Unpublished portions of the Conclusion to The Politics of Art Criticism
On Mayor Wood, Etex, and William Powell (Conclusion):
Wood also advocated for reforms to make city department heads like the police chief accountable to the mayor, so he could then fire them for poor performance, but he succeeded mostly in antagonizing the city aldermen, who included one of his press enemies, anti-slavery Democrat Anson Herrick of the Sunday Atlas. Artist and Democrat Francis Edmonds, who was City Chamberlain, resigned his office in a conflict with nativist bank president Shepherd Knapp, and in doing so exposed how their Mechanics’ Bank had for years bribed politicians.[1] Herrick would be involved in an exchange of bribery accusations with Wood, who was frequently suspected of unscrupulous measures for concentrating power among the factions of the Democratic party. Democratic papers too were wary of his changeability. Henry Wikoff, James Buchanan’s agent and a friend of Herald editor James G. Bennett, warned Bennett that Wood was making false claims to the President about New York politics. Patrick Lynch’s Irish American was loyal to Wood, as was the pro-slavery Day Book and former Tammany organ the Daily News, especially once Wood's brother Benjamin took over the paper. But bohemian papers like the Saturday Press that disliked Republican blue laws and Tammany papers like the Leader were united in their opposition to him. The Evening Mirror suggested editor John Clancy of the Leader had at one point been paid to stop abusing Wood, but thought the money should have been spent on the politicians at the Sunday Dispatch instead.[2] Some Democrats even supported the Republican state legislature’s takeover of the city charter and police force, a ‘reform’ that blocked not just Wood but the influence of immigrant voters.
When Charles Loring Elliott was hired for Wood’s official portrait for city hall, at half the typical fee—the City Council, which hired the artist, was dominated by nativists and Republicans—the Times gave a rundown of some of Elliott’s other city commissions as a lineage for the painting. Elliott had painted Mayor Ambrose Kingsland, a Whig who had defeated Wood for office in 1850, but who was so corrupt, in alliance with his Democratic city council, that he spurred merchant Peter Cooper into organizing civic reforms. He painted Whig governor Washington Hunt, whose efforts to expand the Erie Canal were declared unconstitutional, and who had by this time moved to the Democrats, and ex-Governor William Bouck, a Hard Democrat who also had ties to canal patronage.
...
The Dispatch pointed out that there was already a portrait of Wood at City Hall, anyway, that better illustrated “The Age of Wood,” an apocalyptic era when Gog and Magog, Jewish bankers on Wall Street, bring destruction to the people.[3] The Dispatch was sardonically referring to a grand allegorical picture, the Triumph of America, by Antoine Étex, which had initially been shown at the 1853 Crystal Palace. Étex was a celebrated French sculptor, best known in the U.S. for his reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe. He admired the U.S. and had in 1837 exhibited a 25-foot high allegorical painting of Washington and the founding fathers at New York's Academy of Fine Arts, based on his sketches from portraits in General Lafayette's collection. Though executed “under the auspices” of Lafayette, it met with Whig criticism of its lofty ambitions. Charles F. Daniels’ Whig Gazette and General Advertiser, for example, considered its design, based on a Last Judgment, execrable and impious.[4] In Étex's Crystal Palace picture, To the Glory of the United States, he again depicted George Washington “as large as life,” and the other heroes of the Revolution, including a life-size Benjamin Franklin and Lafayette. These white heroes of American "civilization" were again contrasted with Native Americans, including Osceola, but Étex added a sea of portraits in the background, including all the Presidents, statesmen like Clay, Webster, Calhoun and Seward, as well as authors like Washington Irving and artists like Benjamin West, all surmounted by the aegis of the goddess of Liberty.
