Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 9780520925571, 9780520224988

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A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

  

has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

.

    

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

MM The Publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Art Book Endowment of the Associates of the University of California Press, which is supported by a major gift from the Ahmanson Foundation.

The Body of Raphaelle Peale

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The Body of Raphaelle Peale Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824

Alexander Nemerov

university of california press Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2001 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nemerov, Alexander. The body of Raphaelle Peale : still life and selfhood, 1812– 1824/Alexander Nemerov. p. cm . (Ahmanson-Murphy fine arts imprint) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-22498-1(cloth : alk. paper) 1. Peale, Raphaelle, 1774–1825—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Human figure in art. 3. Still-life painting, American. 4. Still-life painting—19th century—United States. I. Title. II. Series. nd237.p29.n46 2001 759.13—dc21 00-037407 cip Manufactured in Canada 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39 0.48-1992(r 1997) (Permanence of Paper) .8

For Mary

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Contents List of Illustrations :: ix Acknowledgments :: xiii Introduction: Windows on the Object :: 1 part one – before Chapter 1

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 11

Chapter 2

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 27

Chapter 3

Blackberries and Focused Vision: Refusing the Long View :: 43

Chapter 4

Three Kinds of Silence :: 59

part two – beneath Chapter 5

Meat and Nonidentity :: 83

Chapter 6

The Anatomized Still Life :: 101

Chapter 7

Dissector and Dissected: Self and Body :: 125

part three – birth Chapter 8

Abjection: Still Life and the Return of the Maternal Body :: 143

Chapter 9

The Rhapsodic Maternal Body :: 157

Chapter 10 Smallness :: 171 Chapter 11 The Deception of Venus Rising from the Sea :: 189 Notes :: 203 Bibliography :: 239 Index :: 249

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List of Illustrations

Plates ( following page 80) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries, ca. 1813 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake, 1822 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, 1814 John Johnston, Still Life, 1810 Raphaelle Peale, Strawberries and Cream, 1818 James Peale, Still Life with Fruit, ca. 1821 Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, ca. 1822 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak, ca. 1817 Raphaelle Peale, Cutlet and Vegetables, 1816 Human Heart, ca. 1820 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Celery and Wine, 1816 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Watermelon, 1822 Raphaelle Peale, Melons and Morning Glories, 1813 Raphaelle Peale, Corn and Cantaloupe, ca. 1813 Raphaelle Peale, Fox Grapes and Peaches, 1815 Raphaelle Peale, Apples and Fox Grapes, 1815 Raphaelle Peale, Lemons and Sugar, ca. 1822

ix

18. Raphaelle Peale, A Dessert, 1814 19. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Liqueur and Fruit, ca. 1814

Figures 1. Washington Allston, The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 1811–1813 2. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake, 1818 3. Raphaelle Peale, Blackberries (detail) 4. William Bartram, Balsam Pear or African Cucumber (Momordica Charantia), ca. 1769 5. Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale with a Geranium, 1801 6. George Woodward, The E¤ect of Imagination!! 1796 7. Washington Allston, The Dead Man Restored (detail) 8. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Apples, Sherry, and Tea Cake, 1822 9. Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale with a Geranium (detail) 10. Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822 11. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Catostomus duquesnii, 1817 12. Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, 1818 13. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, September 7, 1815 14. Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum (detail) 15. Raphaelle Peale, Strawberries and Cream (detail) 16. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life—Strawberries, Nuts, &c., 1822 17. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life—Strawberries, Nuts, &c. (detail) 18. Washington Allston, Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem to Baruch the Scribe, 1820 19. Rembrandt Peale, The Court of Death, 1819–1820 20. William Rush, Silence, 1820–1821 21. Valentine Green, after James Barry, Venus Rising from the Sea, 1772 22. Francisco de Zurbarán, The Veil of Saint Veronica, ca. 1635–1640 23. Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait, for the Multitude, 1824 24. Charles Bird King, The Poor Artist’s Cupboard, ca.1815

x :: Illustrations

12 14 16 17 19 23 25 28 29 34 36 46 50 51 54 55 55 63 65 66 71 71 72 75

25. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup (detail) 26. Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family Group (detail) 27. George Woodward, The E¤ect of Imagination!! 1796 28. Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of Raphaelle Peale, 1817 29. Benjamin West, Christ Healing the Sick, 1815 30. Henry Smith Mount, Beef and Game, 1831 31. L. Haugg, after John Lewis Krimmel, The Procession of Victuallers (1821), 1861 32. Raphaelle Peale, Cutlet and Vegetables (detail of reverse side) 33. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Dried Fish, 1815 34. John Bell, Untitled, in Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints [1794], 1816 edition 35. Raphaelle Peale, Cutlet and Vegetables, 1816 (see also plate 9) 36. William Rush, Right Maxilla, ca. 1808–1820 37. William Rush, Right Maxilla (frontal view) 38. Rembrandt Peale, The Court of Death (detail) 39. Raphaelle Peale, Fruit in a Silver Basket, 1814 40. Benjamin Smith Barton, Anatomical Torso, 1784 41. Benjamin Smith Barton, Root, ca. 1803 42. Rembrandt Peale, The Anomalous Muscle, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations, 1824 43. Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale with a Geranium (detail) 44. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Untitled, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations, 1824 45. Raphaelle Peale, Cutlet and Vegetables (detail) 46. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Celery and Wine (detail) 47. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Celery and Wine (detail) 48. John Bell, Untitled, in Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints [1794], 1816 edition 49. John Bell, Untitled, in Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints [1794], 1816 edition 50. Invented for the Philadelphia Anatomical Rooms, by Coleman Sellers, Oct[ober] 1823, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations, 1824

78 78 80 85 87 91 93 96 97 102 102 105 105 109 114 117 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 128

130

Illustrations :: xi

51. Rembrandt Peale, Portrait of Dr. John Davidson Godman, ca. 1821 52. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Watermelon (see also plate 12) 53. Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait, 1822 54. Titian Ramsay Peale, Decapitation, ca. 1822 55. Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Vanitas Still Life, ca. 1659–1678 56. Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak (detail) 57. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Hymen, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations, 1824 58. Charles Willson Peale, The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806–1808 59. Charles Willson Peale, The Exhumation of the Mastodon (detail) 60. Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, ca. 1816–1817 61. Rembrandt Peale, The Roman Daughter, 1811 62. William Rush, Exhortation, 1812 63. William Rush, Praise, 1812 64. Rembrandt Peale, The Roman Daughter (detail) 65. Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family Group, ca. 1774, 1809 66. John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, 1812 67. Attributed to Thomas Sully, The City Seal of Philadelphia, ca. 1824 68. John Woodside, The City Seal of Philadelphia, ca. 1816 69. Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819 70. Samuel Lewis, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America, 1815 (detail) 71. Samuel Lewis, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America (detail) 72. Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea— A Deception (detail) 73. Villeneuve, Matière à réflection pour les jongleurs couronnées, 1793 74. Raphaelle Peale, Venus Rising from the Sea— A Deception, ca. 1822 (see also plate 7) 75. Thomas Cole, Tree from Nature, 1823

xii :: Illustrations

132 134 135 137 139 145 145 148 149 151 159 160 160 164 167 173 174 174 179 183 186 194 195 198 199

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Acknowledgments

This project began in earnest with a research trip to Philadelphia in August 1998. At that time, and on a later trip in April 1999, the city’s historians and archivists helped me enormously. Roy Goodman, the curator of printed materials at the American Philosophical Society, answered my questions, examined artifacts with me, and suggested other research venues throughout the city. Nina Long, director of library services and curator at the Wistar Institute, showed me the institute’s on-site collection of anatomical specimens. She also arranged for me to see William Rush’s anatomical models at the storage facility operated by Carl W. Guckelberger and Company in Manayunk, Pennsylvania. Connie Buchert, of Guckelberger and Company, set up the models for my inspection. Richard Bell, in a photo session organized by Nina Long, took the excellent photographs of a Rush model in this book. Michael Sappol, then a scholar-in-residence at the College of Physicians, provided invaluable advice about early-nineteenth-century medicine in Philadelphia. So did the historian Simon Baatz, of the University of Sussex, whom I met while he was himself conducting research in Philadelphia. Patricia Kosco Cossard, director of reader services at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, and her husband, Hugues Cossard, a butcher at Fresh Fields/Whole Foods of Rockville, Maryland, helped me identify the cut of meat in Raphaelle Peale’s Still Life with Steak. Mr. Cossard even photocopied a steak to help me understand the intricacies of the porterhouse. At the Library Company, Erika Piola and Jessy Randall helped me with my often obscure research requests. Robert Devlin Schwarz, of Schwarz Gallery, generously o¤ered me extended viewings of Raphaelle’s Cutlet and Vegetables, as well as some tasty lunches.

xiii

W. Douglas Paschall, of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, helped me examine Benjamin West’s Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky. John Alviti, senior curator at the Franklin Institute Science Museum, also o¤ered his opinions about West’s painting. At the Academy of Natural Sciences, I learned about Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, with its representation of an eel, from Robert Peck, a senior fellow in the history of science, and Eugenia B. Böhlke in the Department of Ichthyology. Martin Brückner, an assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware and an expert on early American maps, kindly o¤ered his views about early national cartography in the United States. Back at Stanford University, I benefited from spending the year 1998–1999 at the Stanford Humanities Center, where I was an internal faculty fellow. To the sta¤ of the Humanities Center, and in particular to Associate Director Susan Dunn, I extend my thanks for providing such a congenial atmosphere for writing. I also wish to thank the other fellows at the center—their projects helped me refine my own—and my colleagues in the Department of Art and Art History, who taught me in many ways how to practice the discipline. In particular I want to thank Scott Bukatman, Leah Dickerman, Pamela Lee, and Michael Marrinan. I also thank Carrie Lambert, a graduate student in the Department of Art and Art History, who helped with the research for this project in its early stages; James Edmonson, curator of the Dittrick Museum of Medical History in Cleveland, who answered my e-mail inquiries while I was at the Humanities Center; and Doris McNamara, of Palo Alto, for grants enabling me to take my research trips to Philadelphia. Once my manuscript was completed, I received excellent criticism from a range of readers. I am grateful to Martin Berger, Sarah Burns, Wanda Corn, Charles Eldredge, Kenneth Haltman, David Lubin, Amy Meyers, Jules Prown, Ellen Handler Spitz, David Ward, John Wilmerding, and Bryan Wolf for their suggestions. I especially thank another reader, Jay Fliegelman, for his encouragement, his insight, and all our great conversations over the years. I extend special thanks as well to Stephanie Fay, my editor, for her careful refinement of my text. Last, I thank my wife, Mary, for her guidance, patience, and great good humor. She is shorter than I am, but I look up to her.

xiv :: Acknowledgments

introduction

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Windows on the Object

Between 1812 and 1824 Raphaelle Peale made and exhibited just over one hundred still-life paintings in Philadelphia, where he lived. The pictures appear simple—they have titles like Wine and Cake, Fox Grapes and Peaches, and Corn and Cantaloupe—but recently they have caused much debate. They have been cast as celebrations of Enlightenment horticulture; as markers of the shift to a more egalitarian political process in early-nineteenth-century America; as signs of a temptation to overindulge, a danger both moral and physical in bourgeois Philadelphia; and, in their immaculate formal beauty, as austere escapes into clarity and order on the part of a tormented eldest son su¤ering from, among other things, the destructive demands of his father, the famous artist-naturalist-inventor Charles Willson Peale.1 Yet none of these accounts, illuminating (and at times debatable) as they are, explains the paintings’ most salient feature: their strangeness, the sense they give of concerning something more, and something odder, than these contextual evaluations can explain. In the only scholarship systematically to consider the oddness of Raphaelle Peale’s art, the art historians David Ward and Sidney Hart counsel against making rationalist sense of Raphaelle’s pictures: “Perhaps we should not try and fill in an unfillable blank, but accept the idea that elusiveness, illusion, and silence are the keys to Raphaelle’s art and perhaps to his life.” 2 The art historian Annie Storr also gets at this oddness when she notes in passing that Raphaelle’s pictures produce an “uncanny feeling,” a feeling “of something still missed, even after some puzzling aspect has been recognized and resolved.” 3 This book will investigate the

1

uncanniness of Raphaelle’s art—the sense of something more, something odder, “something still missed” that haunts rationalizing interpretations of the artist’s work. This uncanniness arises from the embodied quality of the objects in Raphaelle’s paintings. In his art, objects such as fruit and vegetables possess the density and sometimes the liveliness of the human body. They display, in Storr’s phrase, a “physical presence.” 4 The reader’s first reaction might be that this is a familiar remark to make about still-life paintings, which often suggest analogies between the human body and various natural and fabricated objects: between a breast or buttock and a peach, a cheek and an apple, a finger and a stalk of celery. Yet I am interested only secondarily in physical correspondences between Raphaelle’s objects and the human body. What interests me most is the phenomenological sense of embodiedness these objects project—the sense they give of the body’s implication, its embeddedness, in ostensibly separate objects of perception. To put it one more way, I am interested in how the physical presence of Raphaelle’s objects is not strictly their own but that of the human body. The body in question, in turn, is that of the artist himself. Raphaelle’s paintings simulate the artist’s own physical existence projected into the objects of perception. They do so as a way of uncannily breaking down the position of a secure subject standing apart from the things he beholds. Raphaelle’s imagery of embodiment relates to his historical moment, especially to the pressures of two overlapping definitions of personal identity in the early Republic, each prevalent in earlynineteenth-century Philadelphia: the virtuous republican and the possessive individual.5 Although paintings of fruit, vegetables, and meat may at first seem far afield from such political questions, Raphaelle’s still lifes are intimately connected to these definitions of selfhood. To adapt a phrase from Henry James, these definitions are the very string on which the artist’s pearls are strung. They are nowhere explicitly visible, yet they are responsible for nothing less than the look and coherence of his art. A brief history of both definitions shows how this is so. When Raphaelle made his paintings, the concepts of virtuous and possessive individualism were both relatively new. As recently as the 1780s, according to the historian Joyce Appleby, the classical model of government had dominated American political thought. This model made little allowance for anything like the “selfhood” or “individuality” of all (white male) citizens.6 Instead it stressed the natural political power of the privileged few over the vulgar many. By the end of the century, however, this model was becoming outmoded—a change measured in the shifting meaning of two words: “virtue” and “liberty.” In a classical theory of government, writes Appleby, virtue meant “the quality that enabled men to rise above private interests in order to act for the good of the whole.” By 1800, however, “virtue more often referred to a private quality, a man’s capacity to look out for himself and his dependents—almost the opposite of classical virtue.” Accordingly, “liberty,” which had had an essentially public meaning— “To have liberty was to share in the power of the state, to be actively involved in making and executing decisions”—in these years took on a private meaning denoting personal freedom.7 Derived

2 :: Introduction

from the ideas of two seventeenth-century philosophers, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, something like modern “individuality” was coming into view.8 In America from roughly 1790 to 1815, the public and private meanings of “virtue” and “liberty” co-existed uneasily. They did so chiefly in the ambivalent rhetoric of the Je¤ersonian Republicans, with their measured response to a market economy. Having made the word “republican” synonymous with democracy or popular government, the Je¤ersonians installed “virtue” as the goal not of landed aristocrats but of farmers, artisans, and other humble workers.9 A level of Lockean liberty and property was within every man’s grasp. Each man would in turn virtuously contribute to the republic, doing his civic duty, by developing economic self-sufficiency. Even as the Je¤ersonians promoted this version of selfhood, however, they resisted the market economy and its ramifications for the new individual. The Je¤ersonian model, as the historian Charles Sellers has emphasized, was somewhat hostile to personal acquisitiveness.10 The full forces of the market, Je¤erson felt, would corrupt the nation’s virtuous farmers and artisans. Despite a “commercial boom” during the years of his presidency, Je¤erson and his followers thus “succeeded for almost a generation in denying the federal government to market forces.”11 Not until after 1815, during the presidencies of James Madison and James Monroe, did possessive individualism become increasingly the standard of American selfhood and republicanism more and more friendly to private gain. Madison, unlike Je¤erson, felt that the market would reward rather than threaten American farmers. In Sellers’s terms, Madison’s “Entrepreneurial Republicanism” became a “National Republicanism” under Monroe, who as President from 1817 to 1825 aggressively aimed to expand the nation’s borders, thus providing “a continental base for the most extensive free market the world had yet seen.” 12 The stage was then set for a “Market Revolution” in which a newfound self would define his identity chiefly through individual rights of possession. Raphaelle Peale made his paintings in the midst of this redefinition of selfhood. In his family the Je¤ersonian model, with its ambivalent acceptance of market forces, dominated. Although there is an element of the showman, and not just the scientist, in Charles Willson Peale’s grand curtain-lifting gesture in his great late self-portrait, The Artist in His Museum (see fig. 10), the elder Peale’s model of selfhood mostly matched Je¤erson’s idealized kind. When Charles Willson urged Raphaelle to “act the Man,” as he did in a letter of 1817, he meant something straight out of Rousseau, one of the elder Peale’s favorite authors.13 Raphaelle should behave properly, control his passions, and follow his natural goodness by becoming a respectable, economically self-sufficient individual. Personal respectability would benefit society, one’s accomplishments bettering one’s culture as well as oneself. Thus the number of Charles Willson’s portraits in which an object—a flower named, a palette held, a machine invented—indicates the sitter’s public service as much as personal achievement. In early-nineteenth-century America, myriad portraits and self-portraits enshrined the new sub-

Introduction :: 3

jectivity. Together with biography and autobiography, portraiture became one of the preferred techniques of self-making.14 Even still-life paintings—including those by artists such as John Johnston, Henry Smith Mount, and especially Raphaelle’s uncle James Peale—testified to the new culture of selfhood, creating a fiction of subjectivity almost as incisive as that in a portrait. Installing a set of objects upon a ledge, at a distance, as the endpoint of the viewer’s gaze, these still-life paintings make the viewer’s position that of a secure subject, a full-blown individual, comfortably and even complacently eyeing a group of things separate from himself. Almost as surely as these paintings show objects, they imply a subject. Raphaelle’s still lifes appear to do precisely this. The art historians Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., and Brandon Fortune have both argued that Raphaelle’s paintings represent the new subjectivity.15 In this book I argue, however, that Raphaelle’s still lifes actually counter the new models of selfhood. They do so in two overlapping ways, each romantic, that bring us back to the question of uncanny embodiment. First, the strangely animate quality of Raphaelle’s objects visually signals the early nineteenth century’s projective imagination—an imagination that, in those years in America, was equated with childishness, antisociability, and “ill-regulation”: exactly the qualities the burgeoning culture of selfhood sought to repress in its fictions of a rational, self-determining individual. Raphaelle made romantic paintings at a time when this particular form of subjectivity had yet to be made a trait of selfhood in America. Second, and more fundamental, there is the question of what is imagined in Raphaelle’s paintings. Briefly it is this: a presocial relation to things—a relation in which objects do not have names but gain in sensuousness; in which secure distinctions between subject and object break down; in which the objects of one’s perception phenomenologically mirror one’s primordial embodiment. Paralleling the romantic praise of childhood and infantile experience, Raphaelle’s pictures show things too close, with an overdescriptive intensity that dismantles the fiction of a secure subject. Making such pictures was a mixed undertaking for Raphaelle. His focus was both the pleasures and the horrors of being less than a self. The pleasures came in fashioning an imagined existence away from the demands of early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia social and economic life. The embodiedness of his more sparklingly friendly objects, examined in Part 1, implies a safe space of nurture and play, an infantile alternative to the constant pressures of the new individuality. The horrors came in another group of pictures, especially those of meat and split-open melons, in which Raphaelle used the same phenomenological visual language to imply something much grimmer. In these more “anatomical” paintings, the focus of Part 2, the embodiedness is colder and more deathly, the imagery more bloody and blank, and the relation to selfhood more a matter of failure than refusal. In the dead and even dissected thing, Raphaelle found and failed to repress a visceral image of his own nonidentity, which returns here, barely displaced, in a series of jagged and ripped red objects. Undergirding both types of picture—the rhapsodic and the anatomical—is an insistent imagery of

4 :: Introduction

the maternal body, the focus of Part 3. Even as Raphaelle’s pictures represent his own body projected primally into the objects of perception, simulating variously a cocoon of pleasure or a split-open world of death, they also identify the objects with the maternal body. Depending on the picture, this body is either a rhapsodic source of comfort or an abject thing rhymed with the corpse. The maternal body, conflated with the artist’s own, becomes in these pictures the phenomenological site of either a pleasurable or a terrifying nonidentity. In all these ways, Raphaelle’s still lifes exist outside his era’s newfound definitions of selfhood. Through the objects they depict, these paintings give the human body visceral existence as a pulp, a juice, a fiber—a pre- or postsocial existence beneath the virtuous or possessive self. All of this, as we will see, is uncanny in the Freudian sense: Raphaelle’s paintings show repressed things returning, familiar things coming back, playful or macabre, to haunt the ideologies of self predicated upon their exclusion.16 A few words about my methods. Rather than assert directly this or that instance of embodiedness in Raphaelle’s art, I proceed slowly and carefully, examining the artist’s paintings to discover the controlling features of each picture. This means working, with apparent contradiction, both inside and outside the art. First, taking my cue from the paintings’ own hermeticism, I resist the reflexive move outward, into “context,” that so often characterizes scholarship on Raphaelle’s art. Instead I focus on the art’s particularities—the touch of a raisin upon an apple, for example, or the hovering of a berry just above a surface—to deduce what such little things might mean. At the same time, I move outward, though always remaining inside the pictures, by reading Raphaelle’s pictures in relation to other art objects. Raphaelle made his paintings within early-nineteenthcentury Philadelphia’s exceedingly rich visual culture. Unique as they are, his paintings cannot be understood apart from the production of the city’s many other artists. The more these other works di¤er, in my view, the more intensely they relate to Raphaelle’s pictures. Raphaelle’s work implicitly modifies, rejects, and hence contains the art of many others. Thus this book is a history of earlynineteenth-century Philadelphia’s visual culture as much as a history of Raphaelle’s art itself. I examine the portraits of Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale, the history paintings of Washington Allston and Thomas Sully, the sculptures of William Rush, the genre paintings of John Lewis Krimmel, and many other works seemingly unrelated yet very much connected to Raphaelle’s art and therefore to the question of still life, embodiment, and selfhood. These other works of art, in turn, are parts of a still more broadly conceived culture that Raphaelle’s paintings also contain. His art translates into still-life conventions a set of metaphors widely used by the city’s writers and other citizens to describe failed or refused selfhood. As part of a romantically inflected discourse on this topic, Raphaelle’s art relates to the writing of Charles Brock-

Introduction :: 5

den Brown, the drinking songs of Philadelphia artisans, and other period manifestations of identity lost or refused. In this sense, my challenge is to reveal the discursive nature of Raphaelle’s art while always giving its insular singularity its due. Raphaelle’s art is both extraordinary and typical. Raphaelle’s inward art is also outward-looking in its romanticism. Scholarship about Raphaelle and his brother Rembrandt often alludes to the romantic quality of their work, yet in this book I go into detail about what a “romantic” still-life painting might be, addressing the visual specifics of Raphaelle’s still lifes and relating the paintings to the era’s romantic poetry and theory, in particular to the poetry of Wordsworth. Though Wordsworth was not well known in America when Raphaelle painted, the work of these almost exactly contemporary figures is mutually illuminating. Each linked the annihilation of the self—the suppression of rationality—to a rewarding reenchantment of the world. I include one other “outside,” perhaps the most tantalizing one, but also often exclude it. Raphaelle is an especially rich biographical subject.17 The eldest son of Charles Willson, who gave him the name of the famous Renaissance artist, Raphaelle was meant from birth to be a successful and even a great painter. Charles Willson wanted him to paint portraits, but Raphaelle frustrated his father by making such pictures only sporadically, and rarely as well as he painted still lifes. His choice of genre disappointed Charles Willson, who felt that still life was neither profitable nor exalted enough to be the métier of a man with such a promising first, and last, name. This failure or refusal to be the ideal artist of his father’s envisioning was, however, only one of Raphaelle’s travails. He and his wife, Martha (Patty) McGlathery, whom he had married in 1797, became the parents of seven children born between 1799 and 1810—a large brood that Raphaelle could not support on his small earnings. As an itinerant and desultorily practicing portraitist, a maker of silhouettes, and an unproductive painter of a few unremunerative still lifes per year, Raphaelle sometimes had to rely on his father for economic assistance. Throughout, Raphaelle was a quirky and unhappy person. He was a ventriloquist and mimic, given to imitating the voices of men and women. He performed impromptu low-brow hand-puppet shows before astounded Quakers, and made cooked fowl plead for its life and squeal when carved. He was an “odd or craizy fellow” in some people’s estimation, according to Charles Willson Peale.18 Raphaelle was also an alcoholic and a brothel visitor, and at least once contemplated suicide. In several documented instances, beginning in 1806, he was near death because of the excruciating illness that finally killed him at age fifty-one in 1825—an illness that has become the subject of much debate. The art historian Phoebe Lloyd, attributing Raphaelle’s ill health to prolonged exposure to arsenic and bichloride of mercury, the chemicals he reputedly often handled to rid taxidermic specimens at the Peale Museum of their parasites, has outlandishly claimed that Charles Willson Peale, as it were, unconsciously murdered his rebellious and most talented son by permitting Raphaelle’s long-term exposure to agents he knew were poisonous. The art historian Lillian B. Miller, defending Charles Willson, has speculated that Raphaelle actually su¤ered from “saturnine gout,” a result of the lead-lined vessels in which brandy

6 :: Introduction

and other alcoholic beverages were stored and distilled in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In Miller’s view, Raphaelle did indeed su¤er from a form of chronic heavy-metal poisoning, as Lloyd asserts, but the cause was Raphaelle’s excessive drinking and resultant lead intoxication.19 The lurid terms of this debate give a sense of just how provocative Raphaelle Peale is as a biographical subject. Yet the debate also indicates the major problem of studying the artist’s, especially this artist’s, life. The known facts about Raphaelle exert such a powerful pull—chiefly, in the direction of that stereotypical figure, the Tragic Artist—that they threaten to make the pictures mere adjuncts to a more compelling biography. Berries and peaches, no matter how ripe, are nowhere near as juicy as a tale of deep familial dysfunction. This is why I have tried in this book to keep Raphaelle’s “life story” at a distance. Though at times I refer to his biography, I have done so only if I think that an incident can illuminate something important about his paintings. For the most part, I exclude the details of his life. “The Body of Raphaelle Peale,” the title of the book, refers to a fantasy of embodiment, by turns playful and morbid, enacted in the pictures; it does not refer to an actual body. Even when it concerns dissection, this book is more about the galleries than the graveyard. Raphaelle the person, whoever he was, can be deeply felt in his paintings—that I believe; but I mostly prefer to let this biographical presence assert itself as just that—a feeling, an intimation—rather than as an oft-mentioned personality. The art itself is my guide for this method. Some of Raphaelle’s paintings feature windows from the artist’s painting room reflected on the still-life objects. A glass pitcher, for example, might feature several of these reflected windows. In many cases, these reflections—tokens of the outside world—seem to adhere to the objects. The outside comes inside and alights there, becoming a part of the object itself—part of a hermetic autonomy it maintains from a street, a sky, a city, a nation whose expansive spaces it yet contains. In this way, Raphaelle’s paintings themselves visualize my argument that his art includes various “outsides” that do not disrupt its hermeticism. Though adhering to the pictures at times, the artist’s life—if too explicitly discussed—mostly threatens to produce, not a window on the object, but the object out the window. A word, finally, about the way I support my claims. Though I muster a lot of evidence to make my case, I cannot point to any explicit written formulation of my findings by Raphaelle’s original viewers or the artist himself. To those concerned about such proofs, I say only that the speculation is warranted: without it, it seems to me, we are left with an unattractive alternative—normalizing interpretations that insist on repressing the paintings’ salient uncanniness. Such interpretations, in my view, emphasizing the very methods of rationalist explanation that Raphaelle’s little pictures refuse, say little, often nothing, about what makes the paintings so extraordinary. To other readers, however, my argument might seem itself a normalizing procedure. There is no more conventional topic in recent scholarship than the body. As the literary historian Terry Eagleton puts it, apologizing for the “modishness” of a subject that his own book investigates, “Few literary texts

Introduction :: 7

are likely to make it into the new historicist canon unless they contain at least one mutilated body.” 20 Thinking in these terms, one could say that not just my text but the work of various scholars on whose work I rely falls squarely within the trend Eagleton notes. In this sense, the bodily thematics of early national Philadelphia, as they appear here, would be nothing more than the manifestation of a present-day academic trope. Yet the reader could also say, more charitably, that contemporary writing about the body has here allowed an otherwise hidden aspect of the past to come into view. Doubtless in other ways my interpretation—simply because it is an interpretation—might seem to some readers to normalize the paintings. Where once was the “unfillable blank” Ward and Hart write about, the scholar blithely fills in his words, appropriating the space of the uncanny with another account. As Ward and Hart formulate their warning, such scholarship in Raphaelle Peale’s case would be especially profane. Their “unfillable blank” clearly alludes to the great Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, with its empty white fabric confronting the viewer (see plate 7). To get a last word on Raphaelle’s art, to lay claim to a forceful interpretation, is equivalent to refusing to tolerate such a defiantly empty space. Yet I hope to avoid this kind of iconoclasm. My goal is to o¤er a way of seeing Raphaelle’s pictures—a historical way—that not only interprets but enhances their strangeness. My task, as I see it, is not to fill in the blank but, as well as I can, to draw the blank again. To start this process, let us therefore assume nothing, or at least very little. Let us return to the belief that these paintings are literal images of fruit, vegetables, and other such objects—images that yet savor of something odd. Let us begin by considering just this first faint taste of oddness, even if it seems not to concern the body, for out of it all the other issues will emerge.

8 :: Introduction

part 1

............................................................................................................................... ..................

Before

chapter one

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Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination

About 1813 Raphaelle Peale painted a small picture, about 7 x 10 inches, called Blackberries (plate 1). The painting shows approximately two dozen berries, ripe and unripe, on and o¤ the stem, within and atop a shallow white bowl, placed on a flat surface, and set in an interior. On the left, a shaft of light intrudes; on the right, the blackberries’ thorny stem enters the scene. Two prominent arrays of leaves, one on either side, further mark left and right sides. It is a simple painting, yet it can be historicized in two complex ways, both concerning the early national shift to models of virtuous and possessive individualism. Raphaelle’s little picture appears to mark but really refuses that shift. Blackberries apparently marks the shift by representing a newfound model of subjectivity based on internalized authority. This we can begin to see by examining the painting in relation to another, altogether di¤erent picture with which it was shown. Raphaelle exhibited the painting twice, in 1814 and again in 1817, both times at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibitions. In the second exhibition, Blackberries, along with twenty other Raphaelle still lifes, appeared with, among other works, Washington Allston’s 10-by-13-foot Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, which had just been acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy for its permanent collection (fig. 1).1 Allston’s painting shows the dead man, magically revived, removing his winding cloth and gaining color, as a community of awed beholders looks on. The slaves to either side react with astonishment and fear. Above the standing slave the dead man’s daughter comforts her fainting mother. To the far

11

figure 1 Washington Allston, The Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 1811–1813. Oil on canvas, 156 × 122 in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Academy purchase, by subscription.

left, a group of men listens to the account of a priest; and above the kneeling slave, a soldier—paragon of bravery—flees the scene, epitomizing just how terrifying the event really is. As Allston wrote in 1816, the look on the fleeing soldier’s face shows “his emotion to proceed from no mortal cause.” 2 The political motivation for Allston’s picture of awestruck citizens is not difficult to find. Identifying with the Federalist elite, Allston resented what he saw as the godless individualism of early-nineteenthcentury America. What he wanted, as the Allston scholar David Bjelajac notes, was not a nation of atomized beings, motivated only by private gain and other forms of personal aggrandizement. Instead he envisioned a nation united—much like the beholders in his painting—by an awed and stupefied respect for unquestioned higher authority, both divine and political.3 The painting conspicuously rejects the new free-agent individuality. The position of the spotlit dead man emphasizes the point. Orienting himself more to the space in front of the painting than to the space within it, the dead man comes to life as much for the gallery audience as for the figures in the scene. This frontward orientation implies that Allston wished not just to show a community of fearful believers but to create such a group in the gallery space itself. The dead man, seeming to become less pallid and more roseate as one looked, would come to life almost in the viewer’s space. From across the ocean, in London, where he made the painting, this is the political message Allston wished to convey. Blackberries, in contrast, appears matter-of-factly to participate in the political and cultural change that Allston abhorred. With its imitative style, its lack of grand allegorical pronouncements, it claimed no morally uplifting purpose.4 With its frank unrepentant materiality—manifest as a coincident glisten of blackberries, porcelain, and paint—it celebrated its own value as an artifact more than any immaterial message it would convey. It also was made for just a single viewer. Much smaller than Allston’s epic canvas, Blackberries did nothing more than solicit a private aesthetic pleasure, delectation for an audience of one. But not too much delectation. Blackberries, one could argue, features its own moral drama: the new individual’s inward struggle between indulgence and restraint. On the one hand, there is indulgence. Many of Raphaelle’s works, as Brandon Fortune has noted, show dessert courses of fruit, nuts, cakes, or wine. One such picture, for example, shows four wedges of cake, sprigs of raisins and grapes, and a glass of wine (fig. 2). As an extra course, a sweet bit of excess, such desserts signified overindulgence, a danger to both body and morality in mercantile Philadelphia, where the products, the sensual gratifications, were many, and the external constraints—the Allston-like powers from on high— were thought to be few.5 Raphaelle’s pictures, according to this idea, imply a viewer alone with his desire, licking his lips before the tempting treat. On the other hand, there is restraint. Raphaelle does not show food that has been eaten. Nor, it seems, does he show food that will be eaten. David Ward and Sidney Hart note that Raphaelle’s ob-

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 13

figure 2 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Cake, 1818. Oil on panel, 10¾ × 15¼ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maria DeWitt Jesup Fund, 1959.

jects “exist in and of themselves, on their own terms,” not as parts of a meal.6 A certain measured relation to indulgence, then, is what Raphaelle’s pictures concern: sensuous foods set right before the viewer, never to be consumed. The restraint of these images would then be, as Fortune has argued, the pictorial equivalent to calls for temperate living such as those Charles Willson Peale made to Raphaelle.7 Thus for all its di¤erence from The Dead Man Restored, Raphaelle’s little painting implies a drama as intense as the one shown in Allston’s image. In this way, setting up an inward contest between indulgence and restraint, Blackberries visualizes the era’s newfound discursive shift to a model of subjectivity based on internalized authority. This shift was summarized by the physician Benjamin Rush, Charles Willson’s friend. Like Peale an expositor on the value of “temperance” when eating and drinking, Rush believed that in his own era it had become the responsibility of the individual—and not some powerful external force—to regulate per-

14 :: Before

sonal desire. According to the literary historian Steven Watts, Rush was convinced that there had been an “erosion of external authority over the individual in the early modern West.” Watts summarizes Rush’s views: “In the medieval past . . . transgressions had brought ‘civil, ecclesiastical, military, and domestic punishments . . . of a cruel nature,’ but with ‘the progress of reason and Christianity, punishments of all kinds became less severe.’ With this shift away from being ‘governed by force,’ the burden of regulation fell increasingly on the individual himself.”8 Showing sensuous objects not to be eaten, paintings such as Blackberries encode this internalized “burden of regulation.” A brief return to Allston’s Dead Man Restored is instructive here. Against the trends analyzed by Rush, Allston’s painting represents authority as still a wrathfully beneficent external force, operating to bond a disparate populace, freezing men and women in poses of stupefied subordination. It reads as a wish for an unquestioned higher authority that could not be resurrected. In Raphaelle Peale pictures such as Blackberries and Still Life with Cake, this authority has indeed disappeared, but it has not gone away: it has become internalized as the moral will of the liberal subject before the tempting treat, trying to keep him from excessive sensuous gratification.

Animate Nature Yet there is more to Raphaelle’s little picture. Although it may suggest the inward struggles of the new individual, Blackberries more fundamentally refuses the new subjectivity. It does so, first, by representing an antisocial, childish, and—to use the phrase of the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher Dugald Stewart—“ill-regulated” imagination thoroughly at odds with the requirements of rational citizenship. The specific figure of this ill-regulated imagination is the animate object. The objects in Blackberries are very lively—too lively. They give credence to Lillian B. Miller’s contention that Raphaelle “could endow inanimate subjects with an animation occasionally missing from his life portraits.”9 Three features of the painting animate it. First, the berries hover—and by hovering largely defeat what should be their stillness. It is striking how many times Raphaelle does not allow objects to touch, or allows them just to graze, the surface on which the bowl is placed. On the left side of the image, the two lowermost ripe blackberries hang just above the surface, while a red berry hovers slightly higher. On the same side, one leaf points upward while another points downward to the surface but does not touch it. On the right, another leaf similarly points down, hanging in air, while the larger leaf at far right just barely rests upon the surface. Other objects hover as well. The stem extending from the right edge of the picture, itself not touching the surface, features a whole spray of red berries, thirteen in all, that hangs in midair. Seven of these berries create a seesaw e¤ect with the black ones on the left, producing a dynamic play between the two groups. Even without the e¤ects of balancing, however, the picture’s emphasis on things hang-

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 15

figure 3 Blackberries (detail).

ing in air imparts a vivacity to objects that would appear duller, more lifeless, more inert, if arrayed on a flat ground. The most intriguing such object is the lone blackberry hanging over the bowl’s edge at right center (fig. 3). It is unclear exactly how it accomplishes the feat. Presumably it remains attached to the stem, yet Raphaelle lets us see no point of attachment. He also puts this berry amid other bowl-bound ones we suspect must be o¤ the stem. The e¤ect is to make one wonder if this solitary blackberry hangs there of its own volition. Second, and related, is the berries’ orientation. Though their shared stem extends across the painting, from right to left, the berries themselves are insistently oriented toward the picture plane. The red ones at right all protrude in our direction, as do the black ones in the bowl and the two leaves, especially the one at right. It is too forceful to talk of objects turning toward us in this picture, but we can say, in a somewhat unsatisfying euphemism, that there is a strange multidirectionality in the painting, a sense of things entering from the right but almost always facing front. Third, the clustered drupes of fruit, many of them highlighted, twinkle with a glittering liveliness. Raphaelle emphasizes this vivacity by placing dark berries against a light ground and red berries against the darkened wall. The leaves are comparably lively. Their veins give them an internal patterned energy equal to that of the berries. Moreover, the robust yet delicate curving outlines of the individual leaves, especially the one at lower right, are energetic in their own right. Accomplished within the bounds of naturalistic plausibility, so that a glance at the picture might yield nothing more than a sense of its botanical beauty and specificity, these animation e¤ects exert a subtle influence requiring explanation.

16 :: Before

figure 4 William Bartram, Balsam Pear or African Cucumber (Momordica Charantia), ca. 1769. Black ink over graphite on paper, 16½ × 12 in. The Natural History Museum, London.

The idea of animate nature was not so eccentric in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia as it might seem now. The well-known botanist William Bartram (1739–1823), in his drawing Balsam Pear or African Cucumber (Momordica Charantia), illustrated his belief that creeping plants possess some form of intelligence (fig. 4). “What power or faculty is it, that directs the cirri of the Cucurbita, momordica, vitis, and other climbers, towards the twigs of shrubs, trees, and other friendly support?” Bartram asks in his Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida . . . , published in Philadelphia in 1791. “We see them invariably leaning, extending, and like the fingers of the human hand, reaching to catch hold of what is nearest, just as if they had eyes to see with.”10 Depicting the way the tendrils spiral and coil around nearby branches “like the fingers of the human hand,” the illustration helps convey one of Bartram’s hypotheses—one that he extended to all plants: “The vital principle or

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 17

efficient cause of motion and action in the animal and vegetable system, perhaps, may be more similar than we generally apprehend.”11 William’s father, John Bartram (1699–1777), had also put forth this view: “If they [plants] had not absolute sense yet they have such faculties as came so near it that we wanted a proper epithet or explanation.”12 Even without textual amplification, the drawing of the balsam pear conveys the Bartrams’ belief. “In each of his pictures,” writes the art historian Amy Meyers, “Bartram’s lines curve and twist, lending animation to plants, birds and beasts.” For Meyers, Bartram distinguished his drawings from those of his mentor, George Edwards, “by dramatically exaggerating the animated quality that Edwards imparted to his depictions of organisms.” In Balsam Pear, the energetic lines of the cirri, the leaves, and the two pears—as well as the striking S-curve of the vine—represent the liveliness of the vegetable kingdom. They do so, moreover, in a way that extends the principle of animation even to vegetation, like Raphaelle’s, after it has been cut. As Meyers puts it, “Writhing, quivering plants are found in all of Bartram’s pictures. . . . The undulating line makes them appear to be moving of their own volition.”13 In the early nineteenth century, William Bartram was hardly unique in holding such views. Philadelphia’s other eminent botanist, Benjamin Smith Barton (1768–1815), thought in similar terms. In his Elements of Botany, published in 1803, Barton wrote that plants are “endued with the attribute of irritability.” On the topic of plant “sensibility,” Barton confessed himself uncertain yet added that “many facts . . . conspire to render it highly probable, that the attribute of feeling is not conceded to animals alone.”14 He went on to note the way that the pericarp of the genus Impatiens (touch-me-not), when touched, “suddenly folds itself into a spiral form, leaps from the stem, and scatters . . . its seeds to a great distance.” He also considered the case of the wild oat, also known as the “walking-oat,” “now familiarly known to every body,” which “lies upon the ground . . . extends itself . . . and pushes forward the grain of Barley which it adheres to. . . . [T]hus creeping like a worm,” it “will travel many feet from its parent stem.” Barton thought enough of the topic of plant “irritability” to deliver lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was professor of botany and materia medica, “on the affinities of animals and vegetables.”15 These same ideas were current in the Peale family. In 1801 Raphaelle’s brother Rembrandt painted yet another brother, the horticulturist Rubens, proudly displaying one of the prized geraniums he was then growing (fig. 5). The painting, Rubens Peale with a Geranium, represents the analogous vitality of human and plant side by side. The geranium rises out of its convex earthen pot just as Rubens’s face rises from his convex white collar. The V-shape of the plant’s rising stalks repeats the V of Rubens’s lapels and white shirt front. The curve of two of the leftmost stalks echoes the locks of hair falling over Rubens’s forehead. The triangular wisps of white collar at his jaw repeat the angle, thickness, and shape of the leaf immediately to his left. One edge of this leaf also picks up the line of his black collar. The central fold of this leaf, as well as its flared shape, repeats the shape of Rubens’s nose, and the

18 :: Before

figure 5 Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale with a Geranium, 1801. Oil on canvas, 28¼ × 24 in. Patrons’ Permanent Fund, © 1999 Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington.

leaf as a whole repeats the size, shape, and orientation of Rubens’s left hand, even down to the way the central fold repeats the gap between middle- and forefingers. Finally, as many commentators have noted, the fingers of Rubens’s right hand, resting partly within the pot, repeat the two pointed fronds touching or nearly touching his hair. “Like the fingers of the human hand,” William Bartram wrote, “just as if they had eyes to see with.” Even if the geranium is not a creeping plant, Rembrandt’s painting evokes the contemporaneous botanical descriptions of Bartram, Barton, and others. This doubling of human and plant—each cast as an animate being—may seem strange, yet Rembrandt did not regard it so. As the art historian Carol Eaton Hevner notes, the picture exudes “warmth and security,” thanks to its soft light and earthy colors.16 Rubens looks confidently out at the viewer, proud of his horticultural achievement. And the plant, though a strangely animate presence, is not meant to be unsettling. Its fingering gestures, were we to ascribe an attitude to them, seem more inquisitive and possibly even a¤ectionate than anything else. “The plant towers over Rubens,” Miller

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 19

notes, “yet touches him gently in an a¤ectionate, almost familial way.” The finger-like tendrils, she notes, “almost touch the top of his head, as if in blessing.”17 The benign quality of the painting relates to the concept of “universal intellect,” the idea of a pantheistic intelligence di¤used throughout the world, animating humans, animals, and plants with a comparable vitality. “The creator of the universe,” wrote Barton in The Elements of Botany, “has given the plant and the animal so many properties in common with each other, that naturalists are unable to tell what are the exclusive characteristics (if such there be) of the one or the other of these organized beings.”18 In Rubens Peale with a Geranium, the plant courses with the same life as the man. This indeed would be the point not just of the doubling proximity of Rubens and the geranium but of the circuit established between them where Rubens’s hand extends into the earthen pot—the fingers as the roots of the plant, the plant as the fingers of the man, the life of the one flowing through the life of the other. In such details, the painting articulates a reassuring belief in the divine ordering of the universe. As the Savoyard Priest says in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762), the touchstone of Charles Willson Peale’s educational philosophy: “I believe that there is a will which sets the universe in motion and gives life to nature.”19 William Bartram is more equivocal but raises, and adheres to, the same point: “Is it sense or instinct that influences [plants’] actions? it must be some impulse; or does the hand of the Almighty act and perform this work in our sight?” Within a few pages, he is more certain, noting that “The Animal creation,” like moving vegetable life, “manifests the almighty power.” 20 As Meyers writes, Bartram’s “freely-moving plants” imbue his art “with the sense that even the most unexpected parts of nature move in unison with the rest of Creation.” 21 Blackberries may owe something to this belief that nature is animated by a universal intellect. Certainly the strange liveliness of the blackberries—the big one hanging over the bowl, for example— implies a principle of animation similar to the one that informs Rubens Peale with a Geranium. The vibrant shapes of Raphaelle’s leaves also recall those in Bartram’s Balsam Pear, although Raphaelle’s image is more sensuous and idiosyncratic. Even the conspicuous cutting of the blackberries from the vine need not disturb this hypothesis. Like Bartram’s image, Raphaelle’s Blackberries follows to some extent the conventions of natural-history illustrations that show the liveliness even of objects abstracted from their place in nature. Yet, for all that, Raphaelle’s painting is a still life, whereas Bartram’s is not. Still lifes typically represent “dead” objects whereas natural-history representations often show objects as they might appear in life. In Blackberries, therefore, it appears that Raphaelle was not only employing his era’s habit of showing animate plant life but, for reasons we have yet to explore, also turning that habit to stranger ends, so that it no longer expresses the comforting analogies of a world based on universal intellect, where naturalists and geraniums delight in various benedictory reciprocities, but one where objects spring to a stranger, more inexplicable life.

20 :: Before

Raphaelle’s Romanticism A shift in models of individual consciousness helps to explain the di¤erence of Raphaelle’s painting. The early nineteenth century, for the literary historian M. H. Abrams, was a time of “radical transformation” in the way the mind’s operations were conceived. Analyzing a “mutation of metaphors,” Abrams shows how models of the mind changed from those of passive receiver to active agent. The romantic poets, following “Plotinus’ basic figure of creation as emanation,” conceived the mind as a projective force “contributing to the world in the very process of perceiving the world.” A favorite metaphor for this projective force was the lamp, specifically the mind’s lamp adding its glow to that of the world, as in Wordsworth’s lines from The Prelude, as completed in 1805: “An auxiliar light / Came from my mind which on the setting sun / Bestow’d new splendor.” 22 This light transformed nature into a mirror of the mind’s own illuminating power, as in Coleridge’s lines: “When power streamed from thee, and thy soul received/ The light reflected, as a light bestowed.” The mind in romantic poetry and theory, Abrams writes, is both “projective and capable of receiving back the fused product of what it gives and what is given to it.” Glowing now, infused with the projective intelligence of the poet, the dead world awakes. “By projecting its own passion and life,” Abrams summarizes, the imagining mind “transforms the cold inanimate world into a warm world united with the life of man.” 23 The shift to this new model of projective vision, notes the art historian Jonathan Crary, was pervasive. “The most influential figurations of an observer in the early nineteenth century depended on the priority of models of subjective vision, in contrast to the pervasive suppression of subjectivity in vision in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thought.” 24 In Philadelphia the new model of lamp-like imagination began appearing in the late eighteenth century. In 1789 Charles Brockden Brown published a series of essays called “The Rhapsodist” in The Universal Asylum, and Columbian Magazine. “The Rhapsodist,” he wrote, “loves to converse with beings of his own creation, and every personage, and every scene, is described with a pencil dipt in the colours of his imagination. To his strong and vivid fancy, there is scarcely a piece of mere unanimated matter existing in the universe. His presence inspires, being, instinct, and reason into every object, real or imagined, and the air, the water and the woods, wherever he directs his steps, are thronged with innumerable inhabitants.” 25 When the rhapsodist’s mind was not working, by contrast, the world lost its vitality: “All the inanimate objects in this city are uniform, monotonous, and dull,” Brown complained about Philadelphia in 1800. “I have been surprised at the little power they have over my imagination.” 26 In Brown’s writing, the power of animation resides in the consciousness of the beholder, projecting like the proverbial lamp, instead of in a universal intellect su¤using the world. Blackberries shows this same shift to models of the projective imagination. What Ward and Hart call Raphaelle’s romanticism is evident in the picture’s insistence on a thematics of creative subjectivity.27

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 21

This insistence centers on the depicted objects’ strong relation to the beholder’s space, and on the strong light source emanating from that space. As we know, almost all the objects in the picture—the red berries at right center, the prominent leaves at right, and the berry hanging from the bowl—enter from the right but face the beholder. Raphaelle also shows the berries from neither above nor below, but on his own level, and exceedingly close to the picture plane. The flat table-like surface extends implicitly into the area in front of the painting, connecting our world with that of the objects by means of a smooth continuous surface on which the properties of beholder and object might, as it were, slide back and forth. And on almost every blackberry drupe a little reflective globule indicates a strong source of light emanating from our space. Powerfully illuminating the area right before the beholder’s eyes, this frontal light source is more vivid, more crisp, than the background ray. Toward that beam of softer light—a motif Raphaelle borrowed from religious imagery—only a single leaf may be said to turn. The highest-reaching leaf on the left perfectly aligns itself with that subordinate ray. Raphaelle’s picture, then, literally moves a heavenly light to the background. In its place appears the lamp of an individual consciousness—a more immediate light toward which the inanimate things turn: “To his strong and vivid fancy, there is scarcely a piece of mere unanimated matter existing in the universe.” The human mind is shown diverging from the mind of God; in the contest of consciousnesses, represented in the two di¤erent light sources, only a single leaf resists the gravitational pull of the beholder’s imagination. In these ways Raphaelle’s picture, like Brown’s rhapsodist essay, emphasizes the centrality of a creative subject whose presence enlivens the world. For both Raphaelle and Brown, these new powers of imagination might seem to betoken the rise of the possessive individual—a person able to fashion the world in his own terms. Blackberries would thus mark the advent of a formidable new kind of self. In 1813, however, the articulation of a “rhapsodic” sensibility had connotations more pejorative than otherwise. The art historian Rebecca Bedell puts it succinctly: “In the early nineteenth century, suspicion and hostility tinged American attitudes towards the imagination.” Indulgence in imagination, she writes, was thought to lead to “an avoidance of responsibility” and to be “a significant threat to the social order.” 28 Wordsworth’s poetry, for example, received little critical attention in America prior to 1824, when his four-volume Poetical Works was published in Boston.29 Even toward midcentury, the type of the imaginative romantic artist still met with disapproval in America. The art historian Randall Griffin notes how in 1840 Thomas Cole’s large painting The Architect’s Dream was rejected by the architect Ithiel Town, who had commissioned it, perhaps because it was “a comment on art as a fabricated self-projection rather than a mirror of nature.” 30 Even then, but especially in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the type of imagination both Brown and Raphaelle Peale chose to represent had distinctly antisocial connotations, and as such refused the going standards of virtuous and possessive identity. A romantic sensibility had yet

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figure 6 George Woodward, The Effect of Imagination!! in Woodward, Eccentric Excursions (London: Allen and Co., 1796), following p. 136. Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

to be fashioned into the hallmark of selfhood it would become in the 1830s and beyond, when the mind’s projective capacity, the “egotistical sublime,” would begin to signify the self’s sovereign power.31 For many writers in the early nineteenth century, what Brown called the rhapsodic imagination was the “fancy,” or the “ill-regulated imagination”—the property of unschooled, undisciplined, and altogether unenlightened minds.

Imagination, Ill-Regulation, and Solitude We can begin to see how this was so by turning back to England. In George Woodward’s print The E¤ect of Imagination!!, published in 1796, a doltish traveler mistakes windows and vines on a barn for a scowling face (fig. 6). Turning toward a countenance that doubles his own, and even holding a lamp

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 23

suggesting the projection of his thoughts upon the world, Woodward’s traveler is the very type of the “ill-regulated imagination.” In the text accompanying the picture in his Eccentric Excursions, Woodward identifies imaginative projections such as the traveler’s as the “remnants of superstition . . . still to be met with in many parts of the kingdom, particularly in inland small towns and villages.” Such vestigial superstition, for Woodward, is not just funny but dangerous: the number of people killed under suspicion of witchcraft, he writes, “is shocking to humanity. A melancholy instance happened a few years since at Tring in Hertfordshire, where a poor old couple were deprived of their existence by a ducking in a neighborhood pond, for their supposed skill in sorcery. . . . There are numerous other instances equally barbarous where old women, who have been so unfortunate as to be suspected in a village of witchcraft, have perished . . . in the midst of their hospitable neighbors! through the dreadful apprehension of magical contagion!” 32 Woodward’s diatribe against ignorant beliefs and the havoc they wreak suggests more than just superstition as its target. His view of neighbors conducting witch-hunts, killing neighbors, evokes the French Revolution—and more especially the lamentable existence of something like this murderous superstition in parts of England. The ill-regulated imagination becomes for Woodward not just a comical phenomenon but a politically dangerous one. The reader may see the error of the foolish traveler’s ways, but Woodward wants this same reader not just to mock but also to fear the traveler’s foolishness: of such “fancies” is social violence made. In the same years that Wordsworth “declared loyalty to the language and characters of everyday life,” celebrating the customs and beliefs of rural people in his Lyrical Ballads (1798), Woodward’s image warned against the implicitly Jacobin connotations of the ignorant folk.33 The E¤ect of Imagination!! is a nightmarish variant of world and man in proximity, as Rembrandt Peale envisioned them five years later. Whereas Rubens and geranium stand side by side, harmonizing in ways indicating the order of the universe, Woodward splits a comparable pair into antagonists warily eyeing each other, in paranoia and fear, beneath the blade of the moon. Woodward’s picture tells us something else about the dangers of the ill-regulated imagination. The figure walks alone, and solitude breeds a dangerous fancy—as many period publications claimed. In Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published in 1820, the foppish schoolteacher Ichabod Crane, walking alone at night, is “appalled by a shrub covered with snow, which, like a sheeted specter, beset his very path!” 34 Stewart, whose Philosophical Essays was published in Philadelphia in 1811, wrote how “long habits of solitary reflection [can] weaken the attention to sensible objects to so great a degree, as to leave the conduct almost wholly under the influence of imagination.” He continued, Removed to a distance from society, and from the pursuits of life, when we have been long accustomed to converse with our own thoughts . . . we are apt to contract an unnatural predilection for meditation, and to lose all interest in external occurrences. In such a situ-

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figure 7 The Dead Man Restored (detail).

ation too, the mind gradually loses that command which education, when properly conducted, gives it over the train of its ideas, till at length the most extravagant dreams of imagination acquire as powerful an influence in exciting all its passions as if they were realities.35

Comparing Woodward’s image with Allston’s Dead Man Restored provides a further sense of the era’s connection of solitude and the ill-regulated imagination. In a painting begun in England fifteen years after Woodward made his image, the slave’s reaction to the animated dead man matches that of Woodward’s traveler to the haunted house (fig. 7). Yet the slave is just one among a community of beholders regarding the improbable occurrence of inanimate matter strangely come to life. Community, in Allston’s painting, separates fact from fancy. As Benjamin Rush wrote in Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, published in Philadelphia in 1812, biblical miracles really did take place because “every circumstance connected with them was distinctly heard, or seen, not by an individual only, but by two or three, and sometimes several hundred witnesses, in all of whom it is scarcely possible for an illusion to have existed at the same time.” 36 In The Dead Man Restored, Allston’s stress on

Blackberries and the Solitary Imagination :: 25

witnessing is meant to compensate for the vagaries, the illusions, of aloneness—that isolation that yields what Rush termed a “morbid excitement in the blood-vessels of the brain.” 37 Blackberries, with its small size and hermetic space, is the very image of solitude. “Raphaelle’s still lifes are solipsistic,” write Ward and Hart, who describe the atmosphere of these works as one of “extreme hermeticism.” The paintings give the impression, Phoebe Lloyd notes, of someone “withdrawing from the world.” 38 Blackberries visualizes not just solitude but, more precisely, the imaginative e¤ects—the tricks of the mind—it was said to produce. What appears to be the private domain of the virtuous or possessive individual turns out to be the space of the rhapsodic romantic freak, the person communing with the berries, the antisocial figure left, as Brown would have it, “to the enjoyment of himself, and to the freedom of his own thoughts.” 39 Blackberries is a staging of solitude—and of the fanciful solitary imagination—in an era inclined to pathologize such unsociable ill-regulation. Although some writers, like Johann Georg Zimmerman, the era’s staunchest defender of personal isolation, claimed that aloneness actually produced the self— “In solitude,” he wrote, in a book reprinted several times in America between 1806 and 1813, “man recovers from that distraction which had torn him from himself ”—Raphaelle, in his still lifes, maintains that it is precisely this isolation in which the self comes apart.40 Against the discourse of rationality, Raphaelle’s picture, with its lively berries, introduces the irresponsible play of imaginative freedom alleged to emerge when one was alone. In the wit of the picture, we see the “fancy” tactically deployed to refuse the industrious sobriety, the enlightened moralism, of the sociable citizen. Charles Willson’s exasperated rebuke of Raphaelle’s antisocial behavior applies also to his still lifes: “We do not live for our selves alone.” 41 Here Raphaelle and Irving share a similar view. Of Irving’s contemporaneous tales, the cultural historian Bryan Wolf has written, “If his characters seem resolutely comic and undomesticated, perpetual children outside the reaches of a bourgeois work ethic,” that is because the tales “are a means of resisting the encroachments of commercial society.” Irving’s stories, for Wolf, are “a defeat of Yankee culture by gossip, fiction-making, and the inexhaustible resources of the imagination.” 42 Blackberries, like Irving’s tales, skillfully represents childish superstitions in a self-proclaimedly rational age. In doing so, it creates the fiction of a child-like subject, a hermetic imaginer, refusing the rational standards of the new individuality. It constructs a subject whose mind, more than his appetite, is prone to ill-regulation—a subject whose berries cannot possibly all be in the bowl. And this wild “fancy,” this solitary sense of play, exerts an uncanny force, giving the world of selfhood a twinkling image of the childishness it cannot repress.

