
But Belmont had converted when he married, and like Aspinwall his art collection prominently featured Christian themes. Indeed, an editor for the Asmonean was perhaps prompted by Belmont’s involvement with the Crystal Palace and its many prominent examples of modern Christian art, to write about what he would like to see at the World’s Fair of 1905: a Bible translated without prejudice, a Chinese scientist’s comparison of Judaism and Christianity that would exhibit “the picturesque scenery of old, obstinately defended errors,” paintings by famous German Protestant artists like Cornelius and Lessing of the “Last Judgement of Missionaries who Tried to Convert the Jews” (with crowds of triumphing Jews), the Burning of the English House of Lords (which had prevented Jewish banker Rothschild from taking a seat in Parliament on religious grounds), Czar Nicholas on the Ruins of Russia, and the Pope on the ruins of Romanism (the Vatican had recently reinforced the ghetto in Rome). The editor, making it clear that religious tolerance was allied with pro-southern politics as well as anti-British feeling, also imagined a Powers’ Slave of the English High Church, with a description in the catalog furnished by Harriet Beecher Stowe.[6]
Like Aspinwall, after the exhibition Belmont went on to add a semi-public gallery to his home, where the collection could continue to correct “wayward” taste, albeit precisely because of the “absence of the worn out “Old Masters.”[7] Indeed, Harper’s Weekly, edited by former Tribune critic George W. Curtis, in its review (with illustration) of Aspinwall’s Murillo, closed with the hope that when Aspinwall’s full collection was installed in his new gallery, it would also include modern paintings, rather than ones only from a defunct age, and argued once again for private collectors donating to found a free public museum in Central Park.[8] More conservative Republicans (the Courier and Enquirer still opposed abolishing slavery) preferred art stay in the mansions of our rich magnates; utilitarian business not the public sphere was the proper soil for art.[9]
But most of the Harper’s Weekly article focused on clarifying the newspaper controversy over the actual subject of Murillo's painting. A series of letters in the Evening Post (from Civix, Foreigner, Senex, Juvenis, Magister and Discipulus, as well as EFF of Brooklyn Heights and WGH) “aired their ignorance” in questioning whether the painting showed an Assumption or the Immaculate Conception. As the debaters were aware, the Catholic Church had recently made this doctrine an article of faith; some were reluctant to give the seemingly recent concept the imprimatur of the old masters. As the debate resolved in favor of the Immaculate Conception, the Evening Post and the Courier and Enquirer, perhaps for different reasons—Bryant had a longstanding friendship with the Brevoorts--ended by preferring the overcleaned Murillo in Henry Brevoort’s collection (put on display at Goupil’s after Aspinwall’s) to Aspinwall's Immaculate Conception. As a Holy Family, they argued, it came nearer to the soul, as it showed that there is nothing holier than human nature and simple motherhood.[10] The Express, a nativist paper, went even farther in praising the Brevoort Holy Family’s peasant-like lack of a “particle of sanctity” or ideality, its bare, plain, homely look of a “really affectionate mother.” But whether in the familial or more iconic format, reproductions of Murillo’s Madonnas (not in their church context) would be very popular as ideals of true womanhood and motherhood.[11]
For admirers of Young America, though, Murillo’s value had been in his lack of ideality, his attention to peasants, the poor, or even ‘real women.’ Artists who portrayed street children, beggars and sometimes African Americans were compared to him. For the Tribune, Flagg’s early works like his Match Girl (and even his Lady Jane Gray) were his best because they resembled Murillo’s in awakening sympathy; artists including Walter Libbey (who Whitman admired), Daniel Huntington and Edwin White were considered American Murillos.[12] Charles Briggs, writing satires for the Evening Mirror as Ferdinand Mendez Pinto, claimed that every American artist in Italy sent home a dozen or two portraits of beggars in the character of Apostles or Virgin Maries; an Italian bootblack tells Pinto he’s been painted 28 times as Paul, but that he can’t afford to be a saint on what artists pay. Nevertheless he’s proud to be in every gentleman’s parlor in the country. Briggs’ mockery of American taste for Murillo-esque idealization of the poor (who if honestly presented would not be allowed in their houses), parallels the Evening Mirror's advocacy of Young America realism. The Evening Mirror was an extremely vigorous booster of Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s novel The Newsboy, published by J.C. Derby in 1854, praising its uncommon energy of style, lifelike vividness, and pathos that speaks to the “better sympathies of humanity.” The editors, who see the newsboy as coeval with the penny press, point out that the boys in her novel are too good, ideally brave and honest, as seen through a window rather than from actual contact. Nevertheless, it is part of a new school of American writing.
Feminist author and editor Elizabeth Oakes Smith was dubbed a voice of Young America by a French journalist from New Orleans. In his speech at New York University, he hailed as Young America’s flagship George Sanders’ Democratic Review, an expansionist organ that supported international intervention and was sympathetic to the south. But he was careful to note that it was more than a party, it was a thought of the age: what the Hussites were to the 15th century and the English revolution to the 17th century, so Young America was the eternal principle of liberty now incarnated in the present Republic. In art it meant abandoning imitation of the English, and Oakes Smith and Harriet Beecher Stowe were named as leaders of its ardent, audacious and local style.[13] The Smith family were Whigs--though one of their sons was a filibuster in Central America, an activity strong associated with Young America expansion--who had spent time in Charleston, and when they merged Putnam’s magazine with their own $2 a year Emerson's Magazine (slogan: “onward,” and illustrated by Jacob Dallas), they rejected its abolitionism. But Oakes Smith’s feminism led her to a positive, true womanhood view of Aspinwall’s Murillo; she was by contrast skeptical of the materialism of the pre-Raphaelites and Belmont’s collection. Her magazine--which featured profiles of Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur--was sure that the snobdom that admired the French schools would not gain the ascendancy “while we have Churches in our midst.”[14]
[1] Courier and Enquirer, February 19, 1858, rebutted the Journal of Commerce.