Étex had come to the city in 1857 to rescue this painting from the Crystal Palace, which was near bankruptcy. He offered it to the city. Wood had it put in City Hall, where like Thom’s statue of Washington in the Park, it became a symbol of Wood’s own ambitions and alliances, all the more so because Étex added a portrait of Wood. As the Journal of Commerce said, Wood's enemies accused him of having “thieved” Benjamin West’s place in the composition, and instead of palette and pencils, Wood busied himself with bunkum vetoes and bogus contracts. The Herald, only an occasional Wood ally, thought Étex's revised “Glory of America” would become the shame of New York. The Evening Post, more sympathetic to an artist with strong Democratic sympathies, hoped the painting would be kept in the city. But despite Étex's efforts, including making an additional bust of Wood, as well as ones of Franklin Pierce, Democratic Senator Thomas Hart Benton and the Republican Fremonts, it was never purchased.[5]
Étex's effort to dramatize a united and inclusive American body politic was damned by its associations with Wood's brand of politics, a sentiment reinforced by the French artist's endorsement of another Democratic commission, William H. Powell’s De Soto’s Discovery of the Mississippi. When Henry Inman died and Congress gave his Capitol Rotunda painting commission to Powell rather than Inman's more famous student Daniel Huntington, Whigs denounced it as a political job. Joseph Jefferson McDowell, a Democrat who represented Powell's district, had advocated for the commission. McDowell had been raised in Kentucky and Virginia before moving to Ohio, and he was an ardent anti-British expansionist. Charles Lanman, a Daniel Webster acolyte, in his correspondence for the Crayon naturally ascribed Powell’s painting to Congressional Demagogues.[6] Though Powell, who received the commission in 1846 under James Polk, was more successful than Étex at winning public patronage, by the time he exhibited his grand national painting in 1853, the same year as the Crystal Palace, critics similarly condemned its inartistic theatricality and artifice.
Powell had painted the picture of De Soto encountering the Mississippi and Native Americans while in Paris, and he showed it with his portraits of French radical republicans and authors Eugene Sue and Alexander Dumas. The Democratic Review found De Soto’s gaze westward prophetic, and the painting pregnant with suggestion. The Times, sympathetic to Young America, explained that progress was its theme, the idea of a "moving mass" not yet conscious of necessity for a halt, of the American republic’s inevitable fortunes in the hemisphere. The Irish News thought it the best painting in the Capitol, especially its principal motif of raising the cross, and despite or because of its Spanish Catholic conquerors, it was also admired for its religious sentiments by the evangelically-minded Commercial Advertiser, and for its historical ones by the Express. Progress wrote to the rhapsodic Home Journal that even G.P.A. Healy, a painter tied to Daniel Webster, had admired it.[7]
But the Tribune, like Clarence Cook at the Evening Post and the Independent, dissected its mediocrity, Parisian models, inaccuracies, and lack of heroic power. A Tribune correspondent later (after Powell had painted a giant campaign portrait of Know-Nothing George Law, a politician strongly disliked by the Tribune) agreed that De Soto was wretchedly flat and feebleminded, gaudy and theatrical, a French general parading on the Seine, and recommended Healy be hired to paint a substitute.[8] Putnam’s, which shared editors and politics with the Tribune and the Post, like the Crayon openly declared it a baleful product of sectionalism, with nothing American about it, defacing the Capitol and sanctioning the falsification of history.[9]
The Dispatch mockingly noted that the authorship of the criticism in Putnam's was evident in its oracular style and paucity of ideas, and urges the author to wash the dirt of free soil off his hands.[10] Putnam’s objected to it being painted in Paris; the Dispatch agreed Powell should have gone to the banks of the Mississippi for a wide-awake acquaintance with the scene and its mosquitoes; Putnam’s says it is sectional, so the Dispatch suggests Powell to please them should have done a map instead; Putnam’s says Congress paid too much, and the Dispatch suggests Congress should pay for the painting by the yard and thereby obtain something in the style of Godfrey Frankenstein’s panorama of Niagara. The Dispatch had once been quite close to the Tribune in its artisanal brand of Whig politics, emphasizing freethinking and land reform. Editor and printer Amor J. Williamson had been a free-soiler in 1848, a Whig in 1851 and 1853 when he was elected Alderman, but he was an American (nativist) party candidate by the mid 1850s. In 1858, though he was a Republican, Horace Greeley colluded with Fernando Wood to try to eliminate him--Williamson's voters were too aligned with Tammany Democrats like Daniel Sickles.
