Unpublished portions of Chapter 4 of The Politics of Art Criticism
On T.W. Whitley, Doughty (ch 4):
In 1840, in addition to his views of Paterson, Whitley added compositions based on Bryant and James Thomson’s Seasons and a scene of Juno Supplicating Eolus to Destroy the Trojans. The Herald had agreed that his New Jersey landscapes were a botch, and called the mythological piece curious, but disagreeable. The goddess Juno, her honor insulted, appeals to Aeolus, who unleashes a storm to confuse the seas and earth and high heaven. Depending on his composition, it might not have appealed to admirers of divine hierarchy, as Edward Brackett’s sculpture group Binding Satan, for all its humanism, might have done. No admirer of the Evening Post’s poet, the Herald calls Whitley’s version of Bryant’s “Forest Hymn” great trash—dirty, muddled (indistinct)—and his scene from Thomson is “shocking Trash.”
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The Commercial Advertiser praised the 1841 Apollo collection as splendid and rich, and called Whitley’s Storm on the Delaware—in line with the organization’s support for young artists—bold and spirited.[1]
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The Apollo tried to win Bennett over. They advertised, and they sent him an invitation to the private supper before the fall opening, but Bennett sneered that the Association was so generally unknown, he had forgotten about it. He or a reporter (he had advertised a vacancy for an arts reporter), in reviewing the spring 1841 exhibition, trashed almost all of the pictures, even William Page who had so recently seemed the hope of the younger generation, as well as J.K. Fisher’s landscapes. But he thought the pictures by Thomas Doughty, who would sell fifty-one to the Art-Union, near perfection, and Whitley’s scene of rural England pleasing. Whitley may have helped his case with the Herald by advertising, as an editor had noticed a couple of months earlier that the “celebrated” landscape and portrait painter sketched likenesses for a mere song, and recommended that readers “go and look at it!”—it being his Storm upon the Delaware. Whitley also advertised in the Tribune.[2]
Doughty was or would become a friend of Bennett’s (the editor was actively and personally promoting him as a great artist by 1847), and when the Herald attacked the Art-Union later, it was partly in defense of him. Despite Doughty’s many sales to the Art-Union, he had paintings rejected “meanly” by it in 1851, and so accused the managers of setting up a “tribunal of taste” from which there was not only no appeal, but which was out of tune with the public’s tastes (as witnessed by his paintings at the commercial gallery Williams & Stevens) or the taste of his fellow artists who had endorsed the Art-Union only for fear of displeasing their patrons.[3] Some of Bennett’s sneers at the National Academy, which had never elected Doughty as a member, echoed Doughty’s own complaints about a clique bringing the Academy to its last gasp. But Doughty’s rejection was in the future, and the Apollo’s campaign (and ad purchases) may have been effective, as the Herald in the next few years (when Bryant was president) would have little to say about the organization, just an occasional comment that it was flourishing, or an approving note about its engravings or annual meeting; some of these were undoubtedly press releases.
[1] “Exhibition at the Apollo,” Spectator, April 14, 1841, p. 1.
[2] “Apollo,” Herald, September 28, 1840, p. 2; “Apollo,” Herald, April 24, 1841, p. 1. Whitley won a Doughty Spring Morning in the 1849 Art-Union lottery. Herald, February 19, 1841. Whitley’s new rooms at 111 Nassau Street were closer to the penny press. Tribune, June 2, 1841, advertises his studio at 112 Fulton Street and his residence at 22nd and 6th.
[3] Thomas Doughty, “Letter to the Editor,” Herald, January 6, 1852, p. 2, Thomas Doughty, “To the Editor of the Evening Mirror,” Evening Mirror, November 19, 1849.
On F. Grain and Thomas Hicks (ch 4):
The critical and professional fates of the artists involved in Sylvania or New York Associationism seem instructive. Frederick Grain (not to be confused with Peter Grain, the popular theatrical scene painter who worked at the Bowery and for Hannington’s dioramas) was, like Whitley, a struggling artist. He eventually became more successful as an illustrator, as in the well-reviewed Mexico Illustrated (1848). His style (fig. 31) like Whitley’s was topographic; the Mirror in 1838 said his art was very fair but hard, and the Herald in 1840 called it trash, akin to their opinion of Fisher’s and Whitley’s landscapes. Like Fisher and Whitley, he mostly showed local views or landscapes at both the National Academy and the early iterations of the Apollo Association, and received little attention for it, selling the Art-Union only two pictures. Greeley, though, noticed his art school.[1]
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Thomas Hicks took a rather different path. His Fourierist connections served him better; Charles A. Dana, then living at Brook Farm, attended the same Associationist conventions as Whitley and Hicks (Brook Farm’s Harbinger called Whitley a noted artist of New York City in 1843). When Dana, like fellow Brook Farmers George Ripley and art critic George William Curtis joined the Tribune, Hicks would receive positive notices from them as well as from the Evening Post and Hicks’ friend Charles F. Briggs at the Broadway Journal. Curtis, Godwin and Briggs as co-editors of the influential magazine Putnam’s in the 1850s would continue to praise him. Hicks’ anti-slavery politics (he was a Quaker, like his artist brother Edward) followed those of his friends, and he moved with them toward the Republicans, famously being commissioned to do a portrait of standard-bearer Lincoln.