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chapter two

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Blackberries and Embodiment

The animation of Raphaelle’s Blackberries is only one part of a still more fundamental refusal of selfhood. The account of the romantic imagination, of the rhapsodic powers of projected mind, says little about the texture, density, radiance, and specificity of Raphaelle’s objects, indeed the whole range of sensuous e¤ects that make them so lively in the first place. To claim that these sensuous things manifest no more than the powers of the mind seems therefore incomplete. I now want to argue that these objects are not only projections of the artist’s rhapsodic mind but imaginative projections of his body. These objects owe their physical presence chiefly to Raphaelle’s phenomenological investigation of his own body within, indeed as, the objects he depicted. However odd such a claim may be, a set of historical explanations helps to confirm why he undertook such an idiosyncratic task. What Raphaelle imagines is this: a primordially embodied space, set o¤ hermetically from the surrounding world, in which a “self ” does not exist.

The Tactile Still Life In Blackberries, as in Raphaelle’s other pictures, the artist’s body is never far away.1 The thorny stem, conspicuously placed across the bowl, betokens the artist’s arranging hand. In another picture, Still Life with Cake, painted in 1822, the principal objects—apple and cake—tilt in a way that indicates meticulous placement (plate 2). Two sprays of foliage in this same picture, moreover—one in front of the

27

figure 8 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Apples, Sherry, and Tea Cake, 1822. Oil on panel, 10½ x 16⅜ in. Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Upperville, Virginia.

apple, the other over the cake—suggest a comparably careful designing hand. Each seems to have been carefully placed so that the leaves nestle against or almost touch the main objects. In a closely related picture, Still Life with Apples, Sherry, and Tea Cake, golden apple and tea cake appear in the same carefully calibrated skew (fig. 8). Once again the stem extends from the saucer on which the apple has been placed down to the ledge and then back up and against the cake so that its leaves hang just above this morsel, the whole arrangement indicating a hand every bit as precise as the one that placed the thorny stem of blackberries so carefully over the bowl. In yet another picture, Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, painted in 1814, the spoon invites us to think not just of the artist’s arranging hand but even of the turn of the wrist required to position it (plate 3). So does the long stem extending from behind and to the left of the ostrich-egg cup, rising and presumably resting on the bowl of strawberries and then branching so as just to graze both cup and creamer with its leaves. The creamer and cup, moreover, are just two among many objects in Raphaelle’s work featuring handles—the sherry glass in Still Life with Apples, Sherry, and Tea Cake is another. These handles still further mark the artist’s dexterous arranging hand.

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figure 9 Rubens Peale with a Geranium (detail).

These manual signs, moreover, are tokens not of a presence that entered the scene once and then retreated but rather of one still close by. The manipulated objects are shown at close proximity; they are shown across a ledge that implicitly extends into the viewer’s space or comes close to doing so; and they are shown in a raking light that rounds them into a three-dimensional materiality that seems still to indicate the hand that placed them there. In their dense proximate physicality, that is, these objects seem to exist for somebody—and not, by any means, as a pure emanation of consciousness. The verve, the glow, the overall intensity of Raphaelle’s nearby objects imply, to revisit Storr’s words, a physical presence. How do we account for this e¤ect? One explanation is that Raphaelle’s paintings come from a time when the concept of a distanced image—an image set o¤ merely for the eyes—had not become dominant. According to Jonathan Crary, in the early 1800s the primary model of vision was still based on the relation of touch and sight, the continuity between the observer’s physical position and the object observed. For Crary, Chardin’s still lifes, painted in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, exemplify this older model of vision, in which “to know something was not to behold the optical singularity of an object but to apprehend its fuller phenomenal identity simultaneously with its position on an ordered field”—that is, a field ordered by the observer’s body.2 Chardin’s objects, for Crary, are not set o¤ from the viewer as a distanced aesthetic spectacle made for the eyes only. Blackberries, together with the other Raphaelle pictures we have just examined, fits well this older model of vision. Within hand’s reach, densely modeled, and still bearing the traces of manual arrangement, the objects in these paintings show the early nineteenth century’s not-yet-severed relation of sight to body. As the art historian John Wilmerding notes, Rubens Peale with a Geranium, with its detail of the bespectacled naturalist’s left hand holding a second set of eyeglasses, indicates not just Rubens’s poor vision but the era’s general relation of hands and eyes (fig. 9).3

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 29

A contrast to another still-life painting made by one of the genre’s few other American practitioners at the time further exemplifies the tactile quality of Raphaelle’s paintings. In Still Life, painted in 1810, the Boston artist John Johnston shows a scene in which vision is separated from the body. His picture features a group of peaches, apples, and grapes, backed by a grapevine, resting on a table (plate 4). A caterpillar crawls on the vine, and a bee has alighted on the table’s edge. All of these objects in Johnston’s painting are set back, viewed at a greater distance than those of Raphaelle. Their relation to a specific observer is consequently more difficult to discern. Placed at seemingly greater than arm’s reach, the objects take on the quality of a distanced spectacle, meant for the delectation of the eyes alone. In the soft lighting of the picture objects lose some of the material density, the threedimensional graspability, that would imply the hand’s relation to the scene. Johnston’s use of an abstract blank background distances the objects in two further ways. First, the grape leaves against that blank background become flat patterns, decorative e¤ects, rather than physical entities. (To measure the red berries in Raphaelle’s painting against Johnston’s leaves is to see how for Raphaelle a comparable motif—an object against an undi¤erentiated background—was actually an occasion to show that object’s fullness, its rounded plenitude, rather than its flat decorative aspects.) Second, the blankness of this background itself, unlike the atmospheric darkness of Raphaelle’s backgrounds, destabilizes the pictorial space as a coherent area according to which the observer can plot his or her body. The sense of a physical relation to the scene becomes still less clear. Even the objects in Johnston’s painting that might indicate some touch, some manipulation, and hence a fixed bodily relation to the scene—the grapevine, for example, laid across the arrangement as carefully as Raphaelle’s blackberry stem—do so, one feels, at a remove. The vine lacks the roundedness, the vegetative density, that might make us think of the hand that placed it there. The caterpillar, too, as a crawling and hence touching agent, and thus a potential enactor of our own touch, performs its action only at a decorative optical remove. Similarly, the bee on the table’s edge perches there without appreciably making us think of its hold on that surface. And the droplets of water on branch and table sit upon those surfaces as lightly as the insects—as though Johnston’s goal, perhaps even his challenging illusionistic game, had been to show contact between things that yet never touch. This is a picture for the eyes only. Correspondingly, our sense of an artistic hand arranging things in Johnston’s picture, even if only to step way back from them, is reduced as surely as the token of any human presence organizing the scene. In these ways Johnston’s still life augurs the nascent “autonomization of sight” in the early nineteenth century: the broad-based theory of vision as, in Crary’s words, “sundered from any relation to the observer’s position within a cognitively unified field.” 4 Raphaelle Peale’s paintings, however, even as they strive for a formal elegance comparable to Johnston’s, root sight in the observer’s body, and operate thus within an older paradigm of vision.

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Phenomenology and Raphaelle’s Still Lifes Yet this explanation is only partly satisfactory. To explain Raphaelle’s berries merely as instances of a tactile visuality somewhat normalizes their sparkling, weighted intensity, so that his idiosyncratic objects become nothing more than examples of an impersonal discourse of embodied sight. These objects, however, possess a specificity and density that somehow exceed the mere requirements of depicting a graspable thing. Though they relate to older eighteenth-century modes of incarnating vision, Raphaelle’s objects also indicate something else. Here the striking ripe pendulous blackberry at left becomes important. The trouble Raphaelle has taken to imagine this object’s material density, its specific weight, is no less odd than the equal care with which he has rendered the much lighter red berries, each of them springing stiffly o¤ stems they do not bend. By what investment, one finds oneself asking, was Raphaelle able to show something so trivial as the comparative weight of ripe and unripe berries not just with care but with something actually approaching insight? The phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty o¤er a way into this question. Though much separates the writing of this mid-twentieth-century philosopher from the still lifes of Raphaelle Peale, the two figures, as we will see, belong to the same critical tradition—a connection that makes Merleau-Ponty’s ideas especially pertinent in Raphaelle’s case. For Merleau-Ponty, the material specificity of an object owes to the projection of the observer’s body into that object. To see is to see with our body, projecting it out ahead of ourselves, as a kind of emissary through which the world becomes palpable. Beheld in the distance, the texture of a tree manifests itself in the touch of a hand yet far away: without the sensuous surface of the hand, the tree’s own surface could not be apprehended. Accordingly, the density of that tree makes itself felt in relation to the density of the observer’s own body. As Merleau-Ponty writes in The Phenomenology of Perception, “I become involved in things with my body, they co-exist with me as an incarnate subject.” He adds, “The thing is constituted in the hold which my body takes upon it.” 5 Without the body’s projected materiality, the world would lack all sensuousness. Nearby or “tactile” objects, according to Merleau-Ponty, produce a greater phenomenological e¤ect than objects at a distance. These distant objects, “at least at first,” create the illusion of a disembodied vision: we see things at a sufficient distance to lose track of our body as orienting this spectacle. Consequently, the world around can seem nothing but an airy projection of mind. “Tactile experience,” on the contrary, refuses this disembodied consciousness: “Tactile experience . . . adheres to the surface of the body; we cannot unfold it before us, and it never quite becomes an object [that is, a thing utterly apart from ourselves]. . . . I cannot forget in this case that it is through my body that I go to the world, and tactile experience occurs ‘ahead’ of me, and is not centred in me. It is not I who touch; it is my body.”6

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 31

We have already seen how Blackberries encodes the romantic idea of imaginative projection, Abrams’s “lamp” of consciousness. In view of the berries’ physical presence, we can now see that this projection is as much physical as cerebral. All the tokens of projective imagination read also as emblems of a more corporeal creativity. The proximity of the objects, the smooth continuous surface on which the properties of objects and beholder can slide back and forth—these and other formal features indicate Merleau-Ponty’s type of projection: “I cannot forget . . . that it is through my body that I go to the world.” Such a projection would account for the strange sensitivity, bordering on insight, with which Raphaelle has shown the berries’ physical properties. These paintings suggest the body thrown into the depicted space, where it adheres as the density, the vitality, of the objects shown there. At the same time, Blackberries reads phenomenologically in a second way. For Merleau-Ponty, if the observer’s body makes the world palpable, the palpable world reciprocally materializes that very body. Without the tree’s bark, the surface of the skin would itself be an abstraction. Without the density of specific things, the body’s own thickness would also be abstract. In exterior objects we apprehend our own physicality. In his unfinished last work, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty calls this principle the “reversibility” or “intertwining” of body and object.7 He notes the same principle in the early Phenomenology of Perception: “I have the positing of objects through that of my body, or conversely the positing of my body through that of objects.”8 We project our bodies into a world they make palpable; in this world our bodies “adhere,” sticking as it were to the surface of things, and thus reversibly give back to us a sense of our own embodiment. In Blackberries, this reversibility is perhaps most apparent in the curious front-facing berries. Their position allows them to catch a light from our space, which they throw back as the spark of an inward life that is both their own and that of the projector. The glow they receive is a glow they give back. Beyond Abrams’s ideas about the romantic imagination, beyond the idea of a life bestowed and a life given back, this reversible relation reads more precisely as an embodied life imaginatively bestowed and returned. Blackberries simulates a person seeing his own body within the very objects into which he has blown the breath of a corporeal life. Why might Raphaelle have been invested in such bodily imagery? Like Merleau-Ponty, he worked with a distinct anti-Enlightenment bias. Merleau-Ponty, writing from the later 1930s until his death in 1961, generated his writing against the idealist and empiricist biases of earlier philosophies, particularly as these philosophies had been enshrined in the Enlightenment. His work insistently disputes Enlightenment thinking, especially its insistence on a clear-cut separation between subject and object, between imperious conceptualizer and a desensualized world of things-become-concepts.9 At an earlier moment, Raphaelle made sensuous pictures that challenge the same Enlightenment biases: the split between subject and object, and the conceptualization of objects.

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Scientific Truth versus Raphaelle’s Overdescribed Objects In “The Image of Objectivity,” the historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison show how two models of truth dominated scientific representation prior to 1850: the “ideal” type and the “characteristic” type. Each model aimed to find general truths in specific objects. Representing the ideal type meant studying a specific object—a human skeleton, for example—to show its perfected form. Such a representation omitted the idiosyncrasies of the particular object—the skeleton’s deformities or other features judged to depart from the ideal. Though the perfected form shown in the final idealized image did not accurately record the specifics of the model, the study was nonetheless thought to be objective. Characteristic images, in contrast, relied more on the specificities of individual objects. Yet they did so always to illustrate “an underlying type,” a broader class of which the individual object was just one example. The scientific artist had always to weigh the particulars of the object before him against a judgment of what was typical in such objects. The imagery of both ideal and characteristic types thus manifested a strong distrust of what Daston and Galison call the “quirkily particular” individual object.10 Images by Charles Willson and Rembrandt Peale exemplify the two di¤erent kinds of “typical” scientific representation. The dead turkey atop a box of taxidermic tools in Charles Willson Peale’s famous self-portrait of 1822, The Artist in His Museum, shows the ideal type (fig. 10). Based on a creature brought back from the West in 1820 by Raphaelle’s brother, Titian Ramsay Peale II, the turkey is nonetheless not a specific bird. In its easily understood form, its lack of any quirky particularities (no ruffled feathers, no moldering deterioration, nothing that might cause the viewer to fix his gaze and wonder), it represents the general, ideal appearance of its kind: turkey becomes Turkey. This transformation fits the museum’s general goal, to display “specimens of all the various animals of this vast continent, and of all other countries”—that is, to make individual creatures represent entire types of animal, as they do in the cases along the museum’s south (left) wall in Charles Willson’s selfportrait.11 The geranium in Rembrandt’s Rubens Peale with a Geranium shows the characteristic type (see fig. 5). Depicting the geranium in great detail, Rembrandt makes a picture that evinces perhaps an even greater degree of tactile inspection than Blackberries. Yet the plant signifies a realm beyond itself: “Although contained in the pot,” writes Wilmerding, “the growing plant in its dirt represents a piece of the larger landscape and a wider natural world,” including the general type of geranium of which it is a characteristic example.12 This typicality manifests itself chiefly in the plant’s unassertive legibility. The crisp outlines of leaves and stalks define the plant’s distinctive traits; at the same time, the painting’s subdued lighting denies the plant too much specificity: it does not stand out as it would

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 33

figure 10 Charles Willson Peale, The Artist in His Museum, 1822. Oil on canvas, 103¾ x 79⅞ in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Sarah Harrison (The Joseph Harrison, Jr., Collection).

in a more raking illumination. As a result, Rembrandt registers the details of a single plant without granting the plant a singularity arresting enough, strange enough, to cancel its reference to a “wider natural world.” Thus in di¤erent ways turkey and geranium each express the era’s scientific will to generalization. Neither object is idiosyncratic, although Rembrandt’s image comes much closer to idiosyncrasy than Charles Willson’s. Each represents the artist-scientist’s educated capacity to judge the general truth that a particular object only illustrates, and to adjust his representation accordingly. Each presupposes, paradoxically, a willingness to look away from the object—to imagine it in its typical form—in order to see it more clearly. The methods of one of the city’s most respected naturalists confirm the dominance of the “typifying” model in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (1778–1846), called by Charles Willson Peale the “greatest naturalist,” came to Philadelphia from his native France in 1816. Lesueur had been an artist-naturalist on a French expedition to Australia and Tasmania in 1800–1804; his chief interest was the scientific study of fish. Having arrived in Philadelphia, he immediately set to work on a grand project: a large (and never completed) work to be called the “Fishes of the United States of America” that would feature a taxonomic description of every kind of American fish he could observe.13 With so many fish to find, however, his descriptions were fairly cursory. Presenting his discoveries in papers published in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences (he was a member of the academy), Lesueur followed the Journal’s guidelines as set forth in the first issue: “to present the facts . . . clothed in as few words as are consistent with perspicuous description.”14 Describing a freshwater eel (Muraena rostrata) in a paper published in 1817, Lesueur gave a generalized account typical of his work: Snout elongated, pointed and strait; eyes large, and situated very near the angle of the mouth; body tumid in the centre, and narrowed to a point at both extremities; upper parts varied with gray and olive, sometimes of a slate blue, lower parts white; dorsal and anal fins reddish, which colour deepens as it approaches the tail, pectoral fins small, acute and bluish. Length from eighteen to twenty-four inches. Inhabits the lakes Cayuga and Geneva, in the state of Newyork; is esteemed for the table.15

Or consider Lesueur’s account of the fish he called Catostomus duquesnii, also published in the Journal in 1817: Head large and long; mouth wide; scales large, subtrilobate dorsal fin quadrangular; the anal fin extends as far as the base of the caudal fin, which is greatly forked; lateral line forms a long curvature towards the back; lobes of the caudal fin pointed, the upper lobe somewhat

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 35

figure 11 Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Catostomus duquesnii, in Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences 1 (1817), facing p. 105. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

the largest; length from the snout to the extremity of the caudal fin nineteen inches; depth three inches and a half; thickness two inches; the head measures about one-fifth part of the whole fish.16

Although these descriptions contain numerous details, they remain very short and general. They also move constantly from the individual specimen to the larger type. Since Lesueur’s goal is a taxonomic study of all American fishes, his examples of Muraena rostrata and Catostomus duquesnii must stand for the entire species of those fish. Moreover, his pictures—Lesueur was an accomplished illustrator— show the creatures with a degree of generality matching that of the text (fig. 11). In his image of duquesnii, Lesueur aims to show just the fish’s basic characteristics—its fin shape and placement, its tail and jaws, for example. The dominant visual e¤ect is the repeated pattern of the fish’s scales. Even if we try to imagine the creature shown in color, it seems unlikely that Lesueur’s goal was to make us ponder the visceral specificity of the one creature under his inspection. Instead this fish is the type of duquesnii, rendered in a beautiful, schematic picture from which the viewer might be able to recognize all other such fish.

36 :: Before

This type of generalization—on the part of Charles Willson Peale, Rembrandt Peale, and Lesueur— could not di¤er more from the tenacious sensuous specificity of Blackberries. Just on the level of its brilliant colors, but in all its other sensuous aspects as well, the picture features an “overactivity of description,” to invoke a phrase of the cultural historian Elaine Scarry, at odds with the era’s paradigms of scientific representation.17 Merleau-Ponty’s “natural judgment” or “hyper-reflection” can help us here. According to this idea, there is a kind of perception wherein the observer sees an object in its primitive state prior to knowledge; when the observer takes in the mute strange objecthood of the thing across from or next to him and considers it as though he has never seen it before and has no idea what it is: When I contemplate an object with the sole intention of watching it exist and unfold its riches before my eyes, then it ceases to be an allusion to a general type, and I become aware that each perception, and not merely that of sights which I am discovering for the first time, reenacts on its own account the birth of intelligence and has some element of creative genius about it: in order that I may recognize the tree as a tree, it is necessary that, beneath this familiar meaning, the momentary arrangement of the visible scene should begin all over again, as on the very first day of the vegetable kingdom, to outline the individual idea of this tree. Such would be natural judgment, which cannot yet know its reasons since it is in the process of creating them.18

This idea of a pre-reflective “natural judgment” is very di¤erent from Enlightenment conceptions of natural objects. In The Artist in His Museum, Peale’s left hand, ushering us into the space, also points out the turkey. Such a gesture conceptually distances an object. “The act of pointing out,” writes Merleau-Ponty, “presupposes that the object, instead of being approached, grasped and absorbed by the body, is kept at a distance and stands as a picture in front of the [observer].” It is a way of generalizing this distanced object: “This silent gesture is impossible if what is pointed out is not already torn from instantaneous experience and monadic existence, and treated as representative of its previous appearances in me, and of its simultaneous appearances in others, in other words, subsumed under some category and promoted to the status of a concept.”19 In Charles Willson’s painting, the generalization of the turkey—the way it becomes a smooth, unruffled “type” of all turkeys—is shown as the result of the scientist’s cognition. It is the mind that casts a shadow on the raw object, diminishing its materiality and turning it into a type. The much greater sensuousness of the mastodon jaw at lower right might owe, in this view, to Peale’s relative inattention to it. O¤ to one side, awaiting the artist-naturalist’s acknowledgment, it exists still in nature’s strong north light. It has yet to be encompassed by the shadow cast by the artist, in which everything specific, everything quirky, becomes smooth and typical.

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 37

In Blackberries, by contrast, the extremely close vantage cancels the distanced contemplative view. Though Raphaelle titled some of his works inside the frame, writing the names of the objects, such identifications seem perfunctory afterthoughts in paintings that more fundamentally concern a lack of critical distance. Seen up close, at tactile range, sensuously overdescribed, Raphaelle’s objects glow with a primal materiality that reads as the token, not of Enlightenment science, but of something like “natural judgment.” Here we have, as Merleau-Ponty might say, the “genius” of Raphaelle’s blackberries: their capacity to make us see them as though for the first time, as though we had no idea what these strange objects are. For Raphaelle, the impetus for this natural judgment may well have been his resistance to the paradigms of Enlightenment science. Whereas such scientific description typified and distanced, constantly subjugating the specific materiality of a particular object to smoothing generalization, Raphaelle’s art resisted this typicality with a polemically close rendering of specific sensuous things. Choosing to show familiar objects, as it were, at a moment prior to conceptualization, Raphaelle refused the common Enlightenment assumption of the mind’s hegemony over the world. As an alternative, as the evidence of his pictures attests, he imaginatively tried to portray the visibility of things before the bland normalizations of cognition. His paintings make a concerted and deliberate e¤ort, sparked by the complacent conceptualism of Enlightenment science, to show the material world this science habitually repressed. Thus again the uncanniness of this painting. Focusing on the embodied vivacity of nature, Blackberries shows the irrepressible physicality of the natural world.

Phenomenological Embodiment and the Infant’s View Yet in phenomenological terms, nature’s body marks another uncanniness. For the embodied object, as we have seen, gives back to the observer his or her own sensuous existence. We can now elaborate on this reciprocity, this sliding back and forth, wherein the sensualized object betokens the observer’s own body. In a late essay, “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty notes how painters feel themselves observed by the very objects they paint: “Inevitably,” he writes, “the roles between the painter and the visible switch. That is why so many painters have said that things look at them. As Andre Marchand says, after Klee: ‘In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me.’” 20 Here, as the philosopher Galen Johnson notes, Merleau-Ponty does not refer to some literal animism of nature, wherein trees and other objects actually do look back at the artist. Instead, to see is to feel oneself being seen—to feel oneself not a privileged perceiver of the world but rather a physical mass within it, an object in space no di¤erent from the things one perceives. This sense of being looked back at is the recognition, on the part

38 :: Before

of the perceiver, that one’s own body is just a point within a larger enveloping materiality. The viewer is just one object in an encompassing physical world that Merleau-Ponty calls flesh.21 In Blackberries, we have already noted the odd frontal alignment of the fruit. This facing front produces a kind of regard—a sense of being looked back at—similar to what Merleau-Ponty describes. So does the coruscation of the berries, produced by little flecks of white on many of the individual drupes.22 Like the ledge smoothly connecting the spaces of painter and object, this “regard” suggests a phenomenological kinship. The result is the cancellation of the artist’s ostensibly privileged position of detached, subjective observation. Instead, the physical position of the observer in Raphaelle’s painting is mirrored back in the very objects he represents. This same sense of being looked back at appears in other Raphaelle Peale paintings. Strawberries and Cream, painted in 1818, shows in addition to the titled objects a spray of six flowers on the right (plate 5). Two of the flowers, still buds, turn to the right; the other four, including the largest, face the artist’s position much like the blackberries. In romantic fashion, the four open flowers suggest that light projected from the artist’s space makes them bloom. They respond, they open up, to the rhapsodic mind. But their looking back, in the way noted by Merleau-Ponty, indicates that they mark their creator, not as a disembodied mind, a pure power of imagination, but as a physical presence, another thing in a room of things. Here again one of Raphaelle’s paintings establishes an intimate and even disarmingly coincident relation between “subject” and object. The contemporaneous still lifes of Raphaelle’s uncle James Peale, by contrast, do produce a sense of a subject—someone viewing a set of less embodied, more inert objects. In a typical example, Still Life with Fruit, painted about 1821, James’s objects are more beautiful than visceral (plate 6). The di¤used light diminishes the rounded fleshiness of the fruit, making even the bruises on the pears seem somewhat superficial. The decorative patterning of the grape leaves against the black background recalls Johnston’s background e¤ects. Even the bowl-bound peaches, in all their roundness, seem as perfectly volumetric as the porcelain basket itself. Here we get a sense more of the glistening idea of a peach, beautiful and round and perfect, than of a peach itself—a conceptual bias confirmed by James’s grapes. Each one just like the others, these grapes are so much grapes as to be capable of being painted, one after the other, seemingly forever, as identical spheres of highlight and juice. Absent from James’s painting is the quality of phenomenological incarnation, of reversible physical presence, that characterizes Raphaelle’s depictions of similar goods. James gives his objects very little of the animated “regard,” the reciprocal staring, that characterizes the berries and the flowers in Strawberries and Cream. When he does show objects that appear to look back at us, such as the two peaches at center with their cyclopean navels, the reciprocal “vision” of these objects, if we may call it that, is somehow blunted, even canceled, by the soft dematerializing light in which they are shown. It is difficult to feel oneself embodied by the stare of an object that itself seems relatively set apart and

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 39

desensualized. The sprig of grapes on the table, the one set of objects that insinuates itself somewhat into our space, at least venturing a reversible relation between beholder and objects, does so only remotely, with an elegant but leaden inertness. Comparing Raphaelle’s overhanging strawberry leaf to James’s overhanging grapes reveals how Raphaelle’s principle of “hovering,” of keeping objects o¤ the deadening spaces of the ledge, was largely foreign to James. The result in Still Life with Fruit is an image of subjectivity almost as decisive as the kind Charles Willson showed in his portraits. The objects sit over there, beautiful and passive, before their owner. Nowhere do they exhibit a materiality obstinate enough to magnetize the beholder’s body and so to undermine this beholder’s sovereign position. In this distanced aesthetic spectacle, James flatteringly evokes a self safe and secure in the possession of objects whose placidity implies the subject’s own complacent comfort. The mutual sensuousness of subject and object in Raphaelle’s art, by contrast, implies what Merleau-Ponty would call “depersonalization”—a manner of primally experiencing not just the world but one’s own being.23 And we are now able to say more precisely what kind of project Raphaelle undertook. Implicit in the notion of natural judgment—a judgment prior to cognition—is the idea of an infantile perception of objects. As characterized in Rousseau’s Emile, the widely circulated philosophical text Charles Willson Peale used to raise his children, the infant cannot separate itself from the world: “It is only by movement that we learn the di¤erence between self and not self; it is only by our own movements that we gain the idea of space. The child has not this idea.” 24 Rousseau describes infantile experience as phenomenological. The infant “learns to perceive the heat, cold, hardness, softness, weight, or lightness of bodies, to judge their size and shape and all their physical properties, by looking, feeling, listening, and, above all, by comparing sight and touch, by judging with the eye what sensation they would cause to his hand.” 25 Projecting the hand out into the world, doing so with objects at close range, and in a manner in which the body is barely if at all distinguished from these surrounding objects—the infant, in Rousseau’s description, exercises a natural judgment. Blackberries, with its imagery of an acutely heightened perception—a natural judgment of objects— is similar to Rousseau’s views. In fact, Raphaelle’s painting calls to mind the whole romantic valuation of childhood and infantile experience—a valuation for which Emile is a founding text. The child, according to Rousseau, would develop into a rational citizen if his innately good nature were carefully guided and encouraged. Building on this praise of childhood, romantic writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most famously Wordsworth, made the special intensity of childhood perception a ubiquitous subject. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” completed in 1804, Wordsworth presents his own young boyhood as a time of extraordinarily heightened sensuous experience:

40 :: Before

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream.26

The relation of Raphaelle’s picture to the ideas of Wordsworth and Rousseau implies that he fashioned his still lifes to convey an infant’s primally enchanted experience. These paintings, with their qualities of extreme proximity to mundane yet mysterious things, of animate embodied objects not fully separated from the observer’s own physical position, suggest the vantage of a person beholding “every common sight” as if for the first time. This interpretation is confirmed if we look at how Raphaelle’s painting opposes Wordsworth’s and Rousseau’s views, which emphasize the importance of socializing the infant’s and child’s experience. Rousseau’s aim in Emile is to educate a parent or tutor on how best to shape the raw material of the infant’s sensuous view of the world. In Wordsworth’s “Intimations,” the partial loss of “primal sympathy” as one grows up is unfortunate—“It is not now as it hath been of yore . . . / The things which I have seen I now can see no more”—yet also necessary. If this loss reduces the gleam of the world, it also cancels what the literary scholar Geo¤rey Hartman calls the “narcissistic self-absorption” of the Wordsworthian child, helping him to become socialized. As Hartman puts it, “Wordsworth describes some of the trials of the soul that we undergo to become civilized persons.” 27 Like Rousseau, Wordsworth advocates taming, but not obliterating, the child’s sensuous experience of the world. Blackberries, in contrast, depicts a world that simply stops at “the glory and the freshness of a dream.” Unlike Wordsworth, unlike Rousseau, Raphaelle wants to go no further. His art resists the move to civilization that Wordsworth regarded as mournful but also inevitable and worthwhile. Blackberries presents, and celebrates for its own sake, an intimate space of narcissistic self-absorption. This then is the painting’s primary uncanniness. In a culture of selfhood—a culture abounding in visual and literary narratives of socialization—Raphaelle’s still lifes reassert what this culture repressed: the primal sensations of infancy. Raphaelle pictured these sensations in a glowing and richly imagined simulation of all their narcissistic intensity, with no redemptive intimation of socialization. For him, painting still life was foremost a matter of seeing beneath the abstractions of cognition; it was, therefore, to feel one’s embodied relation to the things one beheld; it was, finally—though always with a sense of exquisite control—to imagine oneself back into the sensuous wonder of an infant’s experience.

Blackberries and Embodiment :: 41

chapter three

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Blackberries and Focused Vision Refusing the Long View

The sensuousness of the berries indicates not just a projected body but the concentrated gaze that makes such bodily projection possible. Merleau-Ponty notes the importance of sustained attention in the passage on “natural judgment” already cited: “When I contemplate an object with the sole intention of watching it exist and unfold its riches before my eyes, then it ceases to be an allusion to a general type.” Blackberries represents this intensely localized examination from which the embodied object is born. Vision in Raphaelle’s paintings is to the object like the seed to the fruit: around this focused attention, because of it, the object swells into visceral existence. This localized gaze sharply refuses a hallmark of the era’s new modes of selfhood: the long view, the all-encompassing scan, in which no particular object is a sustained focus. This shifting expansive view decorporealized the world, turning specific things into ephemeral points in a larger visual field, and socialized the viewer by discouraging focused, fascinated vision. In the culture of selfhood, to fix one’s attention too rootedly on one thing would be to enact the primal fascination, the unredeemed gaze, that the whole project of socialization was designed to counteract. By contrast, to show things up close—and to show them, moreover, with a fixation bordering on what Freud would call the infant’s primal stare—was to reject the socialized world of the self, and to reject it in a way that directly relates to questions of embodiment. Raphaelle’s paintings resist a vision that does not bite into things, a vision that produces intentionally ephemeral worlds of learning and lost luster.

43

Intensity to Extension: Fixed versus Attenuated Vision What, besides embodiment, are the hallmarks of this fixed vision in Raphaelle’s art? One is the small size of the objects and of the picture space. In “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Elaine Scarry writes of the “intense localization” of a flower—the way its concentrated color and sensuous surface makes it especially conducive to imagining and depicting. We can see such a flower in our mind, Scarry contends, because its concentrated properties fit our mind’s capacity to imagine better than, say, a di¤use view of a landscape: “If one closes one’s eyes and pictures, for example, a landscape that encompasses the imaginative equivalent of our visual field, it is very hard to fill in its entirety with concentrated colors and surfaces. If, in contrast, one images the face of a flower— a much smaller portion of the visual field with its sudden dropping o¤ at the edge of the petal where no image is required—the concentration of color and surface comes within reach.”1 Given a smaller surface to imagine, according to Scarry, we can fill this surface with the very richness it possesses in life. Our imaginations have just enough color, just enough gossamer texture, to fill the space of a flower. Hence our ability to imagine a flower better than a landscape, wherein a flower’s worth of color and texture must be spread across a vast space. Calling this “the ratio of intensity to extension,” Scarry links the idea to still-life painting. In the very small pictures Edouard Manet made at the end of his life—paintings such as Roses in a Champagne Glass (12 by 9 inches) or Lilacs in a Water Glass (approximately 10 by 8 inches)—she finds an intensity of attention indicating the mind’s greater capacity to vivify the small thing: “The labor of construction has a certain radius: in imagining, as in painting, the localization of intensely filled-in surfaces becomes possible with a smaller surface.” 2 In Blackberries, Raphaelle’s roughly 7-by-10-inch painting, the very plumpness and juiciness of the berries marks the mind’s greater power to act upon small things in small spaces. The e¤ect is analogous to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that tactile space—the envelope of objects directly in front of the observer—vivifies that observer’s embodied relation to the objects. In Scarry’s argument, whether in imagining or observing, the close small space intensifies the sensuous vivacity of representations. Raphaelle himself thought of his art in this way. In his only extant letter that actually mentions his still lifes, he explains to Charles Gra¤, the owner of Blackberries, other pictures he had intended to make before su¤ering an attack of gout: “I meant to have devoted all my time, Principally, to Painting . . . instead of whole Water Melons, merely single Slices on which I could bestow a finish that would have made them valuable.”3 To paint merely a slice of watermelon, as Raphaelle conceives it, would be to “bestow a finish” that he could not supply had he focused on an entire melon. The smaller the surface one paints, the more intensely one can render it.

44 :: Before

Blackberries contains a sign of this concentrated vision. The picture refuses to draw our eye strongly to any other point within itself. Except for the soft light entering from the left and the far left edge of the table it illuminates, the background is emptied of competing visual interest. The backgrounds of Manet’s flower paintings, writes Scarry, “fall away into uniform lavender-gray or black.” Just so, the flower in Manet’s work is imagined at the expense of everything around it—“an intense localization of color with a sudden dropping o¤ at the edges.” 4 Blackberries, with its similar fading of everything except the main motif, implies a comparable imaginative expenditure. The e¤ort to embody the berries— to bring them forth imaginatively—takes place at the expense of enlivening the world around. Instead, this surrounding space has, in Scarry’s words, “a rapid fallo¤ to zero.” 5 In this way, the sensuousness of Raphaelle’s berries can be understood not just as their own but as that of a surrounding pictorial space they have drained of all materiality. The berries glow by gluttonously gathering into themselves all the “juice” of a surrounding world: such is another token of the painting’s link between concentrated vision and embodiment. As the vision swells in a particular place, lapping and overlapping on the same thing, so the sensuousness of the thing swells into being at that very spot. Imparting a plenitude to the world, the concentrated gaze directly opposed the era’s rational and possessive models of visual attention. Each of these models was predicated on a dispersal of the look— a capacity always to see the “there” in the “here.” In Enlightenment science, as we have noted, the specific object always represented a broader category. In Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of the naturalistartist Lesueur, painted in 1818, the eminent ichthyologist holds an engraving tool in his right hand but looks beyond and above his motif: the eel in the jar by his side (fig. 12). This indeed is Muraena rostrata, the freshwater eel Lesueur discovered in 1816 in “lakes Cayuga and Geneva” in New York state and discussed in a paper delivered to the Academy of Natural Sciences on August 19, 1817—not long before Peale mentions painting him in a letter of January 8, 1818.6 Showing Lesueur looking above and beyond the specific Muraena rostrata in the jar before him, Peale represents the spirit of the French naturalist’s brief descriptions. The look away signifies a more exalted undertaking—the conceptual task of taxonomy over and against slimy specifics. It also indicates the even greater goal of Lesueur’s natural history: nothing less than the systematic work describing the “Fishes of the United States of America.” Staring abstractly into space, Lesueur is shown envisioning the mammoth system of which Muraena rostrata is but one example. Only study of the grand system, not the individual thing, makes one “the greatest naturalist.” Moreover, the portrait that shows Lesueur’s act of generalization also represents Peale’s own. In the eel, cursorily depicted, Peale indicates his own interest in the typifying vision the portrait illustrates. In fact, in Lesueur, who holds an engraving tool not unlike the painter’s brush, Peale o¤ers an image of his own idealist science: let the specimen be there, yes, but only insofar as the scientist might see beyond it. This same idealism is indeed apparent in The Artist in His Museum, a painting that adapts

Blackberries and Focused Vision :: 45

figure 12 Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, 1818. Oil on canvas, 23 x 19 in. Ewell Sale Stewart Library, The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

some of the same compositional and thematic devices of the Lesueur portrait, albeit on a grander scale (see fig. 10). In the self-portrait Peale is to the turkey as Lesueur is to the eel—a grand conceptualizer, relatively inattentive to the specific creature by his side. Like Raphaelle’s Blackberries, both Peale portraits acknowledge that concentrated attention bestows sensuous specificity on the object; they make this acknowledgment, however, in reverse: by carefully withholding the “overdescriptive” focus under which the object would come to life. The eel in the portrait becomes smoother, thinner, less recognizable as itself, when not under the eye. By virtue of its much larger size, and its more elaborate didactic intention, The Artist in His Museum shows an even more dramatic visual “thinning” of the specific object. It does so by means of the scientific arrays running along the facing walls of the aptly named Long Room. On the left, the taxonomic boxes are the ornithological equivalent of the “Fishes of the United States of America.” On

46 :: Before

the right, the mastodon skeleton is a comparably systematic array of individual parts. Along each wall, then, is a generalizing structure into which the nearby floor-bound specimens are to be placed. In vertical tracks implicitly moving up each side of the canvas—the turkey up to taxonomic boxes on the left, the single mastodon bones up to mastodon skeleton on the right—the painting shows the paths whereby individual things become parts of much larger and more generalized wholes. In the process, these specific things lose their materiality and become visually “thinner”—especially the foreground mastodon bones, notably the harshly illuminated and idiosyncratic jaw. The naturalist’s task, to judge by this vertical transition, is to place the viscerally odd object in an overarching system—the mastodon skeleton itself—in which that sharp, bold physicality is visually softened. The thinned object is the sign of an attenuated vision, a point exemplified by the Quaker woman staring at the skeleton. Her hands held up in sublime reaction, she disperses her attention onto a mammoth space. In contrast to the jaw, that specific object shown in raking light and caked impasto, the skeleton by its very size stretches the view, attenuating a gaze whose lack of focus is registered as the shadowy generality of the object beheld. In this way, along its right side, the painting charts an intertwined process of acculturation: the generalization of the idiosyncratic object and of the enlightened gaze. As the object moves back in space, as it moves from part to system, it loses its toothy carnality. Just so, its resultant thinness signals a vision dispersed across a vastness, set out before the eye like a gigantic picture in which no quirky particular stands out. This is on one side of The Artist in His Museum. Along the other side, an even more dramatic generalization of vision takes place. Like the mastodon bones, the turkey is to be fitted into a vast and comprehensive armature, the Linnaean classification of species.7 The turkey’s body, generalized already, must undergo a further round of generalization wherein, even as it sits stu¤ed in its own case, it will be seen as merely one spot in the south wall’s own mammoth expanse. This next step is made clear in the implicitly sweeping vision of the gallery’s three male visitors. Although concentrating on the specific cases before which they stand, these figures cannot prevent a dramatic thinning of attention. Were we to imagine ourselves standing in their place, taking the same detached, distanced view of a particular object, we would find that the network of representations impinged on our focused vision, attenuating it. Along the south wall, as Peale shows it, there is always a vast periphery around the individual object beheld. The gaze of these figures ultimately is as dispersed as that of the Quaker woman facing the north wall. According to the picture, this thinning of attention, manifest as the reciprocal thinness of the objects along the wall, is the very basis of education. Pointing to a specific case, the father shows his son one thing but also, implicitly, the larger system, the lateral spread of a whole “world in miniature,” as the Peale Museum was advertised. Holding a guide to the museum, the boy studies the individual thing only as a way to conceptualize a universe. Indeed, as his father gestures to the one box, the boy angles

Blackberries and Focused Vision :: 47

his body toward much of the taxonomic spread, directing his attention simultaneously here and there, as if to show that he learns of this one thing only as part of the entire system. Although the Quaker woman gestures sublimely, reacting to a creature almost incomprehensibly vast, she too signifies knowledge. Her attenuated gaze, matching those of the men and boy, helps us understand how the aweinspiring vastness viewers confront along each wall is in each case delimited, finite, and systematic: the domesticated sublime—the sublime that stops—is Charles Willson’s visual model for the mind’s mastery of the universe. The painting’s conspicuous perspectival system is the sign of this final form of sublimation. As the cultural historian Roger Stein has noted, Peale took special care to render this system with the aid of a drawing machine.8 The idea of a zooming space, in which the “here” is always plotted in a larger expanse—a set of “theres”—was an important element in the design of the painting. The perspective lines of the floor pull away from the material objects of the foreground as if charting the painting’s impatience to conceive these objects as part of a broader scientifically conceived space. The lines draw our attention away from the individual object and out into the hundred-foot expanse of the Long Room, making us see the turkey in relation to a much more extensive area. Perspective here signals both the Long Room and the long view, the very token of a rationalizing adult vision. Here the words of Sir Joshua Reynolds articulate the Enlightenment beliefs of Charles Willson Peale himself: “A hundred thousand nearsighted men, that see only what is just before them, make no equivalent to one man whose view extends to the whole horizon round him.”9 In this way, the painting’s conspicuous perspectival system marks the ideological di¤erence of Peale’s museum from Philadelphia’s other museums. In places such as Jesse Sharpless’s Washington Museum and Gallery of Paintings, located at 48 Market Street, not far from the Peale Museum, the emphasis on lurid particulars was meant to keep the mind from roaming too much to the larger views, the moral lessons and scientific truths, that might raise the idiosyncratic object from “entertainment” to edifying source of wisdom. Featuring, among other things, wax figures of mortally wounded military officers and a special room including paintings of nude or seminude women, the Washington Museum aimed to “satisfy and gratify,” rather than edify, visitors. The Washington Museum’s one large view—the urban panorama to be seen from the roof of the museum building—was itself presented as one in a list of fixating entertainments.10 The object worthy of a fixed gaze, an unstraying attention, was Jesse Sharpless’s goal. Peale, in contrast, was sensitive to the accusation that his own museum (which included wax figures, preserved body parts, and other “curiosities” fully capable of fixing the vision) was just a more glorified version of the same entertainments. Therefore he worked hard to counter the charge in the painting summarizing the achievements of his career. In The Artist in His Museum, the perspectival system—taking us always up and away from the fetish object—most dramatically indicates this sublimatory goal.

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Poulson’s and Attenuated Vision This same attenuation of vision characterized the era’s visual manifestations of possessive individualism. Take for example a typical front page from one of Philadelphia’s leading commercial newspapers in the early nineteenth century, Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (fig. 13). The large sheet, dated September 7, 1815, features a variety of trade announcements. Ships are to sail for Liverpool, Boston, and Bordeaux, among other places. Copious goods, including everything from wine to indigo to fabrics and perfume, have arrived from these and other ports. Various items such as ships, houses, and farms are to be sold. The city appears as a nexus in a local and international trading network. To be a mercantile Philadelphian, the paper suggests, was to occupy one place in a potentially vast commercial network—to be “here,” in one place, only insofar as this one place related to a series of “theres.” The format of the Poulson’s page indicates another mode of dispersed attention, one more directly related to our concerns here. The dense arrangement of short boxed advertisements implies, and helps to invent, a mercantile reader who demands a comprehensive view—one who would find it unproductive to focus too much on any one item. The value of the page for this mercantile reader, we can imagine, was in its dispersal of his attention—if it gave him particulars, it did so always with enough brevity to encourage him to move on to the other items crowding for his consideration. In this way, the ship icons appearing on the page indicate not only the departure and auction of boats but also the page’s own ceaseless transport of the reader’s attention. The eye is meant to travel, and travel quickly, across the page. Thus the Poulson’s page is fascinating for its suggestion that the very hallmark of possessive individualism—of a life spent buying and selling—was a capacity to disperse one’s attention, to be aware of many things, but each one only for a moment. Crary, citing Walter Benjamin, has written that “vision in the nineteenth century was inseparable from transience—that is, from new temporalities, speeds, experiences of flux and obsolescence, a new density and sedimentation of the structure of visual memory.” For Benjamin, according to Crary, “modernity subverts even the possibility of a contemplative beholder. There is never a pure access to a single object; vision is always multiple, adjacent to and overlapping with other objects, desires, and vectors.”11 Crary’s subject in this passage, like Benjamin’s, is the mid–nineteenth century— not the world of Philadelphia from 1810 to 1825. In the Poulson’s page, however, one can detect a nascent moment in this same nullifying of contemplation. To focus on a specific box in the Poulson’s page is always to be aware of other boxes “adjacent” and “overlapping.” To switch to one of these other boxes—to contemplate buying indigo instead of perfume—is merely to have one’s vision encroached on by still other desires, other adjacencies. The paper’s disposability, moreover, implies a bustling world that itself encroaches on the page—a vaster space of wharves and storefronts in whose midst the page itself is just a small box worth only the beholder’s fleeting attention. The world, the

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figure 13 Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia, September 7, 1815, p. 1. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

page suggests, goes by quickly: ships leave and arrive with the alacrity of the modernizing gaze itself. These two modes of inattention—rationalist sublimation and possessive-individualist scanning— predictably overlap. Compare for example the south wall in The Artist in His Museum (fig. 14) with the Poulson’s page. Despite their di¤erent sizes, they are similarly structured. Each features a grid of individual items. Each presupposes the viewer’s dispersal of attention across this grid—the capacity to see one thing always in relation to a more comprehensive whole. Each also presupposes the constant shift

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figure 14 The Artist in His Museum (detail).

of this observer from one item to the next, so that what is central at one moment is adjacent in the next. In each case, the system always beckons, urging the shift of focus to an adjacent item and thus the attenuation of vision Crary describes. The museum-goers in The Artist in His Museum therefore di¤er only nominally from the reader implied by the Poulson’s page. The pose of the most distant figure, it is true, indicates a critical inspection, even a contemplation, at odds with the hurried scanning implied by the newspaper format. Peale

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represents the museum as a space set partly aside from the hurly-burly commerce we can understand to take place all around the sequestered Long Room. Yet in the picture’s dramatic perspectival traverse he also represents the scanning that was a discursive hallmark of commerce itself. Thus even the lone man’s contemplative gaze implies the encroachment of a peripheral system of comparable representations. It was not surprising, then, that newspapers such as Poulson’s were sometimes called museums, and that Peale often took out advertisements in Poulson’s himself.12 In the museum the scanner of the paper might augment his general view of the world. Lesueur’s Catostomus duquesnii confirms the overlap of scientific and commercial paradigms of vision in these years (see fig. 11). Here, as in comparable Lesueur images, the single fish, isolated from others, is ostensibly an object for contemplation. Reproduced in the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences, the illustration o¤ers the scientist a chance for a close examination much like that of the contemplative man in The Artist in His Museum. Yet the dominant visual e¤ects of duquesnii are the patterned scales that encourage the gaze to glide across the fish’s body much as the fish itself glides across the page. Like the text showing through the thin paper on which duquesnii is reproduced, the fish is meant to be read, scanned as one might scan a page of text, moving one’s eyes gradually from one part of the page to another, never stopping in one place. Even as it presents a single object of study, Lesueur’s image spreads the gaze to a thinness that the fish itself (dis)embodies. This e¤ect occurs despite the pattern of net-like scales that suggests a thing held in place. In Lesueur’s illustration, to be captivated, whether as object or as viewer, is to keep moving. The fish appears to move across the empty white page, paper its element, even as it is locked paralytically in that page’s very center. The scales make our eye glide across the image even as they ensnare what they set free. The viewer, his gaze constructed by the object of study itself, so that it is vision itself that swims or darts, is meant to snare the creature in the very act of scanning it. The quick study, the gaze that slides across: only these visual methods can capture one’s topic when there are whole worlds to know. And this capture, finally, is not that dissimilar from the kind of impatient, darting vision encouraged on the comparably thin pages of Poulson’s. The natural-history illustration, like the museum, “cannot transcend a world where everything is in circulation.” 13 In early national America, even the scientific specimens—and the scientific gaze—are on the move. Blackberries contrasts dramatically with these overlapping models of dispersed attention. With their small sensuous objects, Blackberries and other Raphaelle still lifes produce the sense of a lingering examination, a refusal to leave one spot, that is perhaps meant to be transmitted to a similarly tarrying viewer. Whereas objects such as Peale’s turkey or Lesueur’s fish imply the intertwined inattention of artist and viewer—the artist’s generalization licensing our own quick gloss of the typical creature— Raphaelle’s carefully rendered objects arrest the beholder. Moreover, in its hermetic intensity, Raphaelle’s painting di¤ers from the only comparable object

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we have encountered in our description of early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia’s visual culture: the displays in Sharpless’s Washington Museum. Each exhibit at that museum was meant to hold the viewer’s fascinated attention, to “satisfy and gratify” in a primal way, yet the point of the Washington Museum was the sheer number of such displays: the satisfaction and gratification had to be spread thin, kept brief, when one had nine rooms’ worth of exploded guts and wax presidents to see. In this way, even the merely entertaining museum encouraged that characteristic mark of the era’s selfhood: the shifting and inattentive gaze. Blackberries, by contrast, implies the sustained and channeled attention of artist and viewer, thereby discouraging the customary visual move outward.14

The Centripetal Energy of Raphaelle’s Still Lifes This discouragement of the outward view holds even though, as Phoebe Lloyd and others have pointed out, the objects on which Raphaelle focuses are themselves emissaries from the outside world. The Chinese export porcelain pieces in Blackberries, Strawberries and Cream, and other works indicate trade routes like the ones advertised in Poulson’s. The fruits and vegetables in Raphaelle’s paintings are the products of local horticulture and of vaster worlds.15 Yet all of these objects help form the centripetal energy of Raphaelle’s hermetic pictures. The material density of his objects suggests the embeddedness of a fixed, fascinated gaze that refuses to move outward. Concentrated vision and material objects are alike locked in place, tokens of a mutual fixation. Things do come into these hermetic pictures, absolutely; it is just that they never leave.16 This inward energy in Raphaelle’s works is especially fascinating, however, because it is often shown imperiled. If the paintings set up an intimate space, they also hint at the invariable encroachments of the outside world. In Strawberries and Cream, for example, the reflections of the window on the glass pitcher signify the projected light of the artist’s imagination, bounced back to him as the gleam of the objects he beholds (fig. 15; see plate 5). Yet these same markers of intimacy read more literally as markers of the world beyond the room. Thus the reflections are a poignantly divided sign, indicating both an intimate reciprocity between body and object and the very exteriority that would, glass to glass, shatter the intimacy. This dividedness is there even if we think of the dominantly centripetal energies of Raphaelle’s hermetic scene. Primarily, the window reflections fall within the painting’s inward gravitation: they are markers of the outside, yes, but the picture shows them drawn to the glass pitcher like magnets to steel; they cling to it, like to like, as though the pitcher had sucked them into itself, no more letting these squares of milky light leave than the very cream the pitcher contains. Yet more subtly, the reflections cling to the pitcher a little parasitically, like objects from the outside alighting upon the other-

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figure 15 Strawberries and Cream (detail).

wise immaculately intimate object, indicating a faint but discernible centrifugal pull away, toward the world beyond the cocoon born of the fascinated gaze. Carefully painting these reflections, Raphaelle bends the outside into his own space even as he admits the outside’s power to break the fragile domain it enters. Another Raphaelle painting of strawberries still more vividly represents this competition of centripetal and centrifugal energies. In Still Life—Strawberries, Nuts, &c., painted in 1822, he shows a Chinese export porcelain sugar bowl with a roundel scene upon it (fig. 16). The scene shows a subject popular on Chinese export porcelain of the period: an allegorical figure, Hope, with an anchor and a dog (fig. 17).17 The figure holds a tether from which fly two birds that echo the two ships in the harbor. Raphaelle has rendered the scene crudely, perhaps to diminish the undue visual importance a crisply rendered depiction would achieve in the composition. Yet the roundel’s message, entirely appropriate to the energies of Raphaelle’s art, is still readable. The allegorical figure indicates a play between anchored stability and far-flung expansiveness. Leaning her left arm on the anchor, Hope flies the birds with the right. Like the itinerant artist himself, the figure is simultaneously rooted in one spot and

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figure 16 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life— Strawberries, Nuts, &c., 1822. Oil on wood panel, 16⅜ × 22¾ in. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Jamee J. and Marshall Field, 1991.100. figure 17 Still Life—Strawberries, Nuts, &c. (detail).

extended into a wider and far-flown world, as transient as the one suggested by the boat icons in Poulson’s.18 In a primary sense, the little allegory is contained within the centripetal scene. The “world” is just another part of the painting’s hermetic space. All the items in Raphaelle’s painting have come from some distance but are now anchored in this one spot. The curve of the anchor repeats the curves of the bowl’s entwined handles; the birds in the air match the leaves springing o¤ the orange stem; the roundel itself assumes the orange’s shape and implies, by its placement on the sugar bowl, the centripetal idea of a world within a bowl rather than a bowl betokening a world. In this way, the roundel is one sensuous element of a phenomenal scene to be absorbed, not for its allegorical meanings, but for its array of shapes, colors, textures, and other kinds of “physical presence” keeping the eye from moving elsewhere. Yet like the window reflections in Strawberries and Cream, the flight of those two birds still suggests the faint pull of an outward energy, the dispersal of intimacy beyond and above the horizon. One final way that Raphaelle’s paintings represent the fragility of their own intimacy concerns their own horizons—the distant edges of the table-like surfaces on which the objects rest. In Blackberries, this edge is in one sense part of the immaterial background against which the berries derive their juicy palpability. Drained of a competing materiality, the background allows the berries to come alive as the result of sustained attention. At the same time, this horizon exerts the faintest counterinfluence, a pull of the attention away from the berries. The horizon, visible on the left side of the painting, subtly inscribes the perspectival system that would dominate The Artist in His Museum, pulling the attention away from the fetishistic and presocially “overdescriptive” concentration on things. It is not surprising therefore that in Blackberries the horizon of the table is linked to the ethereal light, descending from upper left, that brings it more dramatically into view. Here, in the deep left background of his picture, Raphaelle combines two key markers of Enlightenment sublimation—long view and soft light. Set within perspectival distance, cast in a universal glow, the object in light and at length ceases to be its physical self and becomes part of an encompassing system. The threat of such sublimation may explain why, on the right side of Blackberries, Raphaelle arranges the berries’ thorny stem to obscure the darkened but still visible horizon behind it. Superimposed over the horizon, the stem keeps us from focusing on the distance, instead concentrating our gaze in the close space of the objects themselves. The lip of the bowl itself, moreover, is superimposed on, and made to continue, the horizon line. In each case a nearby object, the bowl and the thorny stem, not only blocks a distant view but replaces it, creating an oxymoronic near horizon that vanquishes the centrifugal energies of a distant perspective. In one way or another, all of Raphaelle’s paintings try to subdue their own horizons. In Still Life— Strawberries, Nuts, &c., the distant edge of the table-like surface at right repeats the horizon within the

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roundel scene. Thus the ledge itself, and not just the roundel, indicates a threatening dispersal of nearness. As if in compensation, the left side of Strawberries, Nuts, &c. features the stacked saucers that create not one but three near horizons. Here, in tripled form, is something like the emphasis on closeness in Blackberries. Yet something else happens in Strawberries, Nuts, &c.: a recognition that objects themselves have horizons as threatening as that of the surface on which they are placed. In the way the saucers bend back and around instead of abruptly vanishing, they suggest Raphaelle’s discomfort in showing objects at the place they disappear from view. Far better for him to treat the edge of an object as the indicator of a further fullness, the promise of yet more roundedness, than as the sign of an irrevocable end. If the latter, then the objects at their edges would be pricked all around with intimations of their finitude instead of swelled, as they are, into such rounded presences. The orange, for example, exudes and glows at its edges, promising more and not less of itself as it disappears. Objects, Raphaelle realized, have their own horizons, and thus the boundedness of each thing he painted required him to address, and solve, a recurring problem of loss. Still Life with Cake (see plate 2) shows another way that Raphaelle’s paintings aim to subdue their horizons. The golden apple features a faintly discernible but striking pentimento: the line of the distant ledge running through the apple’s body. The pentimento reveals that here, as perhaps in all his work, Raphaelle painted the ledge and background first, prior to depicting any objects. At the earlier stages of his picture, then, he would have been confronted by an empty table-like surface leading to a horizon and a blank background. Phenomenologically, this might well have produced a sense of energies running untrammeled on a smooth fast track to an overspilling outer edge; a sense of the body pulled centrifugally out of itself, without so much as a single object to latch onto. To fill this space with even a single thing, but especially one that blocked the horizon, was then dramatically to reshift one’s visual attention. It was to nullify the horizon’s pulling power and to install a nearby object as a target for vision to hit up against. Although the apple is bright and the background dark, painting this object for Raphaelle may have been the equivalent of shielding one’s eyes, at last, from the sun: the apple eclipses the distance and retrains the gaze, allowing it to focus on something nearby. And there this fixed vision can begin to pulsate, bodying forth the small space of a tenacious enchantment.