The Dispatch's artisanal nativism put it at a distance from both the Putnam’s/Tribune clique and Wood's Democrats, as was evident in their support for Rembrandt Lockwood’s Last Judgment of 1854, an epic compilation of portraits culminating in the ascension to heaven of Washington, with a white female slave by his side. Lockwood was a Newark artist (Lilly Martin Spencer took over his studio), but a member of the New York Sketch Club. His giant Last Judgment attempted to rival Michelangelo, with fifteen hundred figures, including the Races of Man and a crowned, but crushed, Despotism. A staunchly Protestant picture, it was endorsed not only by the Dispatch but by Daniel Huntington, the Know-Nothing Express, Whitney’s Know-Nothing Republic (Republic contributor and artist William Walcutt was a friend), and the Albion. The Evening Mirror, sympathetic to the Know-Nothings and an active promoter of Lockwood, asked why the “pretending” “art-nursing” critics of the Tribune and the Times were silent, speculating that because Lockwood was poor, an American, and not an Academician, he could not purchase their verdict.[11] The truth may be that they kindly withheld it; Clarence Cook, a Putnam's contributor who also wrote for the Evening Post, eviscerated it, and its admirers, as inane.
The Dispatch, like its old enemy the Herald, began as a cheap, independent newspaper, with a reform-minded agenda aimed at bringing down social, economic and political monopolies on behalf of their readers, the people of the city. But by the 1850s, a nativist strand always present in artisanal politics pushed both toward a conservative Unionist or national position, whether Whig or Democratic, one that defined the Republicans and their newspapers as the sectional and exclusive (or excluding) party. The fate of the 1852 engraving of Tompkins Matteson’s painting of the Compromise of 1850 (fig. 66) is exemplary of this trajectory.
[1] The Evening Post published Edmonds’ pamphlet with his defense; the editor of the Day Book and Fuller at the Evening Mirror agreed Edmonds had not committed any improprieties. The Day Book editor, September 1, 1855, p. 4, described Edmonds as gruff, cross and willing to humiliate borrowers, unlike the more polite Knapp. The Day Book had approved of Wood’s moral sweep of the city, and like the Dispatch mistrusted the moral faculties of all banks and bankers. The Mechanics' Bank had also been the bank for the city's first Washington Monument Association, for which Knapp was Treasurer, and the bank for Art-Union president Cozzens; Knapp also employed Frederick Coe, like Edmonds, a manager of the Art-Union.
[2] Evening Mirror, January 27, 1857.
[3] "The Age of Wood," Dispatch, January 25, 1857, p. 1, 7. Democratic financier and art patron August Belmont was overseas, but another German Jewish and Republican banker, Joseph Seligman, had moved into gold trading.
[4] Gazette and General Advertiser, October 16, 1837. The portraits of some were fine, and the contrast of red savages and white civilized was superb, but the idea of Liberty presenting Washington to our Savior with some of his friends was too serious to be ludicrous and too ludicrous to be serious, and even more trying was Franklin presenting the divine person with a copy of his works. Editor Charles F. Daniels would soon return to the Courier and Enquirer. The Herald, October 5, 1837, p. 3, was fairly neutral.
[5] “That $500 Portrait,” Dispatch, January 11, 1857; Evening Post, June 29, 1855; Evening Post, August 20, 1855, p. 3, citing the Journal of Commerce. The Herald is cited in the Evening Mirror, August 21, 1855, p. 3. Étex's sketches for allegorical statues of the American Republic and a very youthful French Republic were published in the Illustrated News, October 22, 1853, and November 5, 1853.