During the years of the Sylvanian and Fourierist fever, the Herald generally didn’t think much of Hicks. His Ruth’s Entreaty, that paper’s critic said, was much praised but on no grounds; it was angular, ungraceful, dry and brick-dusty with an utter want of delicacy and poetic conception. His portraits in 1844 were miserable and bad. Briggs, who had friends among the transcendentalists at Brook Farm, in the Whig New World thought Hicks’ portraits promising in their earnestness, but Naomi in Ruth’s Entreaty was a landlady in a boarding house. Brother Jonathan under suffragist John Neal said the composition was very good, while the New Mirror said a bit vaguely that it was a bold effort by a young artist with a great deal of truth. Most papers, even if uncomfortable with his inserting common folk into biblical pictures, gave at least mild praise to his portraits.[2] After a stint in Rome (where he associated with Thomas Crawford, beloved of the Boston idealists) and France (as Charles Dana’s travel companion), he returned to become an acclaimed portrait specialist, often partnering with printsellers who advertised his celebrity portraits widely. He would sell 21 paintings to the American Art-Union, mostly in 1847 and 1850.
The press did quarrel with Hicks because of captiousness about his subjects. The American Whig Review, for example, thought Hicks’ 1852 portrayal of nativist-leaning, anti-slavery Whig and ex-Governor Hamilton Fish (fig. 32) placed him in the first rank of the American school of art, as did Walter Whitman in the liberal Whig Sunday Dispatch. The Dispatch had started out in the Democratic camp, sympathetic to Young America (Hicks was warm and fervent) and land reform, so the idea that Hicks’ portrait emphasized the Homestead Exemption bill (protecting property from sale in bankruptcy) among the Governor’s accessories would be welcome. The anti-reform Knickerbocker thought Fish’s stature was impoverished by such accessories, and called a female portrait similarly overwhelmed by them an altarpiece for a modern Puseyite chapel, or for the Capitol, so presumably a false idol.[3] Hiram Fuller’s Evening Mirror, perhaps explaining why Whitman and the Dispatch were enthusiastic, thought Hicks’ portrait of the Governor a good example of artists who copy from real, vulgar life.[4]
Figure 32. Thomas Hicks, Governor Hamilton Fish, 1852, oil, Collection of the city of New York. The plaster relief behind him is the state arms by Erastus Palmer. Fish was Palmer’s most important New York patron.
To the Herald, which was critical of ministers using the pulpit for political advocacy, Hicks’ portrait of anti-slavery crusader Henry Ward Beecher was singularly inconsistent with priestly sanctity, smacking more of the man of the world than the Christian philosopher; the Republican but halfheartedly anti-slavery Courier and Enquirer and Evening Mirror preferred his portrait of Episcopalian Bishop Wainwright to Beecher’s, as grimy daubs of paint gave Beecher a look of being besotted. The Sunday Dispatch, by then headed by a Republican politician, thought Beecher was Hicks’ best at the exhibition; Beecher and the Dispatch were at the time backing Tribune author Solon Robinson’s controversial book about New York’s “low life” Hot Corn against charges of its immorality by the Herald, Courier and Enquirer and Express. The Times says it is an apotheosis of Beecher in silver-gray glory—a seeming jab at the Silver-Gray Whigs, Beecher’s enemies.[5]
It’s striking that the Tribune’s 1855 critic prefaced a humorous, insider, and favorable account of Hicks’ portrait of Bayard Taylor—a widely liked poet who wrote for Tribune and Putnam’s—with an attack on the National Academy. In a reforming style that departs from the artisanal model of the penny press, the critic said artists ought not to manage their own institution, as art is not for the benefit of artists but for the world. The Academy should be a public institution if the arts are to flourish, and if the American school is to ever break with convention. The critic, operating from this position opposed to the social hierarchy of decorum, also defends the necessity of flippancy, that standby of the penny press, as it is the only way not to be run through with a maulstick by aggrieved painters. He himself begins sententiously by promising to instruct the public on “how to look at pictures,” a process of comparison in which you gaze on a prominent “miracle of art” in order that such “unresisting imbecilities” will whet your desire for something better. Hicks’ portrait of Taylor was that something better. The Tribune says that for some cause not in the picture, Hicks operates as a whetstone on critical faculties, but that this picture of Taylor, in Oriental costume with an Arab companion, is a brilliant success. As with many of Hicks’ celebrity pictures, it was intended to be engraved, in this case as a frontispiece for Taylor’s book of travels. The Tribune flippantly mocks the exaggerated length of the famous pedestrian’s crossed legs as merely an appropriate (for such a traveler) idealization. The Democratic Irish News commented that the portrait’s style was as hard and stiff as the knave of diamonds, but satirically admired the painter’s courage in exhibiting a “native born citizen” in foreign costume.[6]
Whitley’s connections didn’t serve him as well, perhaps because of his own abilities as an artist, but also because his anti-abolition views would eventually align him with the Democrats rather than the more artistically influential Republicans. The short-lived $2-a-year Fourierist Phalanx, in its review of the 1844 National Academy exhibition, praised Jasper Cropsey, a friend of Hicks, and William Page, though it despaired of ever seeing a real “painter prophet.”[7] Edward Mooney, Page’s student, had a portrait of Whitley (in 1842, he’d also had a portrait of the poet McDonald Clarke) at that exhibition, which the Tribune said was as fine a specimen of portrait painting as was in the room. Like Mooney, who never sold a painting to the Apollo or Art-Union, Whitley never came anywhere near the prominence of Page, Cropsey or Hicks.[8] But Godwin and Bryant’s Evening Post and Greeley’s Associationist Tribune as much as the Herald and Home Journal would be vehicles for Whitley’s attacks on New York art institutions. His viewpoint was, like theirs, that of a radical who assailed institutions on the grounds of being anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian.
[1] “The Fine Arts: National Academy,” Mirror, May 26, 1838, p. 382; “National Academy,” Herald, June 11, 1840; Log Cabin, September 18, 1841, p. 8; Grain was at 39 Lispenard Street.