[2] See Anne McNair Bolin, "Art and Domestic Culture: the residential art gallery in New York City, 1850-1870," PhD diss, Emory University, 2000. Bryan donated his collection to the New York Historical Society, which also became the home for Reed’s.
[3] Among the charities were the Colored Home for Orphans and the Cooper Institute. According to the Courier and Enquirer, it raised $4600. The letter “inviting” Belmont to exhibit his collection was signed by men associated with the Art-Union and the New York Gallery of Fine Arts as for example: Abraham Cozzens (of the Art-Union), Jonathan Sturges (of the Gallery of Fine Arts), William Hoppin (of the Art-Union), and William Appleton (Young America publisher and Art-Union manager). See also David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York: Dial Press, 1981).
[4] Robert Lyon?, Asmonean, February 16, 1855. In 1855, according to the by then solidly Know Nothing Express, February 20, 1855, the Asmonean disagreed with Belmont’s politics and agreed with the Express that only Americans ought to be appointed Ambassadors. Belmont advocated for adding Cuba as a slave state, something the Asmonean objected to, but the Asmonean explicitly abhorred Know Nothings’ emphasis on Americanism and attacked both Erastus Brooks at the Express and Bishop Hughes as bigoted and intolerant.
[5] Initial (1846-47) invitees included John G Chapman, AM Cozzens, FW Edmonds, AB Durand, Tuckerman, Ingham, Leupp, John L Stephens, Verplanck, Cummings, Bayard Taylor, Gifford, Haseltine, Leutze, Duggan, John Durand, Wm M Evarts, Bancroft, Rev Bellows, Kensett, Wm c? Noyes, Dix Wm a Butler, Bryant, Oliver Stone, Lang, Appletons, Rossiter, Duer, RG White (and son Stanford White later), James T Brady. Huntington, Also Judge Henry Howland, relation of Aspinwall? Members also included Calvert Vaux Olmstead Homer, McEntee, CP Daly, and Lewis Gaylord Clark.
[6] W, “What we should like to see at the World’s Fair of 1905,” Asmonean, July 22, 1853. W's short term as editor started around September 1852 and ended in September 1853. In 1859, Thomas Hamilton, the editor of the Anglo-African Magazine and 4 cent Anglo-African weekly, wrote a series on an Afric-American Picture Gallery (published in the weekly in August), that similarly revised the usual subjects: instead of Washington, his hero of the American revolution is a portrait of Crispus Attucks, and Mt. Vernon is shown in decay. There is also a portrait of the gallery “boy,” Thomas Onward, who is not an uncle Tom but a "Young Tom," whose fortunes are rising against oppression.
[7] Home Journal; Leader April 7, 1860.
[8] It did; his gallery of British and American art included Huntington, Church and Gignoux. “Mr. Aspinwall’s Murillo,” Harper’s Weekly, January 30, 1858, p. 77.
[9] Sentinel, “Art,” Courier and Enquirer, February 19, 1859. Sentinel was a long time writer for the Courier and Enquirer, a Sewardite reporter on the state legislature in Albany, but also a frequent commentator on art, particularly sculpture. His position was endorsed by the editors shortly after: “A Free Picture Gallery,” Courier and Enquirer, April 12, 1859, Supplement p. 1. "Shall we Have a Public Gallery of Paintings," Harper’s Weekly, cited in Voorsanger and Howat, Art and the Empire City, p. 106, note 82.
[10] Evening Post, February 27, 1858; “Fine Arts,” Courier and Enquirer, February 16, 1858. “Art Matters: Another Murillo,” Abolitionist Lydia M. Child had in an 1846 letter to the Boston Courier identified Brevoort’s Holy Family as alive with feeling. Young America papers that catered to women like the Cosmopolitan Art-Journal (March 1859) p. 85, dismissed Aspinwall’s Immaculate Conception as not one of Murillo’s best.
[11] Express, February 27, 1858. See Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez, The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (University of North Carolina Press, 2016).
[12] “New York Gallery of Fine Arts,” Tribune, November 12, 1844, p. 2; "Fine Arts," Spirit of the Times, January 16, 1858, p. 320; Carl Benson [Charles Astor Bristed], Spirit of the Times, June 19, 1852. Tompkins Matteson, "Fine Arts: National Academy of Design," Morris's National Press, June 20, 1846, p. 4. T.W. Whitley? "Art and Artists, Prepared for the Home Journal by an Artist," Home Journal, July 5, 1851. OPQ, "Apollo Exhibition," Spectator, April 17, 1841, p. 1.
[13] M. Edmund Farrenc, "Young America: Its Doctrines and Its Men," Times, April 1, 1854, p. 8. Edmond Farrenc published in the Democratic Review in 1852. Mrs. Wetherell was also included in his list.
[14] A Modern Brush, "Pre-Raphaelitism," Emerson's Magazine and Putnam's Monthly, February 1858, p. 170.