[6] McDowell asked that the treaty with Britain over Oregon be brought to the people for a vote; McDowell wanted 54-40, not the treaty’s compromise boundary. Étex and other critics, who perhaps also possessed anti-British sentiments, admired the painting while it was being executed in Paris, WEJ, “France: American Art,” Tribune, September 16, 1853. Charles Lanman, "Our National Paintings," Crayon, February 28, 1855, 136-137. Lanman's art collection included Cole, Durand, Harvey and Huntington.
[7] "Gossip of the Month," Democratic Review, June 1848, 573-574. "Fine Arts," Times, November 3, 1853, p. 2, was critical of it being over-dramatic, but "Our National Paintings," Times, December 2, 1853, p. 4, defended the message of Anglo-Saxon progress. The Express (correspondent Viator) had backed Powell since 1846. "Powell's Great National Picture," Express, October 1, 1853. Powell was elected an honorary member of the New York Sketch Club that month, as were reporters McKenzie and Edmund Farrenc of the Democratic Sunday Times and Le Republicain, which puffed Powell. From a Correspondent, "A Day in Washington," Irish News, February 7, 1857, p. 297. WB, "Powell's Historical Painting," Commercial Advertiser, December 17, 1851, p. 2, Progress, Letters from Paris, Home Journal, March 23, 1850. On Anglo-American conquest erasing Spanish influence, see Ann Uhry Abrams, The Pilgrims and Pocahontas: Rival Myths of American Origin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999) 38, and Vivien Green Fryd, Art and Empire (Yale University Press, 1992) 56-61.
[8] "The Fine Arts: Powell's Discovery of the Mississippi," Tribune, December 10, 1853, p. 6; the critic did approve of an engraving after Thomas Hicks' portrait of Henry Ward Beecher. TB, "From Washington, Intercepted Letters No. 111, My Dear S," Tribune, March 12, 1856, p. 5; the author (perhaps Mrs. Donn (Louise) Piatt, aka Bell Smith, of Cincinnati. Piatt was an anti-slavery Democrat turned Republican and friend of Greeley) advocated for Leutze and Healy instead. Young America expansionist and Hard-shell pro-slavery Democrat George Law, whose symbol was the southern “live oak,” campaigned as a third party candidate against the Know-Nothing Whig Millard Fillmore, with support from the Herald, True Sun and the Evening Mirror, before throwing his support to Fremont. Powell in his colossal campaign portrait of Law stressed his business connections with transportation and engineering, rather than the oak. Live Oak clubs sprang up, including one at Hunker Democratic stronghold Brandreth House, where Ohio poet William W. Fosdick, a friend of Spirit of the Times editor Edward E. Jones as well as many Sketch Club artists, presented a bust of Law by Ohio sculptor Thomas D. Jones, which was later vandalized. The Evening Post, who called him the Live Hoax candidate but usually praised Jones, thought Jones’ bust was a miserable auctioneering production. National Academy officer, art critic, and landscape painter Thomas A. Richards would feature live oaks prominently in his paintings and illustrations of the south in the 1850s.
[9] "Fine Arts: Powell's Picture of De Soto," Putnam's, November 1853, p. 574; the editors give rival historical painter Leutze only qualified (unimaginative but popular) praise.
[10] “Powells’s De Soto,” Universe, December 3, 1853. The $1.50 a year weekly Universe was published by Amor J. Williamson, and it shared most of its content with the Dispatch. The article had first appeared in a Sunday weekly.
[11] "Lockwood's painting of the Last Judgment," Dispatch, April 30, 1854, p. 2. Clarence Cook, "Lockwood's Last Judgment," Evening Post, October 21, 1854, p. 1. On p. 2, the editors more gently call it a creditable failure. Evening Mirror, November 11, 1854, p. 3.