[2] “National Academy,” Herald, June 5, 1843; Harry Franco, “National Academy,” New World, June 17, 1843; Brother Jonathan, May 20, 1843, p. 81; “National Academy,” New Mirror, May 20, 1843, p. 108. His portraits included ones belonging Osborne Macdaniel, an active Fourierist.
[3] “The American School of Art,” American Whig Review, August 1852, p. 138. George W. Peck, the then editor of the Whig Review, would also write for the Bulletin of the American Art-Union. [Walter Whitman] “An Hour at the Academy of Design,” Sunday Dispatch, April 25, 1852, p. 2. “National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker, June 1852, supplied “by a friend who has written much about art.” “National Academy of Design,” Knickerbocker, May 1855 (by “a friend and correspondent on his way to Europe,” but not an artist).
[4] “National Academy,” Evening Mirror, April 30, 1852, p. 3.
[5] “National Academy of Design,” Herald, June 7, 1857, p. 5; “Fine Arts: National Academy of Design,” Courier and Enquirer, April 1, 1854, p. 2; “Exhibition of the National Academy of Design, 3rd Notice,” Times, June 20, 1857, p. 4.
[6] “National Academy,” Irish News, May 3, 1856, p. 60. The Times suggested that the sunny morning in Damascus (the locale for Taylor’s image) must be very painful—its colorfulness seems to have caused ophthalmia (eye inflammation).
[7] “National Academy of Design,” Charles Fourier’s The Phalanx, May 18, 1844, pp. 150-151. The author also admired Charles Wier’s Compositor, a rare picture of an artisan. Thomas Hicks wrote a review of associate editor Parke Godwin’s Popular View of the Doctrines of Charles Fourier (he also did Godwin’s portrait, as well as several for co-editor Osborne Macdaniels, one of which was shown in the 1844 National Academy exhibition) in the May 4, 1844 issue, pp. 127-130. “The Sylvania Association,” Phalanx, July 13, 1844, p. 244. J. Winchester, 30 Ann Street, published it, but it was sold from the Sun’s office.
[8] “National Academy,” Tribune, April 25, 1844, p. 2, said that Whitley, now in Ohio, was well known and esteemed as a man and an artist.
On Cincinnati (ch 4):
Whitley’s best-known vehicle for the attack, the Herald of Truth, was an Associationist, Swedenborgian and land reform organ in Cincinnati. The Herald of Truth often supported artists with connections to Fourierist movements like Whitley. A correspondent, in language that emphasized the triumph of the soul over external nature, praised John P. Frankenstein’s religious paintings, for example—noting they had called forth envy rather than fair-minded criticism, because he had stamped goodness and moral purity on a deformed creature rather than on an embodiment of beauty. His Christ effectively conveyed a pure philanthropic soul suffering under scorn. The same writer also praised the genius of Mrs. Spencer, as did Maria Varney’s “Letters from the Queen City,” which described the Western Art Union as a “perfect paradise,” where pictures were hung by both Spencer and landscape painter Godfrey Frankenstein; contributor Sarah Mallory found the heart of a woman and mother, a great and noble soul, in Spencer’s art (fig. 32). Spencer’s parents had been active in Ohio phalanxes (Fourierist communes) and reform, and John Frankenstein had been drawn to Associationism.[1]
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The Associationists’ cultural nationalism was here allied to mild nativism. Hine had worked with E.Z.C. Judson (Ned Buntline), a Democrat who would found a nativist newspaper, Ned Buntline’s Own, in New York City in 1848, and take Forrest’s side on behalf of “American” thespians in 1849’s Astor Place riots. The Herald of Truth also published poems by Augustus Duganne. Duganne was an Associationist if not a strictly Fourierist one—he founded in 1849 the Iron Man mutual benefit society and newspaper, worked for the Tribune, and edited a Know-Nothing (nativist) newspaper. He also published a biography of Italian nationalist Garibaldi; Duganne was a believer in Young America expansion.[2] During the 1840s, he published his poetry in an array of land reform or Associationist-friendly journals, including Brother Jonathan, the Sunday Dispatch, Holden’s Dollar Magazine (under the editorship of Charles Briggs), Evening Post, and Aurora. Bayard Taylor of the Tribune, joined by Nathaniel P. Willis’ brother Richard Storrs Willis of the Musical Times and Hiram Fuller of the Evening Mirror, chose Duganne’s poem as the prizewinning ode in the Ohio-based Cosmopolitan Art Association’s contest for tributes to the Greek Slave; it admired how Powers’ sculpture taught that the mind is free. Powers himself was a Swedenborgian from Cincinnati. The Cosmopolitan Art Association also brought Parke Godwin to speak at its annual distribution.[3]
[1] Arlington, “Art and the Artists,” Herald of Truth, July 1847; Maria Varney, “Letters from the Queen City, Herald of Truth, September 1847; Sarah Mallory, Herald of Truth, March 1848. On Frankenstein, see Gail Husch, Something Coming: Apocalyptic Expectation and Mid-nineteenth-century American Painting (University Press of New England, 2000) 169; Elisabeth L. Roark, “John Frankenstein’s ‘Portrait of Godfrey Frankenstein’ and the Aesthetics of Friedrich Schiller,” American Art 15:1 (Spring 2001) 74-83.
[2] His life of Garibaldi appeared in the New York Weekly in 1859, and was noticed by the Sunday Dispatch, where he was also a contributor.