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chapter four

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Three Kinds of Silence I shall, I hope, make a speaking picture. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Thomas Jefferson, January 15, 1818

Here we come to a related aspect of Raphaelle’s art—its silence. For Phoebe Lloyd, Raphaelle’s “objects seem to dwell in solemn quietude.” Jules Prown, writing about Raphaelle’s Fruit in a Silver Basket, notes, “This is a silent world.” Silence is the leitmotif of Ward and Hart’s article on the artist, starting with the first sentence: “Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825) fascinates because of his silences.” These silences, they note, characterize Raphaelle’s largely undocumented life as well as his mysterious art.1 This chapter explores silence in Raphaelle’s paintings as it relates to three intertwined questions of embodiment and selfhood. First, like sustained vision, silence in Raphaelle’s art is a phenomenological precondition. In romantic poetry of Raphaelle’s era, silence characterizes a primally absorptive state of being, a state prior to cognition, in which the self is effaced and the world is experienced directly. This silence is best demonstrated in Wordsworth’s descriptions of the hushed child or infant sensuously extending into and receiving the world—descriptions that have a decided affinity with Raphaelle’s paintings. Second, the silence of Raphaelle’s art produces a twofold opacity at odds with early-nineteenthcentury Philadelphia’s demands that the self and its artifacts be transparent to understanding. The opaque silence of Raphaelle’s pictures defies the era’s demand that a picture speak clearly—that is, tell a comprehensible tale from which a self-improving moral may be drawn. Moreover, Raphaelle’s pictures refuse not just to tell a moral but to “satisfy and gratify” curiosity. Raphaelle painted in a culture intolerant of individual liberties considered excessive and dangerous, including secrecy and silence.2 In

59

such a culture, one’s motivations and meanings had always to be made clear. Both Raphaelle and Charles Brockden Brown critiqued this omnivorous desire to know—each from a di¤erent angle. Third, Raphaelle’s pictorial silence can be morbid. It can represent not just a refusal but a failure to reach the level of a “speaking” picture. Insofar as such speaking pictures were equated with a transcendent ability to give voice and face to an absent entity—to make even the dead appear and speak— the silence of Raphaelle’s art is also that of a world in which the artist does not exist. In his art the embodied state of “depersonalization” can shift into a grimmer self-effacement.

Absorptive Silence: “An Eye Made Quiet” In the romantic discourse of Raphaelle’s era, silence before nature maximizes one’s ability to spread into the natural world and to let that world flow back into oneself. A well-known example of this condition is the Boy of Winander section from Wordsworth’s Prelude. In the evenings the boy would imitate the hootings of the owls so well that they would answer him, across the lake, “with quivering peals / And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud, / Redoubled and redoubled.” When the owls fail to answer, however, a primordial silence ensues in which something more mystical happens: And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mocked his skill, Then sometimes in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind.3

The boy’s silent absorption repeats that of the Wordsworthian infant, described earlier in the same poem. In a primal state of prelinguistic silence, bonded to his mother, the infant drinks in the world as the Boy of Winander would come to do: No outcast he, bewildered and depressed; Along his infant veins are interfused The gravitation and the filial bond Of Nature that connect him with the world.4

In Wordsworth’s poetry this primal silence, according to the literary scholar Yu Liu, is a form of “wholesome self-obliviousness” that the mature poet hopes to copy. Liu calls it “the strange experience of gaining poetic power through self-annihilation.” One must undergo this “figurative self-annihilation”

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if one is “to receive a poetical gift from Nature.” 5 One of Wordsworth’s most famous poems, “Tintern Abbey,” written in 1798, represents this very process of the mature poet gladly achieving the infant’s “wholesome self-obliviousness.” Calling it a “serene and blessed mood,” Wordsworth describes the moment of depersonalization when the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.6

To say that Raphaelle’s pictures visualize a comparably self-forgetful “solemn quietude” may at first seem strange. Naturally, all images are quiet. Yet Raphaelle painted in an era in which the goal of many artists was to transcend this innate silence and make pictures—whether history paintings, portraits, or still lifes—that would, figuratively at least, speak. In such a milieu, Raphaelle’s quiet art stands out. A representative example, Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, alludes to silence in several ways (see plate 3). First, in its enclosed “rhapsodic” space the painting shows a zone removed from society and what Brown called “the frequent converse.” The rhapsodist, he notes, “is an enemy to conversation.”7 Second, and more complex, the painting implies silence in the way the artist’s brushstrokes are effaced. In Ostrich Egg Cup, as in all his pictures, Raphaelle carefully eliminated almost all signs of his brush on the picture surface. His pictures show, in Ward and Hart’s phrase, the “absence of any authorial presence.”8 This effect can be read as a sign of rationalist self-control—the artist in meticulous command of each brushstroke—yet it reads more convincingly as a pictorial version of the “self-annihilation” Liu describes. Because such self-annihilation in Wordsworth’s poetry is connected to silence, it is possible to make the same connection in Raphaelle’s contemporaneous romantic art. Eliminating signs of the artist’s presence becomes a metaphor for hushing a cognitive, rational self—a self interested in identifying objects and describing their uses—a way of rendering “an eye made quiet.” Moreover, the self-effacing brushstroke helps embody the objects Raphaelle depicts. The way it does so involves a shift from the typical operations of romantic painting. In Constable’s landscapes, for example, as the art historian Ann Bermingham has shown, the obvious brushmark calls forth both the subjectivity of the artist and the physical qualities of the objects shown.9 Thus in Constable’s art a stream is rendered with a series of fluid brushstrokes that indicate simultaneously the fluidity of the

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water and the artist’s flowing creativity. The daub or streak of paint simulates the artist’s projected consciousness, his telltale imprint, as he brings into being a world that he both beholds and creates. Raphaelle’s romantic brushwork is comparably twofold but otherwise different. In his work the invisible brushstroke suggests that the physical object is formed out of an annihilated, rather than a freeflowing, subjectivity. The sensuousness of the egg, its rounded vivacious glow, is achieved through brushwork that effaces the self. As the self disappears, the world comes to life. Instead of disturbing the surface of the painting with impasto or some other mark of subjectivity, Raphaelle stills this surface to the point where few if any traces of self appear. As Wordsworth writes, this quieted vision enables one to “see into the life of things.” In Raphaelle’s art, then, not just sustained vision but silence produces embodiment. The sensuous world born of self-effacement glows with a primal power that enters back into the selfless projector, “carried far into his heart.” Instead of a rational and instructive self, always discoursing on facts and lessons, depriving the world of the sensuous power through which our own being can be apprehended, Raphaelle’s paintings evoke a permeable romantic being, a Winanderish mute, penetrated by the world he brings to life.

Raphaelle and the Art of Saying Nothing But there is another aspect to the “solemn quietude” of Raphaelle’s paintings. Their silence directly contrasts with the widespread period conviction that paintings should tell a morally improving story. The painting that best diagrams the era’s propensity to make pictures speak—to turn the viewer into an auditor—is Allston’s Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem to Baruch the Scribe, painted in 1820 (fig. 18). Made not long after the artist’s return from London to Boston, and installed in the Beacon Hill dining room of the Reverend William Ellery Channing’s mother-in-law, the picture shows Jeremiah delivering his prophecy to his amanuensis, Baruch, who sits attentively at his feet. The people of Jerusalem will be destroyed, Jeremiah foretells, speaking the commands of God, because of their sinful materialistic ways. Like The Dead Man Restored, the painting is a deeply conservative warning about the potential fate of an increasingly liberalizing America. As David Bjelajac writes, summarizing the painting’s message: “Divine retribution ought to be expected when a nation pursues its material welfare at the expense of its infinitely more important spiritual objectives.”10 In Allston’s conservative view, the everyday citizen should be like Baruch—small, subordinate, fearfully awaiting the words of powers far more monumental than himself—rather than like the free-agent individual of republican and liberal ideology. Allston’s painting conveys its message through metaphors of sound. With his right hand, Jeremiah points simultaneously to his ear and toward the oculus at upper right, streaming with a light from

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figure 18 Washington Allston, Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem to Baruch the Scribe, 1820. Oil on canvas, 84 × 98½ in. Yale University Art Gallery, gift of Samuel F. B. Morse, b.a., 1810.

above, through which God’s message has traveled. Sound travels to Jeremiah’s ear through an “eye,” flowing into the room like the fabric flowing into the vessel at lower left. Baruch too, attentively awaiting the prophet’s next words, receives a message. Jeremiah’s left knee and left arm bridge the space between the prophet and Baruch’s scroll and head, respectively, implying the direct transmission of God’s voice through the prophet and into Baruch’s mind and script. The scroll itself conveys this aural directness. Where it is rolled up, just to the left of Baruch’s left shin, the scroll makes an earlike shape that matches the labyrinthine ears of scribe and prophet. Just as Jeremiah, pointing to his ear, is cast as a listener, so too scroll and scribe are visually represented as the receptors of spoken language.

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The figure of Baruch is important in one other way central to the idea of the “speaking” picture. He visualizes Allston’s ideal viewer of the prophetic painting. As Bjelajac notes, “The awestruck reverence of the young Baruch was precisely the attitude that Allston desired the beholder to assume toward the prophet of God.”11 Baruch is then a striking image of the viewer not just as a viewer but also as an auditor. In Allston’s conception, one goes to a picture to listen. Sound again travels through the eye. Dutifully transcribing the visual speech he hears, Baruch also allegorizes the history painting’s aim to redouble itself in the spoken and written accounts of its viewers—its aim both to speak its story and to have that story disseminated in the imitative words, spoken and written, of still other people. The ear-shaped scroll indicates not just Baruch’s listening but also that of other audiences: the Israelites to whom Baruch will read Jeremiah’s prophecy, the Bostonian contemporaries who will “hear” the painting. In the figure of Baruch, Allston represents his hope that the prophetic warning will spread to as many people who will listen, as it were, to his art. It is perhaps not surprising that this painting, with its imagery of both Jeremiah and Baruch as conduits, was later owned by one of the most famous message transmitters of all time, the painter-turned-inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, inventor of Morse code.12 The Peale family used the same message-transmitting mechanics in their conception of painting. Rembrandt Peale, in his essay “Original Thoughts on Allegorical Painting,” published in the National Gazette in 1820, the year Allston made Jeremiah, used the metaphor of the speaking picture to designate both confusing and clear meanings in painting. Of an obscure allegorical figure, he writes, “If it does not speak the sentiment required of it, it is an impostor, and should be banished from the canvas.” Elsewhere he mentions how such obscure figures require “amplification” and how they read, in their lack of clarity, as “provincial dialects.” In contrast, “true and simple” visual language can arise “in bursts of unpremeditated eloquence.” Such eloquence, Rembrandt claims, characterizes The Court of Death, his own recently completed large-scale work, the “first attempt” at this new direct form of visual language (fig. 19).13 Even when Rembrandt conceives his preferred style as a silent one, he represents silence as a form of auditory communication. “The science of painting,” he writes, praising his own direct kind of picture, “would possess the peculiar excellence of being equally understood by the deaf and the acute of hearing . . . without suffering, as language does, from the inattention of the hearer, by the mistake of a word, the misapplication of an epithet, or the weakness of a digression.” Rembrandt’s mute art would be so comprehensible that anyone could understand the message transmitted. “These forms and substances,” he writes of his direct mode, would “communicate to the mind of the spectator, the same train of thought, the same emotion, and lead him to the same conclusion which operated on the sensibility and understanding of the painter.”14 Aiming to make a painting that could be understood

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figure 19 Rembrandt Peale, The Court of Death, 1819–1820. Oil on canvas, 11 ft. 6 in. × 23 ft. 5 in. The Detroit Institute of Arts, gift of George H. Scripps.

even by a deaf person, Rembrandt was striving to escape an auditory model of painting even as he reinscribed the very mechanics of the model. His paintings would still “speak”—in fact, they would contain “bursts of unpremeditated eloquence.” It is just that this language would be clear enough, universal enough, to require no “amplification.” The elaborate dumb show of The Court of Death best illustrates Rembrandt’s ideas. Based on the poem “Death” by Beilby Porteus, the painting is, as the art historian William Oedel notes, “a visual sermon,” and a very clear one.15 With their inebriated swoons, head-twisting pains, and rapacious scurrying, Rembrandt’s figures gesture clearly enough to make even a deaf person hear what they “say.” This very large painting, made for repeated public exhibition, has an effect like the one Roland Barthes attributes to professional wrestling: “Wrestling . . . offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limits of their meaning. . . . [I]n wrestling, a man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness. . . . The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm-lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction.” The result, as in Rembrandt’s painting, is a dream of perfectly clear communication: “Each sign in wrestling is . . . endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot.” The wrestler’s gestures and appearance must carry clearly “to the confines of the hall.” Barthes concludes: “Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than

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figure 20 William Rush, Silence, 1820–1821. Wood, painted white, 66 × 32 × 29 in. Collections of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Pennsylvania, on deposit with The Masonic Library and Museum of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler’s gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true.”16 In The Court of Death, Rembrandt’s “true and simple” visual language, exaggeratedly clear, carrying to the limits of its exhibition spaces, is just such a pantomime. Rembrandt was not the only one in Philadelphia to conceive of art in these terms. In The Court of Death, he aimed for a communicative silence much like that represented in William Rush’s Silence, a sculpture made in 1820–1821 for the rebuilt Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons in Philadelphia (fig. 20). Through a loud gesture, Rush’s figure would have communicated very clearly to the lodge brothers a message about maintaining silence; no “amplification” is required. Whether or not

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Rush’s figure is based on Charles Willson Peale’s own 1808 figure of Silence—a transparency meant to be illuminated during concerts at Peale’s museum—the meaning of the elder Peale’s Silence is comparably loud and clear, transparently so.17 By contrast Raphaelle’s silence, in Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, is opaque. Blank and inscrutable, the painting transmits no message. It is a silence that, as it were, cannot be heard. In part, this silence relates to Raphaelle’s painting of still-life subjects; Allston and Rembrandt Peale were history and portrait painters. Still life was always the lowest, because least morally communicative, of all the visual arts. As Sir Joshua Reynolds put it, “A mere copier of nature can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.”18 Yet Raphaelle’s intensely silent pictures go beyond Reynolds’s negative formulation of still life. In their care to communicate no message, they read as strong reactions to the era of the talkative art object. The very pervasiveness of their quiet records Raphaelle’s obstinate and even recalcitrant refusal to make a “speaking” picture—one that offers an edifying moral lesson, or indeed any pantomimed message at all. Confronted with a culture in which even still-life paintings told stories, Raphaelle chose to make pictures that refused the paradigm of the moral-talking art object. Thus the paintings’ primordial quiet helps conjure a prelinguistic state of “natural judgment” in one other way. It implies a refusal not just to identify but also to narrativize the objects assembled. Raphaelle painted like someone who cannot or will not say anything.

“You Must Not Be Silent”: Arthur Mervyn and Public Curiosity There was more, however, behind Raphaelle’s refusal to make his pictures “speak.” The silence of his art opposed a widespread culture of curiosity in the early Republic. Consider, for example, the era’s numerous stories about hermits. In these stories, notes the literary historian Jay Fliegelman, secrecy is a state of privacy at once fascinating and intolerable. The hermits are ritually discovered and then relieved to have been found out: they gladly reveal the details of their heretofore hidden lives. This genre, according to Fliegelman, “spoke directly to the larger dynamics of popular curiosity” in the period and evinced “a fascination with solitude and invisibility as a form of liberty with a compensatory intolerance for leaving such liberty alone.”19 Perhaps the most extraordinary example of such a literary work comes from Raphaelle’s Philadelphia. In 1799–1800 Charles Brockden Brown published Arthur Mervyn, a two-part novel about the dizzyingly complicated adventures of a do-gooding, self-serving young man in Philadelphia during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. Although not a hermit story, the book insistently enacts and cancels states of silence. In fact, these intrusions happen often enough to suggest that one of Brown’s goals in writing the novel was to critique this form of curiosity, which he represents in darkly comic fashion. Want-

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ing to know, desiring to help, the virtuous citizen in Arthur Mervyn really wants only to gratify his intrusive interest in other people’s lives. The most intrusively curious figure in Brown’s novel is Arthur Mervyn himself. Eager to exercise his virtue, Arthur is achingly impatient to know everything about the people he meets. As he says to Achsa Fielding, his future wife: “You must not be silent; you must tell me what I can do for you.” To another character, Eliza Hadwin, he says, “I think I see your most secret thoughts.” Later he scans Achsa’s face and thinks of ocular speech: “those eyes of yours have told me a secret. I almost think they spoke to me.” Arthur commands Achsa upon first meeting her at a house of prostitution into which he has inquiringly and unwelcomely stumbled, “Speak! tell me, I beseech you!” Achsa herself puts it well when she says to Arthur: “I perceive the folly of endeavoring to keep you in ignorance.” So does the murderous swindler Thomas Welbeck: “You know already too much for me to have any interest in concealing any part of my life.”20 Arthur’s intolerance for secrecy and silence extends to his own thoughts, which he cannot keep to himself. Having secured a precious volume that Welbeck would kill for, Arthur’s “first impulse was to hide this truth; but my understanding had been taught . . . to question the justice and deny the usefulness of secrecy in any case.” He reflects, “My principles were true; my motives were pure: why should I scruple to avow my principles and vindicate my actions?” As he later puts it, “I never was in habits of reserve, even with those whom I had no reason to esteem.” Imagine then Arthur’s self-revelations among those he knows and trusts: “With those who claimed my admiration and affection, it was impossible to be incommunicative.” Of two strangers he has just met, the widow Mrs. Watson and Miss Maurice, Arthur says, “Before the end of my second interview, both these women were mistresses of every momentous incident of my life, and of the whole chain of my feelings and opinions, in relation to every subject, and particularly in relation to themselves.” As Arthur reflects, “I felt no scruple on any occasion to disclose every feeling and every event. Any one who could listen found me willing to talk.” Courting Achsa Fielding, Arthur reports that he feels as if “my whole soul is visible.”21 Indeed Arthur’s unwillingness to keep his own secrets is the source of the whole novel. When the story opens, Arthur is discovered, pale and sickly with yellow fever, on the porch of a Philadelphia doctor named Stevens. Stevens presses Arthur during his recovery to disclose his relation to Welbeck, with whom it has become clear he is somehow connected. Arthur had vowed to Welbeck to keep secret their acquaintance, but he cannot do it. To Stevens he replies, “I had come to a resolution, before you spoke, of confiding to you my simple tale.”22 Thus the story unfolds. In making the story itself the revelation of a secret, Brown represents the very act of reading as a form of intrusive curiosity. With each staging of silence, the novel creates a Mervyn-like desire in the reader to have the inscrutable character or situation made clear in a stream of satisfying revelations.

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Arthur’s “propensity to look into other people’s concerns” is represented as that of the reader as well.23 Reading, as Brown represents it, is a matter of delightedly rendering each character’s “whole soul . . . visible.” So is writing. Nowhere is this clearer, and more self-reflexively described, than in the scene where Arthur visits Welbeck in his prison cell. His privacy invaded, Welbeck is made to scream as much at Brown as at Mervyn: “How dare you thrust yourself upon my privacy? Why am I not alone? Fly! and let my miseries want, at least, the aggravation of beholding their author.”24 From Arthur to author: the novelist himself is cast as the invader of privacy, so much so that Arthur’s words on another occasion—“I think I see your most secret thoughts”—also describe Brown’s own practice of writing his characters’ private lives. The critique in Brown’s novel is clear. Arthur is purportedly a virtuous citizen, sharply opposed to the loathsomely self-interested Welbeck, whom Steven Watts describes as “a nightmare vision of what a society of ambitious individualism could produce.”25 Yet Brown is careful to make Arthur’s description of Welbeck—“His own gratification was the supreme law of his actions”—fit Arthur himself.26 Arthur’s virtuous behavior is really a form of “satisfaction” not unlike Welbeck’s acquisitiveness. Welbeck’s wish to rob others resembles Arthur’s desire “to look into other people’s concerns,” as he says, “and to make their sorrows and joys mine.”27 Arthur’s behavior, adds the literary historian Bill Christophersen, shows an “ambiguous capacity to harmonize ‘virtue’ with ‘recompense’ . . . typical of a national tendency toward a self-justifying materialism.”28 The novel represents reading and writing as themselves forms of this “ambiguous capacity.” The novel is ostensibly made to edify—to promote virtuous behavior through the illumination of private lives. Welbeck, preparing to tell part of his tale to Arthur, perfunctorily expresses this point of view, telling Arthur that he can do him no good “unless the lessons which my example may inculcate shall inspire you with fortitude and arm you with caution.”29 Yet Welbeck has other aims, and so does the novel. As Brown himself represents it, tale-telling is really a means to satisfy and gratify an audience through the titillating enactment and cancellation of secrecy. Raphaelle’s paintings refuse this culture of instant and gratifying revelation. In their hermetic silence, they represent only the first half of the era’s repeated staging of secrecy and disclosure. Showing the interior of a darkened solitary space, they take the viewer, as it were, to the very mouth of the cave. But that is all. They reveal the silent space but never make it satisfyingly comprehensible. Whereas Rembrandt takes us into the Cave of Death itself and makes everything there perfectly clear, giving us what Barthes calls the myth of “the perfect intelligibility of reality,” Raphaelle refuses such reassuring penetrations of privacy.30 In an era intolerant of mystery as a form of inappropriate personal liberty, Raphaelle’s pictures were calculatedly mysterious. Pictures such as Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup were like Raphaelle’s “short talk”—

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the virtually indecipherable coded letters he sent to Rembrandt and Rubens when they were in London in 1803. As Rubens complained to Charles Willson Peale, “You mentioned that Raphaelle would write but we have seen nothing but his short talk which we scearce could understand.” 31 As Ward and Hart put it, summarizing the incident, “Raphaelle spoke his own language, a language of codes that disguised himself and blocked communication with others.” 32 Their words fit the artist’s paintings, which like Raphaelle’s letters purport to disclose a secret space; like the letters’ “short talk,” however, the paintings fail to communicate, offering instead only the dramatization of an indecipherable privacy and silence. Brown and Raphaelle thus treated the same cultural issue from different angles. The writer created a character who ravenously must know everything; the painter made pictures that say nothing.

Prosopopoeia Canceled: Autobiography, Defacement, and Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception This failure to speak had also a darker connotation in Raphaelle’s art. The silent spaces of self-annihilation, in his art, were sometimes those not just of primordial embodiment but of social failure and even death. To be only a body, to remain quiet—these were the attributes of a sensuous and a deathly nonidentity. Raphaelle’s subject could be the horrors as well as the pleasures of being less than a self. The most striking painting about these horrors is now Raphaelle’s most famous, the picture called Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, painted in 1822 or 1823 (plate 7). It shows a small version of James Barry’s original of 1772, Venus Rising from the Sea (fig. 21), hidden behind an extraordinarily painted trompe l’oeil cloth that is either a handkerchief or, more likely, a napkin.33 The picture’s refusal to disclose the woman’s body fits Raphaelle’s general aim to show and then deny the viewer a secret space. And indeed at the end of this book the question of the woman’s body—and even the way it is revealed in its concealment—is crucial to my arguments. For now, however, it is more important to notice another effacement, another silencing, in Venus Rising from the Sea. In it we can begin to see the dark side of Raphaelle’s silent art of embodiment. The second cancellation in Venus Rising from the Sea is that of the face. The handkerchief or napkin, as Lloyd notes, derives from images of Saint Veronica’s veil.34 Francisco de Zurbarán’s painting The Veil of Saint Veronica, from about 1635–1640, provides a good comparison (fig. 22). Although Raphaelle did not know this particular image, the comparable lighting of Venus Rising, as well as its similar system of folds, suggests that he knew comparable seventeenth-century Spanish versions of the subject. The cloth in Venus Rising is like Veronica’s veil in every notable respect except, of course, the central one. As Lloyd writes, “The shining white surface is devoid of a face.”35 To understand the morbid connotations of this absence, we need to examine the paintings Charles Willson Peale was making at the time Raphaelle painted Venus Rising.

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figure 21 Valentine Green, after James Barry, Venus Rising from the Sea, 1772. Mezzotint, 24¹⁄₁₆ × 15⅜ in. The Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, The William A. Whitaker Foundation Art Fund, 80.62.1.

figure 22 Francisco de Zurbarán, The Veil of Saint Veronica, ca. 1635–1640. Oil on canvas, 27½ × 22¼ in. National Museum, Stockholm. Photograph courtesy of Art Resource.

figure 23 Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait, for the Multitude, 1824. Oil on canvas, 26¼ × 22 in. The New-York Historical Society, 1940.202.

From 1822 until his death in 1827, Charles Willson made seven self-portraits. These include smaller pictures such as Self-Portrait, for the Multitude (fig. 23) and Self-Portrait (see fig. 53), as well as the much larger and more famous self-image we have already examined, The Artist in His Museum.36 This last painting is often rightly contrasted to Venus Rising from the Sea. Noting the relation of curtain to figure in each picture, Roger Stein in particular has read Raphaelle’s painting as a “brilliant parody of the values his father expressed in The Artist in His Museum.” 37 Yet the smaller self-portraits also contrast vividly with Venus Rising. Like the big painting, they do so because of their death-defeating purpose. In all his self-portraits, and in an autobiography written during the 1820s, the elder Peale, then in his eighties, was preparing his posthumous reputation. He had suffered a serious case of yellow fever in 1822, and his third wife,

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Hannah, had died that year of the disease. Around this time, according to Miller, Hart, and Ward, Peale “had begun organizing his affairs and divesting himself of property, sending portraits to former sitters or their relatives, clearing his debts, settling the status of the museum, and attempting to ensure that his sons would have employment.” They add, “The sense of summing up, rounding off, and celebrating his life is captured graphically in the series of self-portraits he painted, marking the end of his artistic career.” 38 In his flurry of self-commemoration, Peale was striving not just to record his achievements and appearance but also to create a continuously living self, one that would transcend his death. Noting his interest in wax figures and even in the display of embalmed bodies in the museum, the cultural historian Susan Stewart writes of Peale’s desire to keep “the irreducible fact of a boundary between life and death at bay”—that is, to maintain, through representation, a form of life after death.39 The late selfportraits fit this idea. Autobiography, Paul de Man has argued, is a form of prosopopoeia, conferring face and voice upon an absent entity, and thus enabling an author to appear and to speak after death.40 De Man’s focus is romantic autobiography, and indeed the art world of the early nineteenth century offers good examples of precisely this use of the genre. Benjamin West, in his seventies, dictated his life’s story to the writer John Galt, providing the material for a “biography” published in two parts, in 1816 and 1820, the year of the artist’s death. This biography, “tantamount to an autobiography,” writes the art historian Anne Uhry Abrams, was “an attempt by the elderly artist to create his own apotheosis at a time when his reputation as a leader in the British art world was rapidly declining.” 41 In almost these same years, Charles Willson Peale was busy undertaking his own apotheosis. He would die, but his image and achievements would live on, through prosopopoeia, in numerous self-representations, including his own autobiography. Understood in these terms, Charles Willson’s gesture to the mastodon bone in Self-Portrait, for the Multitude indicates more than his scientific exploits; it also shows the death that the self-image allows him to transcend. These self-portraits would also confer voice upon the absent artist. Like Allston and Rembrandt Peale, Charles Willson was in the habit of referring to “speaking” pictures. In a letter of January 15, 1818, he describes making a portrait of the eminent doctor Caspar Wistar (1760–1818), the Peale family’s physician, who was then in the last few weeks of his life: “I shall, I hope, make a speaking picture.” 42 One of Peale’s methods for achieving this effect was to encourage his sitters to talk while he painted. “I was often in the room when Grandpa had sitters,” Peale’s grandson George Escol Sellers recalled, “[and] he always wanted some one to talk to his sitters so that without taking his attention from his work he could catch expressions.” 43 Thus in Wistar’s final portrait the sitter would appear to speak, even after death. Peale himself provides a perfect metaphor for this desire. Writing on February 14, 1818, about the death of Wistar and of many other long-standing friends whose portraits he had painted, he remem-

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bers “much of the Conversation I had with them while setting,” asks the portraits themselves to be quiet (“hush these momentoes”), and switches suddenly to an optimistic view of America’s future, “when our Cannals shall connect our numerous lakes and lenthy Rivers, and the crossing passages [will be] filled with Steam-boats with Visitors from North to South.” 44 The idea of “crossing passages” aptly conveys the aim of Peale’s transcendentally conversant representations: ferrying the living to communicate with the dead, affording the dead themselves “crossing passages” back into the world of the living, transporting across that irreducible boundary anyone who cares to travel. This desire to produce a perpetually loquacious painting, finally, illuminates the didactic attitude in which Peale shows himself in Self-Portrait, for the Multitude. His gesture is meant to be as clear, as communicative, as the gestures of Rembrandt’s figures in The Court of Death—another painting he called a “speaking Picture.” 45 Like Rembrandt’s painting, Self-Portrait, for the Multitude is meant to show the dead speaking directly, clearly. Ever the educator, even from beyond the grave, Peale sought to teach generations yet unborn the lessons of natural history. Venus Rising, made in the same years as Charles Willson’s autobiographical project, negates the elder Peale’s eternalizing mode of self-portraiture. Using a canvas almost identical in size to those Charles Willson employed for his small self-portraits, Raphaelle painted a blank shroud instead of a face. Signing the empty shroud at lower right, he indicated the actual absence implied by autobiographical representation. The absence, moreover, is that of voice as well as face. Raphaelle eliminated the cacophonous details of Barry’s painting—the neighing horse splashing in the water, the cooing doves, and the gesturing Cupid. These have been muted by a darkness in which only one of Venus’s arms, some of her hair, one foot, and a few flowers are visible. The napkin is a more dramatic indicator of silence. Canceling by concealment the story told by Barry’s image, it offers no substitute tale. This blank opacity refuses the complacent certitude with which other pictures from the time, most notably those of the elder Peale, sought to make transcendent selves of face and voice. Ultimately, as in de Man’s deconstructive formulation, Raphaelle’s painting shows autobiography to be a form of defacement—a form precisely demonstrating the incapacity of representation to do anything but proffer a poisonous cloak of blankness, emptiness, and silence.46 Thus Venus Rising from the Sea, on one level, makes a mockery of posthumous appearance. It is Raphaelle’s laconic image of how he will appear in death. The cloth is indeed, as Stein has suggested, a space of “self-denial or self-obliteration.” 47

Raphaelle and the Living Death of Social Nullity Yet this is just one side of the painting’s morbidity. Raphaelle’s other purpose is to show the living death of silent nonidentity. In this painting he imagines his posthumous nonappearance as a representation of the living death of failed selfhood.

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figure 24 Charles Bird King, The Poor Artist’s Cupboard, ca. 1815. Oil on panel, 29¾ × 27¾ in. Collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund, 55.93.

We can begin to see how this is so if we contrast Venus Rising with another still life made in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth century, Charles Bird King’s Poor Artist’s Cupboard, painted about 1815 (fig. 24). The picture alludes to King’s own life, specifically to the economic troubles that would force him to leave Philadelphia in 1816, ending his four-year stay in the city.48 On one level, despite its

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ostensibly somber subject, King’s autobiographical painting is as much an instance of confident prosopopoeia as any of Charles Willson’s portraits. The books, with titles and headings such as Advantages of Poverty, Pleasures of Hope, and Lives of Painters, say much about their absent owner. The seashell makes their voice explicit. Encapsulating and making audible the sound of an absent entity—one, moreover, to which it bears an intrinsic relation (the ocean)—the shell evokes a capacity to make something elsewhere speak in the very scene of its absence. The shell-like niche, moreover, implicitly extends this capacity to the whole painting. Although this niche may at first seem to be the space of the antiportrait, the space of depersonalization—an ominously dark and silent recess in place of the figure— King makes it brim with a plenitude of personal objects that speak about, and as, the absent figure, transforming The Poor Artist’s Cupboard into a tale-telling picture every bit as communicative, as optimistic, as the elder Peale’s self-portraits. The shell of the niche galvanizes silence into a sounding and resounding speech that speaks volumes (or makes volumes speak). Thus Raphaelle positions his silent, faceless Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception against King’s kind of image as well. Both King and Raphaelle made still lifes that allude to portraiture, King by using a niche that evokes the format of the portraits he often painted. In Raphaelle’s picture, however, no talkative autobiographical presence is permitted to appear. There is another level to King’s still life, however—one that can take us into the further connotations of silence and facelessness in Raphaelle’s picture. Poverty, in The Poor Artist’s Cupboard, can cause depersonalization: the social failure of destitution threatens to make a person disappear. This impoverishment, moreover, is represented as a form of death. The painting is ambiguous about this point, but various details—especially the darkness of the niche and the “Sheriff’s Sale” notice at upper left— cast the absent artist’s poverty in morbid terms. With its subheading, “The Property of an Artist,” the notice, even if we are to understand that the artist himself has tacked it there, makes it appear that the items are being sold posthumously. In the notice and the darkness of the cold hollow space, the empty niche of a missing man, King’s picture spreads a connotation of death over the icons of impoverishment. To have one’s belongings listed as “The Property of an Artist” is to be treated retrospectively, as in an obituary, as though one no longer existed. What the painting sets out to redeem through prosopopoeia, then, is the idea that poverty is death; that poverty makes one talked about as though one were dead; that it makes one a nonentity; that it makes one’s possessions look like remains. Raphaelle, who closed his letter to Charles Graff with the conventional but revealing phrase “your humble Servt,” was himself a “poor artist.” 49 Urged by his father to “act the Man,” he never could achieve the level of virtuous selfhood his culture promoted as an ideal. Sometimes his art refused this culture of selfhood, representing a primally embodied space prior to socialization. At other times it represented a failure of selfhood—and the metaphor for this failure is death. Venus Rising from the Sea, with its eradication of face and voice, casts social nonentity as a shroud. Participating in the same discourse

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as King, Raphaelle gives the topic of living death a far more ominous cast. Raphaelle’s painting is the self-portrait of a faceless, voiceless no one. The artist is not “out,” as in King’s picture; he is gone.

The Silent Body Over There: “Doubling with Difference” How then do we square this faceless silence with the embodied silence of Raphaelle’s other works? In Venus and other grim paintings, the two definitions ultimately mix, intensifying the artist’s blank selfportrayal; for this portrayal is faceless and phenomenologically embodied. The shroud-like napkin in Venus Rising from the Sea is one of the most sensuous of all Raphaelle’s objects. Depicted in exceptionally skillful trompe l’oeil fashion, so that the very threads in the fabric are visible, and given a material weight that lets it convincingly sag from the line on which it hangs, the napkin all but projects into our space. If ever there were an object inviting the touch, it is this one, particularly where the fabric gathers at the top. Here, then, the two kinds of erasure come together. As the Boy of Winander’s absorptive silence prefigures his early death, so here the self-effacement required to body forth the world is inseparable from a more morbid form of self-cancellation. To see primally, as though one were not a self, is perilously close to seeing a world in which one does not exist. Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup is also both primal and morbid. This is particularly true of the ostrich-egg cup itself (fig. 25; see plate 3). On the one hand, the cup is part of the painting’s general representation of embodiment. As with the berries and the napkin, Raphaelle overdescribes the object, providing it with a burnished sensuous glow. On the other hand, this very object is as hauntingly blank as the napkin in Venus Rising. Ward and Hart cogently read this blankness as that of an empty face: “The oval of the cup resembles nothing less than the characteristic oval shape with which [Charles Willson] Peale and other painters of the age painted portraits.” 50 Indeed, in the elder Peale’s portraits, as in his portrait of Raphaelle’s mother, Rachel Brewer, in The Peale Family Group, one can see the schematic oval shape that the self-trained artist routinely employed to render the human face (fig. 26). For Ward and Hart, Raphaelle’s empty-faced ostrich-egg cup is a commentary on his own refusal to paint such portraits: “In a haunting self-reference, this is the space that Raphaelle could not or would not fill.” 51 In light of the self-effacement in Venus Rising from the Sea, the ostrich-egg cup also reads as an image of Raphaelle’s failure or refusal to visualize himself. Like the napkin, it is a depiction of his own facelessness—a reading that makes all the more sense when we consider that ostriches hide their faces. As in the case of Venus Rising, moreover, this more haunting reading of the painting combines with the first one. In the cup, phenomenological plenitude and faceless nonexistence join in the same icon. In both paintings, two types of silent nonidentity, pleasurable and horrible, are combined in the form of a cold incubation.

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figure 25 Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup (detail).

figure 26 Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family Group (detail). See fig. 65.

This ambivalent nonidentity, embodied and morbid, functions in one last way that is important for what follows. The phenomenological relation of subject and object, reversibly embodying one another, does not imply their absolute sameness. Instead, as Galen Johnson notes, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of reversibility entails a split between the related terms. “The metamorphosis of subject into object and back,” Johnson summarizes, refers not just to a “bonding synergy” between the two but to a “strife between . . . self and things.” 52 The object, in other words, remains over there, something distinct, even as it reversibly receives its body from the subject. This bifurcation, which Johnson calls “doubling with difference,” produces an estrangement, a sense of apprehending one’s body within a thing that is yet separate from one’s own being. The mirror reflection is an appropriate metaphor for this split sameness. Intrinsically relating to the person before it, the mirror yet separates the person from the image, a separation enacted in the innately alienating way in which this person might point to the mirror—to a point precisely not where he is—and say: that is me. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, the embodied object is such a mirror image.

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All of Raphaelle’s still lifes double his body with difference, but only some do so in an acutely morbid way. The distinction concerns how the pictures imply repression. In rhapsodic paintings such as Blackberries, the sense of one’s body over there, out ahead, animating a sensuous thing outside oneself, is meant to simulate an infantile view of an animate universe before such ideas undergo repression. The berries are benevolent body doubles—in Brown’s phrases, they provide the “society” replacing the “mirth and pleasantry” of actual human company. Freud summarizes this friendly doubling in his famous essay “The ‘Uncanny’”: “The ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death.’” As a “preservation against extinction,” the fantasy of doubling, for Freud, “dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man.”53 This is the rhapsodic sense of a “society” of inanimate things: the berries are narcissistic extensions of the artist’s being. After repression, however, this doubling changes its character. Then, writes Freud, “the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” 54 In Venus and the Ostrich Egg Cup, to judge by their unnerving effects, still life for Raphaelle meant seeing his body in these more disturbing terms, as a kind of other self returning uncannily from repression. In these grimmer paintings, the fiction of an infant’s view is not entirely successful, for if they seem to show this infant’s enchanted view, they do so more from the vantage of an adult—a failed self whose failure is epitomized by the return of repressed and now demonic enchantments. The double is now no longer an insurance against the destruction of the ego but one’s body in death. Though the dividing line between rhapsodic and demonic pictures is not clear-cut—the ostrich-egg cup picture, for example, works in both ways—some of Raphaelle’s paintings are indisputably more unsettling than others. We see evidence of this uncanniness in Venus Rising if we consider one final point about the picture. In the second of Woodward’s two Effect of Imagination prints, like the first one we examined, a solitary figure mistakenly believes, by the lamp of his ill-regulated imagination, that an inanimate object has come to life (fig. 27). Woodward’s image exemplifies a whole Gothic convention of the living cloth, as in John Ferriar’s debunking Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions, published in 1813, in which the author recounts the story of a friend, spending the night in a supposedly haunted hut, who wakes from a nightmare about a “frightful apparition” to cast “a fearful glance around the room.” He discovers, by the moon-light, a corpse, dressed in a shroud, reared erect, against the wall, close by the window. With much difficulty, he summoned up the resolution to approach the dismal object, the features of which, and the minutest parts of its funeral apparel, he perceived distinctly. . . . After a long interval, and much reasoning with himself, he . . . at length discovered that the object of his terror was produced by the moon-beams, forming a long, bright image, through the broken window, on which his fancy, impressed by his dream, had pictured, with mischievous accuracy, the lineaments of a body prepared for interment.55

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figure 27 George Woodward, The Effect of Imagination!! in Woodward, Eccentric Excursions (London: Allen and Co., 1796), following p. 136. Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Pennsylvania.

Venus Rising from the Sea employs this same period convention. With its two raised points, its diagonal tapering-off at each upper corner into shapes resembling hunched shoulders, and more generally its lively confrontational presence as it hangs from a line, the napkin reads as a spectral cloth sprung to hovering life before the solitary artist. Mirroring the artist’s position, invested with his sensuousness, the napkin reflects the artist as a hauntingly blank and silent thing. Like the blank egg, the napkin doubles his body with a difference, and with a vengeance: it gives him an image of himself not as a rhapsodic friend but as “the lineaments of a body prepared for interment,” an image of himself not as a dead man restored but as a live man who will be dead. As morbid an image as this is, it still is not the darkest one Raphaelle ever made. In another group of paintings, he took the idea of showing his own dead body to another level of graphic explicitness.

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part 2

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chapter five

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Meat and Nonidentity

In the years 1816–1817, Raphaelle made two sensuous paintings of meat. One, Still Life with Steak, shows a porterhouse steak, a cabbage, a beet, and two carrots (plate 8). The other, Cutlet and Vegetables, depicts “an old Philadelphia cut of bacon,” according to the Philadelphia food historian William Woys Weaver, “not now familiar to us because it includes the fore-end with forehock and a piece of the flitch” (plate 9).1 The meat is shown with a bundle of asparagus, a head of lettuce, a Welsh onion, rosemary, and chervil. It is wrapped in butcher’s paper affixed with wooden pins like the one that protrudes through the fat in Still Life with Steak. This pin too presumably once held such paper in place. Cutlet and Vegetables and Still Life with Steak are the most visceral pictures Raphaelle ever made. Bloody and fleshy, they are still grimmer portrayals of embodied nonidentity than Venus Rising from the Sea, with its morbid blankness. The nonidentity they show, moreover, was not idiosyncratic in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia.

“Improving” Raphaelle: Charles Willson Peale in 1817 To see how these still lifes function, we need first to examine the images they oppose. We can do this initially by turning back to Charles Willson Peale’s concerns for Raphaelle. On February 17, 1817, his son’s forty-third birthday, Charles Willson wrote to Raphaelle, asking him to travel from Philadel-

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phia to Belfield, the elder Peale’s Germantown farm, so that he could paint Raphaelle’s portrait. According to Charles Willson, it was Raphaelle himself who had always wanted the portrait: “You have long wished me to paint a Portrait of you. . . . and I have a good canvas just prepared.”2 That same day, Charles Willson also wrote to Rubens, urging him to encourage Raphaelle to make the trip: “Hearing that Raphaelle is not doing anything . . . I have written to him that I have got out of work and wish at this time to comply with a request that he some time past . . . expressed that I would paint a portrait of him. . . . I wish you to take the trouble to urge him to come either in the Sleigh or in the Chaize. . . . I request you to interfere if you think it necessary.” The elder Peale wanted to do everything necessary to induce Raphaelle to make the trip, writing to Rubens: “[I]f he particularly desires any of his family to come with him, that . . . will be acceptable to me, as I wish to make him as comfortable as possible.” 3 Charles Willson’s aim in painting the portrait is clear in its early title: it was called Portrait of a Gentleman when it was shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts annual exhibition in 1819 (fig. 28).4 To be the subject of a portrait might help Raphaelle be, or at least appear to be, a respectable citizen. Certainly the elder Peale shows Raphaelle as a refined person. With a direct gaze and upright bearing, he sits, proud and confident, before a framed example of his work. The position of Raphaelle’s right hand, resting casually on the chair back, shows Charles Willson’s desire to emulate Rembrandt’s contemporaneous manner of showing well-to-do Philadelphians at elegant ease, as in his portrait from circa 1817 of the corpulent merchant Jacob Gerard Koch.5 Raphaelle is gentlemanly too in his immaculate dress: coat, waistcoat, and cravat are all clean and elegant. Each button on the waistcoat is buttoned; the cravat is neatly tied. Moreover, like Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Raphaelle is shown with the tools and accomplishments of his profession: palette, paint, brushes, easel (rising at lower right corner), and finished still-life painting. He is not shown actually making a painting, a task that might make him seem more like a manual laborer than a gentleman. Instead, like Lesueur, he has paused in his work, and in this pause we find another way in which Charles Willson sought to bestow gentlemanly status on his son. This status is conveyed also in Raphaelle’s gaze toward the viewer. Turned away from his easel yet still seated before it, he looks forward intently. This look is di¤erent from Lesueur’s abstracted gaze, or from that of many other Charles Willson Peale sitters. Lesueur, like these other sitters, is lost in thought and hence a passive subject; he does not stare back at us. Raphaelle, by contrast, looks out at something or someone, presumably Charles Willson Peale himself. In portraits of family members by Charles Willson and Rembrandt, the straightforward look, often accompanied by a squaring of the shoulders to the picture plane, signifies the a¤ection of a familial bond. To match the gaze of one’s father or other relative suggests a tender familiarity: as you look intently at me, so I look back at you.

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figure 28 Charles Willson Peale, Portrait of Raphaelle Peale, 1817. Oil on canvas, 29 × 24 in. Private collection.

This is the case, for example, in Charles Willson’s portrait of his third wife, Hannah Moore Peale, made in 1816, which he called “the best portrait I have ever executed.” 6 Peale’s portrait of Raphaelle, made the following year, fits this way of showing familial connection through the softened direct gaze. Raphaelle’s look is especially intriguing, however, because Charles Willson portrays his son as an artist, brushes and palette in hand, clearly meant to be making a picture himself. The connection between Raphaelle’s intent look and his position before the easel suggests that Portrait of a Gentleman shows Raphaelle at a moment when he has paused in his work to study the model for the unseen painting on his easel. In this case, being a “gentleman” meant not only sitting for a portrait but being a portrait painter oneself, here the painter of one’s father. The conceit of Charles

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Willson’s painting is that it is a portrait of a man in the act of making a portrait—an entirely fitting topic for the elder Peale to pursue. “I hope on the next annual exhibition that you will shine as a Portrait Painter—,” he wrote to Raphaelle in 1820, in just one of many similar entreaties, “for as I have always said, if you could have confidence in yourself, and paint portraits with the same exactness of finish as you have done in still life, that no artist could be your superior in that line.”7 Raphaelle’s picture on the easel, could we see it, might well show Charles Willson holding brushes and palette, mirroring the pose of his son. Portraiture, in this painting, produces a familial bond, the son imitating his father in appearance and deed and thus turning his back on the solitary practice of still-life painting to focus on the sociable study of human features. Arranged, if not actually painted, on Raphaelle’s birthday, this wishful picture was Charles Willson’s moralizing gift to his son. Charles Willson Peale’s intense desire to “improve” Raphaelle can be seen still more vividly if we refer to a letter he wrote later that same year, on November 15, 1817. In the letter, one of the most insistent pleas to his son (“Why will you neglect your self—? why not govern every unrully Passion?”), Charles Willson mentions in the first paragraph a special trip he had taken from Germantown to Philadelphia the preceding day: “I was in the City yesterday with yr. brother Rembrandt who came up on purpose to see Mr. Wests Painting of Christ healing the sick in the Temple—.”8 Peale refers to the large painting Benjamin West had made as a gift for the Pennsylvania Hospital; it had just gone on display that month in a specially built brick structure facing Spruce Street, next to the hospital (fig. 29).9 The painting was appropriate for Peale to mention at the start of his pleading letter. Christ, haloed and hands outspread, followed by the apostles, enters a scene of widespread affliction. A paralytic woman at far right, her left hand deformed, is held up by a soldier. To the left of the paralytic woman, a man holds a naked, raving “lunatic” boy emblematic of the hospital’s work with the insane. At lower left, among others, are a blind woman and, behind her, a rickety child. And most dramatic, a pale and sickly man spotlit at lower center, hands clasped, prays that the Savior might heal him.10 This relation between the powerful but beneficent healer and the ravaged su¤erer echoes the rhetoric of Charles Willson’s letter to his afflicted son. Yet West’s painting addressed Peale’s concerns about his son in deeper ways as well. To understand them we must look more closely at the history of the Pennsylvania Hospital and at the subject of the picture, which is a perfectly calibrated expression of the new selfhood. Founded in 1751, when West himself was a young boy living near Philadelphia, the hospital was designed not just to treat the poor but to improve them morally. According to the historian William Williams, it instituted admission standards, based on those of eighteenth-century British charity hospitals, restricting patients to the “useful and laborious” poor, those with curable and noncontagious diseases. “A screening process was set up whereby each prospective patient was required to procure a letter signed by an influential person describing his case.”11 The medical historian Michael Sappol puts it this way: “In the 18th and 19th century, the American bourgeoisie founded asylums and hospitals be-

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figure 29 Benjamin West, Christ Healing the Sick, 1815. Oil on canvas, 120 × 180 in. The Historic Collections of Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia.

cause they wanted to be patrons of the poor. . . . But the bourgeoisie patronized the poor in order to bourgeoisify them, to improve or discipline them, to make them ‘independent’ workers rather than dependent clients, to wean them from the ethos of hostility to hard work, the culture of rough play and impiety (taverns, sports, open sexuality).”12 The Pennsylvania Hospital, with Benjamin Franklin as one of its founders, was designed to help the poor who showed “a decent respect for the ‘work ethic.’”13 West captures the hospital’s mission perfectly in Christ Healing the Sick. Christ is a beneficent healer, a good doctor, along the lines of the physicians who volunteered at the hospital. More than that, he is a distinctly liberalized figure of authority. Unlike Allston’s contemporaneous Dead Man Restored, another painting made in London and shown in Philadelphia in 1817, West’s painting shows healing in a gentle way. Instead of a formidable patriarch whose very acts of healing induce terror, West shows a figure who inspires love and respect in those he treats. Accordingly, West’s painting, unlike Jeremiah Dictating to Baruch, has no hieratic scale, no sense of a patriarch whose size indicates his greater religious and political power. Christ is the same size as his patients. He stands in relation to the pale man as Jeremiah sits in relation to Baruch, but here doctor and patient are more alike. If the patient can

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just stand up, he will stand almost at Christ’s level, as the horizontal arrangement of heads across the upper quarter of the picture suggests. The sick man wants only Christ’s virtue, his goodness, to walk upright, to be “improved.” The very horizontality of West’s picture, in contrast with the hierarchic verticality of Allston’s two canvases, indicates this potential leveling of status. Christ’s power, moreover, has nothing to do with miracles. He is not shown actually healing anyone; he does not lay hands on the afflicted so that they might magically rise or straighten their limbs. Instead, he assists, he cures, through his virtuous and moralizing presence alone; he works his healing by setting a good example, being as it were a good role model. In West’s painting, Christ is a model citizen, and this is the best cure for social ills. In the relation of Christ to the su¤ering man, then, we can see another way that West’s painting fits Charles Willson Peale’s aim to heal his son. Encapsulating the same period discourse of improvement under which the Peales operated, Christ Healing the Sick shows the liberal attempt to make the sickly poor into virtuous citizens. In the letter that mentions West’s painting, Peale’s uplifting words to Raphaelle—“why will you neglect your self—? why not govern every unrully Passion? why not act the Man and with a firm determination act according to your best judgement?”—echo Christ’s implicit message to the sick man: get up, be well, stand on your own two feet. West’s painting fits the Peale family’s drama of improvement in one other way, which again involves the perfection of West’s picture as an index of the new selfhood. West’s painting has strong affinities with images of the temptation of Saint Anthony. Although West never painted this subject, Christ Healing the Sick comparably shows a spiritual figure—not alone here but set o¤ from the apostles enough to make him seem alone—beset by beseeching, raving, and diseased figures. In this way, West’s painting allegorizes not just the beneficence of the liberal subject—his claim to moral virtue, his claim to help others—but also the social forces around him that threaten to undermine his self-control: the afflicted represent the dangers confronting the liberal subject who ventures into places where all is not virtuous. “Will creditable people go into a House of Rendevous to sitt for their portraits[?]” Charles Willson asked Raphaelle in 1818, lamenting his son’s trips to a brothel.14 These associations, Peale wrote, “disgrace you.” The forces in West’s painting are also psychological: the afflicted represent a battle within the liberal subject, between virtue, restraint, and goodness on the one hand, and clamorous lunacy on the other. In this way, West’s painting is typical of the time. Raphaelle’s still lifes, in Brandon Fortune’s reading, encode this same tension between restraint and abandon. Accordingly, in Modern Chivalry, his lengthy novel written between 1792 and 1815, Hugh Henry Brackenridge contrasts staid with impulsive characters to stage the same moral struggle. In Steven Watts’s interpretation, the reserved republican Captain Farrago and his boisterous manservant Teague O’Regan together typify the era’s inclination to see the self in halves—as reserved and rambunctious, responsible and irresponsible, two parts of the

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same personality. For Watts, this penchant “reproduced the dialectical pressures descending on the individual in a liberalizing society.” He continues, “Brackenridge’s handling of [Farrago and O’Regan’s] relationship. . . . imparts much about the liberal individual’s problems of character formation and identity achievement.”15 West’s painting, completed the year Brackenridge finished his book, operates according to the same period sensibility. As Christ epitomizes the liberal subject’s definition through di¤erence from the su¤ering poor, these su¤erers, and social inferiors generally, could represent the demons that threatened the liberal subject from within as well as without. The ideal of walking through a space of affliction, social and psychological, and yet remaining oneself, upright and in control, is one of West’s themes. In the painting, housed not far from Raphaelle’s residence, a Man walked amid demons but did so peacefully, proudly, with dignity. As he looked at West’s painting with Rembrandt on that day in November 1817, Charles Willson might well have thought of Raphaelle. The ravaged spotlit su¤erer was one image of his son, yes; but even more, the figure of Christ might have made him think, if only wishfully, of that same son. To control the demons, inside and outside—that was what Charles Willson desired for Raphaelle.