On the Derby brothers, galleries, and Jarves:
Of the four Derby brothers in publishing, Henry was probably the one with the most straightforward anti-slavery Democratic sympathies, though all of them had ties to the Democrats. Henry owned Democratic newspapers, and partnered with Fletcher Harper, the most Democratic of the Harper brothers, in 1854. Chauncey Derby, a relative of the Melvilles by marriage, owned the Cosmopolitan Art Association. George Derby died young, but published Cosmopolitan Art Journal editor Metta Victor’s novels. James Cephas Derby hired as manuscript readers Democrat Thomas Aldrich of the Home Journal and Republican George Ripley of the Tribune, and his book list was correspondingly diverse. But it included an account of the war in Kansas by G. Douglas Brewerton, the correspondent of the Herald, the memoirs of Herald friend Henry Wikoff, a life of George Law, a Know-Nothing gift annual, Mary Forrest’s Women of the South, Oakes Smith’s Newsboy, a Life of Stephen Douglas, and Fanny Fern, along with celebrity anti-slavery writers, including Henry Ward Beecher’s Star Papers. He told one of his bestselling Confederate writers that he thought southern rights could have been obtained within the Union, so secession was unjustified. He was forced out of the publishing business in 1861, but he restarted in 1864 with an entirely Republican pro-Union list and received a Seward appointment in 1862.
Henry Derby bought the Dusseldorf collection in 1859 for nearly $200,000, for the Cosmopolitan Art Association, and built a grand gallery to house it at 625 Broadway, said to cost him another $200,000, across from Laura Keene’s theater. As the friendly Home Journal described it, it was divided into four galleries devoted to the French, German, English and American schools of art, including a collection of old masters put together by James Jackson Jarves; the Herald said simply that there would be galleries for foreign and American art, with a noble white marble entrance, the most imposing and elegant in Broadway.[1] Like a museum, it was intended for a permanent exhibition of art. Most of the notices of the Institute's opening read like press releases. Since the Derby publishing companies and the Cosmopolitan Art Association were all heavy advertisers, it's not surprising that Derby's Institute received favorable if bland coverage. The Spirit of the Times joined the Leader in calling the opening of the new galleries a triumph; Spirit editor Thomas Thorpe’s Niagara had been exhibited in Henry Derby’s mansion.
Derby’s was a “marble palace,” with allegorical female figures and statues of famous European artists ornamenting the front.[2] The marble palace description was more commonly used for Alexander T. Stewart’s department store, the first building on Broadway to adopt a marble facade. Derby was an art adviser to Stewart, and Stewart, like the Cosmopolitan Art Association, bought a copy of the Greek Slave. The Institute's luxurious interior, with a space for women, was characterized by the Times as an Art Exchange and literary lounging place, associating the space with fashionable women.[3] Despite its majestically embellished front, unlike the windows of printsellers, it was a commercial gallery that like Williams and Stevens or Schaus exhibited new paintings and sculptures by popular artists, including works promoted in the Cosmopolitan Art Association's journal, like William Barbee's Coquette. Derby's showed Orsini’s portrait of Italian leader Giuseppe Garibaldi, and then donated it to a mass meeting for Italian freedom where Young America Democrat and consul C. Edwards Lester spoke, as did Democratic Senator John A. Dix, whose son was a successful artist.
But the Institute also had a room set aside for Jarves' old masters. Derby published Jarves' book on his collection, Art Studies: The Old Masters of Italy (1861), and he wanted to sell his paintings as a group, which would reinforce his prestige as their collector. His paintings from the Italian trecento and quattrocento also, by their very esoteric quality (albeit a quality tied to the modern pre-Raphaelites), gave the “Institute” a public, educational character. Like earlier collections of old masters, the Times saw it as educating Fifth Avenue residents, who couldn't tell originals from fakes.[4] The Evening Post similarly discussed Jarves’ collection in the context of his Atlantic Monthly article on art frauds, which required training in art history to detect. The Evening Post, offering the testimony of Harvard professor and art historian Charles Eliot Norton, endorsed Bostonian Jarves' expertise, and reinforced the authenticity of his collection in a satire.[5] The author was locked in the gallery after it closes and the “Old Masters”—the artists rather than the subjects of the pictures--come alive to reproach Americans for touching them, as if their male bodies were coincident with the painted body of their artworks. Women were especially reproached for fingering them; men used toothpicks.