[3] The Iron Man in 1852 was a weekly 8-cent journal. The Know-Nothing journal was supposed to be published by Palmer, Guyer and Co. at 86 Ann Street in 1854. The Sandusky, Ohio-based Cosmopolitan Art Association sponsored the contest as part of its publicity for the Greek Slave in its lottery. Evening Mirror, October 4, 1854, p. 2. Richard Storrs Willis edited the Musical Times 1852-1864, preceded by, among others, Henry C. Watson, who had worked with Briggs and would collaborate on a journal with Whitley in 1855.
On Dana at the Tribune (ch 4):
Charles A. Dana of the Harbinger replaced Foster as City Items editor in 1847, leaving for Europe in mid 1848. Like Foster, Dana commented on art. He admired a painting owned by Whig poet and Tribune favorite Henry Tuckerman, hoped that the City Councilmen visiting Paul Delaroche’s widely praised Napoleon Crossing the Alps would reflect on clearing the mud and filth that prevented crossing the city’s streets, and in Associationist style praised the American Art-Union’s efforts to achieve what no individual could. The city editor also approved French art dealer Goupil’s International Art-Union (which, the Harbinger pointed out, broke down false and conventional barriers of national prejudice in the arts), defended National Academy classes, and gave a surprisingly harsh review to Lilly Martin Spencer—though he granted her “natural powers of a high and unusual order,” he used terms like “crude,” “unmeaning,” “spotted,” “glaring defects,” “ungraceful” and “unnatural” to qualify the praise. [1] Rather than praising her expressiveness, he urged her to severe study of the classical for two years. In reviews of the 1849 Art-Union, the City Editor praised Tribune favorite allegorical painter Gray (fig. 33) for his spirit and tone of the old masters, Huntington, Doughty, Gignoux, Edmonds, Samuel Osgood (husband of popular Whig poet Fanny Osgood, and subject of a recent biography in the Tribune), Church, T.A. Richards, Edwin White, George Inness (who had associations with Swedenborg and land reform), and T.W. Whitley and Tompkins Matteson.[2] Despite the inclusion of Matteson, there was very little of Democratic Young America in this line-up of Academy stalwarts, and the Tribune would largely part ways with Whitley after 1849.
[1] Tuckerman wrote for the Art-Union Bulletin and had been praised in the Tribune since 1841, including a sonnet to him. Dana, “Weir’s Merchant of Amsterdam,” Tribune, October 24, 1848, p. 2; Dana, “Fine Arts in Common Council,” Tribune, November 3, 1848, p. 2; Dana, “Our Art-Union,” Tribune, November 17, 1848, p. 2, Dana, “Notice of Schools of the National Academy,” Tribune, December 2, 1848, p. 2, Dana, “City Items: International Art-Union,” Tribune, December 4, 1848; Harbinger, December 2, 1848. Dana, “City Items: Mrs. L.M. Spencer,” Tribune, December 5, 1848, p. 2.
[2] “City Items: Opening of Art-Union Rooms,” Tribune, March 8, 1849, p. 2. The review highlights Alexander Rutherford’s Jack and the Giant Killer, purchased by the American Art-Union and engraved for its Bulletin, as having “more meaning than everyone will perceive.” Bayard Taylor had a stint as City Editor following Dana’s departure, as did James Barrett Swain and F.J. Ottarson (by 1851, when Swain went to Raymond’s new Times, but Ottarson had been a reporter since 1848), who liked Matteson. Ottarson had briefly been connected with the Sunday Dispatch and was elected a Republican Councilman from the 15th ward in 1857.
On Whitley and art criticism in the penny press:
The rest of the penny press, more Democratic and open to Whitley’s and Fisher’s anti-monopoly language, was more sympathetic. E. Maurice Bloch documented how the satirical, pro-slavery and anti-cultural nationalist weekly Figaro presented the American Artists Association as a “revolt,” and suggested that Whitley might have written their articles. Figaro was started by Wardle Corbyn, a theater manager, former Herald writer and editor of satirical papers such as Paul Pry and the Picayune. He was joined by a drama critic from the Albion, expatriate Englishman and Young America writer Thomas Powell, who lived in Hoboken, New Jersey, Whitley’s new hometown, and they would collaborate later on the Hudson County Democrat as well as the nativist Young Sam.[1] Whitley in the 1850s was casting around for new outlets. He attended an editors’ dinner at the Astor house in 1851.[2] He started the Worker’s Journal, a paper for the laboring class, which undertook the “arduous task of making something out of Williamsburgh (Brooklyn).”[3] He wrote a melodrama, The Jesuit: The Amours of Captain Effington of the American Navy, based on the Mexican War, that got reviewed positively in the Evening Post and published in the Democratic Review, whose then editor was expansionist Thomas P. Kettell, a former Herald editor; however, it doesn’t seem to have been performed.[4]
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Whitley and art criticism in the Home Journal:
The series notes that Parke Godwin’s Vala was being illustrated by his friends, and that Talbot was busy. Elliott’s portrait of the wife of the Knickerbocker editor, the latter a friend of Whitley’s, was admired, as was work by young Brooklyn artist Walter Libbey, and William S. Mount; other old Willis and Morris favorites like Doughty were defended. The writer gave the artists of the new (anti-Art-Union) Association considerable and familiar attention: William Walcutt has an intriguing original picture, The Gambler, Thomas D. Jones a fine bust of General Winfield Scott (Whig candidate for president), George W. Flagg (an officer of the Association) has a noble painting, art professor Paul Duggan, who had joined some of the Artists’ Association meetings, is good, and Durand is praised for contributing to the Artists’ Association. The New York Gallery of Fine Arts has bought a fine Fisher copy of an old master. A very clever scene from American history by George Inness (an advocate of land reform) found no favor with the Art-Union, but is showing at the new Association of Artists, which, he observes, the Art-Union’s Bulletin has called a collective of mechanics and laborers. He featured old Associationists like Hicks and Cranch, and artists that Whitley knew in Cincinnati: Lilly Martin Spencer has great power and originality, Miner Kellogg’s portrait of General Scott entering Mexico City is noticed, William Ranney is painting a scene of the New Jersey fens. He was also attentive to National Academy artists in opposition to the Art-Union: he puffs Cummings, Ingham and Shegogue, as well as southern landscapist T.A. Richards (one of the few whose works are not adulterated with “hot, suffocating tints” from a mass of imported trash “selected during a tour in Europe.”[1]
The author’s opinions sometimes diverged from Whitley’s earlier ones. In one article, he vigorously defended the depiction of poverty in James Beard’s North Carolina Emigrants at the Art-Union, saying it was faithful and accurate, not exaggerated, and showed Beard’s pre-eminence in art with expatriate painter and Art-Union favorite John T. Peele. Whitley had probably liked Beard even back in 1848 in Cincinnati—he had called him clever then, but when the Western Art Union chose Beard’s humorous genre scene of dogs for their annual engraving, it was too much for him to pass up, given the Art-Union’s claims to lofty ideals. And he could be critical of Spencer, calling a scene she had done of a woman awaiting her sailor husband fit only for grannies and nurses. Spencer may not have appreciated his earlier praise or agreed with his ongoing attack on the Art-Union, which had been a source of support for her. The same year she was made an honorary member of the National Academy (Whitley or the Home Journal columnist had earlier described her work as making Academicians sensible of their defects), she donated an artwork to help bail out its finances, one of those bought en masse by Cozzens for the Art-Union. He didn’t name her in the review though, as the writer often tactfully didn’t name those he satirized. And he admired Brown’s latest Indian sculpture—he seems to have run into him at Bryant’s.[2]
The series gives Whitley himself considerable attention. It opines that the topographic English landscape school, Whitley’s and Richards’ style, is better than the German since it doesn’t allow “picture starers” to poke their noses into the pictures, and calls the sketchy style of former amateur Walter Oddie (he sold 62 landscapes to the Art-Union) mannered—Pan writes in, however, to question whether this idea implies a fixed standard of taste, beyond how a landscape makes a viewer feel.[3]
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The writer keeps up his condemnation of the Art-Unions, including Cincinnati’s Western Art Union, which purchased Powers’ Greek Slave, but not from the artist, so that the sale did not benefit him. The writer recommends instead the new artists’ association in Cincinnati, which is trying to correct the Western Art-Union’s grossest partiality in giving favored artists $3,000 in a single year. He calls the New England Art-Union, where directors have no power over selection of art, the most liberal of all (it exhibited Whitley’s picture of Roslyn, Bryant’s residence); the Art Union in Newark, New Jersey, which purchased Whitley’s paintings (and Thomas D. Jones’ sculptures) along with Durand and Cropsey, is also admired; J. J. Mapes, of the Academy and the Mechanics Institute, who owned land in New Jersey, presided over its opening. Newark artist Rembrandt Lockwood, who was also purchased by that state’s short-lived art union, is approved of too; perhaps Lockwood was a friend of Walcutt or Whitney as well, since the Republic devoted a special feature to him.[4] In brief comments on the American Art-Union exhibition, the critic prioritized artist James W. Glass, who sold over 48 paintings to the Art-Union, mostly historical compositions, including one that seems to satirize the pre-Raphaelites. The Art-Union’s patronage of Glass, who had tenuous claims to be considered an American artist, would become an issue for the Art-Union.[5] He also called H.P. Gray’s King Death, purchased by the Art-Union, a monstrous conception.
The artist columnist notes that Godwin, Henry James, and George W. Curtis are lecturing brilliantly on art at the Stuyvesant Institute (the same series in which Whitley participated); he agrees with the Evening Post that Huntington’s lecture in the series (which tried to counter Godwin’s and James’) was too preachy. The Home Journal also observed that neither the pro-Art-Union Literary World nor the Albion had noticed Parke Godwin’s address to the new Artists’ Association, nor its president William Walcutt’s modest reply; he twits Duyckinck and the “most famous weekly literary review published in the city” for saying they support national taste, while publishing issues almost entirely from foreign authors hostile to the United States.[6] He adds that the rich in the U.S., citing as a type Reverend George Bethune (an anti-slavery Democrat in Brooklyn, an Art-Union associate, and a writer for Putnam’s Home Book of the Picturesque, as well as a toaster at that year’s National Academy dinner), don’t desire American subjects or American nature in their art; only a few poets in Hoboken do. The reference to Bethune helps characterize the anti-slavery faction he, the Herald, Willis, the Day Book, and their allies seem to see controlling the Art-Union, but this doesn’t stop the writer from admiring the genius of Bethune’s parishioner the landscape painter Frederic Edwin Church—though Cropsey is better.