Sensuous Identification in Raphaelle’s Meat Paintings It is striking that at about the time his father painted his portrait, the time also when West’s moralizing picture was first exhibited, Raphaelle made Still Life with Steak and Cutlet and Vegetables. It is still more striking in light of an advertisement for Peale’s museum published in Poulson’s on March 4, 1817, some two weeks after Charles Willson asked Raphaelle to come sit for his portrait at Belfield. The advertisement, perhaps written by the elder Peale himself, lists “numerous valuable and interesting subjects” that “have been lately added,” including “A Still Life Piece, representing a fillet of Veal and Vegetables.—Painted by Mr. Raphael Peale.”16 The description could refer to one of the two extant meat paintings, erroneously identifying the meat, or it could refer to another one now lost.17 In any case, the proximity of Charles Willson’s portrait request and the appearance of a Raphaelle meat painting “lately added” to the museum suggests the radical divergence of the two men’s aims. In the very weeks when Charles Willson sought to raise up his son, making him into “Mr.” Raphaelle Peale, Raphaelle himself, as if in response, exhibited a picture of meat. The proximate dating of Still Life with Steak and Cutlet and Vegetables suggests Raphaelle’s propensity to counter a heightened discourse of selfhood, of moral improvement, with a responsively heightened imagery of sensuous nonselfhood. The nonidentity implied by these pictures derives from the phenomenological power of the meat. The blood-red porterhouse, rendered in Raphaelle’s characteristically overdescriptive manner, shifts

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in hue from part to part. Its system of veins, its glistening fat, its fold of muscle and fat hanging over the ledge, even its severed bone—at the center, to the left of the black-hollowed fold of fat—all are shown in idiosyncratic and luscious detail. The bone is shown with enough care, in fact, to indicate to a modern-day butcher that it has been splintered by not one but two hacks of the cleaver.18 Plainly, this is not the “type” of a porterhouse steak, if such scientific terminology were even applicable in this case, but rather a specific object on which Raphaelle has concentrated at the expense of all else. Everything beyond the steak and its fellow objects falls away, as Elaine Scarry puts it, “to zero.” The same galvanizing attention is visible in Cutlet and Vegetables. The specificity of the meat—the severed bone with its wet marrow; the slug-shaped ribbon of striated flesh below the wooden pin on the right—these and other details are shown with such pink precision as to make all else around them fade rapidly into nothing. The density of the meat, in particular on the left side, is a key element of its glistening physicality. Whereas the meat toward the hoof, on the right, is rendered in a slightly less visceral way, the thick section on the left, below the leftmost wooden pin, is so densely packed as to produce almost a physical feeling of compression, of compactness, in the beholder. Raphaelle portrays bacon and steak, as he did the blackberries, with specificity and even insight. The phenomenological character of Raphaelle’s two meat images is even clearer if we compare them with the only other surviving meat picture painted in early-nineteenth-century America. In Henry Smith Mount’s Beef and Game, painted on Long Island in 1831, a slab of beef rests in a position not unlike that of Raphaelle’s cutlet and porterhouse steak (fig. 30). Propped at about the same point on a table-like ledge similar to Raphaelle’s, the beef is shown at about the same distance from the viewer, and in company with other objects before which it takes pride of place. In every other respect, however, Mount portrays meat di¤erently from Raphaelle. Even if it were reproduced here in a color illustration, the beef in Beef and Game would remain far less visceral. Instead of the idiosyncratic, overdescribed details of Raphaelle’s images, Mount shows a smooth uniform surface, flowing with marbled fat, across which the eye is invited to play but not especially to stop. Whereas Raphaelle’s pictures mass dense objects close together, consigning all else to blankness, Mount’s image tellingly disperses objects across its space. The eye is invited to play upon, and travel across, not just the meat, but the two bird carcasses above and behind it. For Mount, who was co-partner of the sign- and ornamentalpainting firm of Inslee and Mount, the goal of the sign is the goal of his sign-like painting: to represent typical, and hence entirely legible, objects that catch, but do not arrest, the viewer’s attention.19 Whereas Raphaelle’s meat pictures imply a fascination, an investment of some kind, in these slabs of bacon or steak, for Mount, to judge by Beef and Game, a piece of meat may have been many things, but it was not something to identify with. Although the red meat in Raphaelle’s paintings is placed similarly, the beef in Mount’s work seems to sit further back, a distanced object of perusal rather than something pulling the artist magnetically toward, and into, itself. This e¤ect is due partly to the greater

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figure 30 Henry Smith Mount, Beef and Game, 1831. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. The Museums at Stony Brook, New York, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ward Melville, 1976.

physicality of Raphaelle’s objects, partly to the painter’s point of view. In Mount’s picture, we look slightly down on the beef; in Raphaelle’s paintings, we look across at bacon and steak, and, especially in the case of the steak, we do so at close range. This point of view, in which the artist claims no special authority over objects, more firmly identifies him with what he portrays. This primal identification in Raphaelle’s paintings is sympathetic. In Emile, Rousseau describes how the adolescent begins to be aware that others in the world su¤er besides himself: “He begins to perceive himself in his fellow-creatures, to be touched by their cries, to su¤er in their su¤erings.” Rousseau is adamant that such sympathy is possible only phenomenologically, as an emanation of one’s body out into the experience of the su¤erer: “How can we let ourselves be stirred by pity unless we go beyond ourselves, and identify ourselves with the su¤ering animal, by leaving, so to speak, our own nature and taking his[?] We only su¤er so far as we suppose he su¤ers; the su¤ering is not ours but his. So no one becomes sensitive till his imagination is aroused and begins to carry him outside himself.”20 Raphaelle’s meat pictures show a version of this Rousseauian sympathetic projection. They do so, however, with a familiar catch—the one I have noted that separates Raphaelle from Rousseau and

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Wordsworth. Pity, for Rousseau, is projective, yes—a way for the adolescent to be taken outside himself—but it always presupposes the distance, the superiority, and even the pleasure, of the projector. “When he sees how many ills he has escaped he thinks he is happier than he fancied. He shares the su¤ering of his fellow-creatures, but he shares it of his own free will and finds pleasure in it. He enjoys at once the pity he feels for their woes and the joy of being exempt from them; he feels in himself that state of vigour which projects us beyond ourselves, and bids us carry elsewhere the superfluous activity of our well-being. To pity another’s woes we must indeed know them, but we need not feel them.”21 Pity is about identification but also distance. This distance—this ability not to identify too closely with the pitiable object—is part of the adolescent’s socialization, one of his ways of beginning to “act the Man.” In Raphaelle’s meat pictures, on the contrary, the primal identification is so strong, so fixated, as to nullify the idea of individual progress. These pictures represent only a silent primordial identification with the dead and once-su¤ering creature, or part-creature—a self-absorbed identification, enclosed in a hermetic space, from which nothing socially useful is learned. This identification is emphasized if we consider that the meat in Raphaelle’s paintings is barely recognizable as the remains of a living thing. In each case, to a greater or lesser degree, the animal has been sublimated by the butcher’s art. The porterhouse steak is so abstracted into meat that without outside knowledge it cannot be recognized as coming from even a specific part of the animal, in this case the middle section of the back. The same observation holds, in a more qualified way, for the cutlet. Although it is clearly a leg, with the hoof at right and the meatier section at left where the leg once joined the trunk, it has become abstracted as a cut of meat. This aestheticization, however, only intensifies the phenomenological sympathy. By aestheticizing the animal’s carcass, the butcher transforms the animal into generic “flesh” paradoxically more conducive to sympathetic identification. The flesh becomes less a discrete object distanced from the viewer—less a part of a pig, cow, or something fundamentally di¤erent from oneself, less the kind of creature on which Rousseau wanted the adolescent to exercise a reserved sympathy—and more a meat kindred to one’s own body, a flesh-and-bone substance in which one’s own meatiness becomes palpable.

Separation from the Meat: The Black Strip and the White-Frocked Butcher Raphaelle’s two meat paintings, even as they show a powerful identification, also show “doubling with di¤erence.” Having gone out to the object, the body lodges there, remaining apart from the artist, stuck in the things he beholds. The paintings do this by creating a partial sense of distance from the flesh. The distance is that of the butcher, as a brief examination of Philadelphia’s early-nineteenthcentury butchery trade can show. By looking at this localized history of butchery, we can see two things:

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figure 31 L. Haugg, after John Lewis Krimmel, The Procession of Victuallers (1821), 1861. Lithograph, 21⅝ × 24⅞ in. The Library Company of Philadelphia.

first, the source of the distancing devices in Still Life with Steak and Cutlet and Vegetables, and second, the perversity of Raphaelle’s partial identification with the meat. At the very moment when the city’s butchers defined their subjectivity against what they slaughtered and chopped, Raphaelle made paintings in which his subjectivity, or lack of it, is visualized as an identification with the slaughtered and chopped thing. The way to see this is to focus on the most famous event in the city’s early-nineteenth-century meat trade—a great procession of butchers and meat.22 On March 5, 1821, William White, the leader of the Philadelphia Victuallers, took out an advertisement in the Philadelphia Gazette in which he announced a weeklong display, from March 8 to March 15, of many “superior bred animals.” At the end of the week, most of the animals—sixty-three cattle, forty-two oxen, four bears, three deer, ten goats, eight mammoth hogs, and numerous sheep—were slaughtered. The meat—all 86,731 pounds of it—was then ceremoniously marched through the streets of Philadelphia in a two-mile procession recorded by John Lewis Krimmel in The Procession of Victuallers, a painting from which a popular print was made (fig. 31). In the procession, each of the trades was represented—“working on Carriage Platforms at

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their perculiar business,” according to Poulson’s—but at the very front, given the most prominent place, were more than two hundred “Butchers mounted on fine horses, dressed in white frocks and Sashes.” 23 It is these men that Krimmel shows, rounding the corner, the vanguard of the procession. These figures indicate the key element of the early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia butcher’s identity: clad in white frocks and sashes, the butchers represent themselves as the opposite of the bloody meat they cut and chop. Marching in public procession, dramatizing their identity for a watching crowd, they keep their distance from the tools—and the products—of their trade. This opposition was even more apparent in a later section of the procession, not shown by Krimmel, in which the white-frocked butchers appeared again figuratively in the guise of little boys: “Then followed two hundred Butchers Carts,” Poulson’s reported, “each carrying a portion of the meats. The carts were driven by boys with white frocks ornamented with artificial flowers and gay ribbons.”24 The recasting of the butchers as boys in this section of the procession emphasized their innocence in the business of slaughter. The reason for this separation of butcher from butchered is not difficult to find. In The Experienced Butcher, published in London in 1816, the anonymous author quotes another writer who hates butchers because their “employment is violent, bloody, and cruel,” because their “practices, actions and motions of the human body, by the repeated strokes of violence, and by the conversations of their school-fellows in all base lessons, language, and methods[,] never fail to stamp the signatures of brutality and inhumanity. . . . Not only [the practitioners of] this trade, but all employments which communicate with, and handle gross unclean materials, or that frequently oppress any of the inferior animals . . . are sure to have all their sanguine soft tempers sully’d.”25 The anonymous author himself defends butchers, bitterly complaining “that our legislature has affixed such an imputation of proneness to shed blood, upon persons who slaughter brute creatures for a subsistence, that by the laws of England no butcher is permitted to serve on a jury when sitting on the life of a fellow subject.” 26 The author seeks to dispel these sanguinary myths and to portray the butcher as an honest, nonviolent member of society, a goal revealed in the book’s subtitle: The Experienced Butcher: Shewing the respectability and usefulness of his calling, the religious considerations arising from it, the laws relating to it, and various profitable suggestions for the rightly carrying it on. Krimmel’s print, and the victuallers’ procession itself, relate to this same historical moment. Concerned to shed the associations with violence, the city’s butchers paraded in white apart from the meat, which appeared only later (and not at all in Krimmel’s image), separated from the butchers by numerous carriages in which representatives of the other trades rode, attended by flower-clad boy butchers, presented as further paragons of cleanliness and innocence. Krimmel’s image thus shows one of the main purposes of the procession: to dramatize, and even create, the respectable professional identity of the city’s victuallers. And in this way the print typifies the era’s accounts of Philadelphia butchery. “Nothing,” wrote Mrs. Anne Royall in 1826, “can exceed the whiteness of the benches and stalls”

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at the Philadelphia Market. “The meat, which consists of every sort, is exquisitely neat, cut with the greatest care, smooth, and disposed upon tables, on cloths as white as the whitest cambric. The butchers wear a white linen frock, which might vie with a lady’s wedding dress.”27 In Cutlet and Vegetables, this penchant for cleanliness is shown in the white paper affixed to the cut of bacon. More than this, in carefully setting the meat over there, somewhat apart from the artist, Raphaelle’s paintings encode the same opposition between butcher and butchered that one finds in Krimmel’s print. They do so quite specifically. Many of Raphaelle’s other still lifes feature, at the bottom edge, one of two spatial devices: either just the side of the ledge or, more rarely, as in the case of Blackberries, a continuum of table-like surface between the viewer’s position and that of the depicted objects. The continuous surface and edge both emphasize the embodied connection between subject and object. They bring the picture space more closely into contact with the viewer’s space. Cutlet and Vegetables and Still Life with Steak, by contrast, are among the very few works to include a dark strip below the table-like ledge. This dark strip, signifying depth under the ledge, enhances the sense of distance between the viewer’s position and that of the depicted objects. It creates a recessional power that pulls the scene a bit further into the distance, away from the observer. Raphaelle’s uncle, James Peale, routinely employed such a device because, one suspects, it helped him emphasize the subjectivity of the observer over and against the objects he depicted (see plate 6).28 Another element, this time of Cutlet and Vegetables, suggests just how important the dark distancecreating space was for Raphaelle. The image is painted on two pieces of wood.29 The dark strip along the bottom is painted on one long piece of wood, measuring approximately one by twenty-four inches, extending across the entire width of the picture. This smaller piece is joined to the larger piece on which the meat is painted. A photograph of the back of the painting, featuring the lower left corner, shows where the two pieces join (fig. 32). So does the color image of the painting, in which the upper edge of the smaller piece of wood is visible as a white line running along the top of the dark space. The smaller piece, we know, was not added as an afterthought. Four tenons of wood extend from the larger panel all the way through the smaller piece, so that they protrude slightly through its bottom edge. The smaller piece was thus part of the original composite structure of the support. Since the dark space corresponds closely to the extra piece of wood, one reasonable deduction about the composite support is that Raphaelle knew, right from the start, that he did not want too close a close vantage on what could become a threateningly visceral rendition of flesh and that this painting would thus feature one of the distance-creating dark strips. The e¤ect, here and in Still Life with Steak, is to keep the viewer’s position clean, if not exactly whitefrocked, in relation to the meat. As the butchers did not want to be identified with killing, Raphaelle did not fully wish to be identified with something dead. Each e¤ect of distancing was a period-specific attempt to create some kind of respectable identity by means of di¤erence from inert objects. At the

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figure 32 Cutlet and Vegetables (detail of reverse side).

same time, however, Raphaelle’s meat pictures, as we know, feature a powerful identification with the meat. It is the artist’s own body that produces the juicy density of the cutlet and porterhouse steak. It is this bodily projection that distinguishes Raphaelle’s paintings from Mount’s Beef and Game. Thus both Cutlet and Vegetables and Still Life with Steak show Raphaelle’s phenomenological “doubling with di¤erence.” Even as the object is animated with one’s own materiality, invested with the density of one’s own flesh and bone—a density that it gives back—the sensuous body remains over there, across the dark strip. The flap of meat extending over the edge suggests this play of forces, the body reaching out to the viewer’s space across the very void that aims to make it recede. The image in the mirror remains apart, even as it reflects back. Here again this e¤ect is uncanny. Like the blank ostrich egg and napkin, the slabs of meat mirror back, from across the way, the artist’s body. In Still Life with Steak and Cutlet and Vegetables, however, Raphaelle shows his dead self more viscerally, not as a blank but as flesh. A striking proof of Raphaelle’s penchant for identifying with dead meat—with something he both was and was not—is his ventriloquism. The Peale family historian Charles Coleman Sellers recounts that “as a ventriloquist [Raphaelle] is said to have had no equal. In preference to his home he often took his meals at the Black Bear Tavern, where the country folk, come in to market, would stare in bewilderment as Raphaelle rose to carve and the turkey, goose, or chicken pled for its life in sepulchral tones, then shrieked with pain as the fork was thrust in. He could turn them cold in their seats by

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figure 33 Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Dried Fish, 1815. Oil on panel, 9⅝ × 14¼ in. The Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

making a fried fish speak out upon some topic of the day.” 30 Here, in one of the most extensive anecdotes about the artist’s ventriloquism, we get a clear sense of Raphaelle’s interest in projecting himself into dead meat. The turkey, goose, or chicken speaks in a version of the artist’s voice. Raphaelle is the dead or dying thing even as he stands apart from it, inflicting the “sepulchral” pain he himself voices. The e¤ect is analogous to what unfolds silently in the meat paintings, or in a picture that also closely relates to Raphaelle’s ventriloquism, Still Life with Dried Fish, painted in 1815 (fig. 33). Like all of Raphaelle’s works, Still Life with Dried Fish is silent. The fish, despite its suggestively open mouth, belongs to a hermetic and hushed scene that lacks a narrative: the painting does not transcribe Raphaelle’s ventriloquism, even if it does call to mind the anecdote of a “fish speak[ing] out upon some topic of the day.” The goal of many artists working in Raphaelle’s era to make a speaking picture—a didactic

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picture animated by a voice from outside itself—was not Raphaelle’s goal. At a time when other artists routinely aimed to ventriloquize their paintings, the pictures of an actual ventriloquist were silent. Yet in Still Life with Dried Fish the particularized rendition of the golden skin, delicate ribs, and glassy eye—all the sensuous overdescription with which we are familiar—indicates a phenomenological projection that is at least analogous to Raphaelle’s ventriloquism. As he projected his voice into dead creatures at the dinner table, in his paintings so he engaged in a comparable though silent form of projection—one that separates his work dramatically from Lesueur’s beautiful renderings of fish. For Raphaelle, in both ventriloquism and still-life painting, the dead thing was and was not himself. As his visits to the Black Bear Tavern suggest, Raphaelle was fully capable of being both the butcher and the creature he stabbed.

“Like a Bull in the Slaughter House”: The Rhetoric of Bodily Threat Raphaelle’s ability to identify with his grim subject matter was not unique in the Philadelphia of his day. The historian Ric Northrup Caric notes a marked shift in the 1780s and 1790s in the way Philadelphia artisans represented themselves, a new propensity to show their own bodies as subject to gruesome violation and death. Caric locates the origins of this dark shift in the larger national move to a speculative capitalist economy: “The initial speculative enterprises of the 1780’s and 1790’s created enormous economic problems for those involved, magnifying their feelings of ‘care’ and ‘trouble’ and intensifying connotations of bodily exposure to threats of invasion, death, and dismemberment.” 31 Caric’s examples include Mathew Carey, the Philadelphia printer and publisher, who in the late 1780s “came to signify his own body as subject to tremendous pain.” Anxious about the tenuous status of his magazine, the American Museum, Carey became preoccupied with his own mortality, writing in 1788 that his death “was as strong on my mind as my natural existence.” 32 Caric also analyzes the writing of John Fitch, who moved to Philadelphia in 1786 to design the first steamboat. After years of frustrating experimentation, having failed to win the patent he sought and facing numerous creditors, Fitch began to represent the destruction of his own body, linking debt to dismemberment: “Could money have been extracted from my limbs, amputation would have taken place, provided the disjointed part could have been readily joined.” In July 1792, six years before his suicide, Fitch represented his dead body in “The Song of the Brown Jug,” the centerpiece of his will: “To Death I am Shortly Resigned / So we’ll Laugh Drink and Smoke and leave Nothing to Care / And Drop like a Pair [Pear] Ripe and Mellow / When Cold in my Coffin I’ll leave them to Say / He’s gone what a True-hearted Fellow.” Caric describes these verses as Fitch’s “pre-identification with his own death.” 33 These metaphors of bodily destruction, according to Caric, went beyond dire instances such as

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Fitch’s to include the embarrassing everyday loss of face. On September 28, 1808, the Tickler, the city’s humorous newspaper, published a story about a butcher arguing in a tavern with a young man. The butcher bets the crowd that he can answer any arithmetical question thrown his way. The young man asks him an impudent and impossible question—“Can you tell how many grains of corn it will take to make a lump of mush a foot square[?]”—whereupon the butcher “began to roar like a bull in the slaughter house; come into the street you rascal, I’ll tell you pretty quick.” In Caric’s reading, the story of the butcher’s humiliation is a typical early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia enactment of social failure: “The predicament is well-captured by the correspondent’s image of [the butcher] roaring ‘like a bull in the slaughter house’ and its ready associations with the imminent death and dismemberment of an unintelligent beast.” Whereas the butchers in the Victuallers’ Procession would strive to separate themselves from meat, this particular butcher is identified with both violence (“come into the street”) and self-violation. Caric concludes that the butcher in the story experiences social failure “in terms of imminent annihilation.” 34 The most dramatic example of this annihilation, however, comes from another source. Benjamin Rush, in his Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812), describes “a madman in the Pennsylvania Hospital who believes that he was once a calf, and who mentions the name of the butcher that killed him, and the stall in the Philadelphia market on which his flesh was sold.” 35 Here is a case of social failure that even West’s Christ, let alone Benjamin Rush, cannot heal. In light of these stories, paintings such as Raphaelle’s Cutlet and Vegetables, Still Life with Steak, Still Life with Ostrich Egg Cup, and Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception read as part of a general shift in bodily representation in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Raphaelle’s morbid pictures, and in particular those representing meat, use a period-specific rhetoric of bodily dismemberment and cancellation to express social failure and nonidentity. Like the man haunted by images of his own flesh for sale in a Philadelphia butcher’s stall, Raphaelle painted still lifes, perfections of failure, that cannot be improved. Far from it: for Raphaelle’s imagining of his own dead body exposed him tragically, and sensually, to yet a further round of invasion and dismemberment.

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chapter six

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The Anatomized Still Life

In 1816 the Philadelphia publisher Anthony Finley produced the first American edition of John Bell’s Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints. Published first in England in 1794, the book features thirtythree engravings of Bell’s anatomical drawings of cadavers, including his doubled view of an extended arm (fig. 34). Comparing Bell’s engraving to Cutlet and Vegetables, another image produced in Philadelphia in 1816, brings out certain elements of Raphaelle’s picture (fig. 35; see also plate 9). The interlocking and differently shaded portions of flesh are similar in the two images. The onion, compared to the tendons in the hands and wrists in Bell’s image, especially in the lower picture of the arm, begins to appear tendon-like. The wooden pins, however accurately they represent early-nineteenthcentury meat packaging, also correspond strangely to the diagrammatic lines extending into the arms in Bell’s picture. Taking these intriguing but seemingly inexplicable similarities as a starting point, this chapter argues that when Raphaelle made his meat pictures, and indeed other still lifes, he employed periodspecific conventions of anatomical representation. The bodily immediacy of Cutlet and Vegetables and Still Life with Steak owes to a new empirically based medical illustration, and medical practice, that developed in Philadelphia from 1812 to 1824, when Raphaelle made his greatest paintings. During these years, older generalizing paradigms of medical representation began to fade, replaced by a revolutionary empirical model, stressing the sensuousness of the body, that crucially informed Raphaelle’s images. This anatomizing of the still life adds a new and darker sense to Raphaelle’s imagery of failed selfhood.

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figure 34 John Bell, Untitled, in Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints [1794] (Philadelphia: Anthony Finley, 1816). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

figure 35 Cutlet and Vegetables. See also plate 9.

The Paradigm Shift in Philadelphia Medicine, 1800–1825 In 1800 medical practice in Philadelphia was still based, with several notable exceptions, on methods several hundred years old. Physicians regarded the body as a system, with each part related to all the others. This model of medicine, writes the medical historian Charles Rosenberg, “related local to systemic ills; [it] described all aspects of the body as interrelated.” Thus “a distracted mind could curdle the stomach, a dyspeptic stomach could agitate the mind. Local lesions might reflect imbalances of nutrients in the blood; systemic ills might be caused by fulminating local lesions.”1 Systematic physicians felt that balancing the bodily humors was crucial to the patient’s health. They saw the body “as a system of intake and outgo—a system which necessarily had to remain in balance if the individual were to remain healthy.” Thus the physician’s most common therapeutic practice in these years was to “‘regulate the secretions’—to extract blood, to promote the perspiration, urination, or defecation, which attested to his having helped the body to regain its customary equilibrium.” A medical practitioner in 1800 often had no anatomical expertise, “no diagnostic tools beyond his senses.”2 The most prominent systematic physician in Philadelphia at the time was Benjamin Rush. During the yellow fever epidemic of 1793, Rush remained in the city, treating the afflicted through massive purgative doses and bleeding regimens. Administering high dosages of powerful cathartics such as calomel and jalap, he desisted only after “the patient had four or five large evacuations.” 3 When he prescribed the bleeding of yellow fever victims, he urged that four-fifths of the patients’ blood be drained. In less dire circumstances, Rush used the same methods, though more moderately. At the Pennsylvania Hospital, where he voluntarily treated and studied the insane (such as the “madman . . . who believes that he was once a calf ”), Rush extended his systematic diagnoses and treatments to all manner of psychological conditions. In Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Rush described “Night Mare” as a “disease . . . induced by a stagnation of the blood in the brain, lungs, or heart.” It can be cured in part through “bleeding, or gentle purges, and low diet.” 4 Raphaelle himself was bled, although not in documented cases by Rush himself.5 Charles Willson found bleeding so effective a remedy that he sought it as a treatment into his eighties, even though he knew that “persons of my age ought to avoid the loosing of much blood.” 6 By that time, however, the systematic bleed-and-purge method was becoming outmoded in Philadelphia. For the medical historian Simon Baatz, Rush’s death in 1813 “prefigured the end of an era in American medicine,” for soon afterward “considerable, although not unanimous, skepticism was being voiced about the value of metaphysical systems.”7 One of the key figures in this transition was Dr. William Shippen, Jr. (1736–1808), one of the city’s only anatomists in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Another was Shippen’s one-time assistant and eventually the Peale family’s own physi-

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cian, Caspar Wistar, the man whose “speaking” portrait Peale had made just before Wistar’s death. The intertwined careers of Shippen and Wistar indicate the demise of Rush’s methods. Shippen had been trained in London by William and John Hunter, the famous mid-eighteenthcentury anatomists whose specialty—the anatomy of childbirth—he made his own. Fresh from his experience with the Hunters, Shippen returned to Philadelphia in 1765 and was named professor of anatomy and surgery in the new medical school of the College of Philadelphia. (Rush, on his separate track, was appointed professor of chemistry.) There Shippen performed dissections, long before the empirical study of anatomy became more widely approved in the United States. Meanwhile, Wistar had studied at the University of Edinburgh in the mid-1780s before returning in 1787 to his native Philadelphia, where he became Shippen’s assistant. In 1792, just after the medical school had become part of the University of Pennsylvania, Wistar became adjunct professor of anatomy and soon thereafter, with Shippen’s declining health, the city’s leading anatomist.8 Thanks to Wistar’s inspired teaching, anatomy became a popular academic subject in Philadelphia in the early 1800s. Wistar wrote the first American textbook on the subject, A System of Anatomy, published in 1811, described by a fellow physician “as a textbook . . . in anatomy . . . without a rival, in any language.”9 He also established an anatomical collection including wet and dry preparations of actual body parts. In response to the great size of the audience for his lectures—as many as five hundred people—Wistar commissioned William Rush, the city’s best-known sculptor (and Benjamin’s second cousin), to carve a series of oversize wooden anatomical models for use in instruction. The 1824 catalogue to the Anatomical Museum lists twenty-four of these models, a number of which still survive, including a heroic-size sculpture of the right maxilla, shown here in side and frontal views (figs. 36– 37).10 At roughly twenty-four by twenty-five inches, with a depth of sixteen inches, the maxilla was meant to be visible to every last student in a packed lecture hall. In his lectures on anatomy, however, Wistar generalized, seeking to relate human anatomy to broader meanings. “Such were his fascinating powers of description,” wrote Dr. David Hosack, that “even in the demonstration of a muscle or bone, his views were those of the philosopher as well as the anatomist.”11 Indeed Wistar fashioned himself a man of culture more than a professional anatomist and surgeon. At the time of his death, he was president of both the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and the New York–based Philosophical Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge. His spacious house on South Fourth Street, once the home of Dr. William Shippen, Sr. (and still standing), “was the weekly resort of the literati of the city of Philadelphia,” wrote Hosack, “and at his hospitable board the learned stranger from every part of the world, of every tongue and nation, received a cordial welcome.”12 The study of anatomy, then, was just one of Wistar’s occupations, a fact that came across in his lectures, in which, like the butcher boys in the victuallers’ parade, “he contrived to scatter flowers over a field not naturally of an inviting aspect.”13

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figure 36 William Rush, Right Maxilla, ca. 1808–1820. Pine, painted, 24⅝ × 25¼ × 16 in. Courtesy of the Wistar Institute, Wistar Archive Collections, Philadelphia.

figure 37 Right Maxilla (frontal view).

The next generation of Philadelphia physicians, praising Wistar, nonetheless grouped him with Rush as a merely “speculative” practitioner.14 Perhaps the greatest indication of Wistar’s generalizing, intellectualizing approach was his use of Rush’s models. In addition to preferring the models because of their large size, and because of the ostensible difficulty in obtaining cadavers in those years, Wistar may well have preferred to teach human anatomy by means of idealized models rather than actual bodies. Rush’s sculptures, as perfected generalizations like those described by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, were more “accurate” than actual bodies. The right maxilla, for example, as a typical structure, aims to represent the ideal truth of a specific object. Dr. William Tilghman indicated this idealizing approach when he noted Wistar’s original contribution to the study of anatomy: “Wistar was the first who observed and described the posterior portion of the ethmoid bone in its most perfect state.”15 Rush’s models idealize further by showing different systems of the body separately. The right maxilla is represented apart from blood vessels, muscles, and other systems that might complicate the clear presentation of bone structure. Although some of the models were fitted with leather blood vessels and other details, the sculptures mostly abstracted one part of the body from the others. Such mod-

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els were in keeping with the System of Anatomy textbook, which treats the body less as a visceral object than as a set of interlocking structures requiring separate exploration. In Philadelphia the work of Dr. John Godman (1798–1830) marks the full shift to empirical medicine based on dissection of the human body. According to Michael Sappol, Godman by 1826 “was perhaps the most sophisticated young anatomist in the United States, and an enthusiastic supporter of French pathological anatomy”—the empirical method of medical research then being imported to America.16 Arriving in Philadelphia in 1821, Godman had married Rembrandt Peale’s daughter Angelica in October of that year and had fast become both a friend and an advisor to Charles Willson Peale, who called him “a self taught genus of the first magnitude.”17 An instructor of many students by the age of twenty-six, Godman taught very differently from Wistar. He always worked from the cadaver, cutting it up as his students watched. “No authority,” he wrote in his Anatomical Investigations, published in Philadelphia in 1824, “is accredited but demonstration—no book is valued until its descriptions have been tested by a rigid scrutiny, in direct comparison with the structure as fairly exposed, and competently observed.”18 Godman made clear his antipathy to the older systematic medicine: “The mode of teaching anatomy by a pure Analysis . . . is the only method which can free us from the trammels of long reigning prejudice, or the dominion of ancient errours, that have been prescriptively established by frequent repetition in ‘systematic works.’”19 Dissecting the body, Godman focused on the interrelated complexity of anatomical structures, avoiding thus “the limited and unphilosophical views” of those who pay “exclusive attention to the nerves,” or to other specific systems, as Wistar did.20 The parts of the body in previous anatomical teaching, Godman felt, had been “so perfectly insulated, that a person might without difficulty suppose that they were never to be found in company. It is not surprising that anatomy is difficult, when the mind is forced to understand it by continued efforts of abstraction.”21 He openly distanced himself from the idealization manifested in the ungainly grace of Rush’s neoclassical maxilla. “In teaching anatomy by the analytic method, the teacher has not so good an opportunity of making the parts look beautiful as in the ordinary modes of instruction. He must of necessity show the structure exactly as it is.”22 Unlike Wistar, and unlike the butchers, he did not “scatter flowers” over the dead. Godman was only one of many Philadelphia doctors practicing the new empirical methods. In 1813 the University of Pennsylvania Medical School was the only Philadelphia institution offering anatomical instruction, but by 1824 a number of private schools had appeared in the city, producing what Baatz calls a “mania for dissecting.” 23 In 1818 Dr. Joseph Parrish opened a private dissecting room near Christ Church, where he taught in a way that avoided “theoretical speculation” and emphasized “practical lessons,” according to one student, Solomon Mordecai.24 In 1822 Dr. Thomas T. Hewson opened another dissecting room on Library Street; and in March 1820 Jason Valentine O’Brien Lawrance (1791–1823) opened the best-known of these private schools. Lawrance, an 1815 graduate of the Uni-

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versity of Pennsylvania, well versed in French methods most likely because he had lived in New Orleans from 1817 to 1818, avidly performed vivisections and dissections and left behind him at his early death more than three thousand pages of notes on pathological anatomy.25 “By 1824,” according to Baatz, “so many private dissecting schools had appeared in the city that the University of Pennsylvania faculty faced a crisis of no small dimensions”—how to keep its own enrollments high when most of the new schools “had between thirty and one hundred students in any one year.” 26 Philadelphia, stocked with American doctors and students who had gone to France to study in the years after Waterloo, by 1824 had become easily the leading medical center in the United States and, according to Baatz, third in the world after Paris and Edinburgh.27

The New Anatomy in Philadelphia: Exhibitions and Art It was within this context that the Philadelphia publisher Anthony Finley issued the first American edition of Bell’s Engravings in 1816. The issuing of a second edition of this work in 1817 confirms the burgeoning new market in Philadelphia for empirical medical instruction based on dissection. The book, notes the medical historian Kenneth B. Roberts, “was suitable for any class in which human cadavers were dissected and demonstrated.”28 In this dissection-based context, Raphaelle made Cutlet and Vegetables, Still Life with Steak, and indeed most of his paintings. The years 1812–1824, cited by Baatz as the moment in Philadelphia of an enormously increased interest in dissection, correspond exactly to the period when Raphaelle made all his major still lifes. How can we relate empirical anatomy to the contemporary but separate practice of Raphaelle’s art? First, the city’s anatomical instruction and displays were not just the private concern of medical students. Any Philadelphian could learn or see something of anatomy. In 1819, for example, Dr. Granville Sharp Pattison, a “well-regarded Scottish anatomist,” delivered a “popular course of lectures of General Anatomy and Physiology, as Illustrative of the Natural History of Man.”29 After Caspar Wistar’s death, his anatomical collection was given to the University of Pennsylvania for public display. In 1820, according to Baatz, the museum was “unique” in America as an anatomical exhibition space “indiscriminately accessible” to the public.30 By 1824, thanks to the hard work of William Horner, Wistar’s former assistant and his successor as professor of anatomy, the Anatomical Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, as it was called, included almost four hundred objects, many of them wet and dry preparations of normal and morbid human anatomy, including, for example, fifteen hearts and partial hearts. As a public exhibition of anatomy, moreover, the museum followed two of Philadelphia’s older, less scientific displays. One was Peale’s museum itself, where, according to the art historian David Brigham, Charles Willson by 1808 had accessioned “‘human preparations’ of apparently

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normal human limbs, organs, and a fetus.” 31 The other was the city’s oldest anatomical attraction, dating back to the era of the Shippens, Dr. Abraham Chovet’s popular Anatomical Museum, which featured, among other displays, a “wax pair of male and female figures ‘with external parts removable for separate examination.’” 32 Public access to anatomical displays in Philadelphia is best indicated, however, by the exhibits at Sharpless’s Washington Museum and Gallery of Paintings, on Market Street between Second and Third Streets. An advertisement of 1816 describes the partial contents of “Room No. 7”: “ten different pieces of anatomical preparations in wax . . . which will be found worthy [of] the attention of medical gentlemen and connoisseurs.” 33 These contents are as nothing, however, compared with some of the lifesize wax-figure battlefield tableaux in Room No. 5, including a group featuring General Moreau, who joined the Emperor of Russia against Bonaparte, after he was so dreadfully wounded by a cannon-ball, and in the act of being borne off the field of battle by two grenadiers. . . . His thigh-bone is plainly to be seen, together with the artery crurales; his countenance exhibiting the pallid hue of death, the wound representing the natural appearance; his favorite aide-de-camp, Baron Korsakow, deploring the misfortune of his general. A soldier weltering in his blood, his head shattered by a cannon-ball, which exposes to view the internal parts of the head lacerated. All of which are executed with the greatest anatomical precision.34

And in the same room there was “the group of General Packenham (who fell at New Orleans, in the engagement with General Jackson), after he was so dreadfully wounded by a cannon-ball, and supported by one of the infantry. The ball passed through the front of his stomach. The wound being large, his entrails are exposed to view, which enables the beholder to judge the horrid effects of war.”35 Recalling the wax figures at Chovet’s Museum, the two generals of Room No. 5 showed how anatomical display techniques permeated Philadelphia’s popular venues in these years. In Philadelphia art circles, evidence of the newfound “mania for dissecting” is not difficult to find. In his novel Randolph, published in 1823, the perceptive art critic John Neal represents himself in a fictional character who examines West’s Christ Healing the Sick. Looking at the neck of the woman supporting the spotlit invalid, the character says to another man, “Look at it—is that a beautiful neck? Is it not cadaverous, wasted,—unlovely?” 36 Members of the Peale family were also interested in the new anatomy. On April 2, 1821, Charles Willson wrote about Raphaelle’s younger brother Titian Ramsay Peale II: “I am inclined to think that Titian may become an expert Surgeon if he applies himself in that branch of Science. he posseses strong nerves and is an expert disector of Anatomy.” 37 Rembrandt, too, had experience with anatomy and dissection, especially after his daughter married Godman. One of the plates in Godman’s Anatomical Investigations, the book of 1824, is Rembrandt Peale’s Anomalous

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figure 38 The Court of Death (detail).

Muscle: an engraving of a cadaver’s flayed arm, surmounted by two images of blood vessels (see fig. 42). Even before he met Godman, Rembrandt had used a corpse from the Baltimore Medical College to portray the dead figure at Death’s feet in The Court of Death, begun in 1819 and finished in 1820 (fig. 38; see fig. 19).38 Raphaelle also knew firsthand the city’s anatomical discourse. In January and February 1808, when Wistar had first developed the idea of large-scale anatomical models, he approached not just William Rush but also Charles Willson Peale, who together with Raphaelle helped build the first anatomical sculptures. The elder Peale, as he noted in his Autobiography, made oversize “Models of the human throat and wind pipe” in papier-mâché and wax, while Raphaelle “modeled the brains also in a large size, to compleat part of the head.” Rush meanwhile carved the outer part of the head in wood, so that Raphaelle’s brain model fit inside, thus forming “a curious and interresting work . . . to illustrate the anatomical Structure of the human head.” 39 Wistar’s models were idealizations of the cadaver, far cries from the visceral anatomical imagery soon to become far more pervasive, but Raphaelle’s creation of one of these objects, some five years before he began painting his sensuous still lifes in earnest, indicates his participation in Philadelphia’s anatomic revolution.

“A Leg of Mutton and a Human Thigh” Raphaelle’s two meat paintings relate to the era’s anatomical discourse, first, as a kind of dark joke. The painter who made the “mordantly witty” Venus Rising from the Sea, the ventriloquist who made a carved chicken scream in “sepulchral tones,” the man who, his father acknowledged, “is thought by many clever & by some an odd or craizy fellow” made meat paintings that savor of this same morbid humor.40 His pictures allude to the conventional and joking way that the artist’s contemporaries rhetor-

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ically mixed butcher and doctor, meat and corpse. Sappol recounts the story of N. P. Wiley, who one day in 1820 encountered a man with a large box: I spent a dull day on the road. . . . We had but one incident worth mentioning. A scoundrel looking fellow with us had a large box, containing as he said, venison. He was very careful to keep it in a cold place whenever we stopp’d and talk’d a great deal about his anticipated steaks—but unfortunately it fell from the driver’s hands at Poughkeepsie while taking off the baggage & the lid flew open & discovered—a dead man! [The passenger] was a resurrectionist and had got [the body] . . . at Utica. He made quite a joke of it.” 41

Sappol cites another story, “The Negro Steaks,” published several times in 1835, in which two medical students plant a cadaver in the bed of a third student, the narrator. When the narrator returns, he finds the “cold and clammy” body of a black woman in his bed. The next morning, when the prankplaying students have left, he cuts “some fine large steaks from the buttocks of black Sue,” gives them to the landlady to cook, and departs, so that his fellow students, when they return, will eat his “breakfast steak.” 42 In the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century in America, writes Sappol, “dissection was regarded as a form of butchery; the dissected human was demoted to the status of slaughtered meat.” 43 The metaphor was current in Raphaelle’s Philadelphia. In a satirical poem written in 1788 called “An Oration,Which Might Have Been Delivered to the Students in Anatomy, on the Late Rupture Between the Two Schools in This City,” the Philadelphia wit Francis Hopkinson made the meat-corpse analogy in graphic and unseemly detail. Noting popular resentment against anatomists, he wondered that people refused to permit the bodies of their dead relatives to be dissected And yet their tables daily they supply With the rich fruits of sad mortality; Will pick, and gut and cook a chicken’s corse, Dissect and eat it up without remorse; Devouring fish, flesh, fowl, whatever comes, Nor fear the ghosts of murder’d hecatombs.

He then asks: Now where’s the difference? to th’ impartial eye A leg of mutton and a human thigh Are just the same—for surely all must own Flesh is but flesh, and bone is only bone. . . . 44

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The anatomical allusions of Cutlet and Vegetables—its strange relation to Bell’s image of the arm— read as a version of this “odd or craizy” meat-corpse joke. The anatomical quality of the painting becomes still clearer when we consider that, joking or not, the only documented meat painting made in Philadelphia prior to Raphaelle’s two pictures was the work of an anatomist. Ribs of Raw Beef was painted by Dr. John Foulke, an amateur artist, a fellow at the College of Physicians, and a lecturer in anatomy from 1784 until his death in 1796. Thought by some “the best surgeon of his day,” he taught his subject in an “Anatomical Hall” before many students. Ribs of Raw Beef, now lost, was exhibited at the 1795 Columbianum exhibition, at which Raphaelle showed eight early still lifes.45

“Nearer to the Eye”: Dissection and Raphaelle’s Art Cutlet and Vegetables and Still Life with Steak relate to anatomical discourse in a second, more profound way—one that expressly concerns their vivid carnality. Raphaelle’s split-open objects had a specific source: the phenomenological power of early-nineteenth-century anatomical representations. It was the goal of such representations, as Bell and Godman conceived them, to penetrate the eye of the student— to make a lasting impression chiefly through visual appearance. For both Bell and Godman, the student, whether in accurate pictures or in an actual dissection, would absorb anatomical lessons much more effectively through visceral sights than through text or speech alone. Thanks to illustrations, Bell wrote, the lessons of his book “should insinuate themselves into [the reader’s] mind without labour or thought on his part.” Pictures such as his engravings of the arm were more direct, “the truer language of this subject.” 46 Godman, in Anatomical Investigations, treats the student’s observation of a dissection in similar terms. The lecturer “may occasionally err in his descriptions; yet as he opens the faultless volume of nature before the eyes of his class, an error in his speech does not place a veil over their sight; nor does an inaccuracy in his detail, produce any inaccuracy in their perceptions” (italics in original). The most “excellent” arrangement of the corpse, Godman felt, is one that “brings the specimens nearer to the eye of the student.” 47 Both Bell and Godman subscribed to a myth of immediate vision. They separated sight from sound and made sight the more powerfully direct form of communication. Godman placed greater pedagogical value on what he showed than on what he said. Bell wanted his book, with its text and plates, to be “one idea presented in a double form, once to the eye and once again to the ear.” 48 Bell’s choice of a well-known anecdote for the opening paragraph of his Preface is especially revealing: When a young man, who had been blind from childish years, had his sight restored to him by our celebrated surgeon chesselden, all his thoughts, and feelings, and pleasures, and

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pains, were very interesting to his friends; for that most delightful of all our senses was to him as a dream of fairy visions, confused, yet delightful, beyond all that the fancy can conceive. He was like one newly born into the world, needing to learn anew all the objects around him, knowing nothing to the eye, but all by the touch.” 49

Bell’s explicit point is to defend the value of his small pictures of large body parts—like the young man, the reader needs to accustom his eyes to a dramatic change. Yet, as a story of fresh vision, the anecdote resonates with Bell’s subsequent claim that pictures “are the truer language” of anatomy. Like the students reading his book, the young man “needs to learn anew all the objects around him”—and he can do so thanks to a primally inquisitive, “newly born” faculty of sight. For both Bell and Godman, this direct child-like sight is made possible by anatomical representation. The body opened up, in representation or dissection, produced the fixated vision of a child. Such a sight could make one open one’s eyes as though for the first time. Even if one were to turn away in horror or disgust, the sight would remain, fully insinuated, within oneself. For both men, as for Rousseau, Wordsworth, and other late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century figures interested in education, the ultimate point of this fixed gaze was learning. Yet Bell’s and Godman’s model of primal seeing is notable for its contrast with the dominant models of visuality in early-nineteenthcentury Philadelphia. In the era of dispersed vision, when both the rationalist and commercial gazes were constructed as attenuated, as constantly shifting, so that the very objects of perception were figuratively spread thin, the city’s newly prevalent anatomical representations invited an alternative model of sight. In the visceral drawing, or in the opened corpse, the dissected body fixed the gaze. The same was true of the anatomical displays on view in Philadelphia. At the University of Pennsylvania, William Horner made the visual power of the anatomical display clear in a letter of 1818. Arguing that the museum to be created from the Wistar collection should become a “more splendid and extensive establishment,” Horner knew the objects he wanted: “I allude to models in wax, they are very useful and at the same time very captivating to the Eye.” 50 This idea of capturing the eye must also have characterized the museum’s displays of actual human organs, for example one of a human heart injected with wax, one of the fifteen hearts or partial hearts in the collection by 1824 (plate 10).51 Upon this glutinous object the vision sticks. To compare the heart with Rush’s Right Maxilla, located in the same museum at that time, is to see how the latter object invites the gaze only to slide across its sheer smooth surfaces. Vision, if it cannot find a purchase on Rush’s smooth object, lodges in the shiny red mass. A similar “captivating” power characterized the anatomical displays at Sharpless’s and Peale’s museums. The body or body part in these visceral displays, however it might be moralized, could make didactic text secondary and even irrelevant. In one of his exhibits, Peale showed the severed trigger

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finger of one Bruliman, a despondent soldier-turned-counterfeiter who had gone out one day intending randomly to kill someone. One of the people he encountered, Dr. Cadwalader, was so polite on greeting him that Bruliman, in Peale’s description, “forebore to execute his desperate resolution.” Bruliman went on to kill the next man he met. Cadwalader’s sociability saved his life, a moral Peale emphasized in the museum text accompanying the severed finger: “This little story offers a striking proof, that amiableness and Politeness of manners are not only pleasing, but useful, in our common with the world.” 52 Charles Willson’s grandson George Escol Sellers later recalled that his grandfather liked “to draw the moral from whatever he related without leaving it to his hearers. It was so fixed a habit that he could not help it. In that he was like Aesop . . . and sometimes the morals were labored.” 53 The moral of Bruliman’s finger appears to have been forced in this way. The discrepancy between finger and moral must have been similar to the gap in Sharpless’s Room No. 5, where General Packenham’s exposed entrails were alleged to enable “the beholder to judge the horrid effects of war.” In each case the visceral display might well have overridden the ostensible lesson. If The Artist in His Museum offered the long socializing view, exhibits such as Bruliman’s finger could offer the viewer, in the words of the anthropologist James Clifford, a more primal viewing, “a world of intimate encounters with inexplicably fascinating objects.”54 The dissected body, as it became an icon of the localized thing—the thing that would not move and from which it was difficult to move away, the “intimate” still life from which, amid flux and flow, one could not avert one’s captivated eyes—brings us back to Raphaelle’s paintings. His sensuous visual language did not appear out of nowhere. On the contrary, it was heavily mediated, enabled even, by representations of the split-open body featured in the city’s ubiquitous anatomical displays. To fashion works in opposition to the era’s double models of shifting visual attention, Raphaelle drew upon the visual form that most prominently resisted them—the city’s various anatomical representations. The visceral immediacy of the corpse—its unique ability to insinuate itself “nearer to the eye”—provided Raphaelle with a model for nature morte. This mixture of corpse and nature morte perhaps explains why many of Raphaelle’s pictures, not just the meat paintings, contain dissection effects. One of the most striking elements of Fruit in a Silver Basket, for example, is the split-open melon at right (fig. 39). Close to the picture plane, sliced in half, packed with seeds, its flesh beginning to go soft and rot along the upper left and central edges, it has a striking sensuous immediacy and specificity. Perhaps only in an era of empirical-visceral anatomical representation could a melon’s insides be rendered so intensely. And perhaps only in such an era could a still-life artist so repeatedly show the inside of things. Although many still-life painters from various eras have portrayed cut-open melons, Raphaelle’s penchant for showing split-open objects, here and elsewhere, is noteworthy. In his career, he painted at least five melons cut or broken open, three sliced

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figure 39 Raphaelle Peale, Fruit in a Silver Basket, 1814. Oil on panel, 12½ × 19½ in. Manoogian Collection, Taylor, Michigan.

oranges, at least three cakes cut into pieces, a partly shucked ear of corn, and the two cuts of meat— besides several peeled lemons and oranges and numerous knives. The two rotting apples in Fruit in a Silver Basket, in particular the more evidently decaying one at left, also suggest the era of anatomy in Philadelphia. Although rotting fruits and vegetables are a commonplace in still-life painting—James Peale, for example, occasionally includes them in a way that does little to disrupt the harmony of his pictures—the tactile sensuality of Raphaelle’s decaying apples sets them apart. The shiny, soft spots gleamingly invite us to see with our fingers. Here again, it is difficult to imagine an artist painting something like that decaying apple in any era except one dominated by a newly carnal representation of the anatomized human body. None of these comments, however, exactly addresses how this anatomical imagery informs Raphaelle’s still lifes. The anatomized quality of the objects, I suggest, makes itself felt primarily as a repression that returns. What we see, in other words, are pictures that can almost—but not quite—go the whole distance and portray the artist as a cadaver. They can certainly represent him as “meat”: in his phenomenologically charged visual language, Raphaelle openly identifies with these steaks and cut-

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lets set just a little too closely, and too sensuously, in his space. They can even allude, in their “odd or craizy” way, to the contemporary jokes connecting meat and corpse. But at about this point they seem to stop. In a morbidly masochistic joke, they can show “venison” as a sepulchral euphemism for corpse, but they cannot show corpse. They get close to this deathly connotation and then try utterly to avoid it, in part for personal reasons. In addition to suffering a dire illness in 1806, in which “great evacuations” of blood had been made, Raphaelle had been desperately ill with a case of “Gout” in 1815. “Raphaelle is still in the same dangerous state that the Physicians have very little hopes of his life,” Charles Willson wrote to Rembrandt on October 9, 1815. “I now go with less hopes than ever that he will live long. . . . I cannot believe he can survive many days . . . a Mortification will shortly take place—.”55 Seven months later, in May 1816, Raphaelle painted Cutlet and Vegetables. In September 1816 the gout struck again: “If the disease was only confined to my feet,” Raphaelle wrote to Charles Graff, his patron, “I still would have some hope of doing something. But unfortunately my left hand is in a most dreadfull situation, & my Right Getting so bad as to be scarcely able to hold my Pen.” Sometime that next winter, he painted Still Life with Steak. Two years later, in 1818, he was contemplating suicide: “But I fear, Raphaelle,” wrote Charles Willson, “that you are not right. I am led to think so by seeing the word Suecide in your letter [to Patty McGlathery, Raphaelle’s wife].” One month later, in July 1818, Charles Willson wrote to Angelica Peale Robinson, “The other day I received a letter from [Raphaelle], which informs me that he has been almost at deaths door, reduced to a Skeleton by a fitt of the Gout [which] confined him 8 weeks.” As Charles Willson had written to Raphaelle earlier that year, “You have been on the brink of the Grave.” 56 Given his repeatedly perilous illnesses, it is not surprising that Raphaelle would allude to his dead body in his paintings yet be unable to go the whole way and actually show it. As in his ventriloquism, he could die painfully—as something else. The frightful image of his own dead body, understandably, had to be repressed. Yet the repression is only partly successful, and in the eviscerated objects we see the frightful things showing through. We can understand Raphaelle’s objects, then, as barely repressed images of the artist as corpse—images that, as it were, head unflinchingly toward this masochistic implication until swerving, at the last moment, into the thinnest of meat-and-melons disguises. This barely repressed character shows most clearly in a bodily feature of Raphaelle’s art we have yet to consider: the quasi-literal appearance of human anatomy in his still-life objects.