But more commonly, while Jarves' collection was considered to have peculiar interest for the art historian, even to its strongest admirers it was not thought that such a recondite assemblage, with no artists who were in private collections, was adapted for popular comprehension or pecuniary success. The Unionist Whig Express appreciated how his collection allowed one to follow “the progress of the art in its manifestations in individuals and in nations; to perceive how it was affected by religious or national, or social or political influences, or how it in turn affected religion and society, and politics.” They were also valuable as artworks, because putting aside the rules that guided present taste, they had vigor of thought, great boldness and feeling.[6] The Express in 1860 regularly excerpted the Crayon’s criticism and praised it, under editor John Durand and with perhaps fewer bohemian writers (Charles Eliot Norton was now contributing), as the best art journal in the country. The Republican World, a particularly ardent fan of Jarves, was similarly devoted to the Crayon. Art history as well as connoisseurship—Jarves finally sold his collection to Yale University—would underpin the credentials of the Metropolitan museum and the newspaper critics who emerged after the Civil War.
The Herald added that with all the foreign art at Derby and the other commercial galleries, the competition had stimulated native art more than the National Academy of Design, whose artists to the Herald seemed headed for entombment. In the Democratic penny press tradition, the Herald still preferred a more open competition and market in art than the Academy's membership system encouraged. In fact, their comments really addressed Justin S. Morrill's new and high tariff, a Republican measure, that extended to foreign pictures. The Herald had similarly led the opposition to Central Park not as a concept, but because of its administration by a committee, which the paper saw as a Republican scheme to distribute patronage, much as it had seen Whig expansion of the Erie canal as a chance to distribute favors and contracts.
[1] Home Journal, October 6, 1860. "Fine Arts in New York," Herald, November 24, 1860, p. 6. As a consular agent to Dusseldorf in 1865, Derby was said to have brought Lessing’s Martyrdom of Huss back to its home.
[2] Architect J.R. Hamilton included emblematical female figures and Reshner & Saxton did the six statues of celebrated artists in niches.
[3] “Opening of the Institute of Fine Arts,” Times, November 20, 1860, p. 4.
[4] “Old Pictures and Modern Buyers,” Times, November 8, 1860, p. 4. On Jarves, see Karen Georgi, Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Art (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013).
[5] Evening Post: November 26, 1858, p. 2, February 12, 1859, p. 1, June 15, 1860, October 23, 1860, p. 1, December 8, 1860, p. 1. Evening Post, December 14, 1860, p. 1.
[6] “Opening of Derby’s Institute of Fine Arts,” World, November 20, 1860, "Gallery of Old Masters," World, December 1, 1860, p. 6, and a series on "Old Masters at Derby Gallery," December 8, 1860, p. 5, December 15, 1860, p. 5, December 22, January 28, 1861, February 11, 1861. "Jarves Gallery," Express, January 23, 1861, p. 2.
On bias in the press:
In 1840, a Whig satirist tried to expose the penny papers' claim to independence, thanks to their dependence on a mass market rather than party subsidies. Instead, they were "hired agents," hired for a religion, or for another kind of interest, whether mercantile, legal, mechanical, military, masonic, abolitionist, or licentious. All the papers belonged to some clique, even the mass circulation ones like the Sun, because readers wouldn't buy them if they published articles that ran counter to their interest.[1]
[1] J. Cypress, Jr., “Newspapers,” Spirit of the Times, December 12, 1840, p. 1. He also wrote for Hoffman's American Monthly Magazine and the Mirror, and satires like an unpublished chapter of Mrs. Trollope for Spirit of the Times, titled Cries of New York, in which the Tombs (the jail) was a school for cries, including the Whig cry of log cabin and hard cider.