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Whitley eventually started his own paper, the Hoboken City Gazette. Through it, he continued to contribute art criticism to the Home Journal, which reprinted its commentary, and he (as the Gazette’s editor) was also cited by the Evening Post and the Knickerbocker to confirm their opinions. He noticed fellow New Jersey artists like Lockwood and Spencer, and still sent an occasional picture to the National Academy through the 1860s. Unlike Walcutt, he was not so associated with nativists that the Democratic Irish News in 1856 couldn’t praise him, as did the Herald. The pro-Union if also nativist-leaning Evening Mirror thought his Gipsey Camp a fine rendition of the old, open woods of Hoboken, and were impressed that he could pursue publishing, editing, agriculture, along with other occupations, and still study nature.[7] He sustained ties with the Home Journal; H.W. Parker, author of an 1856 series in that weekly on the “Studios of American Artists,” included his Hoboken studio in it.[8]
After the Hoboken Gazette failed at the end of 1855, Whitley was involved in a short-lived Know-Nothing vehicle for George Law, Young Sam, edited by Thomas Powell, who had also worked at Figaro, an anti-Art-Union weekly.[9] The title Young Sam evoked both the workingman’s land reform paper Young America and the nativist effort to co-opt Young America. Law himself was a financier and steamship magnate whose presidential candidacy was endorsed by nativists and Whigs who disliked Whig Millard Fillmore’s ties to Seward. The Herald promoted Law as an alternative: a successful businessman and outsider to the usual corrupt political parties, and publicized his “Live Oak” fan clubs. Law spent freely on the campaign, including buying newspapers, and J.C. Derby published his biography. Emerson’s Magazine and Putnam’s Monthly—subscriptions to which (and the Home Journal) were sold by publisher H.W. Derby’s Cosmopolitan Art Association—endorsed Law. Artists like Spencer, often publicized by the Cosmopolitan Art Journal’s female editor, were also promoted in Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s Emerson’s Magazine.
Whitley’s collaborators at Young Sam included fellow editor and Englishman Charles G. Rosenberg, a writer and painter who—like Whitley—did miscellaneous design work (e.g., the masthead for the Democratic Constellation in 1859) in a topographical style, including a view of Union Square dominated by Henry Kirke Brown’s bronze Washington, and a view of Wall Street painted in collaboration with James Cafferty for a Herald editor. Rosenberg accompanied singer Jenny Lind on her tour of the United States in 1850 and wrote a book about it; since N.P. Willis was one of Lind’s admirers, that may have been how Whitley met him.[10] Like Whitley, Rosenberg was an outsider to the art world, as is apparent in a Sunday Dispatch review of the 1860 National Academy exhibition in the form of a dialogue between Softtongue (a capital exhibition!) and Hardhead (pooh! pooh!). Hardhead argues that the Tenth Street studio clique rules the Academy, and accordingly is critical of Church, Sanford Gifford and Eastman Johnson, while heaping praise on the more obscure landscape painter and New York Sketch Club member William Hart. When Softtongue asks suspiciously if he knows Hart, Hardhead denies it but says he does know Rosenberg, who is better than most artists in the country as a draughtsman, but “when a man has no personal friends…he is a fool to send a work of any pretensions to them [the Academy].”[11]
After the panic of 1857, Whitley joined a long list of artists in Henry Leeds’ art auctions, including Cropsey, Spencer, Hart, Charles Lanman, and Walter Oddie. He tried to revive the Hoboken Gazette in 1858, in part by promising to include his recollections of art and artists and an exposé of the picture trade in New York. He had become a judge in Hoboken by 1857, even briefly publishing a trade journal, the Circuit Judge, so he was not entirely dependent on art (fig. 37) or writing for income. The Home Journal, Evening Post, Sunday Atlas and Herald continued to notice his doings: his rulings in various court cases, his sketches of England’s lake scenery after his 1856 trip there, his delivery of lectures on emigration laws (and other “topics of a national character”) in England, and in New Jersey on “The Influence of Art and Literature on Popular Education,” the publication of his Guide to Hoboken, and Greeley’s attendance at an editorial convention in Passaic Falls with Whitley of the Hudson County Democrat. Working for the weekly Hudson County Democrat may have reflected his political ambitions; in November of 1861 he was nominated by the Union party, a fusionist pro-war party, for state Assembly.
[1] “Art and Artists prepared for the Home Journal,” Home Journal, December 21, 1850. The first issue I spotted in this series was “Domestic Items prepared for the Home Journal,” and “Fine Arts prepared for the Home Journal,” November 30, 1850. The column appeared weekly thereafter (on July 5, 1851, its title was “Art and Artists prepared for the Home Journal by an Artist”) and the National Academy exhibition review for 1851 was also “by an Artist.” By September of 1851, this format seems to have disappeared.
[2] “Art and Artists,” Home Journal, August 23, 1851, observes that H.K. Brown was at Roslyn when Whitley was.
[3] “Fine Arts for the Home Journal,” Home Journal, December 7, 1850. Pan, letter, Home Journal, February 15, 1851.
[4] “American Fine Arts,” Republic, April 1852, p. 185.
[5] Glass’ mother, a Virginian, married an English merchant, and Glass was born in Cadiz. He studied for two years with Huntington in New York but spent the rest of his career in London, where Cotton Whig and Daniel Webster rival Abbott Lawrence helped arrange a sitting with Tory hero the Duke of Wellington.
[6] “Art and Artists,” Home Journal, June 5, 1851.
[7] “National Academy,” Irish News, June 27, 1857, p. 185; “Academy of Design,” Evening Mirror, April 18, 1854, p. 2. He started the Gazette by November 1853.
[8] H.W. (Henry Webster) Parker tells William Sidney Mount that George P. Morris invited him to write the series of articles, and asks Mount for a sketch of his studio; letter in Alfred Frankenstein, William Sydney Mount (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975) 334. Parker wrote at least one poem to Cole’s Cross in the Wilderness, and hailed Church as his successor.