Dissection and Raphaelle’s Art: “Actual” Anatomy Intimations of actual human anatomy punctuate some of Raphaelle’s works. Venus Rising from the Sea— A Deception, with its foot, arm, hand, and hair in the midst of a still life, turns out to be a guidepost

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for understanding how other Raphaelle paintings allow human anatomy to erupt in scenes more prevalently, more literally, given to other objects—if not a napkin, then meat, fruits, and vegetables. In these other paintings, however, unlike Venus, human anatomy appears within, and as, objects that never cease being themselves. The result is that Raphaelle’s pictures occasionally give the uncanny sense of picturing human body parts, even as they indisputably remain images of “just” steak, bacon, melons, and other objects. Two lines of analysis can explain how and why his paintings do this. The first concerns the tendon-like onion in Cutlet and Vegetables. This anatomical vegetable reveals the intimate relation between botany and anatomy in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. Raphaelle made pictures at a time when even the most empiricist anatomical illustrators still cast anatomy vegetatively and vegetation anatomically. Benjamin Smith Barton, the author of The Elements of Botany, is an important precursor here. In addition to his botanical work, Barton was a doctor, holding a professorship of botany and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania until his death in 1815. In an anatomical illustration made in 1784, when he was sixteen, Barton combined his two preoccupations (fig. 40). In this partially damaged drawing apparently showing the blood vessels and vital organs, made a full thirty years before the revolution in medical training in Philadelphia, Barton makes clear that he was no anatomist. Yet his picture is of great interest for its markedly botanized conception of human anatomy. The vegetative blood vessels spreading through the ungainly torso are indistinguishable from a root in one of Barton’s openly botanical drawings (fig. 41). The drawing anticipates the relation of botany and anatomy in The Elements of Botany, in which Barton notes how “Linnaeus has very expressly denominated the leaves, the lungs of vegetables” and how Erasmus Darwin “has taken much pains to prove, that the leaves are not only the lungs of vegetables, but that the office of these leaves is extremely similar to that of the lungs of man, and many other animals.” Linnaeus, as Barton writes, took these analogies even further, comparing “the roots of plants to the absorbing lacteal vessels in animals” and calling the earth “the stomach of plants.” 57 Although he raises these points to criticize the “specious language” of other naturalists, especially Linnaeus, whom he accuses of being “ever fond of analogies,” 58 Barton’s torso drawing indicates that he himself thought analogically. Indeed in The Elements of Botany he wrote of “vegetable physiology” under headings such as “Of the Anatomical Structure of Plants.” As he put it in 1807, “It is, in truth, extremely difficult to point out the precise limits of Natural History, so intimately connected is this science with many others, particularly perhaps with Anatomy, Physiology, the Materia Medica, and Chemistry.” In a universalizing system, with each object interrelated as part of God’s design, “the animal, the vegetable, or the mineral kingdoms . . . are all, in strict propriety, subjects of natural history.”59 Figures such as Godman reacted strongly against Barton’s systematic approach. One can only imagine Godman’s disdain had he seen Barton’s amateurish anatomical image. Although Barton, not without reason, considered himself an enlightened practitioner poised to correct the superstitions of earlier

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figure 40 Benjamin Smith Barton, Anatomical Torso, 1784. Engraving, 8½ × 6½ in. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

figure 41 Benjamin Smith Barton, Root, ca. 1803. Ink on paper, 6¾ × 5½ in. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

figure 42 Rembrandt Peale, The Anomalous Muscle, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1824). The Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

generations, he came to seem antiquated to the newer doctors of Philadelphia. When he died in 1815, two years after Rush, his passing helped signal the shift in medicine there. Yet for all that, Godman’s own Anatomical Investigations shows the residual effects of a botanizing anatomical representation. The book includes a page featuring illustrations by Lesueur and Rembrandt Peale, the author’s father-in-law. Rembrandt’s image shows three anatomical views, one of a flayed arm and the other two of blood vessels (fig. 42). Like Bell’s image, Rembrandt’s indicates the concerns of the new empirical representation. The very depiction in the flayed arm of an “Anomalous Muscle”—“a singular sport of nature,” in Godman’s words—shows the abandonment of the ideal or characteristic type as the model for anatomical illustration. Rembrandt’s rendering of the anomalous arm, moreover, if not as detailed as Bell’s, still struck Godman as “an admirably correct delineation.”60 Accuracy here, however, still meant giving anatomical objects a certain botanized form. Rembrandt portrays the blood vessels in a way that recalls the intertwined stalks of the geranium in Rubens Peale with a Geranium (fig. 43; see fig. 5). The skin of the flayed arm, pulled back, resembles the geranium’s leaves. Indeed the relation of blood vessels to pulled-back skin is similar to that between the geranium stalks

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figure 43 Rubens Peale with a Geranium (detail).

and the fallen—or dead—leaf resting on the geranium’s pot, suggesting an even more pronounced affinity between these two vertically oriented works. That affinity, moreover, confirms the geranium’s own peculiarly anatomical quality—its doubling of Rubens’s nose and fingers, for example—and even suggests Rubens’s vegetative quality, his tendrils of hair, leaf-shaped nose, and fingers rooting in the soil. The skin in The Anomalous Muscle, even considered apart from the earlier painting, has a leafy, vegetative character. The skin is flayed from the arm in the same way that Bartram’s balsam pear splits open to reveal its interior (see fig. 4). Rembrandt treats the human body as something like a botanical specimen, just as Bartram treats the pear anatomically. Even though drawn in 1824, well into the “empirical” period, the flayed arm and blood vessels hark back to the more systematic visual discourse that dominated science in Philadelphia prior to 1810 or so. Accordingly, the image by Lesueur on the lower half of the same page evokes Barton’s rendering of root-like blood vessels (fig. 44). Lesueur, although Godman equated his name “with truth in all that pertains to graphic delineation,” aims here, as in his images of fish, for the general truth of scientific specimens.61 Rembrandt’s and Lesueur’s images thus indicate that the shift from systematic to

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figure 44 Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Untitled, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1824). The Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

empirical scientific representation did not take place suddenly or cleanly in Philadelphia. In 1824, to judge by Rembrandt’s and Lesueur’s illustrations, a certain botanized view of human anatomy still counted as “truth.” No matter how anomalous the muscle, it was still part of a universal system of life. Thus in Raphaelle’s Philadelphia, even in the empirical era, to render human anatomy was to think of it vegetatively, and to render a vegetable was to think of it anatomically, so that any representation of a vegetable or piece of fruit might have elicited the analogy between human and vegetable “physiology.” In Raphaelle’s work, objects such as the tendon-like onion make the same connection. Not just the onion’s innate appearance but also its placement in relation to the meat gives it an anatomical quality. Though it is a vegetable, Raphaelle represents it as an object that assimilates to some extent the form and colors of the cutlet. Note, for example, how the bulb of the onion appears in front of the meat, figuratively blending into it, much like the meat’s own whitish fat. Moreover, the horizontality of the onion matches that of the meat, and the cutlet’s paper-wrapped bottom-left portion repeats the horizontals of the onion’s stalks (a manifold instance of Raphaelle’s penchant for oxymoronic nearby horizons). Placing the onion in front of the meat, reading botany through anatomy and vice versa, Cutlet and Vegetables literalizes the mechanics of early-nineteenth-century anatomical representation in Philadelphia. At the same time, the onion and other comparably anatomical objects in Raphaelle’s art indicate

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figure 45 Cutlet and Vegetables (detail).

a gap between these two types of representation—and this gap suggests the second, more germane explanation for quasi-literal anatomy in Raphaelle’s paintings. The object, at once onion and tendon, uncannily combines the qualities of both while being fully neither one nor the other. Another good example of this undecidable object is the bundle of asparagus in Cutlet and Vegetables (fig. 45; see plate 9). One of the spears, the wide one second from left in the front row, shows at its very tip two odd vertical indentations that produce the strange half-realized sense of a fingernail. Other spears feature similar indentations. Accordingly, the faint network of horizontal striations on many of the spears conjures—but just conjures—wrinkled knuckle skin. Such a ghostly, half-realized emanation of the human body I take to be another sign of the painting’s relation to anatomical representations. More precisely, a motif such as the finger-like spears of asparagus marks a seam, a split, in the painting’s would-be synthesis of inanimate objects and dead body under the heading nature morte. Raphaelle’s picture crosses two genres, still life and anatomical representation, but merges them imperfectly: in the asparagus the human body’s difference registers as the ambiguous physiognomy of one thing seen in terms of another: of an object neither human nor vegetable but an uncanny mixture of the two. In the gap between genres the literal body part most clearly—but always indefinitely—appears. These eruptions illustrate the dynamics of Raphaelle’s anatomical imagery. For when parts of the

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figure 46 Still Life with Celery and Wine (detail).

body start appearing in these paintings, they do so like repressed things coming to the surface of images from which they had ostensibly been banished. Bell’s doubled image of the flayed arm, for example, shows through Cutlet and Vegetables mostly as a template—something the artist is aware of but wishes to exclude—that makes itself visible in the sensuous details of the cutlet and its fellow objects. This means that pictures such as Cutlet and Vegetables and Still Life with Steak read finally as repressions of what they still haltingly but unmistakably visualize: the meat of the human body.

Raphaelle’s Own Body as the Object of Dissection In all these pictures, with their phenomenological intensity, it is not any body but Raphaelle’s own that is shown as nature morte. Still Life with Celery and Wine, painted in 1816 (plate 11), vividly conveys the sense of the artist himself as the visceral object of dissection. The painting shows stalks of celery draped over a basket of bruised apples. To the right of the basket is a decanter of wine and in front, a cluster of raisins and a rotting apple. On the gleaming brown ripple-skinned rotten spot of that apple Raphaelle painted two parallel incisions, difficult to account for literally (fig. 46). They are not, for example, the marks of someone who has sliced this apple for eating. Figuratively, they suggest surgical incisions, a dissector’s interest in cutting open the dead and decaying object. More than this, the two parallel cuts are the clearest marks of personal iconography we have yet seen in the artist’s pictures, matching the distinctive double “l” in Raphaelle’s signature (even down

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figure 47 Still Life with Celery and Wine (detail).

to the way the first “l” is shorter than the second), suggesting that this decaying piece of fruit is a personal emblem (fig. 47). Outside the basket, set off from the other objects—in as direct a relation to the artist’s space as the ostrich-egg cup, the napkin, or the forward-facing blackberries—the sensuous apple, even aside from the dual incisions, is a phenomenologically embodied object. Its rotting body shines with a light projected from the artist’s space. The dual incisions, however, come close to making this phenomenological identification explicit. From over there, across the way, the double “l” combines the artist’s flesh and a dissected object into one decaying thing. Another personalized image of dissection is the late Still Life with Watermelon, painted in 1822, an image of a large pink-and-red object related to the meat pictures (plate 12). Like the incised apple in Still Life with Celery and Wine but on a grander scale, the large piece of melon is scored and cut. It has been sliced across, perhaps by the knife whose handle protrudes from the platter on which the melon sits, revealing a circumference of rind and an inner space of moist fruit. A vertical trench runs through the center of the fruit, extending downward in a darker trough to a rind line studded with black and white seeds that curves up to the left and right, terminating at right in a darkened corner where the melon’s flesh has begun to rot. From this point, moving leftward, a horizontal cut, punctuated by seed sockets, traverses the melon, passing through the vertical trough and ending at the melon’s left edge. Various details—the black seeds, the socketed flesh, the vertical indentation along the white rind at right center, the strange shape outlined in white at the upper right, the cut or broken-off smaller piece at left—do nothing to dispel the oddness of the painting. “The impression is that of bareness, of des-

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figure 48 John Bell, Untitled, in Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints [1794] (Philadelphia: Anthony Finley, 1816). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

olation,” the art historian Wolfgang Born wrote of the painting in 1947, adding that he found the smaller slice of melon “grotesquely shaped.”62 The painting’s grotesqueness may relate to the jack-o’-lantern face made by the scores and cuts of the watermelon’s meat. The year Raphaelle made Still Life with Watermelon, 1822, is probably the year he painted Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, his most vivid image of facelessness. In these two nearly identically sized paintings made at the same time in his career he depicted two kinds of morbid nonidentity. Venus, with its blank sheet, shows the veil of Saint Veronica, fatefully missing the lasting likeness. Still Life with Watermelon—with its gouged fleshy face, pinkly grimacing, resting on a platter like the head of Saint John the Baptist—explores the loss of face from another perspective. Here the relation seems to be once again to the era’s irrepressible anatomical imagery, perhaps to such images as Bell’s carved heads on a kerchief-lined shelf, or at any rate to something comparably grim (fig. 48). Whether Still Life with Watermelon precisely refers to Bell’s picture is unimportant. The point instead is that here, in a painting made after Godman’s introduction into the Peale family, the anatomizing of still life is powerfully apparent.63 In a cadaverous black-toothed face, a tragicomic jack-o’-lantern, Raphaelle painted an image of his own face, over there, in death, an object of dissection. However strange such a picture is, its quasi-repressed fantasy of dismemberment, of lost face and dissected selfhood, was not unique in his day.

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chapter seven

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Dissector and Dissected Self and Body

One could go no further in Raphaelle’s Philadelphia than to imagine oneself as a dissected body. In the cadaver Raphaelle found the ultimate image of failed selfhood—an image so threatening that he had to repress it in images of melons and meat. To be a dissector, in contrast, was to gain identity through command over the dead body. The di¤erent social positions of the two, dissector and dissected, indicate the politics of selfhood in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The di¤erences help us see how steadfastly Raphaelle’s paintings assign the “dissected” position only to the artist himself, with one notable exception.

Oneself as Nobody: Identifications with the Dissected Body Raphaelle’s repressed representation of his dead body was personal but also cultural, derived from eighteenth-century habits of sympathetic projection, of feelingly identifying with things outside oneself—su¤ering animals (as in the case of Rousseau’s pupil), but also dead people. In The Theory of Moral Sentiment, published in 1759, three years before Emile, Adam Smith notes how the living project themselves into the bodies of the dead, imagining thus their own fate. We derive our fear of being dead from imaginatively “putting ourselves in their situation, and from our lodging . . . our own souls in their inanimated bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in this case.”1 To sym-

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pathize with the dead produces terror but also social order: imagining, almost knowing, the horror of death, the citizen refrains from doing violence to others. One finds provocative examples of this sympathetic projection in early-nineteenth-century America. In 1809 Alfred Brunson, a young New Englander who later became a Methodist preacher, had a nightmare: “I fell on the ice and frozen ground with such violence as to kill me. . . . I seemed to stand by and look upon my dead body for a while.” The dream, Brunson later recounted, became a conversion experience: “I desired to live while I did live, and to have religion enough to make and keep me happy.”2 Brunson’s dream, fantasmatically mapping his own body onto that of his father, who had drowned a few years earlier, made him change his ways and live righteously. A similar sympathetic projection, with an anatomical twist, had appeared in a story published anonymously in Mathew Carey’s American Museum in 1790. The narrator of “Influence of Death” describes a dream in which the scalpel-wielding figure of Death cuts open his chest, takes out his heart, and squeezes the “corruption” from it before replacing it and healing the wound. Michael Sappol recounts the rest of the story: “After this open-heart surgery, the dreamer next witnesses scenes in which the figure of Death strikes various people down with a dart that makes their ‘breast transparent.’” 3 Su¤ering death and dissection is a punishment for wrongdoing, for having a heart overflowing with “corruption.” The dreamer who learns what it is to die and be dissected determines henceforth to live free of vice. In post-Revolution America, however, according to Ric Northrup Caric, imagining one’s dead body became a way of acknowledging social failure. John Fitch, the failed steamboat inventor, created a form of “self-representation through torment and extinction.” 4 Carey, the hypochondriacal publisher of the American Museum, which featured the “Influence of Death,” responded to business anxieties with thoughts of his premature demise. This new kind of deathly identification was more like obsession than sympathetic projection. “To su¤er in their su¤erings,” as Rousseau’s pupil did when he confronted tormented animals, or to conceive ourselves inhabiting the bodies of the dead, as in Smith’s account, involved, finally, the saving distance of the projector. Shuddering, the projector could always step back and away from the tormented or dead thing. To be fixated like Fitch and Carey on one’s own demise, however, meant being unable to step back fully from the dead. One inhabited the dead thing, even as one stood apart, examining it. This was doubling with di¤erence. Raphaelle’s dissection paintings, as we have seen, are the visual equivalents of Fitch’s and Carey’s fixation. In each case, the dead body, over there, was not a warning or a lesson but an object of partial but inescapable identification. When the narrator of “Influence of Death” imagines himself as dead and dissected, the e¤ect is to emphasize this failure. This happens not only because dissection was a kind of second death—a form of “overkill,” as Sappol describes it—but also because the objects of dissection at this time in Philadelphia were primarily criminals, blacks, and paupers. As the medical historian David Humphrey writes in an article called “Dissection and Discrimination,” “Blacks in Baltimore and paupers in Philadelphia

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found themselves victims of a set of circumstances which a¤ected many other blacks and poor whites in 19th century America: their powerlessness and marginal social status a¤orded little protection for their dead in the face of persistent shortages of cadavers needed for medical dissections.” The story of the “Negro Steaks” refers to this same situation.5 So does Hopkinson’s parodic “Anatomy” poem of 1788, in which he devotes considerable space to a necrophiliac scenario involving “Brown cadavera” and also asks members of the city’s two anatomical schools to remember how they had robbed graves together in “Potter’s Field”: Think how, like brethren, we have shar’d the Toil When in the Potter’s Field we fought for spoil, Did midnight ghosts and death and horror brave— To delve for science in the dreary grave.—6

Godman too, working just prior to the passage of the first laws permitting medical schools to obtain corpses, noted matter-of-factly how he employed grave robbers to dig up the bodies of the indigent for his anatomical specimens. Public officials were bribed, he wrote, allowing Philadelphia anatomists access to “all subjects buried” in the city’s two potters’ fields.7 The social politics of dissection brings us back to Raphaelle’s cut and carved objects. To represent one’s own dead body was a form of acute marginalization; to represent one’s body as an object of dissection meant expanding this fantasy, imagining oneself as truly the most marginal of figures. Those dual incisions in Still Life with Celery and Wine, for example, irrepressibly mark the body of someone masochistically imagining himself undergoing a second death after his life expires. They also mark a body imagined as that of a criminal, a black, a pauper—a relative “nobody,” from the point of view of genteel Philadelphians. Accordingly, the grimacing, grotesque jack-o’-lantern watermelon in Still Life with Watermelon is not unlike those two heads in Bell’s engraving—the heads, Bell writes, of an unknown man and woman. And the steak in Still Life with Steak is like the flayed back of another of Bell’s specimens (fig. 49). “The head is reduced to a cipher,” Kenneth Roberts writes of this picture, “the body to a thing. Remnants of humanity remain in place, but only insofar as they are relevant to scientific inquiry and medical practice.” 8 Faceless, headless, hanging over the edge of the table, the dissected body is not that of a self, a recognizable individual. Instead, as in Raphaelle’s image, it is just so much meat.

Dissection and the Production of Selfhood This imagery of nonidentity starkly opposed the anatomical specimen’s production of selfhood among early-nineteenth-century doctors. In the 1790s, during the Federalist era, dissection was still regarded

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figure 49 John Bell, Untitled, in Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints [1794] (Philadelphia: Anthony Finley, 1816). The Library Company of Philadelphia.

as an aristocratic endeavor. Sappol writes that “the anatomically-trained physician was regarded as a gentleman,” occupying “a place of privilege that was demonstrated and asserted in the confiscation and dissection of the dead.” In New York City in 1797, when the debtor John Young was sentenced to hanging and dissection, many felt that Young’s fate was a sign of exorbitant Federalist power. In the debates about the sentence, Sappol writes, “anatomy was identified as an illegitimate and ‘unnatural’ aristocratic privilege; Young’s defenders, the critics of anatomy, identified their own position as a patriotic defense of natural rights, the republic, democracy, and egalitarianism.” By the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, however, this same “aristocratic privilege” had been co-opted by aspiring doctors of common background such as Godman, who had risen thanks to “his own talents and industry.”9 The aristocratic connotations of the anatomist, according to Sappol, “became the basis for the formation of the bourgeois medical profession of 19th-century America.”10 Command over the dead body was becoming a form of bourgeois social power. This power took two forms in Raphaelle Peale’s Philadelphia. The first, only nascent at the time, concerned the “universalism” of the dissected body. Even if the corpse was that of a black person, a criminal, or a pauper, Sappol notes, the dissected cadaver still provided the virtuous or liberal self with a model of his own regulated bodily identity. Opening up the body became a way to dramatize one’s own inner regulation—to see the innate qualities of fine-tuned self-control characterizing the

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restrained self. The clockwork of anatomy was the corporeal equivalent to Charles Willson’s conception of self-regulation, manifest in his plea to Raphaelle to “govern every unrully Passion.” There, within one’s body, as one’s body, was a discrete system of perfect regulation, one, moreover, that all potentially shared. The precise regulation of a black person’s body, or that of a pauper or criminal, showed that even these figures, intemperate though they might be, possessed an inner nature of perfect regulation. The e¤ect was similar to that produced by West’s Christ Healing the Sick, in which the poor people want only a little “improvement” to recognize their innate capacity for “self-containment and self-discipline.” Nineteenth-century anatomical inquiry, according to Sappol, helped produce “a universalized bourgeois self.”11 For this reason, Sappol argues, a certain universalism in anatomical representation was crucial. As anatomical pictures became more empirically precise during the nineteenth century, they also became more generalized in one important way. In eighteenth-century anatomical images, the social identity (or, more accurately, nonidentity) of the corpse was likely to be inseparable from the dissected body.12 In Bell’s images of the flayed back and the two heads, made in 1794, the sense of an actual though sadistically annulled person is part of the anatomical representation. Yet Bell’s doubled image of the arm, also made in 1794, augurs a more anonymous anatomy. And in Lesueur’s and Rembrandt Peale’s illustrations for Anatomical Investigations, from 1824, the body parts are also relatively anonymous. This is true even of the arm with the unusual muscle, for it is not shown as belonging to a particular person, or nonperson. Like the cuts of meat that enable greater identification, doing so because they do not relate clearly to a specific living thing, so the universalized corpse became a more receptive object of bourgeois self-formation. Such a corpse made it more possible for someone to say, in e¤ect, that arm is like my own. Around 1800, however, this universalist model was only emerging as an ideological connotation of dissection. At this time, seeing oneself in the dead body, as the “Influence of Death” suggests, signified social cancellation more than social identity. Only later in the nineteenth century, according to Sappol, did universalized anatomy more widely align with bourgeois self-formation. In the early nineteenth century, by contrast, the more dominant ideological connotation of dissection concerned the di¤erence between dissector and dissected. Appropriating the power of the Federalists, the virtuous dissector was a liberal lord, putatively beneficent and more haloed than his Federalist precursors but still wielding tremendous power over the bodies of social outcasts. Godman’s dissections made this meaning clear. In Anatomical Investigations he extols the usefulness of an anatomical table devised especially for him by Coleman Sellers in 1823 (fig. 50). Sellers, husband of Raphaelle’s sister Sophonisba, father of George Escol Sellers, and host to one of Raphaelle’s documented ventriloquism performances, was an all-around inventor, designing and making everything from annealed wire to mail pouches.13 Sellers’s table, Godman felt, gave him unparalleled com-

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figure 50 Invented for the Philadelphia Anatomical Rooms, by Coleman Sellers, Oct[ober] 1823, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1824). The Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

mand over the dead body, allowing him easily to overcome the body’s awkward recalcitrance during anatomical demonstrations. The table included straps and buckles “for the purpose of keeping the subject in place whenever the position of the table is changed.” The body could also be readily shifted. “The great superiority of this table over every other consists in the facility with which the subject may be moved in various directions; and doing away [with] the necessity of the clumsy blocks commonly used; and the unpleasantness of calling in assistants to drag the subject into a di¤erent position.” The table also spun around. “The circular motion is so easy,” Godman wrote, “that with a large subject on the table, the slightest touch is sufficient to carry it round the circle.”14 The table enhanced the lecturer’s dignified bearing by reducing, if not altogether eliminating, instances in which the lecturer and his assistants might have to grapple with the corpse to reposition it. With other tables, Godman writes, “if it be required to change the position during the time of lecturing it cannot be done without much inconvenience.” The table prevented unseemly moments when the lecturer had to stoop to the corpse, in e¤ect bowing to its obscene power. Writing of the table’s

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foot-operated elevation controls, Godman notes, “To raise the greater racks bearing the larger parts of the table it is only necessary to push them slightly with the foot, by which stooping is rendered unnecessary.” Later, he notes how another of the table’s features “saves the teacher from the fatigue and unpleasantness of stooping.” The result was the lecturer’s perfect command over the corpse, whether pauper, criminal, or black—a command further demonstrated by Godman’s virtuoso dissection technique, which he called “Analysis or decomposition”: “The subject is placed before the learner untouched; the knife is not used to clear obstructions from the way of the teacher, previous to the lecture. The student sees the relation of parts—the Anatomy, as it is left by the hand of nature. . . . The body is decomposed by the knife, in his sight.”15 This sense of the individual’s new power over the dead extended in these years even to those who were not doctors. On his visit to Italy in 1829 and 1830, Rembrandt Peale toured the Catacombs of Santa Maria della Vita, near Naples. Guided by an old villager, Peale and his companion exhibited an insouciant power over the entombed: “We found the bones in these Catacombs in excellent preservation, and on many the flesh of fifteen hundred years was still of such tenacious though pliant fibre that it required a sharpe knife to cut o¤ a piece. The guide showed us the heads of some of those early Christians with the tongues still remaining in them, but would not permit us to take one away.”16 The blithe control manifested in cutting pieces o¤ dead bodies is similar to that of Godman’s dissective decompositions. Here, moreover, Rembrandt and his companion define themselves against the Italians and the dead simultaneously: each is a form of otherness. The catacombs are a foreign land, full of souvenirs.17 At the same time, the lordly power of the middle-class dissector was tempered somewhat by his goal, which Godman stressed, of helping other persons. Anatomy, he wrote, was “a science which interrogates death itself, in order to benefit the living.”18 With his command, his unstooping professional assurance, the virtuous doctor would be neither aristocratic dominator nor lowly tradesman but a respectable professional. In an introductory lecture to his students in 1824, Godman expressed the hope that his students, by their high conduct, would “hasten that era when the title of student of medicine will be . . . expressive of . . . honourable ambition, elevated feelings, and high moral worth.”19 As the victuallers’ parade of 1821 aimed to transform the city’s butchers into white-clad paragons of respectability—into upstanding citizens instead of tradesmen tainted by a “proneness to shed blood”— so Godman at this same time wished to transform the city’s doctors into models of civic goodness. One wielded the cleaver, the other the surgical knife, but practitioners of each historically linked profession aimed to clear themselves of grim associations. Rembrandt Peale’s portrait of Godman conveys this quality of benevolent authority (fig. 51). Made around the time of Godman’s marriage to Rembrandt’s daughter Angelica on October 6, 1821, the painting probably commemorates the doctor’s entry into the Peale family, celebrating him sentimen-

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figure 51 Rembrandt Peale, Portrait of Dr. John Davidson Godman, ca. 1821. Oil on canvas, 22 × 18 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, bequest of Nellie G. Taylor.

tally and professionally as a formidable but relaxed figure. Rembrandt portrays Godman’s face as a mix of kindliness and intellectual power. The softness of the eyes and the lips, the informality of the tilted head, and the direct and a¤ectionate gaze at his new father-in-law mitigate the intellectual intensity implied by the gleaming and capacious forehead—the conventional Peale family sign for “genus of the first magnitude.”20 Godman’s pose augments this relaxed intensity. He leans to one side of the large upholstered chair, yet his head tilts back the other way, producing a dynamic repose, neither too relaxed nor too formal. The slight asymmetry of his collar enhances this e¤ect. Its left side matches the part of the upholstered chair behind it, while the right side fans out, matching the expanse of chair to the right. The asymmetry establishes informality without diminishing the sitter’s dignity. Here is a doctor shown neither as lord nor laborer but as a man of “honourable ambition, elevated feelings, and high moral worth,” his professional identity transmuted by a softening domestic a¤ection. Through the 1820s, however, the grim associations of anatomical work still held, as Godman and

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Rembrandt both recognized. Rembrandt’s allusion to the doctor’s profession only in the painting’s title—he chose not to show Godman with a surgical instrument—suggests how much anatomical study was still derided in 1821. Accurately linked to grave robbing and gruesome displays of the body, the early-nineteenth-century dissector was regarded less as a benefactor than as an icon of social power, less a virtuous gentleman than a virtuoso table spinner, cranking, lowering, raising, and twisting the body of an illegally exhumed criminal, black, or pauper. West’s Christ Healing the Sick again perfectly captures the power politics of the medical moment. The painting shows Jesus as a haloed good doctor surrounded by disciples helping him make his rounds. Palms outstretched, he gazes like Godman in Rembrandt’s portrait. At the same time, however, as we might expect, Jesus still dominates the afflicted, in particular the spotlit marble-skinned prayerful man. Jesus, standing over him and the woman with the “cadaverous” neck, is like God/man himself holding forth beside one of his prone alabaster specimens.21

Raphaelle and the Sepulchral Panzographia To judge by his anatomized still lifes, Raphaelle would have identified more with the figure on Coleman Sellers’s table than with the professional holding forth next to it. Although pictures such as Cutlet and Vegetables and Still Life with Steak, like all of Raphaelle’s still lifes, imply some distance between subject and object, this distance is difficult to mistake for the separated self-forming view of a figure such as Godman. On the contrary, the sense of phenomenological identification between subject and object is, as we have seen, too powerful in these paintings for the artist to maintain an absolute separation. In a city undergoing both a “mania for dissecting” and a transformation to new models of selfhood, Raphaelle’s paintings powerfully, if obliquely, isolated the dissected body as the most absolute form of the nonself. Nowhere is this nonselfhood more powerful in Raphaelle’s art than when he intimates a dissected face, thus anatomizing the prime marker of identity. This we can see by comparing “portraits” of dissector and dissected. In his portrait of Godman, Rembrandt Peale places tremendous importance on the sitter’s features. The head is set o¤ by its large size and bright illumination, and by the collar, which formally separates it from the body. In this picture, the face is the self. Still Life with Watermelon (fig. 52; see plate 12), when set against the contemporaneous portrait of Godman, reads by contrast as a dark parody of portrait formulas. With the vertical oval frame now shifted to the horizontal serving dish, and the confident and secure subject transformed into a grimacing carved face, the painting is less a still life than an antiportrait. In the era of the self, when the image of the face helped define the new individual, Raphaelle’s cadaverous nonportrait, a partly repressed image of a dissected face, stands as one of his most decisive representations of social failure.

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figure 52 Still Life with Watermelon. See also plate 12.

And of the permanence of death. Still Life with Watermelon was painted in the years of Charles Willson’s burst of self-commemoration, when the elder Peale was manufacturing various forms of prosopopoeia, including Self-Portrait, painted, like the melon picture, in 1822 (fig. 53). In their aim to bestow an everlasting presence, an eternity of face and voice, Charles Willson’s pictures followed the purpose of portraiture as set forth by Philadelphia’s best-known portrait promoter, Joseph Delaplaine, the publisher of Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans, issued in two deluxe volumes in 1816–1817. Calling later for a museum, a “National Panzographia” that would display portraits of great Americans, Delaplaine made the choices clear: either death or a form of everlasting portrait-given life. In a Prospectus written in December 1818 he explained in graphic detail: When time shall have swept away the splendid train of our earliest philosophers, statesmen, and warriors, to swell the “gathering” of the grave; when the tongue of genius shall moulder in gloomy silence; when the eye of the orator shall be closed in darkness, and the spiritual fires of its glance no longer kindle the dormant intellect around; when the warrior’s

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figure 53 Charles Willson Peale, Self-Portrait, 1822. Oil on canvas, 29¼ × 24⅛ in. The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3d, 1993.35.22.

arm shall be sinewless, and, by the side of his decaying form, the sword of his triumphs shall lie rusting; when the patrons of the soil shall have become an ingredient in its physical amalgama; a generous and grateful posterity will rank among the first of its public institutions, that which will a¤ord them, in e¤ect, the delight of a sweet and familiar intercourse with beings, endeared to them by the brilliance of their talents, and their virtues, as well as by the benefits which they conferred upon the land of their birth.22

In Still Life with Watermelon Raphaelle chose to make a “posthumous” portrait—yet one that shows the subject not in life but, perversely, in death and even under dissection. Given Delaplaine’s choice between panzographia and sepulchre, Raphaelle selected neither, instead combining them in a painting as though for a hybrid space of his own devising—a sepulchral panzographia: a gallery of portraits of the dead, like the one Delaplaine advocated, except perversely showing the dead as dead and dissected. In so doing, he answered, in an “odd or craizy” way, his father’s arguments that he apply his still-life talents of “exact immitation” to the painting of portraits.23

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The further relation of the watermelon picture to Charles Willson’s self-portraiture confirms this idea. Raphaelle painted this image, like Venus Rising, on a canvas almost identical in size to his father’s Self-Portrait. All three pictures, within a fraction of an inch, are 29 x 24 inches, with the watermelon painting oriented on a horizontal. The similar dimensions imply that the portraitness of the watermelon image might well have confronted Raphaelle, an occasional portrait painter, as a distinct connotation even before he made a single mark on it. (The portrait size of Venus Rising from the Sea implies that it too was indissolubly connected to portraiture before Raphaelle had even begun to paint it— begun, that is, to paint it back to a version of its originary state of blankness.) Here then is an acute form of the “negative relationship,” as Ward and Hart call it, “between Raphaelle’s still lifes and his father’s portraits.” 24 The portrait connotations of the watermelon painting—namely, a melon painted on a portrait-size canvas by an artist constantly urged to paint portraits and not still lifes—indicate the crossings between human anatomy and nature morte that produce the picture’s “grotesque” e¤ect. The human face, in this picture, is displaced into a still life, but not so completely as to erase the gruesome sense of an anatomized head, an antiportrait, reminiscent of Bell’s dissection images. The failure of face in Still Life with Watermelon relates to general social expectations in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. But it also relates most specifically to Charles Willson and his repeated pleas to his son. Raphaelle, picturing his own failure to achieve Charles Willson’s level of virtuous respectability, takes a self-demeaning stance strikingly like that of Edmund Burke in a letter to the duke of Richmond in 1772, in which Burke describes himself as base and common compared with the aristocratic Richmond. Though Burke’s letter dates from an earlier moment in the bourgeois transformation, his contrast of lordly and ordinary people suggests how Raphaelle, fifty years later, would visualize his own social nothingness: Persons in your station of life ought to have long views. You people of great families and hereditary trusts and fortunes are not like such as I am, who whatever we may be by the Rapidity of our growth and of the fruit we bear, flatter ourselves that while we creep on the Ground we belly into melons that are exquisite for size and flavour, yet still we are but annual plants that perish with our season and leave no sort of traces behind us. You, if you are what you ought to be, are the great Oaks that shade a country and perpetuate your benefits from Generation to Generation.25

Accordingly, to contrast Still Life with Watermelon with Charles Willson’s self-commemorations of the same years, including The Artist in His Museum, is to see a creeping, bellying view versus a long one; a grounded world of carnality versus a lasting beneficial presence above; and a death that will “leave no sort of traces” versus a life to be felt perpetually, through prosopopoeia, “from Generation to Generation.”

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figure 54 Titian Ramsay Peale, Decapitation, ca. 1822. Watercolor over graphite on paper, 7¼ × 9⅝ in. American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

Head and Heart, Once Removed In at least one case, however, Raphaelle brought Charles Willson into his world of dissected nonselfhood. Titian Ramsay II, the son whom the elder Peale felt would make an “expert surgeon,” had performed a surgical cancellation of Charles Willson’s contemporaneous self-portraits, making a fantasy picture of his father’s decapitated head (fig. 54).26 This private sketchbook image, made about 1822, combines the e¤orts of Charles Willson and Raphaelle during this same year, producing a macabre portrait “still life.” Raphaelle’s way of visualizing an “anatomized” Charles Willson would have to be not just more subtle, but undecidable. Dealing in fruit, meat, and vegetables, Raphaelle never made still lifes like Titian Ramsay’s watercolor that read literally as representations of the human body, let alone of particular human bodies. Yet in one painting Raphaelle seems somehow to have included an anatomized Charles Willson: Still Life with Steak.

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In this picture, formal relationships connect the two main objects, steak and cabbage. The curving top of the cabbage matches the curving fat of the meat. The flap of fat at the center of the meat, falling outward to graze the carrot to the right, matches the folds of the cabbage at upper left. The tender thin flap of meat extending over the side of the ledge also matches these cabbage folds. The “veins” of the cabbage relate to the literal veins of the meat, each constituting a tracery within the object. Finally, the meat’s fat tonally relates to the color of the cabbage. In all these ways, Raphaelle rhymes two disparate objects as he does in many of his paintings, linking them in a mock-heroic visual couplet not unlike the Popian rhymes he wrote at various points in his life.27 One way to understand the relation of these objects is to think of the phrase “head of cabbage.” In Tales of a Traveller, published in 1824, Washington Irving describes the motto and crest of arms of Wolfert Webber, who has gone from raising cabbages to owning real estate: “And to commemorate the origin of his greatness, he had for his crest a full-blown cabbage painted on the pannels [of his coach], with the pithy motto alles kopf, that is to say, all head: meaning thereby that he had risen by sheer head-work.”28 The phrase could also be morbid, or morbidly humorous, as in “Thimble’s Wife,” a well-known song recorded in a Philadelphia songbook of 1815 that begins: “Thimble’s scolding wife lay dead. Heigh ho says Thimble / My dearest duck’s de-funct in bed, Death has cabbaged her scolding head.”29 Comparing Still Life with Steak with one of many possible examples of the vanitas still life, here one by Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, suggests a pictorial basis for showing a “head” of cabbage (fig. 55). Although Raphaelle would not have known of this particular painting, his spherical cabbage assumes the shape, and the position, of one of the most frequent of all still-life emblems: the human skull. In this sense, though the cabbage is a cabbage, it is so in much the same way that the asparagus spears in Cutlet and Vegetables are asparagus: like them, the cabbage alludes to, without ever becoming, human physiognomy. This allusion to the human head becomes more suggestive if we recall that in 1808 Raphaelle had fashioned his model of a human brain—a process that probably required him to view an actual brain. With its spongy texture, its gray-green color, its veins and folds, and its divided hemispheres, the cabbage evokes this anatomical model of the artist’s own manufacture. Certainly it is striking that the head of cabbage in Still Life with Steak was painted by very likely the only fine artist in the United States at that time who had made an explicit representation of the human brain. In these ways, the cabbage in Still Life with Steak suggests yet another ambiguously “anatomical” object, this time a skull, a brain, or an undecidable combination of the two. The steak has its own anatomical properties, more explicit yet equally ambiguous. As a piece of meat, cleaved through the bone, it is more clearly related to anatomy and dissection than the cabbage. Yet the part of the body it refers to is not precise. I have compared the steak both to the flayed back of one of Bell’s cadavers and to a wax-filled heart in the Wistar collection. Because of the cabbage’s

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figure 55 Cornelis Norbertus Gijsbrechts, Vanitas Still Life, ca. 1659–1678. Oil on canvas, 33¼ × 30¾ in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Abbott Lawrence Fund, 58.357.

strong evocation of a head, the steak’s connotation of a “heart” may be the most powerful (though eternally ambiguous) of its anatomical references. Head and heart were a commonplace rhetorical pair in Raphaelle’s time, not just in well-known examples such as the Head and Heart dialogue Thomas Je¤erson sent to Maria Cosway in 1786, but in the Peale family itself. In “Original Thoughts on Allegorical Painting,” his essay of 1820, Rembrandt claims that straightforward paintings are “as well understood by the head as they are frequently impressive on the heart.” 30 Raphaelle employed the figure in his Popian love poem to his future wife, Patty McGlathery, in 1796. Sending the poem along with the gift of a popular multivolume set called Lives of the English Poets, he characteristically animated the inanimate (“Go happy Volumes”) and gave advice to all the poets therein: “In short, Ye Ev’ry Poet take a part / Instruct the head or Else improve the heart.” 31 In Charles Willson’s letters, the “heart” is a recurrent emblem of Raphaelle. “Those who know [Raphaelle],” he wrote to Angelica Peale Robinson in 1806, “well know that goodness of his heart.” And in 1813, in a letter to Nathaniel Ramsay: “Raphaelle has been unfortunate in some things—and

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neglectful of himself. [H]e possesses a good heart.” And to Raphaelle on February 2, 1818: “Your Mother loves you. [S]he knows the goodness of your heart.” And to Raphaelle a little later, on March 1, 1818: “I know you possess a good heart.” And in the same letter, now more dissectively, implying the opening up of his son’s body: “I am certain that you do not want a monitor in your breast.” 32 By the same token, as Titian Ramsay well knew, the head and only the head—alles kopf—was the icon of the elder Peale, the man who preached rational restraint and self-regulation. At one remove, then, we might say that Still Life with Steak is a macabre representation of Charles Willson and Raphaelle, set before the viewer as quasi-anatomical specimens, dissected nobodies.33 Like Titian Ramsay, Raphaelle imagines the elder Peale’s decapitated head, but he does so with a di¤erent type of secrecy. Whereas Titian hid his patricidal drawing in a private sketchbook, Raphaelle disguised his violent impulses in a characteristic screen of vegetative repression: the “head,” at the last moment, is swerved into “head of cabbage.” Yet this object cannot quite cancel its anatomical associations. Made at about the time of Charles Willson’s “Gentleman” portrait, Still Life with Steak brings the exalted man down to the level of a vegetable that sits next to the bloody emblem of Raphaelle’s own nonidentity. “Why will you neglect your self—? why not govern every unrully Passion? why not act the Man and with a firm determination act according to your best judgement?”—here, in a fantasy Raphaelle cannot quite repress, “Death has cabbaged [that] scolding head.”

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part 3

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Birth

chapter eight

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Abjection Still Life and the Return of the Maternal Body

Raphaelle painted, roughly speaking, two kinds of still life: one benevolent, the other malevolent. The enchanted objects of the rhapsodist mark a refusal to enter the attention-dispersing world of commerce and rationality. The blank and anatomized objects mark a failure to enter this world. In imagining his own dead dissected body—if in a repressed way—Raphaelle found the ultimate sign of failed selfhood. We come now to a third kind of painting that encompasses the first two: the still life of the maternal body. This body, in Raphaelle’s art, can be destroying, nurturing, or a combination of the two. In one type of image, Raphaelle maps the maternal body onto the corpse, making the two coincide as objects of uncanny nonidentity. In another he portrays the maternal body more rhapsodically, as a source of sustained gratification, as part of a sensuous hermetic space from which one would never wish to depart to take the “long view.” In yet another, in particular in Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, the maternal body is a source of both terror and pleasure. In a culture that constantly urged Raphaelle to “act the Man,” the maternal body, made to coincide with his own, became a powerful image of both refused and failed selfhood. Subsequent chapters examine the rhapsodic and ambivalent images. This chapter focuses on paintings that link the maternal body and the corpse.

The Origin and the End: Abjection At the center of the meat in Still Life with Steak is the dark opening flanked by a flap of fat on one side and the cleaved bone on the other (fig. 56). The vaginal character of this opening, unsettlingly trans-

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ported into a still life, reads as another anatomical image surfacing from repression, haunting the scene of its exclusion. The opening in the steak corresponds roughly to the way the female genitalia were shown in the era’s anatomical representations—for example, in Lesueur’s 1824 image of the hymen published in Godman’s Anatomical Investigations (fig. 57). This reading makes sense for two reasons. First, both Raphaelle’s and Lesueur’s images recall the prominent role of obstetrics in Philadelphia’s medical discourse during these years. Dr. William Shippen, Jr., having trained with William and John Hunter in London, taught courses in midwifery in Philadelphia in 1765, leading the city’s obstetrical revolution. When Shippen died in 1808, Caspar Wistar eulogized his mentor for “e¤ect[ing] a great change in the habits of the city” by promoting a clinical approach to midwifery and making it acceptable, even welcome, for a male physician to help the mother give birth. By this time, notes the medical historian Sarah Blank Dine, “man-midwifery had become a normal occurrence even in the countryside of Philadelphia.”1 The result, according to Benjamin Rush, writing in 1809, was a “di¤usion of medical knowledge [about birthing] among all classes of citizens, by means of publications and controversies.”2 Dine, analyzing Philadelphia obstetrics in these years, writes of “the broad cultural, social, and economic changes that created a class of lay readers and a market for medical advice books” about birth.3 In this milieu, where the popular literature about birth and the female reproductive organs had gone from virtually nothing in 1765 to ready availability in 1809, Raphaelle painted both Still Life with Steak and other pictures featuring a barely repressed obstetrical imagery. Second, Still Life with Steak and Cutlet and Vegetables, as “kitchen still lifes,” pictures showing foods set out for preparation rather than for consumption, imply a maternal space fraught with uncanniness. About kitchen still lifes, the art historian Norman Bryson writes, “The male artist is peering into a zone that does not concern him directly. . . . [A]lthough everything looks familiar, the scene conveys a certain estrangement and alienation” in which something repressed returns: the mother’s body.4 In the kitchen still life, the sensuous foods of a mother’s preparation merge strangely with her long-repressed body and in particular, as Freud wrote, with “the former Heim [home] of all human beings.” Bryson quotes Freud in “The ‘Uncanny’”: “It often happens that neurotic men declare they feel there is something uncanny about the female genital organs. This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim . . . of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning. There is a joke saying that ‘Love is home-sickness’; and whenever a man dreams of a place or a country and says to himself, while he is still dreaming: ‘this place is familiar to me, I’ve been here before,’ we may interpret the place as being his mother’s genitals or her body.” 5 For Bryson, kitchen still-life painting—with its emphasis on sensuous objects and familiar yet alien spaces—generically indicates the cocoon of the mother’s body returning from repression. In Still Life with Steak, the central object’s almost explicitly anatomical character intensifies this maternal

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figure 56 Still Life with Steak (detail).

figure 57 Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, Hymen, in John Godman, Anatomical Investigations (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1824). The Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

quality. Perhaps more than any other American still-life painting, and probably because of the influence of explicit anatomical imagery, Still Life with Steak represents the irrepressible “former Heim . . . of all human beings.” In Raphaelle’s art the maternal body is made identical with the nullity of another surfacing repression: the artist’s corpse. In Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, the ostrich egg, that image of nonidentity, is also a feminine image of birth: origins coincide with facelessness in a glow of blankness. The same is true in Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, an intertwined image of Venus’s birth and a shrouded, faceless nonexistence. Accordingly, the deteriorating jack-o’-lantern face of Still Life with Watermelon is one and the same thing as the fruit’s seed-filled womb. The dark opening in Still Life with Steak embodies the same combination, the origin and end of life. This combination of the maternal body and nonidentity helps explain why the steak in Raphaelle’s painting is so abject. For Julia Kristeva, in her book Powers of Horror, the abject is what culture expels in order to exist. The abject, she writes, is all the disgusting varieties of the not-me—filth, waste, dung, rotten food, the corpse. It is the loathsome stu¤ over there, apart from oneself, that produces a saving revulsion: that, over there, is what the subject is not.6 As Kristeva points out, however, the abject haunts the subject from within, gnawing at her, threatening to engulf her through the sheer visceral power of a loathsome encroachment. To fail to keep the sickening thing distinctly over there, apart from oneself, across a black strip or other zone of separation, is to feel oneself slipping into nonidentity. For Kristeva, what we experience as abject often goes back to the maternal body.7 It is this body that must undergo massive repression if the subject is to be formed, to gain a clear sense of identity, of di¤erentiation from objects. Yet for Kristeva certain things, particularly the corpse, reawaken this primally abject body, producing “a massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness . . . a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.”8 In Still Life with Steak the meat is too close for comfort. Instead of resting fully over there, it gives back to the artist a dark sense of his own embodiment. It is the artist’s body somehow over there even as “in reality” this body exists on the safe side (the viewer’s side) of the black-stripped threshold. The unseemly body that cannot be resisted—that pulls the artist into itself—is now, we can see, not just cadaverous but abjectly maternal. Raphaelle’s picture rhymes the maternal body and the corpse as the macabre sites of a carnal nonidentity. In doing so, the painting stages with remarkable success—in a biting but also remorseful way—the inescapability, the insinuating power, of the very things against which early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia culture defined itself. Raphaelle painted Still Life with Steak in a milieu emphasizing signs of achievement—of selfhood made and secured: the assured slouch of the portrait sitter on an easy chair; the scientist next to a geometrized gadget attesting to a brilliant inventiveness; the battlefield, swirled with smoke and snow and traversed in cannon tracks, on which the heroic general—in bombastic,

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massive scale—authoritatively reels his stallion. Still Life with Steak, so di¤erent from all these pictures, is for this very reason directly related to them. In its catalogue of abject nonidentity, Raphaelle’s Steak shows, at too-close range, everything the surrounding culture had to exclude in order to exist. His irrepressible imagery of maternal origins and cadaverous ends sharply refuses the culture of selfhood, but it also masochistically portrays the artist’s own failure to achieve the very selfhood he refuses.

Charles Willson Peale and Benjamin West: Managing Abjection For Raphaelle to link birth and death in the same object may seem odd, yet at least two other artists from the time condensed birth and death in similar ways. They did so, however, in an attempt—not entirely successful—to manage these abject zones rather than grant them their uncanny power. One of these birth-death paintings is Charles Willson Peale’s Exhumation of the Mastodon, painted in 1806–1808 (fig. 58). It depicts an event from summer 1801, when Peale traveled to Orange County, New York, to supervise the removal of mastodon bones found buried in the land of John Masten, a local farmer. One of the two almost-complete exhumed skeletons stood in the Mammoth Room at the museum, and is partly shown in The Artist in His Museum. Next to one of the skeletons, Peale displayed Exhumation of the Mastodon.9 The painting represents digging up the burial place as a triumph of reason. Although it is not necessarily an allegory of grave robbing, its slant on exhumation is analogous to that featured in such prodissection texts as Hopkinson’s “Oration,” in which the narrator speaks of the need “To Delve for Science in the dreary grave—.” In Peale’s painting, the signs of a scientific conquest of death are numerous. At center, looming over the marl pit from which the bones are being extracted, stands the sca¤olding of the water pump Peale designed: operated by figures running in the large wheel above the pit, the pump continuously sends buckets down into the “morass,” as Charles Willson called it, from which these buckets reemerge laden with water that they discharge down a sluice extending into the right distance.10 As a way to get at the remains, to make them visible, the pump system is not unlike Coleman Sellers’s anatomical table—and indeed Coleman Sellers, Peale’s kindred inventor, appears under the umbrella at right, next to his wife, Sophonisba Peale. Charles Willson also appears at right, extending his right arm toward the pit while holding with his left hand an unfurled drawing of a huge bone. His gesture derived from that of the Apollo Belvedere, Peale epitomizes enlightened reason. At the lip of the morass, he is like Godman next to a corpse: overseeing, with some detachment, the grim contents of the grave and the work of manual laborers who will bring the body to him.11 The rhyming of birth and death in the painting, however, begins to nullify the confident manage-

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figure 58 Charles Willson Peale, The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 1806–1808. Oil on canvas, 50× 62½ in. Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore.

ment of the burial place. At left center, framed by the two leftmost legs of the sca¤olding, Peale’s second wife, Elizabeth DePeyster Peale, points at an oncoming storm (fig. 59). She had died in 1804, two years before the painting was begun. The cultural historian Laura Rigal notes that Elizabeth died after she was “unable to deliver an overly large baby boy after a pregnancy of twelve months.”12 Having su¤ered a ruptured uterus, she was attended to by Shippen himself, as well as Wistar, and a third doctor, Thomas Chalkley James, who performed the operation during which she died: “He delivered her of a Child the largest Boy perhaps ever seen,” Peale sadly noted to Elizabeth’s brother, “when instantly the life left your dear Sister and my a¤ectionate wife!!—.”13 Rigal notes that Elizabeth looks down at the pit as she gestures toward the darkening skies streaked with lightning at far right. Holding on to a son, Titian Ramsay II (born in 1799), Elizabeth visually connects pit and storm as natural phenomena

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figure 59 The Exhumation of the Mastodon (detail).

beyond scientific control. The spaces of birth and death, rhymed in the pit, threaten to undo the designs of science. The painting’s obsessive number of portraits, including many of the Peale family, also acknowledges the pit’s uncontrollable power. To the right of Peale is his third wife, Hannah Moore; to her right are three of Peale’s sons, Rembrandt, Rubens (in the hat), and Raphaelle, holding the furled end of the bone drawing. Between Rembrandt and Raphaelle are two of Elizabeth DePeyster Peale’s daughters, Sybilla and Elizabeth. Coleman Sellers and Sophonisba Peale stand under their umbrella. Further to the left, perched at the edge of the pit and turning the log in the water, are Peale’s young sons Linnaeus and Franklin. Behind little Titian Ramsay II and his mother are Elizabeth DePeyster Peale’s sister and brother-in-law, Major and Mrs. John Stagg. And there are still other portraits of

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individuals who were not family members, such as the ornithologist Alexander Wilson, who stands alone at left. One of Susan Stewart’s descriptions of the painting intimates the purpose of all this portrait making. Noting Peale’s characteristic desire to transcend death by means of various representations, Stewart connects the number of portraits in the exhumation picture to Peale’s later image Noah and His Ark: “Just as Noah’s sons, in the face of extinction, would help their father gather members of each species and begin a new world, so would Peale’s aesthetic dynasty continue his aesthetic project.”14 For Stewart, the extinction in this painting that most concerned Peale was not that of the mastodon but that of the Peale family itself. Along the lip of the pit, Peale paints portrait after portrait, a gallery of recognizable figures given eternal life through a form of prosopopoeia. What is striking about Peale’s picture, however, is the way it stages portraiture and the pit of extinction in such close proximity. This implicitly sets up something like a visual diagram of the contrast Joseph Delaplaine set forth in his National Panzographia prospectus of 1818. On the one hand, there is the pit, a morass of birth and death, of nonidentity symbolized by the faceless laborers. These anonymous workers, many with their backs to us, operate below ground, where they stand as clammy-skinned symbols of death and “laboring” birth. As Charles Bird King would align death and poverty as forms of nonexistence in The Poor Artist’s Cupboard, so Peale’s painting similarly aligns laboring bodies and nonidentity. On the other hand, above the ground, at the pit’s edge, identity takes place. The confident poses of some of the figures—in particular the jaunty posture of Wilson, the ornithologist, at left—even evince a certain contemptuousness, a defiance of the pit’s power. As Delaplaine would argue, the portrait defeats death. No wonder Peale gives himself such a heroic, death-defying pose. Gesturing like the Apollo Belvedere, looking down at the threatening pit, he is like an immortal god who has just slain the python. Yet the very proximity of death and transcendence finally casts identity production as a precarious business. Many of the portrait figures, for all their would-be defiance of the pit, nonetheless stand at the brink. The painting, in showing a panzographia built at the edges of oblivion, at a spot where the face is never fully separable from the “face of extinction,” acknowledges the central power of the pit, the slosh of birth and death. Portraits appear in compensatory abundance, as if Peale believed that the more of these likenesses he made, the less might be the power of the morass.15 In this regard, the centralized contraption reads as a device not only to pump water but also to churn likenesses, spinning one, and then another, and then many more in a defiant and heroic but finally makeshift operation. Peale’s comment about the laborers in his Autobiography—that they struggled “to keep the morass . . . from overwhelming them”—summarizes his fears about all the figures in the painting. Though the portrait ostensibly keeps one from being buried in earth, it cannot be separated, in this remarkable picture, from the “overwhelming” force of abject nonidentity.16 Perhaps an even more anxious treatment of birth, death, and identity is the strange painting Ben-

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figure 60 Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, ca. 1816–1817. Oil on paper on canvas, 13¼ × 10 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wharton Sinkler.

jamin West made of Benjamin Franklin about 1816–1817 (fig. 60). The picture is a polished sketch for a much larger portrait West intended to paint for installation at the Pennsylvania Hospital, in the same room as Christ Healing the Sick. In the plan, never realized, the painting of Christ was to have been flanked by a West self-portrait and the picture of Franklin, one of those who co-founded the hospital in 1751.17 The portrait shows Franklin’s most famous moment—his discovery that lightning is a form of static electricity. A jolt travels through the key and into Franklin’s right hand. The painting is far from showing the famous moment as it happened in life, however. Franklin, who died in 1791, sits in the clouds, flanked by cherubs. On the right several fly a kite, while two other

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cherubs on the left, surrounded by Leyden jars and electrostatic dischargers, conduct an experiment showing the e¤ects of lightning striking a lightning rod on a model house.18 One of these experimenters points in Franklin’s direction, as if to acknowledge the pioneering figure in their research. The painting thus shows Franklin ensconced in the heavens, continuing his famous experiment from beyond and well above the grave. In so doing, the painting of Franklin fits West’s aim in these years to create a form of eternal life through representation. West began the painting of Franklin in 1816, the year John Galt published the first volume of The Life of Benjamin West, the artist’s thinly disguised autobiography. Flanking Christ Healing the Sick, the Franklin image and West’s self-portrait were to have granted an eternal presence— an eternal face and voice—to these two eighteenth-century Philadelphians. Accordingly, West transforms Franklin’s famous moment into a metaphor for the eternal galvanization a¤orded by portraiture. The electrical jolt gives a glow to Franklin’s cheeks, a spark to his eyes, and a wildness to his shock of white hair. Like the experiments in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in England the year after West finished his picture, the portrait of Franklin makes the dead live again. Here, however, rather than a hideous resuscitation, Franklin’s electric reawakening presents an ostensibly benign form of miraculous, womanless birth that contrasts with West’s fictitious account of his own perilous origins. In his quasi-autobiography, West connected his birth to a storm like the one shown in the Franklin picture: the thundering rhetoric of the Quaker orator Edmund Peckover, whose impassioned sermon, with its talk of “the storm, the thunder,” had induced “the pains of labour” in the artist’s mother. The process of giving birth to Benjamin had “nearly proved fatal both to the mother and the infant.”19 In the painting of Franklin, by contrast, a storm painlessly sparks the great man into being. He is as youthful and energetic as the newborns all around him. Portraiture, the painting claims, is a form of renewal, a Michelangelesque moment of male creative genius with no “pains of labour.” Thus the painting manages abjection. In the heavens, Franklin and West control a storm like the one that descends on Peale and his indefatigable exhumation team, harnessing it to produce a form of everlasting life. Through the portrayal of electricity and the electricity of portraiture, they defeat the chaotic forces of birth and death, producing an experimental form of eternal subjectivity.

The Morass of the Melon and the Snap of the Corn Raphaelle, at only one remove, showed unflinchingly what West euphemized and Charles Willson uneasily attempted to manage: the cadaver and maternal body, intertwined. For Raphaelle to paint his own body phenomenologically in these abject nonentities was to refuse selfhood in the most dramatic terms he could possibly find (and fear). Hence his displacement of these nonentities—though a perilously minimal displacement—onto still-life objects. This was the case not only in Still Life with Steak

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but in two earlier pictures, one of which is Melons and Morning Glories, painted in 1813 (plate 13). The painting anticipates Still Life with Watermelon, the picture of 1822, in its arrangement of a large central piece of melon juxtaposed with a smaller portion to the left. In many other respects, however, Melons and Morning Glories treats the subject di¤erently. More than the later work, this painting concentrates on the melon’s womb-like interior. It does so, first, by featuring no knife. Accordingly, the melon’s interior meat has not been carved up and made quasi-representational as in the later painting. Because no face is discernible here, and because Raphaelle emphasizes the black seeds, the melon’s reproductive function is conspicuous. The melon in the later picture has fewer of these seeds, which here glisten like the blackberries Raphaelle painted probably in the same year, attracting our attention. This womb-like interior in Still Life with Watermelon is shown as the space of a cadaverous abjection: the melon is plainly going bad. Dark areas of rot bloom all the way around the rind; dark crevices mark other areas beginning to rot; the fruit is starting to lose its shape. The contours imply a sag, a softening, as though if we were to push down on the top, the melon would yield and compress. From the melon drips a sugary juice, forming a seed-strewn puddle. The seeds, glistening, animate, seem almost to crawl like parasites about their host. All these details Raphaelle represents in an object directly facing his space at close range. This melon’s interior, unlike the one in Still Life with Watermelon, directly meets the viewer’s gaze. Even if the painting has deteriorated over the years, making the melon contrast too strongly with the surrounding darkness, the confrontational quality of the object was probably there from the start.20 In a picture illuminated from the foreground, with the melon blotting out the horizon and acting as a veritable screen to catch the frontally projected light, the artist’s lamp-like identification creates the fiction of his body mirrored back to him in rhymed uncanny spaces of end and origin, rot and seed, joining in one close, musky space of annihilation. This abject femininity is what the cultural historian Barbara Creed, referring to horror films, calls “the voracious maw, the mysterious black hole.” Such a “gestating, all-devouring womb . . . signifies female genitalia as a monstrous sign threatening to give birth to equally horrific o¤spring as well as threatening to incorporate everything in its path.” In patriarchal ideology, it gives rise to “a terror of self-disintegration, of losing one’s self or ego.”21 Indeed in paintings such as Melons and Morning Glories, the issue is not so much that the melon is to be eaten as that it threatens to eat, to satisfy its own voracious cravings. The observer’s space, and not the melon, is in danger of being swallowed. By implying the artist himself in the path of such a devouring object, pulled into its maw, this picture simulates Raphaelle’s failed selfhood even as it also rebarbatively critiques the selfhood he fails to achieve. Showing the morass of the melon so confrontationally, Raphaelle portrayed—and yet also feared— what the culture of selfhood had to exclude to maintain the fiction of identity.

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The second abject picture from about that time is Corn and Cantaloupe, painted around 1813, in which the reproductive capacity of each eponymous object is emphasized (plate 14). The corn’s peeled husk discloses a seed-filled space as womb-like as that of the melon, although the corn’s interior is not gaping mush but two parallel rows of seeds clamped like yellow teeth.22 The corn’s dangling silk, one of the most spectacularly weird details in all of Raphaelle’s art, further activates this sense of the “former Heim.” Although the silk corresponds to an element of an actual ear of corn, it registers as something odder. Meticulously rendered, it evokes the finely portrayed human hair of Raphaelle’s portrait miniatures. It also decisively prefigures Venus’s cascading hair in Venus Rising from the Sea—an association that might alone confirm the “hairiness” of the silk. Here this hairiness, so unwonted in a picture of corn, reads again as bodily imagery returning from repression. Like the asparagus in Cutlet and Vegetables and the vagina-like opening in Still Life with Steak, the silk ambiguously allows the body to come into view at the site of its exclusion. The painting’s relation to anatomical imagery allows a more precise understanding of the hairy silk. In 1774 Jan van Riemsdyck made his detailed drawings of a pregnant cadaver for William Hunter’s Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, drawings that show the peeled skin, exposed internal organs, and pubic hair of the cadaver. Corn and Cantaloupe, for all its manifest di¤erence from van Riemsdyck’s drawings, nonetheless shows the influence of these and similar obstetrical images in Philadelphia, home of Shippen, one of Hunter’s students.23 Here as elsewhere in Raphaelle’s art, however, this dissection imagery makes itself felt as something transmuted—changed into something else so that it almost, but not quite loses its anatomical associations. This bodily residuum, palpable in the peeled husk, exposed womb-like interiors, and silk strands that read finally not just as hair but as pubic hair, gives the painting its uncanny force. As uncanny objects, the feminized corn and melon are identified with the artist’s space. As in Blackberries, Raphaelle depicts the objects on a ledge that implicitly continues into the viewer’s area. The lack of an edge, or of a dark strip like the one in the meat paintings, emphasizes the physical connection, the reversible flow, between the artist’s space and that of the objects he depicts. The ear of corn, moreover, is one of the more visibly handled of all Raphaelle’s objects. The extraordinary manipulation of the corn—arranged to rest on the melon, its husk delicately peeled and turned back at several points—underscores its tactile proximity to the artist’s body. So does its vast scale. At some fifteen inches long, it is considerably larger than an actual ear of corn—an expansion that produces an unsettling, and even overwhelming, sense of its proximity to the viewer’s space. Finally, the way Raphaelle attends to the corn’s physical presence—carefully distinguishing the torn and striated husk, the shiny kernels, and the frazzle of silk—gives it a phenomenological carnality. Like all of Raphaelle’s still-life objects, the corn simulates the body thrown out over there, into the objects of perception, where it becomes an uncanny figure not just of the maternal body but of the artist’s own.

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The same is true for the Anne Arundel melon, with its musky scent implicitly permeating the artist’s body even as its sensuous rendering draws that body toward it. Phoebe Lloyd notes that the melon refers to the area of Maryland in which Raphaelle was born and thus “calls attention to the artist’s nativity.” 24 It does indeed. Shown at only one remove, through just the thinnest corn-and-melon screen of transmuting repression, the abject maternal body exerts its power to disturb, pulling the artist inescapably to the place where he was born.

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chapter nine

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The Rhapsodic Maternal Body

Not all of Raphaelle’s paintings represent the maternal body so darkly. Other images, such as Blackberries and Strawberries and Cream, depict the playful, primally sensuous objects of a deep gratification, sealed o¤ from the surrounding world. These nurturing still lifes, connected to the artist’s own embodiment and to the idea of the infant’s gaze, not surprisingly represent the body of the mother as well. The sensuous object in these paintings simulates the pleasurable bond between mother’s and infant’s bodies, though Peale’s representation always recognizes the slight space between the two. The most striking of these nurturing still lifes feature breast-like paired fruits. These paintings, and a related series emphasizing the touch of one still-life object upon another, can help us understand more about the characteristics and historical specificity of Raphaelle’s maternal imagery.

The Eroticized Breast circa 1800 Among Raphaelle’s portrayals of paired objects are two beautiful paintings he completed within one month of each other in 1815, Fox Grapes and Peaches and Apples and Fox Grapes, and the later Lemons and Sugar (plates 15–17). In their breast-like shape and pairing, these objects embody—at a remove—the era’s emphasis on the maternal bosom. Although they can be connected to a long-standing tradition in which, as Meyer Schapiro notes, “fruit is a natural analogue of ripe human beauty” and “apples are

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both an o¤ering of love and a metaphor for the woman’s breasts,” Raphaelle’s breast-like pairings more fundamentally owe to a historically specific discourse on such subjects.1 Beginning in the mid–eighteenth century, mothers were more often urged to attend closely to their infants. At about that time, writes the literary historian Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, “women were being barraged with admonitions about remaining in the sphere of the home in intimate and constant contact with their infants and young children.”2 Mothers were urged foremost to breast-feed their children, most famously in Rousseau’s Emile, Charles Willson’s child-rearing guide. Partaking of the substance of their own mothers, Rousseau wrote, would start infants on a naturally good life. Mothers and fathers would benefit too. As Marilyn Yalom puts it in her book A History of the Breast, Rousseau “argued that breast-feeding would attach mothers more firmly to their babies and their families, and provide the basis for societal regeneration.” The consequences of Rousseau’s argument were widespread. “The Rousseauist idea that woman was by nature a giving, loving, self-sacrificing, contingent creature,” writes Yalom, “was to form the basis for a new ideology of idealized motherhood, and one that would find currency in Europe and America for much of the next two centuries.” 3 The new Rousseauian stress on “natural” maternity made the display of the breast far more prominent, especially in the clothing of the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century (in the Empire waist, for example). According to Gelpi, as early as the 1690s women’s fashions had begun to emphasize the breast more than the belly, a shift that eroticized the maternal breast, but the emphasis was more pronounced after Rousseau’s ideas were published.4 Noting the “scant attire” worn in public by young mothers in early-nineteenth-century England, Yalom describes the change: “The breasts that had been separated during the Renaissance into two groups—one for nursing, the other for sexual gratification—were now reunited into one multipurpose bosom.” 5 Gelpi quotes Wordsworth’s “grotesquely serious depiction” in The Prelude of the French nobleman Vaudracour seeking comfort at the breast of his lover, Julia, side by side with their infant son: Oftener he was seen Propping a pale and melancholy face Upon the mother’s bosom, resting thus His head upon one breast, while from the other The babe was drawing in its quiet food.6

Philadelphia in these years abounded with literary and pictorial examples of the eroticized maternal breast. The eponymous hero Arthur Mervyn in Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, published in 1799–1800, hides in a closet and voyeuristically watches as a man urges a woman to breast-feed his infant son. The man, Arthur relates, “artfully insinuated the propriety of bestowing care upon the little foundling. . . . She was, for some time, averse to her husband’s proposal, but at length was persuaded to take the babe

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figure 61 Rembrandt Peale, The Roman Daughter, 1811. Oil on canvas, 8¾ × 62⅞ in. National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, gift of the James Smithson Society, 1977.103.

to her bosom and give it nourishment.” The erotics of the breast-feeding are enhanced both by the man’s identity (he turns out not to be the woman’s husband) and by Arthur’s closeted viewing position. Discovering secrets yet again, he sates his curiosity by looking “into other people’s concerns.”7 The most dramatic example of the eroticized breast, however, comes from the Peale family itself. In 1811 Rembrandt painted a large picture called The Roman Daughter, showing the daughter, one of the straps of her high-waisted dress lowered, o¤ering an ample breast to her imprisoned father (fig. 61). The painting was one of many works focused on the breast at the Second Annual Pennsylvania

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figure 62 William Rush, Exhortation, 1812. Pine, painted, 56 × 19 × 18 in. Saint Peter’s Church, Philadelphia. Photograph courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

figure 63 William Rush, Praise, 1812. Pine, painted, 57½ × 24½ × 18 in. Saint Peter’s Church, Philadelphia. Photograph courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Academy Exhibition in 1812, which included William Rush’s carved wooden sculptures, originally painted white, of Exhortation and Praise (figs. 62–63).8 Rembrandt’s painting, however, was the most conspicuous of these works. In the picture gallery, according to one reviewer, it was what “first attract[ed] the notice of visitors.”9 Though presented as a moral admonition about charity and the importance of familial loyalty, the painting is also an interestingly lascivious confirmation of Yalom’s argument that around 1800 lactating breasts had become sexualized. In Rembrandt’s painting, as in the scene from Arthur Mervyn, the sequestered location of the figures increases the erotic charge. Father and daughter look anxiously to the left, as if in fear of discovery,

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but the point of the picture, of course, is to thrill the curious viewer who discovers them in their furtive act. Rembrandt promised as much in his advertisement for the painting’s initial exhibition, in late 1811 at his own Apollodorian Gallery. For an admission price of twenty-five cents, one could enter the Apollodorian and then figuratively enter the still-more-closeted space of the picture housed within it,10 in which the eroticized act, performed by figures “as large as life,” takes place. Like Arthur Mervyn, the viewer is transported into a private chamber and allowed to witness figures engaged in actions, as Arthur would say, of the “most secret and momentous nature.” Picture viewing, like reading in Brown’s novel, is cast as a way to “satisfy and gratify” a curious public both fascinated by, and intolerant of, secrecy.11 Knowing something of the prevalence of the erotic breast in Raphaelle’s Philadelphia, we can better understand the doubled fruit in Fox Grapes and Peaches, Apples and Fox Grapes, and Lemons and Sugar. Raphaelle made his paintings during what Gelpi calls “a cultural obsession with breasts.”12 It is still a long way, however, from literal portrayals of the female body to paintings of paired fruits. Or perhaps not. In his Zoonomia, published in 1794–1796, Erasmus Darwin defined the beautiful object as that which reawakens a primal sense of the maternal breasts. The infant’s pleasurable sense of them is so powerful that in our maturer years, when any object of vision is presented to us, which by its waving or spiral lines bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom, whether it be found in a landscape with soft gradations of rising and descending surface, or in the forms of some antique vases, or in other works of the pencil or the chissel, we feel a general glow of delight, which seems to influence all our senses; and, if the object be not too large, we experience an attraction to embrace it with our arms, and to salute it with our lips, as we did in our early infancy the bosom of our mother.13

For Gelpi, Darwin’s view calls to mind the doctrine of correspondences, in which one thing is felt intrinsically to relate to another comparably shaped object. In the romantic context, she continues, it requires but the projective imagination to fully embosom the beautiful objects. She quotes Keats in claiming that these rounded things for Darwin needed only “a greeting of the Spirit to make them wholly exist” as the primal objects they evoked.14 In Darwin’s view, therefore, these objects do not flash forth uncannily, as terrible things returning from repression, but instead produce a warm recollection, akin to nostalgia except that it collapses time: the breast-like object, by the sheer force of its resemblance, all but makes one once again into an embracing, kissing infant. This experience, far from terrifying, produces “a general glow of delight.” Raphaelle’s paintings imply something similar. The breast-like objects of oral gratification in his paintings imply a smooth and comforting recollection of maternal nurture that at the same time aspires to be no mere recollection at all. The physical presence of Raphaelle’s objects is equivalent to

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Darwin’s “object of vision . . . presented to us”: in each case, the power of the object enables immediate experience of the primal past. In each case, moreover, this mode of immediate experience is phenomenological. As Darwin’s viewer wants to embrace and kiss the maternal object, reaching out to it, so Raphaelle’s paintings depict a strong bond between the artist’s space and the objects he represents. In Lemons and Sugar, as in Blackberries, no edge of a table-like ledge appears; things here are as close to the artist as they get in Raphaelle’s art. A bright light from the artist’s space reflects o¤ the lemons, spoon, decanter, basket, and sugar bowl, which glow with a warmth that they give back as their own vivacity. The illumination and proximity richly embody the objects. The artist invites us to note the texture of the lemons’ skins, and to examine their rounded protuberances that point upward to the right. Overall the lemons read as sensuous enough, and odd enough, to be the simulated products of a “natural judgment” rather than of a taxonomic gaze. The painting o¤ers, to repeat and adapt the words of James Cli¤ord, “a world of intimate encounters with inexplicably fascinating objects: personal fetishes.”15 Although the objects in Fox Grapes and Peaches and Apples and Fox Grapes at first seem less visceral than the lemons in Lemons and Sugar, the e¤ect is similar. In each of these paintings the objects, especially the apples, are set further back than the lemons. And in each Raphaelle also identifies the objects, writing down their names in the pictorial space, so that taxonomy appears to be his purpose. Yet this desultory script, and the relative distance of the fruit, are hardly significant enough to detach the objects from the artist’s space. Again, the goal of these sensuous paintings appears to be to make mundane objects mysterious; to make them look like the objects of “natural judgment”—like things beheld as if for the first time. The clefts and navels of the peaches, as well as their fuzzy texture, imply the nonconceptualized space of “intimate encounters.” These breast-like objects, then, again double the artist with a di¤erence. Yalom quotes one of Freud’s last notebooks, in which the psychoanalyst tried “to reconsider the place of the breast in a child’s mental life.” “Children,” wrote Freud, “like expressing an object-relation by an identification: ‘I am the object.’ . . . Example: the breast. ‘The breast is part of me, I am the breast.’ Only later: ‘I have it’ that is, ‘I am not it.’”16 In these paintings, Raphaelle seemingly strives to show something like this primordial relation to the breast—a relation expressed as a bond between one’s own body and that of the mother, a near-inseparability of the two. In Raphaelle’s paintings, even as the objects are set over there, in the objectified space of the not-me, they exert a pull, a phenomenological magnetism, that partly eradicates the distance, making the worlds of me and not-me intertwine. Raphaelle’s objects, finally, are no more terrifying than the ones Darwin describes. Reminiscence that rounds into direct experience, in which the breast-like objects all but emit a haloed glow of plenitude, is exactly “rhapsodic.” Like Blackberries, these are romantic pictures about “the glory and the freshness of a dream”: the untrammeled intensity of the pre-reflective infantile world in which the

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breasts are but narcissistic extensions of the infant’s own being. The uncanniness of the paintings— for surely they are as uncanny as any pictures Raphaelle ever made—perhaps arises from our own repression of such magically animated worlds of sensuous intensity.

Perpetual Infancy: Delight and Disgust The connotations of the breast in Raphaelle’s peach, apple, and lemon paintings are thus very di¤erent from those in Rembrandt’s Roman Daughter. The still lifes make subordination to the breast-like object a welcome eroticized confinement, whereas Rembrandt’s picture leaves unclear whether a man in a state of infantile dependence is a good or a bad thing. Rembrandt’s painting meditates uncertainly on the power politics of the new maternal eroticism. On the one hand, there is the kindly girl, performing a noble deed designed, no doubt, to give a certain kind of viewer a pleasurable arousal. She is a subordinate figure, a faithful servant. On the other hand, the painting raises the possibility that this same woman is actually too powerful, too captivating in her sexual allure. That was the opinion of George Murray, the art critic for the Port Folio, who wrote in 1812, “The female figure . . . is far from being graceful, and conveys but a faint idea of that extreme delicacy and beauty so perceivable in the female figures of the ancients. . . . [Her] drapery . . . seems to stick to the body.”17 The daughter, for Murray, was not delicate enough in two senses of the word: neither graceful nor modestly clad in loose-fitting garments, she was too strong and too sexualized. The daughter is indeed a powerful figure in still another way: Rembrandt represented her as not just the man’s savior but also his captor. Her long brown hair, pinned up in plaits on her head, curls down over her left shoulder, where it ends in the vicinity of the father’s face (fig. 64). In a figurative sense, however, her hair continues in the chain attached to the wall, which repeats the fall of the hair as well as the rightward bend of her body, in particular her left arm, creating a visual pun about locks of hair. This braided iron, a figurative extension of the woman’s actual hair, falls across the stone bench to the floor, where it grasps the man’s right ankle. Nor is this the only metaphor of imprisonment associated with the daughter. The bend of her right arm, which supports her left breast, matches the geometries of the massive prison wall. Like the wall, she looms over the man. This connection repeats the close hold of the woman’s left hand on the man’s shoulder. The woman, the painting implies, imprisons the man, keeping him in a dungeon of perpetual infancy. In this sense, his anxious glance to the left can even be read as the hopeful look of a captive awaiting a rescuer. Deliverance at last, he seems to say in the silent form of expressive pictorial speech Rembrandt favored, while the daughter, anxious lest he be taken away, cups him to her still more closely. The historical interest of the painting lies in the painter’s indecision about the strength or weak-

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figure 64 The Roman Daughter (detail).

ness of the female figure. The painting’s symbol of this uncertainty is the gap between hair and chain, which allows for the di¤erence between the two even as it visually connects them. Hair both does and does not coarsen into coils of iron. Yet in the way it depicts the father as a simpering dependent, a figure who cannot “act the Man,” the painting may finally lean toward the view of one of its sharpest critics, the reviewer for the Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, who wrote, “The figure of an old man, placed in the situation of an unconscious infant, is perfectly disgusting.”18 Not so for Raphaelle—at least in his nurturing still lifes. His peach, apple, and lemon paintings, in e¤ect, lovingly produce and reproduce the Roman father’s vantage point. Rather than a dungeon, they imply a di¤erent private space from which, amid the bustle of the self-making world, one might never wish to depart. These pictures become small spaces of eroticized maternal plenitude in part because of the ripe perfection of the fruit and in part because of something distinctive in Raphaelle’s art—a feature he employed again and again that no other still-life artist, as far as I know, so devoted himself to.

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The Touching Object In many of Raphaelle’s paintings subordinate objects—the less colorful and smaller items such as leaves and raisins—touch or almost touch the more brilliantly colored main objects. In Fox Grapes and Peaches long slender leaves rest on both peaches, in particular the one at right. The longer leaf makes contact with the fruit across a full quarter of its circumference. In Still Life with Cake, painted in 1822, each of the principal objects, apple and cake, is matched by a sprig of leaves (see plate 2): two curve along the apple, one horizontally and the other vertically, to touch its shiny golden skin; others similarly bend over the cake, though they do not quite touch it. In the related Still Life with Apples, Sherry, and Tea Cake, also from 1822, four leaves bend down toward the cake, the tip of one leaf grazing its surface and two others coming close to doing so (see fig. 8). The leaves of a separate stem resting in the saucer touch the golden apple in a similar way. All or much of the reverse side of one leaf, resting horizontally on a raisin, seems in contact with the apple. Another leaf, extending vertically toward the apple’s stem, like the one that grazes the cake, curves to touch the fruit’s surface with only its pointed tip. Still other examples come to mind. In Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup the larger leaves extend from the carefully placed stem to touch the cup at several points along one smooth side (see plate 3). Others almost touch the creamer below its spout, or rest on that spout. Below, three smaller leaves of the same stem appear to graze the roundel painted on the creamer. In A Dessert, another picture made in 1814, a sprig of leaves rests atop three oranges in a bowl full of raisins and nuts (plate 18). The left- and rightmost leaves sit gently on the oranges, the tip of the one on the right lodging in the navel of the orange below it. Three additional leaves, partly hidden by the orange at left, also appear to graze the surface of that fruit. This same painting shows how Raphaelle used raisins as well as leaves to perform this touching. In Still Life with Cake several raisins at the cake’s left edge accomplish the touch that the leaves above the cake only intimate. A Dessert shows raisins touching several surfaces, notably the orange on the right, the lip of the bowl, and the ledge surface on the right, near the four chestnuts. In Still Life with Liqueur and Fruit (plate 19), a closely related picture of circa 1814, three raisins rest on the orange at right. Raphaelle’s leaves and raisins intensify our sense of two intertwined phenomena: the materiality of the objects they touch, and the body of the touching observer. The dimpled texture of the oranges in A Dessert, the downy fuzz of the peaches in Fox Grapes and Peaches, the glowing smooth surface of the apple in Still Life with Cake, all become more vivid for having been grazed by another object. The touching object also enacts the tactility—the business of seeing with one’s hands—that is otherwise only implicit in the dense proximate roundedness of arranged cakes and fruits. More precisely, these touching objects act as emissaries of the viewer’s perception: to perceive the leaves grazing the golden apple, for example, is to feel the apple’s texture by means of these leaves,

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to feel the sensations of one’s own fingertips as the “sensations,” if we may call them that, of the leaves themselves. The leaf’s “sensitivity to light and, equally, its sensitivity to touch,” as Elaine Scarry has written about flowers, would be “precocious of our own perception.”19 In a more phenomenological way, these things spring to life—they are given the quality of sensing—not just as primitive versions of human apprehension but as imaginative projections of the artist’s body, in particular his hands. In Fox Grapes and Peaches the slender finger-like leaves curl around the peach on the right as though grasping it. Accordingly, the raisins in Still Life with Liqueur and Fruit, strikingly resting on the side of the orange, touch the object like clinging fingertips. Blackberries and Still Life with Cake, paintings in which the paired leaves extend in a multidirectional exploration of nearby objects, do so in a leftright adjacency that invites us to see them as hand-like. The raisins pushing against the cake seem like more fingertips erupting at the scene of their repression. The touches in this last painting are especially persistent—the main objects seemingly cannot be left alone. In these paintings, then, maternal object and infantile touching hand come together, grazing and grazed, cupped and curled around one another, as if striving to defeat the space between subject and object. Imaginatively projecting his hands out ahead of himself by means of ambiguous physiological amalgams such as leaf-fingers and raisin-fingertips, Raphaelle figuratively reaches across a threshold, connecting himself to the things he shows. It is as though these objects, having been arranged so carefully by the artist, still retained the weight, and even something of the appearance, of the hands that placed them there. To place the object just so, and then to make the object into an image of the placing hand, letting the hand remain forever in the space it has vacated: this is what these paintings depict, a reluctance to let go. Raphaelle’s still lifes thus follow Rousseau’s conception of the infant, who “wants to touch and handle everything. . . . to perceive the heat, cold, hardness, softness, weight, or lightness of bodies, to judge their size and shape and all their physical properties.”20 In doing so, however, the paintings resist the era’s narratives of socialization. Touching in them is not about learning anything socially useful; it is not to be sublimated into cultural activities. We can see this point better if we turn to one of Charles Willson Peale’s best-known paintings—a picture expressly devoted to a cultural lesson about the sublimation of an infant’s primal touch. Before 1775, the elder Peale began the large family portrait called The Peale Family Group, a picture he worked on, abandoned, and finally resumed and finished in 1809 (fig. 65). The painting shows the extended Peale family living in Charles Willson’s house in Annapolis, Maryland, in the 1770s. Charles Willson bends down, at upper left, to supervise the drawing e¤orts of his younger brother St. George Peale, having interrupted his own work on a picture of three female figures chalked in on the canvas at left. Meanwhile, James Peale, Charles Willson’s other brother, sits to St. George’s left

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figure 65 Charles Willson Peale, The Peale Family Group, ca. 1774, 1809. Oil on canvas, 56½ × 89½ in. The New-York Historical Society, 1867.298.

and points a pencil toward St. George’s sitters at far right. These are Mrs. Peale, the family matriarch, who poses stiffly, staring straight ahead, and a young child, variously identified as Charles Willson’s one-year-old daughter, Eleanor, or as the child of Elizabeth Digby Peale Polk, the artist’s sister, who sits next to Mrs. Peale. Between the groups at left and right is Rachel Brewer Peale, Charles Willson’s wife, whom we have seen earlier in a detail (see fig. 26). She holds another child, who has been identified as Margaret, Eleanor’s sister, and more recently as Raphaelle, who was born on February 17, 1774.21 The Raphaelle figure is already improbably dexterous. As James gestures with his crayon to the right, the infant reciprocates with a gesture to the left. The infant also orients its body more to the art-making side and seems to watch St. George in the act of drawing. The art historian David Steinberg, who has persuasively re-identified the figure as Raphaelle, notes that he was the first child whom Charles Willson named after a famous artist, in a sense programming him for an artistic career. To show this child precociously interested in art, Steinberg points out, would make sense. He writes, “Peale may have conceived this work of art to prompt Raphaelle to strive to handle and to master the

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tools of art.”22 Thus, in Steinberg’s reading, Charles Willson’s desire to show his son as an old master in the making, a Raphaelle from birth, perhaps caused him to depict the infant as entirely too dexterous for his age. The other child, conversely, demonstrates a sensuous touching more in line with Rousseauian ideas of infancy and early childhood. Reaching for the plate of fruit set out before her, the child recalls Rousseau’s words in Emile. In the painting’s narrative of socialization, this child has moved only a little way from the primal source of this touching—the mother’s body—to a rudimentary form of substitute object. The child’s primitive dexterity is indeed far from that of St. George Peale, the figure at the opposite end of the table. Although each figure is a novice undergoing a first lesson, the painting contrasts the child’s imprecise fingering with St. George’s relatively skillful handling of the pencil.23 Unlike the Raphaelle figure, precociously related to drawing, the child on the right is a clumsy-handed foil to St. George’s manual precision. From right to left, the painting thus charts a Rousseauian journey: from proximity to the mother’s body, to a first rounded substitute object, to the sublimatory glories of artistic craft, where one draws one’s mother on a flat surface, from a proper distance across the table. The three female figures, chalked on the easel, emphasize how artistry renders the first body, that of the mother, still more evanescent. The more distance one gains, the more that body becomes an airy representation and perhaps a generic type for multiple female figures (here three). This thinning and flattening of initial plenitude—its transformation first into the still-rounded forms of the fruit and then into flat surfaces bearing rudimentary and wispy marks—is no tragedy, however, but instead epitomizes warm, a¤ectionate, and cultivated behavior.24 Raphaelle’s pictures such as Still Life with Cake simulate something like the touching depicted in The Peale Family Group’s infant on the right. Raphaelle’s touching motifs, like the Rousseauian infant’s experience, represent first substitutes, bare substitutes, for the maternal body, but with the forms of the still life themselves acting as both the touching hands and that first body. To this extent they imply no real substitution—no strong sense of loss—but rather represent objects as rounded, as sensuous, as the Very First Things, and “fingers” as exploratory and open to new sensation as those of the Rousseauian infant. They depict, in other words, something akin to Erasmus Darwin’s pleasurable collapse of time. These pictures thus posit not just the physical and chronological proximity of maternal body and sensuous things that The Peale Family Group so neatly diagrams, but also their near identity in rounded, nippled, and naveled objects of oral gratification. Raphaelle’s pictures, moreover, devote themselves to hermetic spaces of a small fascination meant never to end; a space in which the long view, the conceptualized space of detachment, hinted at in the horizon, is understood to be a loss, not a gain. In Still Life with Cake the arcing sprig of leaves at right seemingly strives to touch not just the cake but the far edge of the table-like surface, as if to bring even

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that token of distance, of dissipating sublimation, within the grasp of immediate experience. Whereas The Peale Family Group shows a world in which touch is gradually desensitized (is it likely that St. George is actually meant to feel the paper on which his drawing hand rests?), Raphaelle shows a space in which that touch is always wondrously sensitive. Like all of Raphaelle’s nurturing images, Still Life with Cake, signed “Raphaelle Peale, Jan 1st, 1822,” is about beginnings.

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chapter ten

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Smallness

Raphaelle’s maternal still lifes, like all his pictures, cannot be understood only on their own terms. They were a reaction against two kinds of art. One was the long view enshrined in the very large picture: only a culture abounding in images of confident individuals and wide fields, often rendered in massive canvases, could produce an art as small and radically inward as Raphaelle’s. The other was the era’s iconography of a socializing mother, whole and benevolent, that allegorized civic and personal subjectivity in Philadelphia. By looking more closely at the socializing function of this “good mother” imagery, we can better understand the strategic quality of Raphaelle’s own more intimately maternal pictures. Let us consider this allegorical mother figure first, and the expansive picture second.

Maternal Allegory and Civic Identity in Early-Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia The print and visual culture of Philadelphia in Raphaelle’s era was dominated by allegorical figures of women. These figures, as Ric Northrup Caric notes, helped to invent the civic identity of the city’s residents. In his discussion of identity formation among the city’s artisans in the period 1785–1820, Caric analyzes popular songs and jokes and concludes that “when artisans represented themselves as distinct individuals or selves, they also represented their reality allegorically through images of a ‘good mother.’”1 He elaborates:

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At militia dinners, political meetings, and civic processions where artisans posed themselves as independent, skilled and virtuous members of the trade and community, [they did so through] benevolent feminine images like “good-humoured fortune,” the “genius of liberty,” or “Columbia.” Through these female spirits, artisans represented an economic reality of smooth shop production, large sales, and stable relations with debtors and creditors that was benevolently “giving” them prosperity and making it possible to experience themselves as respectable and independent.2

Public sculptures in Philadelphia, including some we have already examined, indicate that Caric’s findings relate to all socioeconomic levels of the city’s culture. Rush’s Exhortation and Praise, originally ornamenting the new organ at Saint Paul’s Church, and later at nearby Saint Peter’s, where they still stand, were focal points for large congregations (see figs. 62–63).3 At the Masonic Hall, Rush’s Silence, among other maternal figures by the sculptor, acted as a comparable point of communal identification for the lodge brothers (see fig. 20). According to the Masons’ Building Committee, the sculpture was placed “in the niche on the Stairs,” meaning that the Masons would approach it from below as well as above.4 Sixty-six inches tall, including its base, Silence would thus have looked down upon the men climbing the stairs, a looming benevolent mother that might have encouraged the Masons to feel all the more distinct as members of a respectable community. Rush’s wide-hipped, high-waisted figure, painted white, epitomizes Caric’s idea of the city’s ubiquitous and benevolent “female spirits.” John Lewis Krimmel’s painting Fourth of July in Centre Square shows another of Rush’s sculptures in just such an overseeing role (fig. 66). Painted in 1812 and exhibited at the Second Annual Pennsylvania Academy Exhibition, along with Rush’s Exhortation and Praise and Rembrandt Peale’s Roman Daughter, Krimmel’s painting shows Rush’s recently completed Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill. Carved in 1809 of wood painted white, the sculpture depicts a woman holding a bittern from whose beak shoots an eight-foot jet of water. The sculpture symbolizes the activity of the classical building to the left: the pumping station of the city’s original waterworks, designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe and built in 1799–1800 to pump water from the Schuylkill River through pipes into the city. Krimmel shows Rush’s sculpture at the very center of his painting, above the frieze of foreground figures. Signifying civic progress, the sculpture benignly oversees the disparate activities of the populace. Rush’s Allegorical Figure, moreover, placed centrally not only in Krimmel’s painting but in the city itself (Philadelphia’s City Hall now occupies the site), provides a rallying point for a heterogeneous public that might otherwise be difficult to define as a united civic group. In this painting, which the Port Folio’s George Murray called “Hogarthian,” Krimmel confronts a pictorial dilemma like the one that faced eighteenth-century British artists.5 In a mercantile nation in which many persons are actuated by self-interest, how does one show community? The art historian David Solkin, who has traced this dilemma through eighteenth-century British art, describes a picture in words that fit Krimmel’s:

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figure 66 John Lewis Krimmel, Fourth of July in Centre Square, 1812. Oil on canvas, 22¾ × 29 in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Pennsylvania Academy purchase (from the estate of Paul Beck, Jr., Collection).

“What we see . . . is a crowd of people pursuing their own disparate interests in a modern urban place of entertainment.”6 In Krimmel’s picture, as children play and men drink, as almost all the assembled figures engage in different activities, Rush’s sculpture offers a saving definition of commonality. In a national celebration, what signifies a local and national public is not finally the American flag but the allegorical image of a benevolent woman. Rush’s sculpture is like “the goddess of liberty” and the “Guardian Genius of Columbia,” to which various Philadelphia groups would drink toasts on the Fourth of July.7 It brings people together. As a marker of civic identity, Rush’s sculpture was yet not the most prominent female allegorical figure in Philadelphia. The city seal, shown here in two versions from around 1816 and 1824, features

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figure 67 Attributed to Thomas Sully, The City Seal of Philadelphia, ca. 1824. Oil on canvas, 108 × 64 in. (cropped at edges). Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

figure 68 John Woodside, The City Seal of Philadelphia, ca. 1816. Oil on canvas, 56¼ × 56 in. Independence National Historical Park, Philadelphia.

two allegorical women (figs. 67–68). Designed in 1789, the seal depicts a central shield, featuring a plow and sailing ship, flanked by two figures: Plenty on the right and perhaps Philadelphia on the left, holding an unfurled plan of the city.8 Above the shield in the version attributed to Thomas Sully, probably painted in 1824 for Lafayette’s entry into the city, a disembodied arm holds the scales of justice— as specified in the 1789 design. In the 1816 version by the noted Philadelphia sign painter John Woodside, the figure on the left holds the scales. In each case, these large paintings allegorize balanced civic identity in the full-length figures of maternal women. Presiding over the visually rhymed attributes of justice, farming, and mercantile trade, these figures promise a benevolent and shielding social reality out of which an apparently coherent identity can be fashioned. Raphaelle, by focusing so tightly on a much more fragmentary maternal imagery, created in his nurturing still lifes an altogether different “good mother.” The viewer of these paintings is meant to be kept forever in the ungridded spaces of sensuous gratification, away from Centre Square. Yet in one way the city’s allegorical figures are actually analogous to Raphaelle’s paintings as expressions of nonidentity, as we can see in a brief analysis of two pictures about the hydraulics of identity formation,

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Charles Willson’s Exhumation of the Mastodon (see fig. 58) and Krimmel’s Fourth of July in Centre Square. In each painting a community gathers around a water-pumping device that gives its disparate members a sense of common cause. The two communities, however, are vastly different. In The Exhumation, sharp-featured portraits spring up around the morass; individuals gain personal and communal identity precisely because of their proximity to the womb-like grave of nonidentity. Racing the impending storm, Charles Willson and the other figures work desperately to manufacture a sense of self before it is too late. Identity formation is an active and even heroic endeavor in Peale’s image, as it is in West’s painting of Benjamin Franklin. In each case, using crude materials and the ingenuity of desperation, virtuous figures work against time to make a name for themselves. In Krimmel’s image, by contrast, figures gather around a standing white goddess instead of a dark hole in the ground. The gathering point is an icon of identity instead of the very abyss against which identity must be fashioned. Whereas Peale’s image represents the urgent manufacture of identity, Krimmel’s shows identity already manufactured and set forth as a prepackaged image before a complacent public. As Latrobe’s pumping station sluices water to consumers, so Rush’s sculpture distributes identity to those gathered around it. Krimmel’s painting even satirizes the sculpture’s identity-giving function, claiming that Rush’s work does not so much produce as confuse the crowd’s civic identity. The painting notes that the sculpture designs the identity of the populace for them, absolving them of any Peale-like urgency to invent themselves by their actions, allowing them instead to frolic in a bacchanalian panoply of aimless gratifications. In Krimmel’s painting, Rush’s sculpture is like a golden calf, licensing frivolous amusement rather than civic virtue.9 This prefabricated image of identity not only pacifies but baffles the crowd. The vague and arbitrary iconography of the sculpture exemplifies what Rembrandt Peale meant in 1820 when he decried allegory’s confusing personifications, its “local expressions, obscure meanings, absurd symbols, and unnatural combinations.”10 The joke of the painting is that members of the assembled crowd interpret the allegorical sculpture differently. Two countrified figures at far right, one scratching his head, plainly cannot understand its significance. They are set off against the elegant men and women to their left— figures at home with the art and architecture of Centre Square. The women, clad in white, match Rush’s allegorical figure; and the men, as the art historian Anneliese Harding points out, wear hats that match the round-topped dome of Latrobe’s pumping station.11 The sculpture embodies their own smooth-flowing, up-to-date social elegance. At left center another top-hatted man stares at the sculpture as if enamored. A man at far left gestures vigorously with his walking stick, seeming to explain the work to his bespectacled companion. Meanwhile children play within and just outside the iron fence surrounding the sculpture, and a Quaker man, turning his back on the nymph, admonishes his son not to approach it, while his wife looks back at the offending art over her shoulder.

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No one in Krimmel’s painting quite knows what to make of an allegorical figure of the kind that Rembrandt wrote “has yielded the same species of amusement as riddles.”12 Thus at the time when allegory was questioned as a way to convey meaning, Philadelphia’s most ubiquitous markers of civic identity were allegorical. At the city’s very center, personal and civic subjectivity was personified as a woman holding a struggling and spitting shorebird. The sculpture is then the goddess, the patron saint, of the social disunity around it. Raphaelle’s paintings, much different and far less interested in allegory, nonetheless share Krimmel’s ambivalence about the imagery of the new selfhood. The most salient fact about Raphaelle’s maternal imagery, however, remains its disavowal of any attempt to socialize. Even if the benevolent goddess figures finally attested to an inability to represent personal or civic identity, they nonetheless aimed to create it; Raphaelle’s paintings, on the contrary, rejected this aim.

The Long View, the Big Picture, and the New Selfhood In an era encouraging visual jumps from here to there, from specificity to far-flung generality, Raphaelle produced radically bundled arrays of objects, such as those featured in Still Life with Cake (see plate 2), and pictures that refuse the perspectival attenuation of the visual field that helped mark the era’s rational and commercial models of selfhood. A related characteristic of the era’s expansive pictures is their often extraordinary size. To cite only pictures shown in Philadelphia between 1811 and 1822, Allston’s Dead Man Restored is 13 by 10 feet; West’s Christ Healing the Sick is 10 by 15 feet; Charles Willson’s Artist in His Museum is roughly 8½ by 6½ feet; Rembrandt’s Roman Daughter is about 7 by 5 feet; and his Court of Death, one of the largest pictures shown in Philadelphia in this period, is about 11½ by 23 feet. Elsewhere in the country John Trumbull’s 12-by-18-foot history paintings were installed in the Capitol Rotunda between 1817 and 1824. Allston painted his Jeremiah, roughly 7 by 8 feet, as well as his Belshazzar’s Feast, begun in 1817 and never completed, which measures more than 12 by 16 feet. And in New York between 1816 and 1819 John Vanderlyn painted one of the era’s panoramas, Palace and Garden of Versailles, which measures 12 by 165 feet. By contrast, to pick four Raphaelle paintings shown in Philadelphia in these years, Blackberries is 7¼ by 10¼ inches; Apples and Fox Grapes is roughly 9¾ by 11½ inches; Fox Grapes and Peaches 9½ by 11½ inches; and Still Life with Cake 9½ by 11½ inches. At first the size differential may seem too obvious a point to remark. Of course, one might think, still-life paintings would be smaller than history paintings. Yet many still lifes are larger than some history paintings, in particular those influenced by the genre painting that appeared increasingly in antebellum America.13 More fundamentally, the acuteness of the contrast is striking: Raphaelle painted

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exceptionally small pictures in an era of exceptionally large pictures. Because of their pronounced difference, the two kinds of painting exist in a tantalizing relation, which centers on the discourse of selfhood. The Artist in His Museum shows how expansive pictures and expansive spaces could become tokens of the new selfhood in these years (see fig. 10). Like other large pictures from the era, it showcased the artist’s ability to control space. The Peale figure gestures below and to the upper left, bringing the extreme foreground and distant background of the Long Room under his control. The perspectival lines of the floor emphasize his spatial command: objects that exist at the far end of the room are on a continuum with those in the area where the artist himself stands. The distance is not a dislocated area of unknown relevance to the central figure but an extension of his rational being. With his perspectival web he controls this vast area as much as he does the very spot on which he stands. The rationalist generalization, which conceives localized entities in relation to vaster universes, here establishes the controlling ubiquity of the republican self. Peale is present everywhere, not just in the place where he stands. The power of the republican self is measured by his mastery of expansive space. This space is not just that of the Long Room but also that of the large painting. Peale noted of one of his late self-portraits, a small picture in which he holds a brush and palette, that he had painted it at age eighty-one “without spectacles.”14 If we understand how proud he was of his ability to make a small painting at an advanced age, we can more readily comprehend the self-reflexive pride of his pose in the much larger self-portrait he completed in the same years. “Peale raises a curtain with his right hand,” writes David Steinberg, “as if to declare ‘this is the order that I composed.’”15 The Quaker woman in the background is taken aback by the size of the mammoth, but Peale is not overwhelmed by the size of the painting. With his proud gestures, he indicates the picture he has painted as well as the museum he has created, as if to say, all of this I have controlled—I can master even a vast amount of canvas, and at age eighty-one. This imagery of spatial mastery was appropriated from aristocratic visual models. As Roger Stein notes, The Artist in His Museum derives from such portraits of aristocratic figures as Herman van der Myn’s large full-length picture, Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord Baltimore, an image Peale knew from his youth. Painted about 1730, it hung in the Annapolis statehouse. As Stein writes, it shows Calvert before a “deep space,” attesting to his “aristocratic power.”16 Almost one hundred years later, Peale would appropriate this spatial power as an icon of the new selfhood. In 1772 Burke could still deprecate his own upstart status compared with the expansive space at the command of the duke of Richmond— “Persons in your station of life ought to have long views.” By 1822, however, as Peale’s painting attests, the long view had come to signal the ambition of the virtuous and possessive self. Burke’s words to Richmond, “You . . . perpetuate your benefits from Generation to Generation,” fit well Charles Willson’s conception of the museum’s own noblesse oblige. As Allston’s Jeremiah represented a relic

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of the older aristocratic model of spatial control—a commanding prophet still dominating a huge pictorial space in 1820—so Peale’s painting showed the bourgeois appropriation of the long view.

Vastness and Bewilderment: The New Selfhood in Thomas Sully’s Passage of the Delaware This appropriated imagery of long views, however, had a potentially negative connotation. The visual language of a new liberal ambition always threatened to be too expansive—to represent a space whose very limitlessness, if insufficiently controlled, might represent the nightmare of the new selfhood: a space without restraints, without definition, that testified less to the self’s expansive mastery than to its fearful bewilderment before too much possibility, too much responsibility. Inheriting the aristocratic long view was a mixed blessing. The most powerful and most pessimistic of the era’s meditations on vast space and the new selfhood is Thomas Sully’s great 12-by 17-foot Passage of the Delaware, painted in Philadelphia in 1819 (fig. 69). Sully made the painting in his studio in Philosophical Hall, adjoining the Pennsylvania State House, the building in which the Peale Museum was located in those years.17 The picture shows Washington in the military action Emanuel Leutze would make iconic thirtytwo years later. Washington, on a white stallion in the foreground, watches the flotilla of artillery cross the Delaware River in the middle of the night, prior to the Battle of Princeton. The general, we are to understand, will soon cross the river himself with his nearby attendants, following the icy trail of the cannon at lower left. Sully conceived the painting as a “historical portrait.” It was to accompany two smaller, more conventional portraits of Washington that Sully, underbidding Rembrandt Peale, had been commissioned to paint for the North Carolina State House in Raleigh.18 The painting is interesting first for its transformation of Washington into a version of the new individual. Although Washington was a Federalist, markers of his new liberal selfhood abound in Sully’s painting. Each age reinvents Washington to fit its own cultural and political purposes, and the early nineteenth century was no exception.19 The art historian Philipp Fehl notes Washington’s “gentle civility” in the picture and the “soulfulness” of Washington’s face, based on an accentuation of “sentiment” in one of Sully’s avowed sources for the general’s features, Giuseppe Ceracchi’s sculptural bust of a youthful introspective Washington. Indeed Sully’s insistence on Washington’s youth—accurately reflecting the general’s age in 1776—alone softened the patriarch’s severity. From venerable elder statesman to soulful younger man—Sully’s picture transforms paternal power much as West transformed Allston’s fearful Old Testament patriarchs into benevolent New Testament healers. Like the figure of Jesus in Christ Healing the Sick, installed in Philadelphia two years before Sully painted The Passage of the Delaware, Washington is a kinder, softer leader. As Fehl puts it, Sully warned his patrons “that they might not recognize the George Washington they knew.”20

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figure 69 Thomas Sully, The Passage of the Delaware, 1819. Oil on canvas, 146½ × 207 in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of the Owners of the old Boston Museum.

In Sully’s portrayal, however, the new self’s quiet command is tinctured by doubt. Although the flotilla sails on Washington’s orders—and does so, we know from the historical narrative, successfully— this is not what the painting conveys. Its whole left side is a fog-strewn icy zone, an extremely uninviting space of danger, that the artist’s friend William Dunlap aptly called “sublime.”21 The dead tree, extending jaggedly from the middle ground into the background, marks the foreboding chill of that distant space. Washington’s body language confirms the danger. He turns partly away from the river crossing, looking at it over his right shoulder only glancingly or perhaps not at all. Other figures share the leader’s ambivalence. Washington’s horse points away from the icy emptiness, again looking at it, if at all, only with a twist of the neck. The standing man at lower right, preparing to mount his horse,

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also turns his back upon the sublime zone, he too seeing it only with a glance over his shoulder. Although his destination too appears to be the river, his body language suggests that he cowers before the abysm. The other two figures at right, including the man on the rearing stallion pointing his sword energetically, confront the distance more directly. Yet these figures show no sign of moving toward that perilous zone. The historical narrative notwithstanding, what the picture conveys visually is that no one on the right side of the painting wishes to follow the cannon down into the distance. The painting thus comes across as a meditation on the perils of the new subjectivity. The long view, appropriated from aristocratic representations, is now set out before the liberal individual, where it represents the potentially limitless command of the new self. Yet it is fearsome, a space to recoil from or to contemplate only warily. Washington, the surveyor, looks out upon a cold, dark vast space that resists intellectual and physical control. Suddenly to have a whole wide world at one’s feet—to have successfully appropriated the potentially limitless command of an aristocratic lord—produces a daunting new challenge. The long view represents an inhospitable world in which one will sink or float entirely on one’s own merits. Sully’s very choice of a moment in the “Delaware” narrative is significant. Whereas Leutze in 1851 would show the general crossing the river, chin to the wind and cutting a defiant profile, Sully revealingly shows Washington when the issue is in doubt. Not having embarked himself, with the flotilla just having begun to cross, Washington knows only that the night is cold and the outcome uncertain. Leutze’s Washington is confident; Sully’s watches a scene more like that conveyed in the diary of a participant, who wrote, “It was as severe a night as I ever saw. The frost was sharp, the current difficult to stem, the ice increasing, the wind high, and at eleven it began to snow.”22 This same ambivalence is played out self-reflexively in the artist’s relation to the painting’s enormous size. As Washington struggles to command a vast space, so Sully found a comparable challenge in controlling the breadth of a truly daunting stretch of canvas: 146 by 207 inches. On the one hand, to take control of it, as much as to take command of a vast space, might attest to the newfound reach of the liberal subject. To paint on that scale, as Charles Willson Peale knew, would itself be a heroic indication of the new subjectivity. On the other hand, the large canvas, like the expanded field, offered a chance for spectacular failure, and Sully’s painting dwells on this possibility of pictorial failure with a winning bafflement. The picture does this by acknowledging its inability to marshal the left side of the canvas into unity with the right side. As contemporary viewers recognized, Sully’s painting divides, with a portrait on the right and a history painting on the left, the two halves existing in a refractory and unresolved combination. As John Neal put it in 1823, “Some people went to see the passage of the delaware: and some a portrait of george washington, at full length. Both came away dissatisfied. It wanted the singleness, the unity, and imposing reality of a portrait. And there were not enough great features

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uniting, at once, in one great expression, for historical painting.” 23 Sully’s painting even represents this split in the way the figures on the portrait side, especially Washington himself, ambivalently eye the vast and empty space—the history side—that finally neither they nor the artist himself knows what to do with.24 In this sense, Washington might represent Sully himself. Neal described the artist’s daring project— to venture into the field of history painting—in a way that clearly refers to the ambivalent figure of Washington: It was putting [Sully’s] very existence at hazard, even to trespass, for a day, upon the historical department. . . . Much as he panted for adventure—these reasons deter him from it. Yet—the time might come, he thought, when he could loosen the bands that bound him, and unfetter his genius—it might!—and where would be the peril, if he ventured abroad, a little, to feel the publick, in this portrait of Washington, without actually invading the great territories of history. There would be some peril, to be sure, in this hazardous ordeal, to which he would have to expose it, before a cold hearted, mercenary people.25

As Washington sits poised on the edge of an unknown space, so Sully thinks ambivalently about a foray abroad, a “hazardous ordeal,” “without actually invading the great territories of history.” The critic turns the ambivalent Washington of The Passage of the Delaware into an allegory of the artist’s own brave but nervous pictorial venture. As Washington anxiously faced a vast and unknown realm, a land of too-fearsome possibility, so did Sully. In The Artist in His Museum, by contrast, Peale rigorously inscribed and overinscribed such a long view, making it perspectively his own, emphasized in the mathematized floorboards of an untrammeled command. Perhaps even as a direct response to Sully’s painting, which after all was made three years earlier in a space adjoining Peale’s museum, The Artist in His Museum shows Charles Willson’s capacity to survey long views and large pictures better than even the surveyor Washington himself. Peale delimits vast space; his is a finite sublime. Sully’s painting, in contrast, shows the quandaries of the new self. Sensing a world of possibilities in which he might enlarge his own standing beyond that of a mere portraitist, Sully ventured into unknown territory, making a painting of vast proportions, but was ultimately confounded in his ambition, made the victim of too much space, too exalted a sense of potential—a quandary significant enough, powerful enough, for him to represent as the very subject of his painting.26 In The Passage of the Delaware, the self’s expanded canvas is a wintry world promising oblivion more than fame. In a culture emphasizing the long view and the large picture, it is no wonder that Raphaelle chose to make such conspicuously small paintings. These minuscule pictures, in their very size, refused both the aggrandizement and anxious doubt of the era’s images of commanding selfhood. Amid fear-

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ful icy vistas and massive canvases, Raphaelle’s pictures make a strategic point of remaining small and, as it were, indoors. The touch of a leaf upon a piece of fruit, in a hermetic space of maternal warmth, cannot be understood apart from the vastness that such a gesture, in all its tenderness, aggressively rejects. It is no surprise, therefore, that Raphaelle’s only explicit representation of these rejected spaces is a scene like Sully’s Passage of the Delaware, except cast in miniature. On the sugar bowl in Strawberries, Nuts, &c., Raphaelle shows the allegorical figure of Hope kneeling in the foreground (see figs. 16–17). Anchored there, the figure is also pulled by the two tethered birds into the distance, as uncertain a space for this figure as for Sully’s Washington, painted three years earlier. The story of selfhood, the business of being pulled away into a vast unknown space, of entering a wide and daunting world, is precisely what Raphaelle employs all his pictorial skills to refuse.

Transcoding National and Personal Space: The Expansive Self The world Raphaelle knew had grown much wider at the time he made his conspicuously small pictures. His still lifes come from the years directly after the Louisiana Purchase, which enlarged the country significantly. The vastness he rejected was therefore far more expansive than it had been for Brown in his “Rhapsodist,” published in 1789. When that figure “would withdraw himself entirely from the commerce of the world,” the world in question was far more localized.27 Raphaelle’s hermeticism, in contrast, took place in a nation symbolized by the fossil discoveries of Charles Willson Peale and others: that is, a newly “mammoth” land. Raphaelle’s rejection of vastness, however, is a criticism, not of expansion, but of what it came to represent in this era: the expansive possibilities of the self. A coincidence shows how this is so. On Apples and Fox Grapes, his roughly 9-by-11-inch painting, Raphaelle signed his name and, below it, the place and date: “Phila. Sept 7. 1815.” On this same day, Poulson’s reprinted an article from the Port Folio about “the largest specimen of geographical design ever produced in the United States,” Samuel Lewis’s roughly 6-by-6-foot New and Correct Map of the United States of North America, shown here in a detail of the northeast section, prominently marked by the Appalachian Mountains (fig. 70).28 The first of several large-size national maps Lewis produced in Philadelphia from 1815 to his death in 1822, the New and Correct Map did not even show all the territory explored by Lewis and Clark: it shows the West only to a point just beyond Louisiana and to the middle of Minnesota. Yet in Poulson’s the reviewer connected the size of the map to the grand spaces of the newly expanded nation: “You involuntarily think of it as the representative of vast limits and exalted qualities. It exhibits a view of lakes and rivers, and plains and mountains, wilderness and cultivated land, not unworthy of the immense extent and lofty character of the country it delineates.”29

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figure 70 Samuel Lewis, A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America, 1815. 67 × 73 in. (detail). American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia.