[9] Evening Mirror, April 9 1856, p. 3. Henry C. Watson, T.W. Whitley, and C.G. Rosenberg sued James Abbott and Thomas Powell in Marine court for unpaid services as writers for Young Sam, receiving $153.98. Figaro was edited by Thomas Powell in 1851, and Englishman Powell would also write for John Brougham’s Lantern, Cornelius Mathews’ Reveille, Hudson County Democrat (Hoboken, NJ), Daily News, D.W. Holly’s Democratic Review and Frank Leslie’s. See Hershel Parker, The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011). Englishman Watson was primarily a music but sometimes art critic, formerly of the New World (1841), Albion (1844), Broadway Journal (1845), American Literary Gazette (1847, with Briggs, Duyckinck, and J.B. Auld), Evening Mirror (1847) and Musical Times (1848, edited by R.S. Willis).
[10] Sherry Lee Linkon, “Reading Lind Mania: Print Culture and the Construction of Nineteenth-Century Audiences,” in Ezra Greenspan and Jonathan Rose, eds., Book History, volume 1, (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998) 94-106, p. 106, note 22.
[11] “Art Matters: Academy of Design: A Brief Visit and Conversation,” Sunday Dispatch, April 28, 1860, p. 8; May 12, 1860, p. 4.
[1] J.W.S. Hows was a critic at the Albion starting in 1843, after A.D. Paterson left. Powell came in 1851. Former Herald writer David Russell Lee also contributed. On Powell, see Hershel Parker, The Powell Papers: A Confidence Man Amok Among the Anglo-American Literati (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2011). Powell arrived in the U.S. in 1849, allied himself with the Duyckinck-Mathews circle of Young Democrats, but he went on to make common cause with the Herald, Day Book, Lantern, Daily News, and Frank Leslie’s, all of which would be if not outright Democratic papers then sympathizers.
[2] The dinner was for printing press innovator Robert Hoe, and was attended by Beach of the Sun, Greeley, publisher John Keese, and Park Benjamin, as well as Henry Ward Beecher of the Independent, Reverend Chapin, Dr. Francis and GPR James, Evening Post, January 29, 1851.
[3] Sunday Mercury, November 25, 1849. He also published in Sartain’s Union Magazine in 1852. John Sartain was a fellow Englishman and former Fourierist.
[4] Evening Post, April 18, 1850. Thomas W. Whitley, “The Jesuit,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review, March 1850, p. 235. The subtitle suggests a reference to James Fenimore Cooper, often mockingly called “Mr. Effingham” by Whigs. The same issue profiled Democrat Lewis P. Clover (b. 1790), father of the artist of the Phrenologist and owner of a frame shop on Warren Street, appointed by Van Buren to the customs house when his shop went bankrupt.
Misc. press criticism of the Art-Union (ch 4):
At the penny Evening Mirror, where Briggs was a contributor, editor Hiram Fuller (a Zachary Taylor Whig, and frequent advocate of Young America) might have been expected to support the Art-Union, if only from dislike of his former partner Nathaniel P. Willis, who after 1849 waged war against the Art-Union in his Home Journal. But Fuller Whiggishly quarreled with the managers’ taste: they didn’t buy Briggs’ friend William Page’s (expensive) Mother and Child, preferring instead the poor and commonplace (and cheaper) pictures of uneducated artists. By mid-1851, Fuller wrote that the purchases that year were not worth the price of admission (which was nothing), singling out James Beard’s Last Man as “simply disgusting,” a “sea sick individual” with skin of pink leather and tubes for veins. Fuller later said that while he was sorry to be on the side of sore heads who can’t sell their abortions, the Art-Union had become tyrannical.
…
The Herald also repeatedly called the Bulletin silly, because the Art-Union wasted its money on publishing rather than art. This was a jab at Evert Duyckinck, an Art-Union manager (1848-51) and editor of the Literary World. Duyckinck was a moderate Democrat, a friend of Wetmore, Page and Mount, who professed a certain amount of cultural nationalism—like his colleague, Cornelius Mathews, he favored the international copyright, as a protectionist tariff against imports—and anti-slavery sentiment. Duyckinck’s circle had a tinge of Whiggish elitism to it. Cornelius Mathews’ Yankee Doodle, published out of the Tribune office, for example, mocked Young America weeklies like the Dispatch for mottos that claimed to embrace the whole continent and even the universe. Mathews too wanted to see Yankee Doodle’s opinions, pictures, statues, books, and newspapers fill the world, but his tone in regards to this expansive cultural nationalism was sardonic: though Americans scorn infringements on their freedom, including their perfect right to think as they please about a picture as much as a President, Mathews preferred a certain amount of mental aristocracy in regards to both.[1]
Duyckinck was allied with other editors and publishers among the managers of the Art-Union, including William Appleton (1850), Henry J. Raymond (1847-1850) of the Tribune, Courier and Enquirer, Times and Harper’s, George W. Curtis of the Tribune, Putnam’s and Harper’s, and Briggs (1842-1845) of Putnam’s, the Times and Harper’s.[2] This circle was anti-slavery, and their connections with newspapers, publishers, and magazines made them competitors and rivals to the other weeklies and the dailies. The Herald’s accusations that the Art-Union was in cahoots with Raymond’s Times, the Whigs, and anti-slavery activism were not strictly true, but there was a degree of sympathy and collaboration.
This was articulated aggressively by the penny Day Book, which, under its last editors, Dr. John H. Van Evrie and R.G. Horton, would become New York’s most racist defender of slavery. Under its first editor, cholera doctor Francis Bacon, it had started out Whig and mistrustful of the slaveholding power that had defeated Henry Clay; however, with the addition of editor Nathaniel P. Stimson, it began shifting direction toward the conservative Whigs, supporting Millard Fillmore, who had ties to the Know-Nothings, Daniel Webster and the Compromise of 1850. Stimson had been involved in a libel suit with Webb of the Courier and Enquirer, and like the Herald was hostile to the Seward (anti-slavery) Whigs that financially backed Webb’s journal, the Tribune and the Times. By 1856, the Day Book would support Democrat Fernando Wood for mayor of New York.