Part of a “print discourse of geography” that helped Americans fashion a sense of national identity in these years, Lewis’s vast map dramatized that identity in its very dimensions.30 The era’s large paintings also often link expansive space and expanded national territory. More precisely, they connect vast pictorial space—that symbol of the possibilities and anxieties of the new self— and the expanded lands of the nation. As a blessing and a burden, the self in these years suddenly had more territory to work with—and the dizzying new extent of the United States became the paradigm for these liberating or threatening spaces of individuality. The idea was not necessarily to go to these new spaces but to represent one’s own space as a territory, a vaster arena than an earlier generation of American artists could envision as a figure’s locale. In The Artist in His Museum, for example, the territoriality of the Long Room is signaled by several references to expansion. The turkey, as Stein notes, had been brought back by Titian Ramsay from Missouri, where he had accompanied the expedition of Stephen P. Long in 1819.31 The mastodon, as Laura Rigal points out, was also called a “mammoth,” and it became associated in these years with “the

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social and economic policies of Jefferson and his supporters, the Jeffersonian-Republicans,” in particular the vast increase in the country’s size.32 The Long Room itself had expansive connotations. Located on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House, it was directly above the chamber in which both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were signed. Its attenuated space might have been read in 1822 as a stretching of the nation’s smaller original quarters: a more expansive room for a more expansive country. A similarly attenuated view is present in The Passage of the Delaware. Made in the year of Long’s expedition to the Rocky Mountains, the first scientific foray to the West since Lewis and Clark’s expedition, the painting shows figures looking east, yet its representation of vast distance owes something to a Monrovian era of National Republicanism in which the nation’s own vastness was a new political fact and a novel source for the imagination. The topmost man in Sully’s picture points to the distance with a gesture that midcentury artists such as Leutze and William Ranney would appropriate as the sign of the western pioneer’s recognition of a new land. Even if the self in Sully’s picture is a reluctant pioneer, confronting a land of possibility that has yet to become a halcyon space of promise, the expansiveness of the painting manifests the country’s new size. Raphaelle’s paintings, in this same era, thus enclose and diminish themselves against not just long views and large pictures but also against the wide national spaces transcoded through the Big Image. The worlds they exclude are more far-flung than simply the local view out the reflected window, as Raphaelle’s most distinguished patrons later recognized. Writing in 1837, at the end of Andrew Jackson’s aggressively expansionist presidency, the Baltimore collector Robert Gilmor, Jr., conveyed his anti-Jackson sentiment to the Philadelphian Charles Graff, owner of Blackberries: It is something soothing in these gloomy times to be able to talk or write for a few minutes on the subject of the Arts, in which, thank God, you + I have as a resource, whatever may happen. Let us not despair, but encourage each other, + cultivate our tastes, and at no distant day this tremendous tornado raised by the arch demon of mischief [Jackson] (tho’ the idol of the people) will pass away, and we will once more take our cheerful glass of Madeira together + talk over our amusements + past times, + rejoice we have weathered the storm.33

Gilmor, the owner of several Raphaelle Peale paintings, not only severely criticizes the expansionist president, taking it for granted that Graff shares his ideas; he also contrasts the “gloomy” storm outside to a secluded space of intimacy whose icon, the “glass of Madeira,” evokes the iconography of a still-life painting. In the much more aggressively expansionist 1830s, Raphaelle’s paintings might well have seemed even more hermetic, more resistant to vast space and overreaching personal ambition, than they had during the artist’s lifetime.

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The Mother Country: Raphaelle Peale and Samuel Lewis For all their differences, Raphaelle’s Apples and Fox Grapes and Lewis’s New and Correct Map, those two images of 1815, share one important feature. Both are designed to familiarize strangers with the land of their birth. The review in Poulson’s is explicit about this aspect of Lewis’s map. After mentioning its value to a foreigner, the reviewer writes, “Nor is it in reality of less moment to the natives of the soil. Without its aid even they must remain, throughout the course of the longest life, notwithstanding their most strenuous exertions to the contrary, strangers, in a great degree, to the country that gave them birth” (italics in original). Later, after apologizing for his strong feelings about the subject, the reviewer justifies them by saying that “they have been awakened by looking on a faithful and interesting parental likeness.” These feelings, he continues, “are such as no American will think it unbecoming in him to cherish, or blush to avow, when examining an excellent and beautiful map of his native country, which he admires and loves—a country, which it is his duty to prize, and of which his hereditary privilege entitles him to be proud.” 34 Like Raphaelle’s pictures, the New and Correct Map shows viewers a “parental likeness,” a “native country,” “the country that gave them birth.” But it does so in a socializing way foreign to Raphaelle’s imagery of natural judgment. Instead of showing the native soil primally, as a rounded fleshy object, or—as in the case of Still Life with Steak or the pit in Charles Willson’s Exhumation of the Mastodon—as a mysteriously dark opening, Lewis shows its “vast limits and exalted qualities.” His is the idealized mother country of “lofty character.” To become familiar with it, according to the reviewer, will produce “solid advantages that will endure to the latest period of life.” 35 Hanging on a wall overlooking its viewers, it will help to make the self, as the city’s omnipresent female allegories purported to do. Here the United States is a type of earth goddess whose goodness and capaciousness are meant to produce rather than annul social and national identity.36 Lewis’s map, however, does produce an uncanny quality akin to that of Raphaelle’s pictures, one that undermines the stable identity it invents. Even as the map features place-names, even as it underscores the gridded political boundaries of the land, it also emphasizes the disruptive forms of the Appalachians, visually the map’s most insistent and mysterious features. In their relative darkness and their sinuous lines, they compel attention more than anything else on the map. Instead of producing the “exalted” view, by which the subject learns the vast extent of a sublimated land of origins, the mountains in their odd dark meandering lines invite a more focused, fascinated attention (fig. 71). The mountains imply the origins not of the country, but of the land. Early-nineteenth-century geology, writes the art historian Kenneth Haltman, “is marked by an obsessive interest in original creation.” In these years, “a national prehistory had to be formulated commensurate with the promise of

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figure 71 A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America (detail).

the new”—a fabricated prehistory that prominently involved geological inquiries into “the early history of the earth itself.” 37 Just as odd rock formations forced the era’s geologists to imagine a distant past, a temporality so primeval as to trivialize the transient preoccupations of the decade, so the mountains in Lewis’s map of 1815 counter the place-names and state borders. These mountains, given such insistent presence by Lewis, indicate a mysterious earthly origin that no amount of naming can repress, one that continues to assert itself obstinately in the socialized spaces of the nation. In an age that still conceived mountains as primitive threats to progress, Lewis’s Appalachians appear like indecipherable hieroglyphs amid the beautifully inscribed words of a man who was not just a mapmaker but a writing master.38 Thus in an image that celebrates and codifies the viewer’s “native soil,” the mountains insist finally upon the disquieting puzzle of origins. As Horace Hayden, a member of the American Geological So-

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ciety, put it in 1824, anyone explaining the features of the earth according to one idea “will find himself, at last, involved in a labyrinth, so inconceivably intricate, that it will be impossible to extricate himself.”39 Lewis’s Appalachian jumble shows something like such a labyrinth: a maze of snaking lines in whose midst, right in the middle of the map, one could get lost. A New and Correct Map extends the mother country far and wide; yet like Raphaelle Peale’s art it also focuses on, and can never resolve, the primeval time and space that any name—“Philadelphia” or “Apples and Fox Grapes” or “Raphaelle Peale”—spans only as Lewis’s word “Ocean” spans the water: a thin and floating and utterly tenuous sign of identity.

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chapter eleven

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The Deception of Venus Rising from the Sea The imagination of the novice . . . paints Human nature beautiful—amiable—mild—lovely[,] clothes her almost in perfection—but strip her ornaments—tear from her that garb of deceit that She so frequently wears—expose her naked to your views, and you are Struck with Horror at the sight of a deformed Monster! David Meredith, Philadelphia merchant, July 8, 1795

The ocean on Lewis’s map brings us back to another ocean picture, Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, and its more explicit imagery of birth (see plate 7). We have seen how the shroud-like napkin plays against the era’s imagery of self. The blank cloth, faceless and silent, darkly satirizes the perpetually speaking subject enshrined in the era’s portraits and self-portraits. Now we come to Venus. Her partly obscured figure can more fully explain one last fundamental question about Raphaelle’s paintings. If his pictures are about the body—the body as the site of a pleasurable or anguished nonidentity— why did he not depict the body directly? Why does bodily imagery appear only in his still-life objects? The answer, as I have suggested, concerns cultural prohibitions and the artist’s own fears. What we could not expect, however, is that both prohibitions and fears would be directly represented, indeed diagrammed, in Venus Rising. The painting shows the sensuous body hidden by a still-life object—hidden because Raphaelle made his pictures in a time and place that thought such bodies, publicly displayed, a subject far too lascivious for art. Hiding the goddess of love behind a cloth, Venus Rising satirically illustrates but also respects this prohibition. At the same time, for an artist often “on the brink of the grave,” another kind of sensuous body—the anatomized corpse—was simply too terrifying to represent directly. Here Venus Rising is again an illustration, specifically because Raphaelle deliberately rep-

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resents Venus as an ambiguous figure: a witch as well as a seductress, a harbinger of death as much as a goddess of love. In these darker guises, Venus is something the artist himself preferred not to see. In this painting, then, he covered both what he could not and would not show. The still-life object substitutes for both the prohibited and the feared body. The incompleteness of this concealing substitution in Venus, however, best illuminates all of Raphaelle’s art. Venus Rising from the Sea shows an ostensible replacement—the still-life object for the body—yet it also shows a relation between the two terms. What is placed over the top of the body, hiding it from view, does not so much cancel this body as visualize it in a di¤erent form. For in Venus Rising the body reappears in, and as, the sensuous cloth that would conceal it. Vague and partial, this reappearance is also unmistakable. In it, the painting diagrams the mechanics and motivations of all of Raphaelle’s still-life paintings: the return of the body, pleasurable or terrifying, at the scene of its exclusion. In vivid form, as if Raphaelle could not help setting out the inner dynamics of his art at least once before he died, Venus Rising from the Sea confirms that his sensuous imagery is paradoxically founded upon a repression, both cultural and personal. It tells us, too, that the body in question is neither that of a woman nor that of the artist but some combination of the two.

Venus as Goddess Let us look first at how Raphaelle hides the pleasurable body only to let it reappear. As the art historian Dorinda Evans points out, Venus Rising from the Sea alludes to “the practice of suspending curtains in front of risqué pictures” of nude women.1 This interpretation is especially apt when we consider that two provocative female nudes were exhibited in early-nineteenth-century Philadelphia: Adolf Wertmüller’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold in 1806, and John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos in 1820. Though popular, these exhibitions also provoked moralizing opinions about the propriety of showing such subjects in public. Charles Willson Peale, for one, thought that Wertmüller’s painting should not be shown: “I like no art which can raise a blush on a lady’s cheek.”2 Raphaelle’s picture, painted just after the exhibition of Vanderlyn’s Ariadne, both satirizes and repeats this moralizing attitude about the nude. The napkin, however, rather than fully hiding the figure of Venus, obliquely makes it visible. It does so in part by repeating Venus’s visible limbs and by suggesting the hidden parts of her body. The sinuous fold at upper center repeats the length and verticality of Venus’s arm. This same fold, continuing past the overhanging portion of the napkin, travels all the way down the length of the cloth, terminating at the bottom edge, just to the right of Venus’s foot. Taken as a whole, it connects arm and foot and invites us to imagine more of the body behind the cloth, even to the point of constituting a rudimentary “representation” of that sinuous body’s full length. In a more anthropomorphic way, the

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tubular hollow formed by the doubled cloth at upper right, where it hangs down and inward, exactly repeats the shape and diagonal orientation of the arm. This creates a second “arm” shape within the concealing garment. More provocatively, at the lower center of the napkin, at the point where the vertical fold is crossed by a horizontal fold, Raphaelle paints a small protuberance of fabric. Slightly below the region of the figure’s genitals, this androgynous disturbance yet further visualizes the body beneath. The trompe l’oeil rendering of the fabric also transfers the sensuality of Venus’s body onto the cloth itself. As Venus luxuriously holds her long hair, so the viewer is invited to exercise the sense of touch upon the body of the thing that conceals her. It even seems to be true, in this diagrammatic painting, that the actual body dematerializes in proportion to the materiality of the object that revisualizes it. Venus Rising thus diagrams how the repressed body reappears, obliquely but unmistakably, in the rhapsodic still-life object. In this way the painting o¤ers a rule about all the artist’s images of fruit, vegetables, and other objects.

Venus as Monster Venus is a far more ambiguous figure, however, complicating the painting’s imagery of cancellation and revelation. In one sense, Evans’s reading of the painting is indisputable. The connection between the figure in Barry’s picture and the visible parts of Raphaelle’s version, the kindred clusters of flowers, and of course the matching titles put the relation between the two images beyond question (see fig. 21). But the very accuracy of Evans’s interpretation threatens to make us complacent about the figure behind the cloth. In particular, the interpretation threatens to make us ignore two elements of the work: first, Raphaelle’s creative choice about which parts of the body to let show and, second, his wish—as the view-blocking cloth clearly indicates—that the figure should always be mysterious. The painting is clearly structured not to reveal the exact appearance of the hidden figure. Although Evans’s interpretation invites us to “see” Barry’s Venus behind the cloth, to maintain such a definitive view is to rationalize a picture not meant to be so transparent to reason. The napkin itself is the first clue about the ambiguity of the figure. In the Peale Museum itself, such cloths hid disturbing pictures, not lascivious ones. The most famous example is Charles Willson’s painting Rachel Weeping, showing his first wife—and Raphaelle’s mother—crying at the bedside of her dead infant (her daughter Margaret, who died not long before Raphaelle was born). Peale placed an admonition next to the curtain concealing the painting, warning spectators not to look if the sight of a grieving mother and her dead child might cause pain.3 The concealing curtain in contemporaneous Gothic fiction also often hid disturbing things. In Brown’s Wieland, published in Philadelphia in 1798, Mr. Hallet wishes to know where Clara Wieland’s

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brother and sister are. He assumes them to be fine, but Clara, knowing better, sadly and silently “pointed to the bed,” where the body of her sister lay dead. Following Clara’s command, “[Mr. Hallet’s] attendants drew aside the curtain, and while their eyes glared with horror at the spectacle which they beheld, those of Mr. Hallet overflowed with tears.” 4 Raphaelle’s painting, which after all shows a figure behind a shroud, belongs to this genre of Gothic concealment. As Allston’s dead man lifts up one arm and displays just one foot (see figs. 1, 7), so Raphaelle’s gray-skinned Venus, one foot visible, raises an arm above her shroud. Raphaelle’s theory of the mastodon provides a more precise clue about the ambiguity of the Venus figure. In one of the few documents describing Raphaelle’s thoughts in any detail, John Adams wrote to his friend Francis Van Der Kemp on November 5, 1804, describing a conversation with the artist: Mr. Raphaelle Peale, a Son of the industrious and ingenious Mr. Peale of the Museum at Philadelphia, made me a Visit a few weeks ago, and in conversation told me, that the Skeleton of the Mammoth at his fathers he believed was that of a Sea monster; or rather he thought it amphibious, but chiefly inhabiting the Sea[.] In some great Convulsion of Nature, he believed they had been thrown up, by Some Spacious Subterranian Caverns, into the places where the bones are found, which he says are always in or very near to Salt Licks which he thinks have communications with the Sea.5

The letter—an occasion for Adams to take a characteristically sour view of this “despicable philosophy of Mammoths,” one of the “pitifull Bagatelles” of the Je¤ersonian Republicans—is striking for our purposes because it reveals Raphaelle describing the mammoth as a monster born from the sea, “thrown up” from “Spacious Subterranian Caverns,” “in some great Convulsion of Nature.” Raphaelle, in this obstetrical account given not long after the quickly successive births of three of his children, Eliza in 1799, Sophonisba in 1801, and Charles Willson in 1802, displayed his interest in origins, more precisely in a womb-like space similar to the one his father would portray in the Exhumation painting, a picture commenced two years after Adams’s letter, in 1806.6 Venus Rising becomes a more complicated and a darker painting for having been made by an artist interested in the birth of monstrous forms from the ocean, and even in what may be described as a monstrous form of oceanic birth. To summarize: in the scant firsthand evidence of his life, including his paintings, Raphaelle referred only twice to figures born from the sea: once to Venus and once to a “monster.” This is another indication that the figure behind the napkin is not necessarily meant to be identical with the one in Barry’s image. Yet another sign is Venus’s hair. Although Barry gave his Venus lavishly long tresses, Raphaelle emphasizes the figure’s hair even more by showing it without depicting the head or anything of the upper body except the left arm. In this way he isolates the icon of dangerous sexuality that so compelled

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his brother Rembrandt in The Roman Daughter and even gives Venus some of the connotations of a Medusa. The starchy rigidity of the napkin evokes both the fearsome power of a phallicized Medusalike mother and the petrifaction of her victim, joined in a single icon of fearsome nullity. The imagery of a gaping femininity is thus here replaced by the equally unsettling imagery, like that in Corn and Cantaloupe, of a femininity upright and sti¤.7 Venus’s hand holding the hair is also significant. Raphaelle is roughly true to Barry’s rendering of Venus’s left hand lifting the streaming tresses, yet he omits the right hand, leaving us with the e¤ect of only the single hand grasping a thick vertical plume of hair. To understand this e¤ect, we need to consider a contemporaneous story of split womanhood, for Raphaelle’s painting operates within the conventions of such stories. In “Adventure of the German Student,” published in Tales of a Traveller in 1824, Washington Irving tells of one Gottfried Wolfgang, living in Paris during the French Revolution. Despondent and reclusive, su¤ering from the e¤ects of the solitary imagination, Gottfried lives in “an ideal world of his own” punctured only by a repeated haunting dream of a beautiful woman. One night, walking home through the rainy streets of Paris, Gottfried passes the guillotine and miraculously sees, at its base, the exact beautiful woman of whom he has dreamed. He finds her “ravishingly beautiful,” with a pale face “set o¤ by a profusion of raven hair.” Her only jewelry “was a broad black band round her neck, clasped by diamonds.” Taking her back to his room, he confesses his love. The next morning, however, he finds her “with her head hanging over the bed, and one arm thrown over it.” She is dead. Summoned to the room, a policeman “undid the black collar round the neck of the corpse, and,” as Irving writes, “the head rolled on the floor!” The woman had been guillotined the day before; Gottfried Wolfgang, beset by the delusions of melancholy solitude, has slept with the corpse—“the fiend! the fiend!” he screams in the light of day.8 Raphaelle’s pallid Venus deals in a similar Gothic imagery of a seductive figure both beautiful and ghoulish. The decapitation of Irving’s raven-haired woman alerts us to the grim significance of the hairholding gesture in Raphaelle’s Venus. In showing the figure this way, Raphaelle invites, without definitively showing, a relation to the era’s images of decapitation, in particular to images of the head held by the hair (figs. 72–73). Titian Ramsay’s fantasy image of Charles Willson’s decapitated head (see fig. 54), also made in the early 1820s, perhaps 1822, the year Raphaelle probably painted Venus, attests to the Peale family’s interest in such imagery—an imagery not uncommon in Philadelphia during the thirty years or so following the French Revolution.9 If the city seal represents a raised arm holding the scales of justice (see figs. 67–68), Raphaelle’s painting featuring a raised arm denotes a less balanced form of law. Hidden behind her shroud, Venus implies the same necrophiliac energy as the Washington Museum’s special “Room No. 7,” in which, for 25 cents extra, patrons could view “anatomical prepara-

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figure 72 Venus Rising from the Sea— A Deception (detail).

tions” alongside a copy of Wertmüller’s Venus.10 Raphaelle’s own secret “Room No. 7,” unlike the Washington Museum’s, makes Venus herself into an “anatomical preparation.” The ambiguity of the Venus figure, beautiful but monstrous, lends new significance to the cloth. This is a sheet, we can now see, that also performs a saving function for Raphaelle. As much as it prevents our seeing a sensual goddess, it also thankfully keeps a monstrous and deathly body hidden. This is the body—the very figure of death—that a brink-of-the-grave person such as Raphaelle did not want to see. Attached to the line by two pins that repeat the two nails of Cutlet and Vegetables (see plate 9), the cloth is like the white paper covering the meat, or like the butchers’ white frocks: it creates a compensatory emphasis on purity instead of “employment . . . violent, bloody, and cruel.” The flowers at Venus’s foot, as similar euphemisms, brighten a subject “not naturally of an inviting aspect” by marking a grave but not the body it holds. (Why, if not to intimate this darker subject matter, did Raphaelle retain the flowers, but nothing else, from the surroundings in Barry’s original?) Yet the cloth’s saving disguise is incomplete. The figure of Venus obliquely shows through, and as,

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figure 73 Villeneuve, Matière à réflection pour les jongleurs couronnées, 1793. Engraving. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Photo courtesy of Photothèque des Musées de la Ville de Paris.

the object that would conceal it. Venus’s deathliness in fact appears more dominant than her “good” sensuality, for this is indeed one of Raphaelle’s most mordant paintings. That hunch-shouldered shroud, faceless and silent, crisply rises from its flower-marked grave. Confronting the spectator, the monster reappears. Thus Venus Rising again exemplifies a rule about Raphaelle’s paintings, this time the anatomical ones. The body returns in the visceral e¤ects of split-open watermelons and carved meats at the very scene of its repression. Precisely not wishing to visualize that embodiment, Raphaelle turned away—he placed a sheet over things such as cadavers. Yet, as John Ferriar’s story suggests, there is not much di¤erence between the “lineaments of . . . interment”11 and the body they conceal. Charles Willson’s Exhumation of the Mastodon more clearly and openly, one could say more bravely, confronts the object of fear, the womb-like grave against which identity must be produced. In Raphaelle’s work the feared thing is hidden. Yet blank and bloody, rising from the morass, from its sepulchral “Subterranian Caverns” in a “great Convulsion of Nature,” it comes back with far greater force than anything in the elder Peale’s art.

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The Witch-Self: Decomposition in Philadelphia, 1800–1825 What shows through in Venus Rising from the Sea, finally, is not simply a sensually dangerous feminized thing over there, a separate entity upon which the artist gazes with detachment. The monstrous figure is not a figure fully apart from the artist but always something implicated in his own being—a combination illustrated by the one known story concerning Raphaelle and a handkerchief like the cloth in the painting. As George Escol Sellers recalled at the end of his life, Raphaelle once walked into a dour Quaker gathering held in the Sellers parlor around 1820, when Sellers himself was just a boy. Urged by his hosts to entertain the guests, Raphaelle “pulled a great spotted India silk handkerchief out of his pocket and began winding it around his Hand.” As someone wondered if he was injured—“has thee hurt thy hand?”—Raphaelle made a gaping face appear from behind, and as, the handkerchief. “His show,” wrote George, “was his thumb for a chin and a lower lip and the upper knuckle of the fore finger for the upper lip and nostrils which he manipulated to imitate a gape.”12 In that little amusement, Raphaelle made his bandaged hand into an abject female form—a version of the gaping mouth that reappears in his art—identifying the two in the handkerchief. Accordingly, in Venus Rising the cloth is invested with the bodily presence of both Venus and Raphaelle himself. As much as it reveals the figure behind it, the sensuous cloth, a phenomenological screen, also receives the projected embodiment of the artist. As in Still Life with Steak, Still Life with Watermelon, and Corn and Cantaloupe, Raphaelle depicts his own visceral nonidentity in an abjectly feminine guise. The way he does so in Venus Rising from the Sea translates into pictorial terms a common image of social ruin in Philadelphia in these years. If Rush’s generous goddesses were meant to symbolize a benevolent social reality, the hideous witch figure represented a man’s nonidentity—his “decomposition,” in Ric Northrup Caric’s word. Caric notes how in popular songs and newspaper articles “artisans and others in Philadelphia identified non-public spaces like the outskirts of town, darkened streets, and abandoned buildings as fragmented and fragmenting forces . . . with scolds, shrews, witches, and ghosts.” The witch was a symbol for the social travails of Philadelphia men struggling, like Raphaelle, to make a living in the era of the new selfhood: “The day to day struggles of masters and journeymen in finding credit, paying debts, drumming up business, obtaining a position, or collecting wages fractured the [benevolent female figure] into an overpowering and annihilating imagery of scolding wives, witches, and evil that harassed, assaulted, and overwhelmed the self of the artisan.”13 Caric cites an example from the correspondence of David Meredith, a Philadelphia merchant facing difficult times in 1795. Meredith’s choice of metaphors (see the epigraph to this chapter) is strikingly analogous to the “deception” in Raphaelle’s Venus Rising from the Sea. Human nature clothed is beautiful, but “expose her naked to your views, and you are Struck with Horror at the sight of a de-

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formed Monster!”14 In Meredith’s description the monstrous figure is again not a presence apart from the beholder but the symbol of an “annihilating” social reality that threatens to merge with, and consume, the self. In Raphaelle’s case, the monster, largely hidden, nonetheless reappears in the blank and silent cloth, the shroud of nonidentity. The witch, for both David Meredith and Raphaelle, is the very figure of one’s own decomposed selfhood. In these examples, and in Gothic fiction, the witch-self is both a sadistic and a masochistic figure— a fact we can see vividly in Sir Walter Scott’s story “The Tapestried Chamber,” first published in America in 1829.15 In the story, General Browne spends the night at the castle of his old friend Woodville. Recovering from the “fatigues and wounds” of war, Browne retires to the tapestried chamber, where he is stirred “by a sound like that of the rustling of a silken gown and the tapping of a pair of highheeled shoes,” and he soon sees “the figure of a little woman [pass] between the bed and the fire.” Thinking the woman innocuous, Browne makes a little noise to get her attention, whereupon “she turned slowly round” to display “a face which wore the fixed features of a corpse” and then moved directly toward him: “The hag made . . . a single and swift stride to the bed where I lay, and squatted herself down upon it, in precisely the same attitude which I had assumed in the extremity of horror, advancing her diabolical countenance within half a yard of mine.”16 Mirrored by the hag, finding her “within half a yard” and “in precisely the same attitude” as his own body, Browne is unmanned: “All manhood melted from me like wax in the furnace . . . and I sank back in a swoon, as very a victim to panic terror as ever was a village girl or a child ten years old.” As Irving’s guillotined woman mirrors Gottfried Wolfgang—“We are as one,” Gottfried says—so the hag visualizes the formless wax of Browne’s haggard body. Her corpse-like features produce and repeat what he calls his “discomposure.” As in Irving’s story, the sadistically shown female body becomes the site of a masochistic identification. Writing of the abject dolls of the surrealist sculptor Hans Bellmer, the art historian Hal Foster notes the way Bellmer “appears not only to desire the (dis)articulated female body but also to identify with it, not only to master it sadistically but to become it masochistically.”17 In Venus Rising from the Sea and other paintings, notably Still Life with Steak, Raphaelle evinces this same masochistic desire: to represent his own nonidentity as a sadistically disarticulated female form. “We are as one.”

Behind the Cloth We can never know, of course, what the androgynous Venus in Raphaelle’s painting really would look like (fig. 74). Yet we can look last at another figure (fig. 75), made by another artist working in the same place and time, and within the same romantic discourse, that can give us perhaps our best glimpse, if not of Raphaelle’s actual Venus, then of the deathliness her shroudish re-visualization suggests. In

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figure 74 Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, ca. 1822. See also plate 7.

figure 75 Thomas Cole, Tree from Nature, 1823. Pen and ink on paper, 9¹⁄₁₆ × 7¼ in. Collection of the Albany Institute of History and Art, gift of Mrs. Howard Silberstein.

1823 the young artist Thomas Cole, not long before he moved to Philadelphia, made a pen-and-ink drawing called Tree from Nature. Echoing the ideas of David Huntington, the art historian Alan Wallach notes that Tree from Nature shows Cole’s “characteristically romantic penchant for the ‘pathetic fallacy’—the self-conscious anthropomorphizing of natural forms.”18 Indeed, in his Caribbean story, “Emma Moreton, a West Indian Tale,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1825, Cole links the two lovers, Emma Moreton and Edward Vivian, to “two majestic tamarinds, whose branches interwove in seeming a¤ection,” and later connects Emma’s “light and graceful” form to that of “a young cocoanut tree.”19 In Tree from Nature, however, the tree is far from light and graceful. Cole’s dead thing is a hideous and malformed figure, more precisely, a feminine one. With its long, flowing mossy “hair,” its multiple cloven-foot roots, and its many breast-like protuberances, the tree is the anti-Daphne, a distinctly grim image of Mother Nature. Here the tree may well represent the same failed social identity that Caric has isolated in the rhetoric of Philadelphia merchants and artisans. Cole arrived in Philadelphia along with his parents and siblings, all of them emigrants from England, in 1818. In the next several years, unable to find sustained work, he made wood engravings, designed wallpaper patterns, taught painting and drawing, and painted stage scenery and a drinking scene for a barroom. During this time, he moved from Philadelphia to Steubenville, Ohio, where his family had gone; then to other small Ohio towns such as Zanesville and Chillicothe; then to Pittsburgh, where his family had relocated anew; and finally back to Philadelphia in November 1823.20 Tree from Nature, signed May 20,1823 (when the artist was living in Pittsburgh), reads as an appropriately abject self-emblem, a kind of non–self-portrait, uprooted and ambulatory, for an itinerant artist beset by economic uncertainty. “In his wanderings through the landscape,” notes Huntington, “Cole again and again sought out those trees that answered to the various stances of his own spirit: torn and devastated, ecstatic, serene.”21 In May 1823, according to the art historian Howard Merritt, Cole was working temporarily “as an assistant in his father’s floorcloth factory in Pittsburgh”—not the most economically comfortable or secure position.22 The grim tree of Tree from Nature is the very image of social reality as a “deformed Monster,” a hideous feminized presence from which the artist cannot fully separate his own nonidentity. Just as the tamarind trees in “Emma Moreton” represent both male and female characters, so Cole’s hideous tree is both an “Emma” and an “Edward,” or both an “Edward” and a “Vivian,” an image of male nonidentity as a gruesome female form. Raphaelle, painting in Philadelphia in these same years, portrayed a comparably long-haired female figure, vertically oriented on a canvas not much larger than Cole’s 10-by-15-inch sheet of paper. Unbeknownst to each other, both artists conceived male nonidentity in terms of the abject female body. In Raphaelle’s case, however, the threatening thing could not be fully visualized. He hid it beneath a

200 :: Birth

cloth that partly represses the deathly figure behind it. Both artists—one at the end of his career, the other just beginning—unknowingly shared a romantic language for figuring failed selfhood. Indeed the relation between these two contemporaneous romantic images is powerful enough to suggest that Cole’s drawing, much more than Barry’s painting of fifty years earlier, shows the truer image of that mysterious figure behind the cloth. But even if this figure remains hidden, that should not obscure Raphaelle’s position as the greatest American painter of the human body in his time, and one of the great producers of visceral e¤ects in all of American painting and literature. His split melons and shrouded Venus are the conflicted but clear precursors to the Gothic imagery that Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard would produce in Philadelphia not long after his death. Still Life with Steak, with its displaced anatomical imagery, anticipates the surgical wound that Thomas Eakins, Philadelphia’s other great anatomical painter, would show in The Gross Clinic almost sixty years later. These are the lineages to which Raphaelle’s grim work, at least, belongs. To claim otherwise—to argue for a taxonomic meaning or some other normalizing interpretation of Raphaelle’s art, to say that it does not aim, in ways variously dark and playful, to surprise us out of our propriety—is not just to drain his works of their power but to miss their very reason for existing.23 Remove Venus from behind the cloth, and the napkin, one senses, would dry and crack to a brittle inconsequence. The painting itself, like the cloth, like all Raphaelle’s still lifes, would have no reason to hang, no reason ever to have been made. With nothing to hide, Raphaelle’s art would have nothing to show.

The Deception of Venus Rising from the Sea :: 201

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Notes

Introduction 1. For Raphaelle’s work as a celebration of Enlightenment horticulture, see three essays by Phoebe Lloyd: “Philadelphia Story,” Art in America 76 (November 1988): 155–171, 195–203, esp. 161–162; “Raphaelle Peale’s Anne-Arundel Still Life: A Local Treasure Lost and Found,” Maryland Historical Magazine 87 (spring 1992): 1–9; and “Essay Exhibit and Book Review: The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870,” Pennsylvania History 64 (summer 1997): 421–430, esp. 429. See also Annie Storr, “Raphaelle Peale’s Strawberries, Nuts, &c.: A Riddle of Enlightened Science,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 21 (1995): 25–34. For Raphaelle’s work as marking a shift to a more egalitarian political process, see Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “Democratic Illusions,” in Cikovsky at al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 31–71. For Raphaelle’s paintings as signs of the contest between restraint and indulgence, see Brandon Brame Fortune, “A Delicate Balance: Raphaelle Peale’s Still-Life Paintings and the Ideal of Temperance,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 135–149. For Raphaelle’s paintings as escapes into clarity and for the destructive demands of Charles Willson Peale, in particular an argument that the elder Peale allowed his son to be poisoned to death, see Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” esp. 167¤; Lloyd and Gordon Bendersky, “Arsenic, an Old Case: The Chronic Heavy Metal Poisoning of Raphaelle Peale (1774–1825),” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 36 (summer 1994): 654– 665; Lloyd, “Invisible Killers: Heavy Metals, Saturnine Envy, and the Tragic Death of Raphaelle Peale,” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 16 (December 1994): 83–99. For a popular-press summary of Lloyd’s claims, see Patty Reinert, “Arsenic and Old Painters: Historian Says Poison Killed American Artist Raphaelle Peale,” Houston Chronicle, August 1, 1999, p. 1.

203

2. David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 (summer/ fall 1994): 97. 3. Storr, “Raphaelle Peale’s Strawberries, Nuts, &c.,” 25. 4. Storr, “Raphaelle Peale’s Strawberries, Nuts, &c.,” 34. 5. The term “possessive individual” I derive from C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 6. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 8–9. 7. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 16. 8. Both Hobbes and Locke emphasized the rights of the individual, defining them in economic terms. All men, they believed, had the natural right to use their own labor to prosper economically. Accordingly, in Locke’s formulation the role of government became far more liberal than in the British monarchical system. As Macpherson has shown, Locke amended the views of Hobbes to argue that no sovereign is required to make a society of market-driven individuals cohere; that all individuals can accumulate property and appropriate the labor of others without regard to the community as a whole; that they can do so because everyone respects the law that enables such self-flourishing. (See Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, 194–262.) Appleby notes that the word “individual” was used with increasing frequency in the eighteenth century (Capitalism and a New Social Order, 15). 9. Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order, 62–63. 10. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), esp. 3–69. 11. Sellers, The Market Revolution, 39. Fearing “the squalor and demoralization that accompanied the highly developed capitalist market” in Europe, Je¤erson was not afraid to instigate anticapitalist measures such as the Embargo Act of 1807, which responded to British naval aggression by prohibiting American commercial ships from leaving American waters, thereby denying American products to British ports (Sellers, The Market Revolution, 35, 23). 12. Sellers, The Market Revolution, 90. 13. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, November 15, 1817, in The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, ed. Lillian B. Miller, Sidney Hart, and David C. Ward (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 3:547–549 (hereafter cited, with vol. 2 [1988], vol. 4 [1996], and vol. 5 [2000], as Peale Papers). For Charles Willson’s reading of Rousseau, see, among other sources, Sidney Hart, “Charles Willson Peale and the Theory and Practice of the Eighteenth-Century Family,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 101–117. 14. Scott Casper, in Constructing American Lives: Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), notes that “between 1790 and 1820, American periodicals repeatedly called for biographies of illustrious Americans” (21); that “only book reviews and poetry appeared

204 :: Notes to Pages 1–4

15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20.

more frequently than biographies in magazines of the 1810s” (22); and that “at least three biographical dictionaries composed solely of American entries appeared between 1809 and 1815” (22).The most famous book-length biography of the period, Mason Locke Weems’s expanded Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington (1806), was issued in repeated editions by the Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey (22–23). See Cikovsky, “Democratic Illusions,” and Fortune, “A Delicate Balance.” Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’” (1919), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 17:219–252. For accounts of Raphaelle’s life, see for example Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story”; and Lillian B. Miller, “Father and Son: The Relationship of Charles Willson Peale and Raphaelle Peale,” American Art Journal 25 (1993): 4–63. Charles Willson Peale, letter to John Isaac Hawkins, August 7, 1803, in Peale Papers, 2:597–599. Here and elsewhere I have retained Charles Willson Peale’s original spelling and punctuation, as I have done also in the case of Rembrandt Peale, Charles Brockden Brown, and others whom I cite from the time. Miller, “Father and Son,” 48–51. For Lloyd’s theories, see note 1 above. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 7.

Chapter One 1. For the Pennsylvania Academy exhibition history of Blackberries and The Dead Man Restored, see Anna Wells Rutledge, The Annual Exhibition Record of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1807–1870, ed. Peter Hastings Falk (Madison, Conn.: Sound View Press, 1988), 166, 15. 2. Washington Allston, quoted in “Exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Mr. Allston’s Picture of the Dead Man restored to Life by touching the bones of the Prophet Elisha.” Broadside printed in Philadelphia, April 1816. Archives of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. 3. David Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 51, 119. 4. “Derived from ordinary, direct, and shared experience rather than from privileged and educated experience,” Cikovsky writes, Raphaelle’s still lifes were “democratically accessible” and therefore less elitist than more erudite forms of art such as history painting. (Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “Democratic Illusions,” in Cikovsky et al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes [Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988], 56.) 5. See Brandon Brame Fortune, “A Delicate Balance: Raphaelle Peale’s Still-Life Paintings and the Ideal of Temperance,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996). 6. David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 (summer/ fall 1994): 115. 7. See Fortune, “A Delicate Balance,” 136.

Notes to Pages 4–14 :: 205

8. Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 135–136. Watts quotes from Rush’s essay, Thoughts upon the Amusements and Punishments, Which are Proper for Schools, published in 1798. 9. Lillian B. Miller, “Father and Son: The Relationship of Charles Willson Peale and Raphaelle Peale,” American Art Journal 25 (1993): 47. 10. William Bartram, Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the Cherokee country, the extensive territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the country of the Choctaws [1791], in William Bartram: Travels and Other Writings, ed. Thomas P. Slaughter (New York: Library of America, 1996), 17. 11. William Bartram, Travels, 17–18. The Venus flytrap is one of Bartram’s key proofs for this idea. After viewing these “sportive vegetables,” he writes, “can we . . . hesitate a moment to confess, that vegetable beings are endued with some sensible faculties or attributes, similar to those that dignify animal nature; they are organical, living, and self-moving bodies, for we see here, in this plant, motion and volition” (Bartram, Travels, 17). 12. John Bartram, quoted in Thomas P. Slaughter, The Natures of John and William Bartram (New York: Knopf, 1996), 63–64. John Bartram expressed his view in a letter to Benjamin Rush, December 5, 1767. 13. Amy Meyers, “Sketches from the Wilderness: Changing Conceptions of Nature in American Natural History Illustration, 1680–1880,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985, 159, 158, 159. My thanks to Meyers for pointing out the S-curve, one piece of evidence in her persuasive argument that the Balsam Pear drawing should be oriented on a vertical. (Meyers, conversation with the author, October 1999.) 14. Benjamin Smith Barton, The Elements of Botany; or, Outlines of the Natural History of Vegetables (Philadelphia: Printed for the author, 1803), 2:3. 15. Barton, The Elements of Botany, 2:264–265, 4. William Bartram also noted the capacity of plants to travel significant distances: “The most apparent di¤erence between animals and vegetables is, that animals have the powers of sound, and are locomotive, whereas vegetables are not able to shift themselves from the places where nature has planted them: yet vegetables have the power of moving and exercising their members, and have the means of transplanting or colonising their tribes almost over the surface of the whole earth” (Bartram, Travels, 18). 16. Carol Eaton Hevner, “The Paintings of Rembrandt Peale: Character and Conventions,” in Lillian B. Miller, In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778–1860 (Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 1992), 255. 17. Miller, In Pursuit of Fame, 58. 18. Barton, The Elements of Botany, 2:3. 19. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile [1762], trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993), 282. The priest’s full explanation is this: “The first causes of motion are not to be found in matter; matter receives and transmits motion, but does not produce it. The more I observe the action and reaction of the forces of nature playing on one another, the more I see that we must always go back from one e¤ect to another, till we arrive at a first cause in some will; for to assume an infinite succession of causes is to assume that there is no first cause. In a word, no motion which is not caused by another motion can take place, except by a spon-

206 :: Notes to Pages 15–20

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

taneous, voluntary action; inanimate bodies have no action but motion, and there is no real action without will. This is my first principle. I believe, therefore, that there is a will which sets the universe in motion and gives life to nature.” William Bartram, Travels, 17, 19. Slaughter, commenting on John Bartram’s belief in animate vegetation, points out that the elder botanist believed the same thing: “Order, balance, and similarities across the spectrum of living organisms are what John saw and what he sought out in nature. In these connections he found evidence of a ‘universal intellect’ shared by animals and plants” (The Natures of John and William Bartram, 64). Meyers, “Sketches from the Wilderness,” 159. M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 57, 58, 60. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), in The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 2.378 ¤. Abrams’s book, in my opinion, is still a remarkably steady and informative guide to romantic theory. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 60, 67, 68. Coleridge’s lines are from his poem “The Gentleman,” lines 12 ¤. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 9. Charles Brockden Brown, “The Rhapsodist, No. II,” The Universal Asylum, and Columbian Magazine 3 (September 1789): 537–541; in The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943), 6. Brown, letter to James Brown, April 1800; quoted in Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn, 185. Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” 119. Rebecca Bedell, “John Quidor and the Demonic Imagination: Ichabod Crane Flying from the Headless Horseman (c. 1828),” Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (spring 1998): 111. David Simpson, “Wordsworth in America,” in The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruo¤ (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 276–279. See also Annabel Newton, Wordsworth in Early American Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928). Randall Griffin, “The Untrammeled Vision: Thomas Cole and the Dream of the Artist,” College Art Journal 52 (summer 1993): 69. See Bryan Jay Wolf, “When Is a Painting Most Like a Whale? Ishmael, Moby-Dick, and the Sublime,” in New Essays on Moby-Dick, ed. Richard Brodhead (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 141–179. G. M. Woodward, Eccentric Excursions; or, Literary & Pictorial Sketches of Countenance, Character & Country in di¤erent Parts of England & South Wales (London: Allen and Co., 1796), 135, 136–137. Woodward’s “E¤ect of Imagination” pictures came to my attention through Terry Castle’s excellent chapter, “Spectral Politics: Apparition Belief and the Romantic Imagination,” in her book The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 168–189.

Notes to Pages 20–24 :: 207

33. Simpson, “Wordsworth in America,” 279. Simpson notes that Joseph Dennie, the Federalist editor of the Philadelphia-based conservative publication Port Folio, who at first admired Lyrical Ballads, by 1807 began “to find something disturbing in Wordsworth’s commitment to simplicity of style and subject” (278– 279). 34. Washington Irving, “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” [1820], in The Sketch Book of Geo¤rey Crayon, Gent. (New York: Signet, 1961), 336. 35. Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind [1792], in The Collected Works of Dugald Stewart, ed. Sir William Hamilton (Edinburgh: Thomas Constable and Co., 1854), 457–458. This passage comes from a section of Stewart’s book entitled “Inconveniences Resulting from an Ill-Regulated Imagination.” Stewart notes, “[T]o a man of an ill-regulated imagination, external circumstances only serve as hints to excite his own thoughts, and the conduct he pursues has, in general, far less reference to his real situation, than to some imaginary one, in which he conceives himself to be placed” (Collected Works, 460). For an informative reading of Sir Walter Scott in relation to Stewart’s theories of the imagination, see Jana Davis, “Sir Walter Scott and Enlightenment Theories of the Imagination: Waverley and Quentin Durward,” NineteenthCentury Literature 43 (March 1989): 437–464. 36. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind [1812] (New York: Hafner, 1962), 308. Rush gives his opinion in the section called “Of Illusions.” 37. Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, 72. 38. Phoebe Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” Art in America 76 (November 1988): 197. Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion,” 20, 21. 39. Brown, “The Rhapsodist, No. II,” 6. 40. Johann Georg Zimmerman, Solitude Considered, with Respect to Its Influence upon the Mind and the Heart, trans. J. B. Mercier (New London, Conn.: Cady and Eells, 1806), 216. Zimmerman manages solitude in his text by converting unsociability into a marker of social selfhood. He begins by acknowledging the negative connotations of solitude: “The title of this work will, perhaps, give some alarm to delicate ears: the word ‘solitude’ may inspire melancholy and unfavorable ideas” (iii). Elsewhere he notes that “[solitary] Romantic speculation may lead the mind into extravagant resolutions and erroneous systems [and] may frequently foment base, contemptible passions” (189). Yet he believes that “under the peaceful shades of solitude, the mind of man regenerates, and his faculties acquire new force.” Individuals in isolation, exercising “proper vigilance upon the desires of the heart,” can acquire “the important knowledge” of themselves (14, 37). “Solitude not only creates simplicity of manners, but prepares and strengthens the faculties for the toils of busy life” (162). “Liberty, true liberty, is no where so easily found as in a distant retirement from the tumults of men and every forced connection with the world. It has truly been said, that in solitude man recovers from that distraction which had torn him from himself; that he feels in his mind a clear and intimate knowledge of what he was, and of what he had been; that he lives more within himself and for himself than in external objects; that he enters into the state of nature and freedom; no longer plays

208 :: Notes to Pages 24–26

an artificial part, no longer represents a di¤erent personage, but thinks, speaks, and acts according to his proper character and sentiments; that he discovers the whole extent of his nature” (216–217). 41. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, June 26, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:593. 42. Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 109.

Chapter Two 1. For the idea of an artist’s embodied relation to painting, I am deeply indebted to the work of Michael Fried, in particular Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Raphaelle’s still lifes, with their smooth surfaces and reluctance to show the human body literally, di¤er vastly from Courbet’s pictures; thus the specifics of Fried’s argument about the French artist are not relevant to my interpretation of Raphaelle’s paintings. But without Fried’s example, which is derived, in his words, from “a longstanding familiarity with phenomenological thinking (in particular with the work of Maurice MerleauPonty)” (p. 49), I am sure that my own reading of Raphaelle’s work would never have come to me in the terms presented in this book. Here, as elsewhere in my scholarship, Fried’s writing has been enormously influential. 2. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 62. 3. John Wilmerding, “America’s Young Masters: Raphaelle, Rembrandt, and Rubens,” in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., et al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 86. “Optometry aside,” writes Wilmerding, “this intricate imagery serves to reinforce on a deeper level the links between hands and eyes.” 4. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 19. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception [1945], trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1996), 185, 320. 6. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 316. 7. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible [1964], trans. Alphonso Lingis, ed. Claude Lefort (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968). See in particular chapter four, “The Intertwining—the Chiasm,” 130–155. 8. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 350. 9. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty critiques both “empiricism” and “intellectualism” for their maintenance of unproblematic splits between subject and object. The first gives us a world that simply “is,” prior to and apart from ourselves; and the second, more lamp-like, gives us the world as the product of our consciousness. As he writes, summarizing his critique first of empiricism and then of intellectualism, “We started o¤ from a world in itself which acted upon our eyes so as to cause us to see it, and we now

Notes to Pages 26–32 :: 209

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

have consciousness of or thought about the world, but the nature of this world remains unchanged: it is still defined by the absolute mutual exteriority of its parts. . . . We pass from absolute objectivity to absolute subjectivity” (39). Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (fall 1992): 95, 85. Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David Ward (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 185. Wilmerding, “America’s Young Masters,” 83. For information on Lesueur’s career, see Maurice E. Phillips, “Fame Comes Late to a Gifted Naturalist and Artist,” Frontiers: A Magazine of Natural History (April 1953): 103–105, 111; Gilbert Chinard, “The American Sketchbooks of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 93 (May 1949): 114–118; and “Lesueur, Charles-Alexandre, 1778–1846,” biographical summary, vertical files, Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. For Lesueur’s “projected work on the Fishes of the United States of America,” see his own reference to this subject in Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, “A new genus of Fishes, of the order Abdominales, proposed, under the name of Catostomus. . . . ,” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences 1 (October 1817): 105. Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences 1 (May 1817): 2. Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, “A short description of five (supposed) new species of the genus Muraena . . . ,” Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences 1 (September 1817): 81. Lesueur, “A new genus of Fishes,” 105. Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations 57 (winter 1997): 99. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 43–44. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 120–121. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 129. Galen A. Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Johnson, 48. In a letter to Rembrandt written in 1816, Charles Willson describes making a portrait of Raphaelle’s wife, Patty McGlathery—a portrait “Raphaelle is so much pleased with . . . that he is not willing that I should pass over the face again. [H]e says the Colouring is perfect & the likeness cannot be mended, he only wants the dots on the Eyes.” These dots on the eyes are presumably the final touches—the bits of pigment that will give the portrait its quality of animation and lifelikeness. The passage in Peale’s letter allows us to understand the dots on the berries as instituting a comparably animate regard in inanimate objects that, presumably like Patty McGlathery in Peale’s portrait, stare back out at the viewer. (Charles Willson Peale, letter to Rembrandt Peale, February 20, 1816, in Peale Papers, 3:390.) Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 215.

210 :: Notes to Pages 33–40

24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile [1762], trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993), 36. For the popularity of Emile in America, see Paul Merrill Spurlin, Rousseau in America, 1760–1809 (University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 75. 25. Rousseau, Emile, 35–36. 26. Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” [1804], in Wordsworth: Poems, selected by W. E. Williams, intro. by Jenni Calder (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1985), 71. 27. Geo¤rey Hartman, “Wordsworth Revisited,” in Hartman, The Unremarkable Wordsworth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 16.

Chapter Three 1. Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations 57 (winter 1997): 98. 2. Scarry, 99, 98. 3. Raphaelle Peale, letter to Charles Gra¤, September 6, 1816, in Peale Papers, 3:447–448. 4. Scarry, “Imagining Flowers,” 98. 5. Scarry, 99. 6. Eugenia B. Böhlke, of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, an expert on the moray eel, believes that the creature shown in Peale’s painting of Lesueur is one of the “genus Muraena” described by Lesueur in his Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences article of September 1817. I am indebted to Dr. Böhlke for sharing her opinions during an examination of the painting at the Academy of Natural Sciences on April 22, 1999. 7. For Peale’s design of the museum, featuring the Linnaean system, see Amy Meyers, “Sketches from the Wilderness: Changing Conceptions of Nature in American Natural History Illustration, 1680–1880,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1985, 197–205; and Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 182–198. 8. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design,” 171. 9. Sir Joshua Reynolds, quoted in John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 80. 10. The contents of Sharpless’s Washington Museum are listed in an advertisement reproduced in J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 2:951. 11. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), 20–21, 20. 12. The Philadelphia publisher Mathew Carey began a magazine called the American Museum in 1788. For one of Peale’s advertisements, see Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser 46 (March 4, 1817): 1. Raphaelle himself

Notes to Pages 40–52 :: 211

13. 14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

occasionally advertised in Poulson’s, although, as Ward and Hart point out, “it seems unlikely that he had an astute sense of the art market or for business. . . . [H]e was not an e¤ective operator in a market economy.” (David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 [summer/fall 1994]: 108.) Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 20. Even when Raphaelle’s paintings were shown in the midst of large exhibitions, as they often were at Pennsylvania Academy annual shows, their intense smallness might well have blocked out the expansive circulation of images around them. As anyone who has examined them knows, Raphaelle’s paintings—in their smallness, their detail—bring the viewer in close, thus canceling out surrounding objects. In this sense, Raphaelle’s paintings are as aggressive as the era’s much larger pictures: these large paintings colonize the space around themselves, transforming other smaller images into mere satellites; Raphaelle’s paintings, in their smallness, even more aggressively erase everything around them, producing—in the space of the exhibition hall itself—“a rapid fallo¤ to zero.” Phoebe Lloyd argues in her scornful review of the catalogue for the exhibition The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870 that Blackberries does not show blackberries but “Mysore Ras (Rubus niveus),” an exotic fruit from “the southern Indian capital of Mysore” that in America could be grown only in greenhouses. Noting that the plants at William Hamilton’s greenhouse were dispersed upon Hamilton’s death in 1813, Lloyd speculates that the greenhouse may have contained one of these Indian plants and that therefore Raphaelle’s painting “is the first illustrated notice of the Mysore Ras in the Americas. Thus his painting provided a jolt to avid local botanists” (429). In her review, Lloyd excoriates the contributors to The Peale Family catalogue for their failure as art historians, claiming that they ignore “the primacy of the image” in their interpretations. In her own arguments, however, Lloyd discusses paintings such as Blackberries—pictures as challenging and visually stunning as any ever made in the history of American art—as botanical illustrations. (Lloyd, “Essay Exhibit and Book Review,” Pennsylvania History 64 [summer 1997]: 429.) The objects in Raphaelle’s paintings, write Ward and Hart, are painted in a way that “disconnects them with anything outside the canvas” (“Subversion and Illusion,” 115). That the figure on the bowl is Hope is made clear in the catalogue to a Sotheby’s sale of Chinese export porcelain featuring one item listed as “Chinese Export ‘Hope’ Bowl, circa 1790.” The bowl, which features a female figure leaning on an anchor and staring out at two ships at sea, is clearly the same kind that Raphaelle shows. See Chinese Export Porcelain and The Late Rev. Benjamin J. Lake, D.D., Collection of Sta¤ordshire Figures, Groups and Busts, Sotheby’s auction catalogue for the January 29, 1987, sale. My thanks to Ben and Doug Tomsky for sharing this information with me; and my special thanks to Ben, who studied the roundel scene in Raphaelle’s painting and o¤ered me a detailed description and interpretation. Raphaelle himself traveled up and down the eastern seaboard from Boston to Savannah in an e¤ort to find new markets for his work. Thoroughly acquainted with the peregrinations demanded of the new individual, he would have had all the more occasion to make hermetic pictures that try to banish the wide world.