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The Day Book however shared the Sunday papers’ and the Herald’s hostility to blue laws that aimed to legislate morality. No evangelical or nativist, Stimson defended immigrants and (like Bennett) promised to give an impartial account of life in Wall Street and among the fashionable, their intrigues, corners, operations and transactions, called by their true names. As with the Dispatch’s attack on the American Institute, or the Herald’s earlier attack on the National Academy clique, the Day Book decried how the wealthy and fashionable Art-Union managers had become petty tyrants and quacks puffing their own taste, staying in office or nominating their associates and accomplices, and creating a monopoly injurious to art and artists.[3] Though the Day Book was severe on the Art-Union’s purchasing (or Cozzen-ing) of good press ($325 for ads in the Times, $62 for a letter in the Journal of Commerce, $120 for one in the Herald, etc.), the villain for Stimson was Abraham Cozzens, who had been a manager since 1840, and President in its last years, replacing Wetmore, who had been only slightly more to the Day Book’s liking. The Cozzens’ family had ties to the Knickerbockers, the nativist party and free galleries: Abraham’s father William, as a Native American alderman, had spoken in favor of the city donating its Rotunda for a Gallery of the Fine Arts (albeit not a free one). The Cozzens’ American hotel was a center for nativist politics, and its hotel on the Hudson at West Point a popular Knickerbocker vacation spot; Charles Loring Elliott would paint wine merchant and author Frederick S. Cozzens fishing there with Knickerbocker editor Clark. All of the Cozzens were art collectors to some degree, including commissioning Art-Union favorites like Leutze (only 13 purchased, but his were expensive; 2 engraved) and Huntington (42 paintings purchased, 2 engraved).
…
The papers that had long supported the Art-Union—Bryant’s Evening Post, the Courier and Enquirer and the penny Express—gave no credence to the penny paper attacks. They published Fisher’s letters defending himself and Whitley against the charge of being merely disappointed artists, and covered the “respectable group” of artists dissatisfied with the American Art-Union, but they stalwartly defended the sincerity and integrity of the institution’s managers as well as its general usefulness. The Express’ editors, brothers Erastus and James Brooks, were moving away from the proto-Republicanism of the other two papers though. Erastus would become a Know-Nothing, and his paper, like the Herald and Day Book, favored compromise with the South. Their former art writer, Charles Lanman, had left for Washington, D.C. in 1848, and with music and art editor James F. Otis in New Orleans (he would eventually fight for the Confederates), the paper began excerpting art coverage from Willis’ Home Journal, which was deeply anti-Art-Union and where Whitley contributed art criticism. Perhaps that’s why in the Express’ National Academy review of 1851, Whitley’s genre scene Lecture on Art was praised, right after Edmonds and Mount.[4]
[1] “Yankee Doodle,” Yankee Doodle, October 10, 1846, p. 3; “The Fine Arts,” Yankee Doodle, October 10, 1846, p. 5; “Yankee Doodle and the American Institute,” Yankee Doodle, October 17, 1846, p. 2.
[2] In 1844, Duyckinck tried to start a journal called Home Critic, with Henry J. Raymond, Hiram Fuller of the Evening Mirror, and George W. Curtis. Whig Charles Lanman wrote art criticism for Duyckinck’s Literary World in 1847 and in 1849 lobbied for Duyckinck to arrange for the Art-Union to purchase his painting; Duyckinck Papers, Archives of American Art.
[3] Stimson, Day Book, September 1, 1855, p. 4, also complained of the haughtiness of bankers, and singled out F.W. Edmonds, prominent in both the Academy and the Art-Union, as one who tries to humiliate customers.
[4] “Art Matters: Notes on the Academy,” Express, May 16, 1851.
On Henry K. Brown (ch 4):
But the artist Willis chose for the controversy had other significance; he was useful for those critical of the anti-slavery Young America wing of the Whigs and the Democrats. Brown as Phiz in 1842 had illustrated a satirical novel by Cornelius Mathews, published by Appleton’s, that was despised by Mathews’ enemies at the Knickerbocker, Evening Mirror (satirist Briggs was no friend to Mathews) and Sunday Mercury. Mathews, who with Duyckinck was co-editing the monthly Arcturus, served for them as an example of all that was wrong with favoritism in literature.[1] In 1849, Duyckinck’s Literary World had endorsed Brown’s statuette for the Art-Union. An earlier Literary World correspondent, H, had even compared the relatively unknown Brown to the famous Hiram Powers, condemning the Greek Slave as wretchedly tame, unfeminine, and ephemeral, whereas Brown’s work was original. Then-editor Charles F. Hoffman in a rather ineffective demurral warned that the correspondent shouldn’t try to convince people that the Greek Slave was a humbug, as that would set back the cause of art. The Evening Mirror concurred.[2] Powers’ Greek Slave, with its naturalism and associations with Young America support for democratic revolutions abroad, was not an effective foil for Brown.
[1] Publishers were major employers of artists; Appleton’s published Mirror artist J.G. Chapman’s Drawing Book, and other of their books were illustrated by Elliott, Durand, Edmonds, Beard et al.
[2] Literary World, June 16, 1849; “Fine Arts,” Literary World, December 18, 1847. In response to the Literary World’s comments, Vermont (Hiram Powers’ birthplace), “Mr. Brown,” Evening Mirror, December 23, 1847, wrote that the comments on Powers were malicious.