212 :: Notes to Pages 52–56

Chapter Four 1. Phoebe Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” Art in America 76 (November 1988): 158; Jules Prown, “Raphaelle Peale, Fruit in a Silver Basket, 1814,” in American Paintings from the Manoogian Collection (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1989), 98; David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 (summer/fall 1994): 97. 2. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Je¤erson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 134. 3. William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805), 5.379–385, in Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: Norton, 1979), 172. 4. The Prelude, 2.241–244; in The Prelude, 1799, 1805, 1850, 78. 5. Yu Liu, “The Ambiguity of Sound and Silence: The Prelude,” Essays in Literature 21 (fall 1994): 186–187. 6. “Tintern Abbey” (1798), in Wordsworth: Poems (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1985), 38. 7. Charles Brockden Brown, “The Rhapsodist, No. II,” Universal Asylum, and Columbian Magazine 3 (September 1789), reprinted in The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943), 7, 6. 8. Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion,” 116. 9. See Ann Bermingham, “Reading Constable,” Art History 10 (March 1987): 38–58. 10. David Bjelajac, Millennial Desire and the Apocalyptic Vision of Washington Allston (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 138. For the commission and location of the picture, see Bjelajac, 137–138. 11. Bjelajac, 137. 12. Oliver W. Larkin, Samuel F. B. Morse and American Democratic Art, ed. Oscar Handlin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1954), 192. Larkin writes, “Morse bought Allston’s ‘Jeremiah’ and gave it to Yale University,” from which he had graduated in 1810. He could hardly have chosen a more appropriate commemorative gift: among other things, the painting attested to his by then generally forgotten career as a painter and to his subsequent and far better known work in the field of message transmission. 13. Rembrandt Peale, “Original Thoughts on Allegorical Painting,” National Gazette, October 28, 1820; reprinted in Peale Papers, 3:850, 848, 848, 848–849. 14. “Original Thoughts on Allegorical Painting,” 851, 851. 15. William T. Oedel, “The Rewards of Virtue: Rembrandt Peale and Social Reform,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 156. 16. Roland Barthes “The World of Wrestling,” in Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 16, 16, 19, 16–17, 18, 18–19. 17. Linda Bantel et al., William Rush, American Sculptor (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1982), 164. For the idea that Rush’s figure is derived from Peale’s, see Charles Coleman Sellers, “Charles Willson Peale as Sculptor,” American Art Journal 2 (fall 1970): 10–11. 18. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1959),

Notes to Pages 59–67 :: 213

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

41–42; quoted in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “Democratic Illusions,” in Cikovsky et al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 41. Fliegelman, Declaring Independence, 134. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 [1799–1800] (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889), 2:213, 80, 198, 105, 199; 1:196. Arthur’s desire to know people’s secrets is also represented by his compulsive breaking into and entering private residences. As he says when preparing to enter Welbeck’s private study, a room he had been forbidden to examine, “The influence of prohibitions and an appearance of disguise in awaking curiosity is well known. My mind fastened upon the idea of this room with an unusual degree of intenseness” (1:82). Entering the house of prostitution, he finds the occupants unhelpful and concludes, “The satisfaction that I sought was only to be gained by searching the house.” He reflects, “Did I act illegally in passing from one story and one room to another? . . . My behaviour, I well know, was ambiguous and hazardous, and perhaps wanting in discretion, but my motives were unquestionably pure” (2:106–107). At another point, he precipitately enters the house of Mrs. Wentworth: “I had opened doors without warning, and traversed passages without being noticed.” Again he reflects for a moment, “Should I not return softly to the outer door, and summon the servant by knocking?” (2:137–138). Still later, faithfully traveling to Baltimore to inform the wife of one of Welbeck’s victims that her husband is dead, Arthur intrudes: “Guided by the impulse of the moment, I crossed the street to the gate, and, lifting the latch, entered the paved alley,” where he looks in through the window: “I felt a sort of necessity for apologizing for my intrusion into these precincts,” he comments, before knocking at the door (2:155–156). Finally, a few pages later, his breaking into and entering yet another home—that of the Maurice family, to whom he wishes to give ten thousand dollars that is rightfully theirs—begins in a familiar way: “I lifted the latch” (2:179). Arthur Mervyn, 1:200; 2:173, 179. Arthur Mervyn, 1:15. Arthur Mervyn, 2:116. Arthur Mervyn, 2:121. Steven Watts, The Romance of Real Life: Charles Brockden Brown and the Origins of American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 112. Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 1:200. Arthur Mervyn, 2:116. Bill Christophersen, The Apparition in the Glass: Charles Brockden Brown’s American Gothic (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), 116. Christophersen writes that Arthur “deploys his virtue like a martial art, confounding his adversaries with an aggressive passivity” (101). Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 1:86. Barthes, “The World of Wrestling,” 25. Rubens Peale, letter to Charles Willson Peale, May 26 and June 1, 1803, in Peale Papers, 2:530.

214 :: Notes to Pages 67–70

32. Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion,” 105–106. 33. For many years after the painting reemerged in 1931, it was called After the Bath—the name given it by the art dealer Edith Halpert. In 1982, however, the art historian Dorinda Evans demonstrated convincingly that the figure behind the cloth derives from Barry’s Venus Rising from the Sea, and that therefore “the painting must be a variant of or identical with . . . Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception,” the title of a picture Raphaelle exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1822. See Evans, “Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea: Further Support for a Change in Interpretation,” American Art Journal 14 (summer 1982): 62–72. Ward and Hart refer to the cloth as a “handkerchief or napkin” (“Subversion and Illusion,” 24). Melissa Leventon, curator of textiles at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, believes that the object is more likely a napkin than a handkerchief—it is pressed so sti¤—though its identity is still not certain. (Leventon, conversation with the author, December 1998.) 34. Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” 165. 35. Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” 165. 36. For astute readings of Charles Willson’s late self-portraits, see two essays by David C. Ward: “Celebration of Self: The Portraiture of Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale, 1822–27,” American Art 7 (winter 1993): 9–27, and “An Artist’s Self-Fashioning: The Forging of Charles Willson Peale,” Word and Image 15 (April-June 1999): 107–127. 37. Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 206. 38. Peale Papers, 4:500. 39. Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 44. 40. Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement,” in de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67–81. 41. Ann Uhry Abrams, The Valiant Hero: Benjamin West and Grand-Style History Painting (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 31. See John Galt, The Life of Benjamin West [1816, 1820] (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960). 42. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Thomas Je¤erson, January 15, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:566. 43. “Memoirs of G[eorge] E[scol] Sellers” [1897], bk. 5, p. 5. The “Memoirs,” in manuscript, are in the collection of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 44. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Dr. Richard Bradford, February 14, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:575. 45. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Thomas Je¤erson, July 3, 1820, in Peale Papers,3:831. In his excellent dissertation on the early portraits of Charles Willson Peale, David Steinberg notes Peale’s use of the “speaking Picture” phrase in the letter to Je¤erson and comments helpfully on its meaning. For Peale the phrase denoted painting that avoids artificial emblematical signs, instead employing a “natural” or “direct” sign that

Notes to Pages 70–74 :: 215

46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

a¤ects the viewer’s “empathy” rather than his or her “knowledge of more arbitrary semiotics.” (Steinberg, “The Characters of Charles Willson Peale: Portraiture and Social Identity in Philadelphia, 1769–1776,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993, 240.) The idea of directness clearly relates to prosopopoeia: communication must be clear from beyond the grave; ghosts holding obscure allegorical emblems, unable either to scare or to console because their audience simply cannot understand what they mean, might as well never have made the trip from death back into life. I read Peale’s “speaking Picture” phrase more literally than Steinberg, as evincing Peale’s desire not just to make direct pictures but pictures that actually evoke the quality of speech in their subjects. De Man begins by connecting autobiography to prosopopoeia, but he then goes on to show how autobiography actually reinscribes the deathly silence it would transcend by thematizing its own muteness. Like the coat of Nessus, language is a garment that would restore something lost, “but the restoration turn[s] out to be a worse deprivation, a loss of life and of sense” (“Autobiography as De-Facement,” 80). Raphaelle’s blank cloth, like the coat or cloak Deianeira gives Hercules, is just such a “worse deprivation”: an image promising a face, promising a restoration, yet producing nothing but its own faceless silence. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design,” 207. Amid its myriad inscriptions, King’s picture includes many disparaging references to Philadelphia. In particular King condemns the city’s surplus of art criticism and its lack of art patronage. Bound to the scroll leaning against the left wall of the niche, a Poulson’s-type publication reads, in part, “The Art of Painting better Advanced by Critisism [sic] than Patronage.” This lack of patronage, the painting claims, is not for want of money. The card resting on the water glass reads: “Mr. Skinflint Requests the Honour of your company on Thursday evening next after tea.” Another portion of the Poulson’s-type paper reads: “The beautiful estate Prospect Hall was yesterday purchased by Mr. Penny, late Chest Monger, for two hundred thousand dollars.” All of this makes it ironic when the same scrap of paper also reads, just above the “critisism” passage: “Just Published[:] Proofs that Philadelphia is the most Beautiful, the Most Hospitable, the greatest Patron to the fine Arts, and in Every Respect Superior to any City in the World. By an inhabitant.” Meanwhile, below the “Mr. Penny” notice, the paper reads: “The city of New York has ordered their hall to be ornamented with the Portraits of the Distinguished . . . of the Army and Navy.” King moved, however, not to New York but to Washington in 1816. Raphaelle Peale, letter to Charles Gra¤, September 6, 1816, in Peale Papers, 3:448. Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion,” 109. Ward and Hart, “Subversion and Illusion,” 109. Galen A. Johnson, “Ontology and Painting: ‘Eye and Mind,’” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Johnson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 49. Elsewhere Johnson calls this “the paradox of unity at a distance or sameness with di¤erence” (47–48). Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 17:235. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 235.

216 :: Notes to Pages 74–79

55. John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: J. and J. Haddock, 1813), 26–28. My thanks to Terry Castle for making me aware that the “living cloth” was a common figure in Gothic literature and other writing of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Chapter Five 1. William Woys Weaver, letter to David Cassedy, Schwarz Gallery, January 13, 1995. Schwarz Gallery files, Philadelphia. 2. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, February 17, 1817; quoted in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., et al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 104. 3. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Rubens Peale, February 17, 1817, in Peale Papers, 3:469–470. 4. Peale Papers, 3:470 n. 1. 5. This painting, along with its pendant, Rembrandt’s portrait of Jane Griffith Koch, is in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. For the dating of the picture to 1817–1820, see Ilene Susan Fort and Michael Quick, American Art: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art Collection (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991), 104–106. 6. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Rembrandt Peale, October 21, 1816, in Peale Papers, 3:457. 7. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, July 4, 1820, in Peale Papers, 3:833. 8. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, November 15, 1817, in Peale Papers, 3:547. 9. For a detailed history of the commission, see Helmut von Er¤a and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 346–350. 10. The individual characters are identified in West’s Painting. Description of the Picture, Christ Healing the Sick in the Temple (Philadelphia: James Webster, 1817). To furnish a written key to the painting was to promote the scanning attention analyzed in chapter 3. As West’s painting encourages the eye to roam, filling its space with a multitude of figures and in that way presuming the viewer’s tendency toward boredom, so— as an extra measure—it comes with a written guide that further takes the eye away from the object at hand. (In this respect, it was like many large-scale history paintings, including several of West’s own, dating back to the 1770s.) West’s painting lacks the more intensely pictorial e¤ects—e¤ects of absolutely fixating “hereness”—that might have countered this shifting attention. In its drive to make the viewer not stop and stare, its drive always to narrate a story outside itself, West’s painting fails to do what the art historian Michael Marrinan has detected in the work of early-nineteenth-century French history painters such as Baron Antoine-Jean Gros. Gros’s pictures, adhering to a demand—an imperial decree—that they tell a story, yet contain outlandishly visual e¤ects such as the slaughtered troops in Napoleon Visiting the Battlefield of Eylau (Salon of 1808), e¤ects that by their sheer visual power resist narrativization. The demands of a storytelling art, Marrinan writes, thus “produced a free space born of repression where some painters discovered (perhaps rediscovered) the power of figurality—much of what is called modernist painting descends from these surreptitious beginnings.” West’s painting, impatient with such autonomous visual e¤ects,

Notes to Pages 79–86 :: 217

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25.

is more interested, as Marrinan writes about French history painting of the period, in “the mobile act of spectating across the space of historical narration” than in the “other experiments” that this narrativized art produced. (Michael Marrinan, “Literal/Literary/‘Lexie’: History, Text, and Authority in Napoleonic Painting,” Word and Image 7 [July–September 1991]: 177–200, esp. 193.) William H. Williams, America’s First Hospital: The Pennsylvania Hospital, 1751–1841 (Wayne, Pa.: Haverford House, 1976), 14. Michael Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy in Nineteenth-Century America: Death, Dissection, and Embodied Social Identity,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997, 27. Williams, America’s First Hospital, 14. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, February 2, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:569. Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790–1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 52. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser 46 (March 4, 1817): 1. For a discussion about which meat picture the Poulson’s advertisement refers to, see William Gerdts, “Raphaelle Peale, Cutlet and Vegetables,” in One Hundred and FiftyYears of Philadelphia Still-Life Paintings, ed. Robert Devlin Schwarz (Philadelphia: Schwarz Gallery, 1997), 22. Again I am indebted to Hugues and Patricia Kosco Cossard for this information. Cutlet and Vegetables features its own poorly executed and extra cuts. As Weaver notes, “From a technical butchering standpoint, the piece of meat depicted is badly cut, that is, sliced in the wrong place.” He also notes, “Someone in [Raphaelle’s] kitchen cut o¤ a small portion of the fore-end (right through the wrapping paper!)” (Weaver, letter to Cassedy, January 13, 1995). “The work would have served excellently as a butcher’s-shop sign, were it not on canvas,” write William Gerdts and Russell Burke in American Still-Life Painting (New York: Praeger, 1971), 49. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile [1762], trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993), 220. Rousseau, Emile, 228. Phoebe Lloyd, writing about Still Life with Steak, suggests that “the painting of beef may be related to one of the great parades staged by Philadelphia’s victuallers,” but she does not say—in this single-sentence aside— what the relation might be. (Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” Art in America 76 [November 1988]: 160.) Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, March 16, 1821; quoted in Milo M. Naeve, John Lewis Krimmel: An Artist in Federal America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1987), 117. For a less sanguine view of the procession, see James Mease, “Remarks on the Late Cattle Procession in Philadelphia, with Directions how to e¤ectually promote the Breed of Cattle,” Memoirs of the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture (Philadelphia: Robert H. Small, 1826), 5:157–166. Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, quoted in Naeve, 117. The Experienced Butcher: Shewing the respectability and usefulness of his calling, the religious considerations arising from it, the laws relating to it, and various profitable suggestions for the rightly carrying it on. . . . (London: Darton, Harvey, and Darton, 1816), 18.

218 :: Notes to Pages 86–94

26. The Experienced Butcher, 17. 27. Anne Royall, Sketches of History: Life and Manners in the United States (1826); quoted in Philip Stevick, Imagining Philadelphia: Travelers’ Views of the City from 1800 to the Present (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 149. 28. Raphaelle’s use of the dark strip in one of his most rhapsodic pictures confirms this rationale. In Strawberries and Cream he included the blackness below the ledge, but he also signed his name on this blackness (see plate 5). The signature cancels the recessional power of the darkness and brings it, paradoxically, closer to our space. Transforming the void into a surface, the signature illusionistically protrudes like the strawberry leaf that extends toward us. In an image emphasizing the intertwining of subject and object, the black space ceases to be a contradiction. Raphaelle may in fact have signed his name on the black space and not on the ledge precisely to maintain the rhapsodic closeness the rest of the painting works so hard to establish. 29. For this information, and for the demonstration that the two pieces of wood are joined by four tenons, I am grateful to Robert Devlin Schwarz of the Schwarz Gallery. 30. Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 398. Sellers paraphrases from the “Memoirs of G[eorge] E[scol] Sellers” [1897], manuscript, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, bk. 8, p. 2. 31. Ric Northrup Caric, “‘To Drown the Ills That Discompose the Mind’: Care, Leisure, and Identity Among Philadelphia Artisans and Workers, 1785–1840,” Pennsylvania History 64 (Autumn 1997): 477. The historian Toby Ditz has noted a comparable anxiety in the writing of the city’s merchants during this time. In their letters addressing the constant dangers of business misfortune, these men, according to Ditz, produced a “sustained meditation on the precariousness of manly identity and reputation, a precariousness linked not only to the competitiveness and volatility of markets but also to the difficulties of defining a reputable self.” (Ditz, “Shipwrecked; or Masculinity Imperiled: Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of American History 81 [June 1994]: 51.) 32. Caric, “‘To Drown the Ills,’” 477, 465. 33. Caric, “‘To Drown the Ills,’” 477–481. 34. Ric Northrup [Caric], “Decomposition and Reconstitution: A Theoretical and Historical Study of Philadelphia Artisans, 1785–1820,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1989, 185–186. 35. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind [1812] (New York: Hafner, 1962), 80–81.

Chapter Six 1. Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in NineteenthCentury America,” in Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 12. 2. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution,” 13, 14.

Notes to Pages 94–103 :: 219

3. Russell F. Weigley, ed., Philadelphia: A Three Hundred–Year History (New York: Norton, 1982), 185. 4. Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations Upon the Diseases of the Mind [1812] (New York: Hafner, 1962), 303, 302. 5. In 1806, while in Georgia on a painting trip, Raphaelle became very ill. Charles Willson wrote to his son upon hearing of his recovery: “[I]t is a joyful intelligence to us all. . . . [T]o hear you had recovered your intellicts, is what we did not expect so soon, although Doctor Wistar told me, it was no uncommon case, when great evacuations had been made, for such persons to be insane for a short time” (Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, May 10, 1806, quoted in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., et al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes [Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988], 96). 6. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Angelica Peale Robinson, April 2, 1821, in Peale Papers, 4:36. As he was painting the heads of figures at the top of a large canvas, Peale fell o¤ the object on which he was standing, striking his side on a stool and finding himself in great pain, whereupon he “thought of getting leeches to take blood from the part a¤ected,” sending a letter “to Germantown to a man who follows bleeding cuping [sic] &c but had no Leeches.” Eventually, he writes, he “submitted to be cupped.” 7. Simon Baatz, “‘A Very Di¤used Disposition’: Dissection Schools in Philadelphia, 1823–1825,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 (April 1984): 203. For a detailed discussion of this paradigm shift, see John Harley Warner, Against the Spirit of System: The French Impulse in Nineteenth-Century American Medicine (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998). 8. For general information about the career of Shippen, Jr., see Betsy Copping Corner, William Shippen, Jr.: Pioneer in American Medical Education (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1951). 9. Charles Caldwell, M.D., An Eulogium on Caspar Wistar, M.D., Professor of Anatomy (Philadelphia: Thomas Dobson, 1818), 14. 10. Linda Bantel, in the exhibition catalogue William Rush, American Sculptor (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Adademy of the Fine Arts, 1982), reproduces the Right Maxilla as well as another model, Left Temporal Bone with Inner Ear Structures, writing that the remainder of Rush’s models are lost (111). A number of them still exist, however, in the collections of the Wistar Institute, Philadelphia. 11. David Hosack, Tribute to the Memory of the Late Caspar Wistar, M.D. (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1818), 13. 12. Hosack, 16–17. 13. William Tilghman, An Eulogium in Commemoration of Doctor Caspar Wistar (Philadelphia: E. Earle, 1818), 22–23. 14. John Godman, Monitions to the Students of Medicine. A Lecture Introductory to the Course Delivered in the Philadelphia Anatomical Rooms, Session of 1824–5 (Philadelphia: J. R. A. Skerrett, 1825), 15. 15. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40 (fall 1992): 81–128. Tilghman, An Eulogium, 25. 16. Michael Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy in Nineteenth-Century America: Death, Dissection, and Embodied Social Identity,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997, 159. 17. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Angelica Robinson Peale, April 2, 1821, in Peale Papers, 4:38. Peale puts it

220 :: Notes to Pages 103–106

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

nicely when he explains Godman’s tremendous erudition: “he is learned in the dead Language beside his knowledge of the living languages.” John Godman, Anatomical Investigations Comprising Descriptions of Various Fasciae of the Human Body (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1824), vi. Godman, Anatomical Investigations, vi. Godman, Anatomical Investigations, viii. Godman, Analytic Anatomy. A Lecture Introductory to a Course Delivered in the Philadelphia Anatomical Rooms, Session of 1823–4 (Philadelphia: Published by the Class, 1824), 13. Godman, Anatomical Investigations, viii. Baatz, “‘A Very Di¤used Disposition,’” 205, 209. Solomon Mordecai to Ellen Mordecai [1820], quoted in William Barlow and David O. Powell, “A Dedicated Medical Student: Solomon Mordecai, 1819–1822,” Journal of the Early Republic 7 (winter 1987): 390. Simon Baatz, “The French Connection: Pathological Anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, 1820–1845,” unpublished paper. Baatz, “‘A Very Di¤used Disposition,’” 206. Baatz, “‘A Very Di¤used Disposition,’” 206. Kenneth B. Roberts, “A Case History: John Bell’s Anatomical Etchings of the Muscles,” in Mimi Cazort et al., The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996), 93. Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 275. Simon Baatz, “The Wistar Legacy: Medical Science in Philadelphia, 1796–1905,” manuscript, Wistar Institute Library, Philadelphia, 111. David Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic: Peale’s Museum and Its Audience (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 95. Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Je¤erson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 134. Quoted in J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 (Philadelphia: L. H. Everts, 1884), 2:951. Quoted in History of Philadelphia, 2:951. Quoted in History of Philadelphia, 2:951. John Neal, Randolph, A Novel [1823], excerpted in Observations on American Art: Selections from the Writings of John Neal (1793–1876), ed. Harold Edward Dickson (State College, Pa.: Pennsylvania State College,1943), 9. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Angelica Robinson Peale, April 2, 1821, in Peale Papers, 4:38. William T. Oedel, “The Rewards of Virtue: Rembrandt Peale and Social Reform,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 162. Neal provides another example of the interrelation of art and anatomy in Rembrandt’s work. Looking back in later life on

Notes to Pages 106–109 :: 221

his friendship with the artist, Neal corrects a “very strange” mistaken belief that he had posed for the figure of War in The Court of Death. He did claim to have posed, however, as the figure of Virginius in Rembrandt’s (now-lost) Death of Virginia: It happened thus: One day Dr. John Godman, the celebrated anatomist and lecturer, who afterward married Angelica, Peale's second daughter, and who had seen me with my right arm bare, after I had been sparring or fencing, I forget which, asked me if I would consent to help Peale in a desperate emergency. He wanted a leg or two, and a right arm, and knew not where to find them. I consented; and soon after stood for the Roman father till I was ready to drop; after peeling me, he transferred my right arm, uplifted and brandishing the bloody knife, and one of my legs, or both of them, to the canvas.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43. 44.

45.

46.

The key to this striking account is the word “He” in the sentence that begins, “He wanted a leg or two.” Coming after the mention of both Godman and Peale, the “He” is strategically ambiguous, referring both to the anatomist and the painter, allowing Neal to take full advantage of the deliberate confusion between dissection and painting that follows: “He wanted a leg or two, and a right arm”; “after peeling me, he transferred my right arm . . . and one of my legs, or both of them, to the canvas.” Though referring to Neal’s experience of watching his limbs copied into the painting, the passage also black-humoredly evokes the writer’s dismemberment as his limbs were transferred into the painting (even as the writer himself “brandish[es] the bloody knife”). In this way, the passage suggests the interchangeability of art and anatomy in Philadelphia around 1820. To be “peeled” was to be both painted and dissected. (Neal, “Our Painters. I,” Atlantic Monthly [1868], in Observations on American Art, 76.) Autobiography of Charles Willson Peale, in Peale Papers, 5:356–357. Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 207. Charles Willson Peale, letter to John Isaac Hawkins, in Peale Papers, 2:597–599. N. P. Wiley, letter to I. B. Van Schaick, 1820, quoted in Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 157–158. “The Negro Steaks (A Chapter from the Diary of a N.Y. Physician),” Thomsonian Manual 1 (1835): 181–182, quoted in Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 113–114. Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 143. Francis Hopkinson, “An Oration, Which Might Have Been Delivered to the Students in Anatomy, on the Late Rupture Between the Two Schools in This City,” in Hopkinson,The Miscellaneous Essays (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792), 3:202–203. For John Foulke as the painter of Ribs of Raw Beef, see William Gerdts, “Raphaelle Peale, Still Life with Steak,” in Masterworks of American Art from the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute (New York: Abrams, 1989), 25. For Foulke’s career as an anatomist, see Horace Mather Lippincott, “Dr. John Foulke, 1780, a Pioneer in Aeronautics,” General Magazine and Historical Chronicle 34 (July 1932): 525–533, esp. 525–527. For more on Foulke and medical practice, see J. H. Powell, Bring Out Your Dead: The Great Plague of Yellow Fever in Philadelphia in 1793 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949). John Bell, Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints [1794] (Philadelphia: Anthony Finley, 1816), ix, x.

222 :: Notes to Pages 109–111

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

Godman, Anatomical Investigations, ix, 83. Bell, Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints, ix. Bell, Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints, vii. William E. Horner, letter to James Gibson, June 23, 1818, University of Pennsylvania Archives, Philadelphia. For a complete catalogue of the Anatomical Museum, see William E. Horner, Report on the State of the Anatomical Museum of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: By Order of the Trustees, 1824). Charles Willson Peale, quoted in Brigham, Public Culture in the Early Republic, 138–139. “Memoirs of G[eorge] E[scol] Sellers” [1897], bk. 8, p. 1, quoted in Phoebe Lloyd, “Philadelphia Story,” Art in America 76 (November 1988): 170. James Cli¤ord, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 216. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Rembrandt Peale, October 9, 1815, in Peale Papers, 3:363. Raphaelle Peale, letter to Charles Gra¤, September 6, 1816, in Peale Papers, 3:448; Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, June 26, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:593; Charles Willson Peale, letter to Angelica Robinson Peale, July 24, 1818, quoted in Cikovsky, Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes, 107; Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, February 2, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:569. Benjamin Smith Barton, The Elements of Botany; or, Outlines of the Natural History of Vegetables (Philadelphia: Printed for the author, 1803), 2:55, 56, 20. Barton, The Elements of Botany 2:20, 5. Barton, A Discourse on Some of the Principal Desiderata in Natural History and on the Best Means of Promoting the Study of the Science in the United-States (Philadelphia: Denham and Town, 1807), 13. Godman, Anatomical Investigations, 57, 58. Godman, Anatomical Investigations, 73. Wolfgang Born, Still-Life Painting in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 13. See Peale Papers, 4:223. “In late February 1823,” write the editors of the Peale Papers, Miller, Hart, and Ward, “Peale began to compose his lecture. He completed it by March 5 with the assistance of his son Raphaelle and his granddaughter’s husband, the naturalist [and anatomist] John D. Godman.”

Chapter Seven 1. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiment, quoted in Michael Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy in Nineteenth-Century America: Death, Dissection, and Embodied Social Identity,” Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997, 49. 2. Alfred Brunson, A Western Pioneer; or, Incidents of the Life and Times of Reverend Alfred Brunson (Cincinnati and New York, 1872), quoted in Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790– 1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 191–193.

Notes to Pages 111–126 :: 223

3. The American Museum, or, Universal Magazine 8 (1790): 227–229, quoted in Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 65. 4. Ric Northrup Caric, “‘To Drown the Ills That Discompose the Mind’: Care, Leisure, and Identity among Philadelphia Artisans and Workers, 1785–1840,” Pennsylvania History 64 (autumn 1997): 466. 5. Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” p. 138; David Humphrey, “Dissection and Discrimination: The Social Origins of Cadavers in America, 1760–1915,” Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 49 (September 1973): 819. For “Negro Steaks (A Chapter from the Diary of a N.Y. Physician),” Thomsonian Manual 1 (1835): 181–182, see Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 113–114. 6. Francis Hopkinson, “An Oration, Which Might Have Been Delivered to the Students in Anatomy, on the Late Rupture Between the Two Schools in This City,” in Hopkinson, The Miscellaneous Essays (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792), 3:197. The section concerning “Brown cadavera” is on 199–201. 7. John Godman, letter to John C. Warren, January 1, 1829; quoted in Patsy A. Gerstner, “A Note on Body Snatching in the United States,” Bulletin of the Cleveland Medical Library Association 18 (July 1971): 64–65. Massachusetts, in 1831, was the first state to legalize the acquisition of corpses for medical study. 8. Kenneth B. Roberts, “A Case History: John Bell’s Anatomical Etchings of the Muscles,” in Mimi Cazort et al., The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996), 97. 9. Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 137, 150; Thomas Sewall, Memoir of Dr. John D. Godman (New York: American Tract Society, 1830), 2. 10. Sappol, “The Cultural Politics of Anatomy,” 137. 11. Sappol, “Sammy Tubbs and Dr. Hubbs: Anatomical Dissection, Minstrelsy, and the Technology of SelfMaking in Post-Bellum America,” Configurations 2 (1996): 131–183. 12. Michael Sappol, e-mails to the author, March 3 and June 3, 1999. Sappol argues that in “early modern anatomies, the social character and physical context of the cadaver and the anatomical act (dissection) receive representation. . . . The spectator is reminded that this is a person who has been carved up, and perhaps that the person is of a social class associated with the body (pauper, criminal, prostitute).” In most nineteenth-century anatomies, in contrast, “anything that suggests a context or the particular humanity of the cadaver . . . is suppressed.” Sappol adds that in still “later anatomies the reduction/erasure is even carried further through an emphasis on cellular and local anatomy, so that the body itself ” disappears. 13. For information about Coleman Sellers, see John Maxson, Jr., “Coleman Sellers: Machine Maker to America’s First Mechanized Paper Mills,” Paper Maker 30 (1961): 13–27; and Eugene S. Ferguson, Early Engineering Reminiscences (1815–40) of George Escol Sellers (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1965). 14. John Godman, Anatomical Investigations Comprising Descriptions of Various Fasciae of the Human Body (Philadelphia : H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1824), 82, 82, 84. 15. Godman, Anatomical Investigations, 80, 81, 83, vii.

224 :: Notes to Pages 126–131

16. Rembrandt Peale, Notes on Italy (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1831), 50–53. For a discussion of Notes on Italy, including this incident, and of other nineteenth-century American travel narratives, see Susan Stewart, “Exogamous Relations: Travel Writing, the Incest Prohibition, and Hawthorne’s Transformation,” in Culture/Contexture: Explorations in Anthropology and Literary Studies, ed. E. Valentine Daniel and Jeffrey M. Peck (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 132–155. 17. As a narrative of identity formation, Rembrandt’s story differs from a comparably gruesome tale recounted by Titian Ramsay Peale II. In Missouri during the Long Expedition in 1819, Titian and the Long party heard of an event that had taken place three years earlier. A local resident, Mr. Monroe, had “observed a mound of earth about 8 feet high” near the site of an encampment. He and his men accordingly opened the mound and were surprised at finding in it the body of a white officer of distinction which had been interred with extraordinary care. The body was placed in a sitting posture upon an Indian rush mat with the back resting against some logs. The clothing of the body was still in a state of sufficiently good preservation to exhibit a red coat trimmed with gold epaulettes, a spotted buff vest also trimmed with gold lace, and common hat, and white nankeen pantaloons, with feet. A walking cane with the initials, T.M.C. engraved upon a golden head, inclined upon the arm, but was decayed where it came in contact with the muscular part of the legs. Upon raising the hat from the head of the body they observed that the deceased had been hastily scalped. To what nation this officer belonged, whether American, British, or Spanish, Mr. Monroe could not distinguish, but he observed that a button taken from the shoulders had the word, Philadelphia, moulded upon it. The cane still remains in the possession of [Mr. Monroe], but the button was taken by another of his party. (“The Journal of Titian Ramsay Peale, Pioneer Naturalist, Part II,” ed. A. C. Weese, Missouri Historical Review 41 [April 1947]: 276.) Perhaps because of the secondhand nature of this tale (told to Titian by Mr. Monroe), as well as the “distinction” of the dead man, the sense of power over the dead body is less here than in Rembrandt’s account of 1831. Although Monroe’s party disturb the body and take souvenirs, in Titian’s recounting they treat the “white officer” with relative respect, if not with the “extraordinary care” demonstrated by the original interment party. Perhaps the chief measure of this respect is the absence of the visceral detail that characterizes Rembrandt’s story. The dead white officer is never visualized fully as an object; attention is displaced onto his clothes and other accoutrements—probably because the dead man, like the members of the Long party, was an agent of exploration with a Philadelphia connection. Unlike those buried in the catacombs, he is more “us” than “them.” Less reverentially, Titian, Thomas Say, and one other man had opened a number of Indian graves near Saint Louis earlier in the trip (“The Journal of Titian Ramsay Peale, Pioneer Naturalist,” part 1, ed. A. C. Weese, Missouri Historical Review 41 [January 1947]: 160–161.) This account assumes more the tone of Rembrandt’s proprietary view of the dead. It also provides some of the visceral detail missing from the story of

Notes to Page 131 :: 225

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

the white officer. Here the body comes more into view: “We saw a head that had been dug up so old that the teeth and alveole process were entirely wanting, leaving a sharp edge to the jaw bone” (161). Both these events are also recounted in Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1823), 1:90–92, 59–64. John Godman, Contributions to Physiological and Pathological Anatomy (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1825), 8. John Godman, Monitions to the Students of Medicine. A Lecture Introductory to the Course Delivered in the Philadelphia Anatomical Rooms, Session of 1824–5 (Philadelphia: J. R. A. Skerrett, 1825), 15. David Steinberg, “Charles Willson Peale Portrays the Body Politic,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 119–133. Steinberg offers an informative reading of Peale’s visual devices for showing “good minds.” See also David. C. Ward, “An Artist’s Self-Fashioning: The Forging of Charles Willson Peale,” Word and Image 15 (April–June 1999): 107–127, in which he writes of Charles Willson’s Self-Portrait (see fig. 53), “The eye is drawn to Peale’s balding pate . . . and to the Peale mind as the seat of reason and self-mastery” (121). Godman, although Rembrandt depicted him as a comfortable middle-class figure, was often short of money and, toward the end of his life, in poor health from the tuberculosis that killed him at age thirty-two in 1830. His strong separation from the corpses of the indigent was then perhaps a compensation for a certain closeness he felt to these figures. Near the end of his life, he also repented of his medical practice, regarding it as a “riotous rebellion ’gainst the laws / Of health, truth, [and] heaven,” all so that he could “win the world’s applause” (Godman, untitled poem, in Sewall, Memoir of Dr. John D. Godman, inside front cover). Joseph Delaplaine, Prospectus of Delaplaine’s National Panzographia for the Reception of the Portraits of Distinguished Americans (Philadelphia: William Brown, 1818), 10–11. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle Peale, November 15, 1817, in Peale Papers, 3:548. David C. Ward and Sidney Hart, “Subversion and Illusion in the Life and Art of Raphaelle Peale,” American Art 8 (summer/fall 1994): 115. For Ward and Hart, this negative relationship “hinges on their [father and son’s] starkly contrasting subject matter: Peale painted the great men and rising middle classes of America while his son painted fruit and vegetables” (20–21). Although I agree that this was one form of Raphaelle’s negation, a more fundamental form, I am arguing, is the way he sometimes crossed portraiture and still life, in effect painting “the great men and rising middle classes” as “fruit and vegetables” or, more precisely, painting himself in such terms. The portrait-like quality of Raphaelle’s still lifes haunts discourse about them to this day. Raphaelle’s Corn and Cantaloupe (plate 14), wrote the art critic Grace Glueck in 1999, “has the character of a fine portrait.” As if to emphasize this connection, Glueck’s article features a reproduction of Corn and Cantaloupe above a reproduction of William Dunlap’s Self-Portrait. (Grace Glueck, “A Historian Who Wielded a Brush as Well as a Pen,” New York Times, January 8, 1999, sect. B, p. 37.) Edmund Burke, letter to the duke of Richmond, November 15, 1772, quoted in Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 4–5. I learned of this drawing from the work of Kenneth Haltman, the first scholar to develop an interpretation

226 :: Notes to Pages 131–137

of the image. See Haltman, “Titian Ramsay Peale’s Specimen Portraiture; or, Natural History as Family History,” in The Peale Family: The Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 191 and 294 n. 27, and Haltman, “Figures in a Western Landscape: Reading the Art of Titian Ramsay Peale from the Long Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, 1819–1820,” Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1992, 196–202. In “Titian Ramsay Peale’s Specimen Portraiture,” Haltman notes that Phoebe Lloyd, in “Invisible Killers: Heavy Metals, Saturnine Envy, and the Tragic Death of Raphaelle Peale,” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 16 (December 1994): 83–99, attributes the drawing to Raphaelle “based on style.” Haltman stands by the attribution to Titian Ramsay, and so do I. 27. In 1796 Raphaelle wrote a love poem in couplets to his future wife, Patty McGlathery. Accompanying a gift of Samuel Johnson’s Works of the English Poets, the poem mentions many poets, including Alexander Pope, the great couplet writer. Addressing the books, commanding them to do his bidding, Raphaelle writes, “Display the native Charms that led a Pope,/Above a height that no one dares to hope” (in Peale Papers, 2:153–154). Raphaelle was still writing couplets twenty-nine years later. On the day Raphaelle died in 1825, George Escol Sellers wrote, he “called me to him and showed me several closely written cap pages and said that a confectioner and candy maker on Market St. below 4th St. paid him a certain price for couplets, for what at that time were called secrets, but that he preferred comic to lovesick. He amused me by reading many of them” (“Memoirs of G[eorge] E[scol] Sellers” [1897], manuscript, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, bk. 8, pp. 10–11). The relation of Raphaelle’s paintings to his poetic couplets is well worth investigation. His visual “rhymes” of objects—the play between the cabbage and the steak, for example—duplicate the “parallel and antithesis” of the couplet: the way the couplet’s two lines play off one another to create “ironic resemblance or difference between the rhyme words.” (William K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon [Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1954], 180; John Jones, Pope’s Couplet Art [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969], 6.) At the same time, Raphaelle’s pictures, with their wit, match the couplet’s reliance on rhyme, with its connotations of low-brow humor. As Addison put it in Spectator No. 62, he was against “doggerel rhymes and puns as instances of that ‘mixt wit’ which consists partly in the Resemblance of Ideas, and partly in the Resemblance of words” (quoted in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon, 184). Each—still-life picture and couplet—relies thus on both rational rules and low-brow “doggerel.” That Raphaelle’s pictures are so conspicuously silent, so incommunicative, need not disturb this hypothesis. Analyzing his paintings in these terms would be a matter of understanding the Popian couplet transmuted into visual form, made to function with something like the couplet’s doggerel elegance, and yet to do so in a way that folds the couplet into the specific properties of visual art. Nor would this hypothesis necessarily be troubled by the Wordsworthian element in Raphaelle’s art. It would not be contradictory for an early-nineteenth-century American artist to express himself in terms of Romantic projection and a neoclassical “Popian diction,” especially when we consider that Pope was one of the most popular of all poets among early-nineteenth-century American audiences. (Annabel Newton, Wordsworth in Early American Criticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928], 2.)

Note to Page 138 :: 227

28. Washington Irving, Tales of a Traveller, quoted in Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 110. 29. Quoted in Ric Northrup [Caric], “Decomposition and Reconstitution: A Theoretical and Historical Study of Philadelphia Artisans, 1785–1820,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1989, 238–239. 30. Rembrandt Peale, “Original Thoughts on Allegorical Painting,” in Peale Papers, 3:849. Rembrandt also writes of paintings “affecting the heart without doing violence to the understanding” (849) and of a way of painting that would “sympathize with the heart or . . . illuminate the understanding” (851). 31. Raphaelle, letter to Patty McGlathery, June 17, 1796; in Peale Papers, 2:153. 32. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Angelica Robinson Peale, June 17, 1806, in Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., et al., Raphaelle Peale Still Lifes (Washington D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1988), 96; Charles Willson Peale, letter to Nathaniel Ramsay, March 13, 1813, in Peale Papers, 3:190; Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle, February 2, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:571; Charles Willson Peale, letter to Raphaelle, March 1, 1818, in Peale Papers, 3:580. 33. In this sense, cabbage and beef would be barely repressed versions of the imagery explored in Bell’s picture of the two decapitated heads (see fig. 48) or in Théodore Géricault’s similar Study of Two Severed Heads, circa 1819. Indeed, on first seeing Still Life with Steak at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in June 1993, I immediately thought of Géricault’s painting, and I still believe that the two almost contemporaneous pictures can be read productively one against the other. Although of course he did not know Géricault’s art, Raphaelle, as I have been arguing, painted still lifes deeply informed by the anatomical imagery explicit in the French artist’s paintings. Still Life with Steak would thus owe its similarity to Study of Two Severed Heads— its comparable massing of forms, its aura of recently completed violence—to its failed repression of the type of imagery Géricault shows openly. For readings of Géricault’s anatomical imagery, see Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, “Géricault’s Severed Heads and Limbs: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Scaffold,” Art Bulletin 74 (December 1992): 599–618; and Michael Fried, Courbet’s Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 27–28.

Chapter Eight 1. Sarah Blank Dine, “Inoculation, Patients, and Physicians: The Transformation of Medical Practice in Philadelphia, 1730–1810,” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 20 (December 1998): 90. 2. Benjamin Rush, quoted in Dine, “Inoculation, Patients, and Physicians,” 68. 3. Dine, “Inoculation, Patients, and Physicians,” 68. 4. Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 170. 5. Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’” 245, quoted in Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked, 170–171. The interpolation is in the original. 6. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

228 :: Notes to Pages 138–146

7. For a reading that emphasizes the connection of Kristeva’s theory of abjection to the maternal body, see Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in The Dread of Di¤erence: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 35–65. Creed writes, “One of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes an abject at that moment when the child rejects her for the father who represents the symbolic order” (36). 8. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2. 9. Laura Rigal, “Peale’s Mammoth,” in American Iconology, ed. David Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 18. 10. Francis Hopkinson, “An Oration, Which Might Have Been Delivered to the Students of Anatomy, on the Late Rupture Between the Two Schools in This City,” in Hopkinson, The Miscellaneous Essays (Philadelphia: T. Dobson, 1792), 3:197. Charles Willson Peale, Autobiography, quoted in Lillian B. Miller, “Charles Willson Peale as History Painter: The Exhumation of the Mastodon,” in New Perspectives on Charles Willson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 151. 11. For the connection of Peale’s pose to that of the Apollo Belvedere, see Miller, “Charles Willson Peale as History Painter,” 157. 12. Rigal, “Peale’s Mammoth,” 31. 13. Charles Willson Peale, letter to John DePeyster, February 19–20, 1804, in Peale Papers, 2:637. See also Dine, “Inoculation, Patients, and Physicians,” 85. 14. Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 49. 15. For Peale’s obsessive additions to the picture—additions that kept him at work on it all the way into 1808— see Peale, letter to John Isaac Hawkins, October 25, 1807, in Peale Papers, 2:1033–1039, esp. 1036 and 1039 n. 9. In this note the Peale Papers editors write, “Although Exhumation was completed and signed by [Peale] in 1806, [he] continually added to the work, and, by 1808, when he finally stopped modifying it, the number of figures had risen to seventy-five and the number of actual portraits to twenty.” 16. Charles Willson Peale, Autobiography, quoted in Miller, “Charles Willson Peale as History Painter,” 151. 17. See Helmut von Er¤a and Allen Staley, The Paintings of Benjamin West (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 596–597. 18. For the identification of the instruments on the left side of West’s painting, and for an interesting general discussion of the picture, I am grateful to W. Douglass Paschall, research associate at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and to John V. Alviti, senior curator at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. For a good description of the scientific instruments, see Mitch Struble, letter to Judith Stein, September 25, 1970, curatorial files, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Struble writes: “The two cherubs to [Franklin’s] right are toying with a set of Leyden jars in series, used to collect static electricity. In the right cherub’s hand and in front of the jars are glass-handled electrostatic dischargers (they cannot retain a charge). Static electricity is flowing from the sphere (attached to the metal arc joining the two jars) to a ground plate.”

Notes to Pages 146–152 :: 229

19. John Galt, The Life of Benjamin West [1816, 1820] (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1960), 6–8. 20. Other signs of the painting’s deterioration include two pentimenti: the watermelon shows through the smaller whole melon placed in front of it; and in the background the horizon line shows through a plate-bound object placed in front of it. This last object, like the golden apple in Still Life with Cake, reveals that Raphaelle painted the empty ledge first and then populated it with objects canceling the horizontal emptiness of this initial stage. 21. Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” 56. Creed writes, “The archaic mother—constructed as a negative force—is represented in her phantasmagoric aspects in many horror texts, particularly the science fiction horror film. We see her as the gaping, cannibalistic bird’s mouth in The Giant Claw (1957); the terrifying spider of The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957); the toothed vagina/womb of Jaws (1975); and the fleshy, pulsating womb of The Thing and Poltergeist (1982). What is common to all of these images of horror is the voracious maw” (55–56). Melons and Morning Glories, for all its di¤erence from something like the shark in Jaws, nonetheless a¤ords a similar image of a threatening female mouth. The imagery of the open red mouth is close enough in these vastly di¤erent representations—an early-nineteenth-century still-life painting and a 1970s motion picture—that the two might be compared as points in a larger history of threatening female (non)forms in American visual culture. The comparison suggests the relation of the shark’s mouth in Jaws to early-nineteenth-century Gothic imagery, as well as the “horror” elements of Raphaelle’s painting. 22. For the identification of the melon as an “Anne Arundel,” see Phoebe Lloyd, “Raphaelle Peale’s Anne-Arundel Still Life: A Local Treasure Lost and Found,” Maryland Historical Magazine 87 (spring 1992): 5. 23. Jan van Riemsdyck’s drawings for the Anatomy of the human gravid uterus are located in the Special Collections Department of the Glasgow University Library. For a color reproduction of van Riemsdyck’s frontal view of a womb, see for example Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla Jordanova, The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 84. 24. Lloyd, “Raphaelle Peale’s Anne-Arundel Still Life,” 5. Two other points in Lloyd’s account make the picture interesting in the terms I set forth: first, Raphaelle may well have given the picture to its initial owner, Dr. Benjamin Lee, of Prince George’s County, Maryland, in lieu of payment for medical services rendered (6–7); and second, Anne Arundel County was the “ancestral surround” of Raphaelle’s mother, Rachel Brewer Peale. Raphaelle had come to this part of Maryland, perhaps giving the painting to Dr. Lee, because there he might “enter into a dense social network that was always available to him through his mother’s family contacts” (5). In some way, then, Corn and Cantaloupe can be connected not just to the artist’s birthplace but to his mother’s own homeland and to his medically treated body.

Chapter Nine 1. Meyer Schapiro, “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-Life,” in Schapiro, Modern Art, Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1978), 6. Schapiro’s argument about Cézanne’s still lifes—that “there is a latent erotic sense, an unconscious symbolizing of a repressed desire”

230 :: Notes to Pages 152–158

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

in his imagery of apples (12)—has affinities with my argument, though Schapiro’s case is so specific to Cézanne and mine to Raphaelle that I have found Schapiro’s essay to be mostly irrelevant to my project. This was a surprise to me, since when I started my research, and as I mulled the topic still earlier, I had assumed that Schapiro’s essay would be more important to my concerns than it has turned out to be. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 39. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Ballantine, 1997), 111. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 49. Yalom, A History of the Breast, 120. Wordsworth, The Prelude, 9.811–815, quoted in Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 44. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 [1799–1800] (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1889), 1:40, 2:116. For a mention of Rush’s Exhortation and Praise at the 1812 Pennsylvania Academy Annual Exhibition, see Linda Bantel et al., William Rush: American Sculptor (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1982), 130. G[eorge] M[urray], “The Fine Arts—for the Port Folio. Review of the Second Annual Exhibition,” Port Folio 8 (July 1812): 20. Lillian B. Miller, In Pursuit of Fame: Rembrandt Peale, 1778–1860 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), 108–109. A¤ording the viewer a privileged view of a cave’s interior, and doing so in exhibition venues requiring paid admission, The Court of Death worked on the same principle, cave and dungeon being but di¤erent versions of sequestered space. Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 54. Quoted in Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 52. Quoted in Gelpi, Shelley’s Goddess, 53. James Cli¤ord, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 216. Freud, Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, 23:299, quoted in Yalom, A History of the Breast, 151. Murray, “The Fine Arts—for the Port Folio,” 20. Quoted in Miller, In Pursuit of Fame, 111. Elaine Scarry, “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium),” Representations 57 (winter 1997): 108. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile [1762], trans. Barbara Foxley (London: Everyman, 1993), 35–36. David Steinberg, “The Characters of Charles Willson Peale: Portraiture and Social Identity in Philadelphia, 1769–1776,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1993, 212–217. In his dissertation, Steinberg devotes considerable space to an expert reading of The Peale Family Group. See chapter 2, “The Character of a Virtuous Patron,” 200–220; and chapter 3, “The Character of a Painter,” 221–277.

Notes to Pages 158–167 :: 231

22. Steinberg, “The Characters of Charles Willson Peale,” 217. 23. Steinberg alludes to this tactile relation when he writes of St. George’s drawing, “Four seated figures can reach it as easily as the granddaughter grasps a peach from the still-life that is the drawing’s compositional counterpart on the right end of the table” (243). 24. One could say also that it epitomizes a warm yet faded recollection of the mother. Discussing the way St. George is shown drawing his niece after completing the drawing of his mother, Steinberg writes, “St. George’s fleeting yet steady perception of his niece exists in precise counterpoint to his lingering yet degenerating image of his mother—an image ‘fading, old, and past.’” For a discussion of St. George’s act of drawing in relation to perception and memory, see Steinberg, “The Characters of Charles Willson Peale,” 245–251.

Chapter Ten 1. Ric Northrup [Caric], “Decomposition and Reconstitution: A Theoretical and Historical Study of Philadelphia Artisans, 1785–1820,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1989, 237. 2. Caric, “Decomposition and Reconstitution,” 236–237. See also 182–183. 3. After being shown at the Second Annual Pennsylvania Academy Exhibition in 1812, Rush’s sculptures were installed that same year at Saint Paul’s, which had commissioned the sculptor to decorate the church’s new organ. In 1830 Exhortation and Praise, along with their companion work, Cherubim Encircled by a Glory, were transferred to nearby Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church, also in Philadelphia. At Saint Peter’s the figures were installed on either side of the organ (Linda Bantel et al., William Rush: American Sculptor [Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1982], 130–132). Recently the Philadelphia Museum of Art restored the figures, repainted them white, and returned them to Saint Peter’s. 4. Quoted in Bantel, William Rush, 164. 5. G[eorge] M[urray], “The Fine Arts—for the Port Folio: Review of the Second Annual Exhibition,” Port Folio 8 (July 1812): 24. 6. David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 276. 7. Caric, “Decomposition and Reconstitution,” 182–183. 8. For information about the city seal, see Joseph Jackson, Encyclopedia of Philadelphia (Harrisburg, Pa.: The National Historical Association, 1933), 4:1077–1078. 9. Here it is helpful to think of Nicolas Poussin’s Adoration of the Golden Calf (1637; National Gallery of Art, London), although of course I do not wish to imply any direct relation between Krimmel’s and Poussin’s pictures. 10. Rembrandt Peale, “Original Thoughts on Allegorical Painting,” National Gazette, October 28, 1820; reprinted in Peale Papers, 3:848. 11. Anneliese Harding, John Lewis Krimmel: Genre Artist of the Early Republic (Winterthur, Del.: Winterthur, 1994), 22.

232 :: Notes to Pages 168–175

12. Rembrandt Peale, “Original Thoughts on Allegorical Painting,” Peale Papers, 3:848. 13. For example, Asher B. Durand’s picture, The Capture of Major Andre, painted in 1835, is only 25 ⅛ by 30 ½ inches, barely larger than Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception and Still Life with Watermelon. (Durand’s picture is now located at the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts.) For the shift to genre-inflected history paintings in the period 1830–1860, see Mark Thistlethwaite, “The Most Important Themes: History Painting and Its Place in American Art,” in William Gerdts and Thistlethwaite, Grand Illusions: History Painting in America (Fort Worth, Tex.: Amon Carter Museum, 1988), 34–44. “This transformation began to occur in the early 1830s,” Thistlethwaite writes, “ . . . and became prevalent during the 1840s and 1850s” (37). For a reading of the ideology of a comparable shift—the creation of a “popular” British history painting in the 1760s and 1770s—see Solkin, Painting for Money, 190–213. 14. Quoted in Charles Coleman Sellers, Charles Willson Peale (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), caption for an illustration following 402. 15. David Steinberg, “Charles Willson Peale Portrays the Body Politic,” in The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, ed. Lillian B. Miller (New York: Abbeville, 1996), 133. 16. Roger B. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design: The Artist in His Museum,” in New Perspectives on Charles Wilson Peale, ed. Lillian B. Miller and David C. Ward (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 173. 17. Sully had his studio and picture gallery in Philosophical Hall from 1812 to 1822 (Edward Biddle and Mantle Fielding, The Life and Works of Thomas Sully [1783–1872] [Philadelphia: Wickersham Press, 1921], 29–30). Biddle and Fielding quote William Dunlap, who wrote that in fall 1819 Sully “was . . . painting his great picture of the crossing of the Delaware and occupied the Philosophical Hall adjoining the State House.” (See Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States [1834; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965], 1:328.) 18. For a detailed account of the commission, see Philipp P. Fehl, “Thomas Sully’s Washington’s Passage of the Delaware: The History of a Commission,” Art Bulletin 55 (December 1973): 584–599. 19. Mark Thistlethwaite, “The Image of George Washington: Studies in Mid–Nineteenth Century American History Painting,” Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1977, 28. 20. Fehl, “Thomas Sully’s Washington’s Passage of the Delaware,” 592, 587–588, 587. 21. Quoted in Fehl, 586. 22. Quoted in Fehl, 589. 23. Neal, Randolph, A Novel [1823], excerpted in Observations on American Art: Selections from the Writings of John Neal (1793–1876), ed. Harold Edward Dickson (State College, Pa.: Pennsylvania State College, 1943), 12. 24. It is interesting in this regard to compare Sully’s painting to John Trumbull’s earlier picture Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar (1786–1789; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which uses the same split composition to represent a di¤erent political problem. Whereas Sully’s soulful Washington surveys a vast empty space, not knowing what to do with it, Trumbull’s aristocratic British generals, in particular General George Elliot, face a great roiling triangular mass of battling soldiers. Visualizing Trumbull’s own Fed-

Notes to Pages 176–181 :: 233

25. 26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

eralist disdain for the rabble, pictured here as a clamoring pile markedly separated from the officers’ own dignified position, the painting halves itself to represent an aristocratic distance from the common run of person. The division is emphasized by the way Trumbull’s British officers gaze upon the mortally wounded Spanish officer Don José de Barboza at center foreground. Allowing the officers to show their civilized empathy (respect and compassion even for an enemy), the figure of de Barboza relieves the British commanders of the need even to contemplate the run of common soldiers further to the left. Thirty years after Trumbull finished his picture, in 1819, Sully used the same split to show the new self—the appropriator of Federalist command—confronted now not with a mass of social inferiors but with the spectacle of his own terrifyingly open prospects. For Trumbull’s painting, see the catalogue section of Jules Prown, “John Trumbull as History Painter,” in Helen Cooper et al., John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 56–62. Neal, Randolph, A Novel, excerpted in Observations on American Art, 11–12. Sully was literally the victim of too much space in this picture, since he made it so large that it would not fit on any wall in the North Carolina State House in Raleigh, its intended destination. Relieved of his commission to provide the State House with a picture, Sully took the painting on a tour that was not financially successful (see Fehl, “Thomas Sully’s Washington’s Passage of the Delaware,” 585–586). Charles Brockden Brown, “The Rhapsodist, No. II,” Universal Asylum, and Columbian Magazine 3 (September 1789), in The Rhapsodist and Other Uncollected Writings of Charles Brockden Brown, ed. Harry R. Warfel (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1943), 7. ED, “Map of the United States,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser 44 (September 7, 1815): 2. “Map of the United States,” 2. For the phrase “print discourse of geography,” and a convincing argument about the importance of maps and geographic texts in forming American national identity in the early nineteenth century, see Martin Brückner, “Lessons in Geography: Maps, Spellers, and Other Grammars of Nationalism in the Early Republic,” American Quarterly 51 (June 1999): 311–343. Stein, “Charles Willson Peale’s Expressive Design,” 171. Laura Rigal, “Peale’s Mammoth,” in American Iconology, ed. David Miller (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 19. Robert Gilmor, Jr., letter to Charles Gra¤, May 11, 1837, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The quotation appears, with slight alterations, in Anna Wells Rutledge, “One Early American’s Precocious Taste,” Art News 48 (March 1949): 51. My thanks to Lance Humphries for furnishing me with a precise transcription of the passage. “Map of the United States,” 2. “Map of the United States,” 2. As Brückner notes, the claim that Americans should learn about their own country through maps and geographic texts dates to Noah Webster’s On the Education of Youth, published in 1788. “Every child in America,” Webster wrote, “should be acquainted with his own country” (quoted in Brückner, “Lessons in Geog-

234 :: Notes to Pages 181–185

raphy,” 318). The review in Poulson’s, however, with its emphasis on “birth” and “parental likeness,” interestingly plays on the standard theme by turning country into mother country. 37. Kenneth Haltman, “The Poetics of Geologic Reverie: Figures of Source and Origin in Samuel Seymour’s Landscapes of the Rocky Mountains,” Huntington Library Quarterly 59, nos. 2–3 (1996): 303–347. Haltman details the era’s two competing theories of origin. “Neptunian theory held that the surface of the earth had once been submerged entirely beneath a vast primeval ocean, out of which mineral deposits had precipitated and later been exposed when the waters receded.” Plutonian or Vulcanian theory, on the other hand, argued that bizarre geologic features such as sheer jagged cli¤s indicated an earth formed by “violent upheavals caused by subterranean fire” (322–323). The Appalachians in Lewis’s New and Correct Map indicate this period-specific interest in earthly origins without clearly advocating either Neptunian or Vulcanian theories. 38. In its emphasis on the mountains, Lewis’s map dates itself to an era prior to what Sellers calls the “transportation revolution”—prior, that is, to the completion of the Erie Canal and various turnpikes that opened the way through the Appalachians and other formidable natural blocks to economic progress (Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 42–43). Consequently, many of the next generation of cartographic publishers, such as Samuel Augustus Mitchell, would issue maps in which the Appalachians simply do not appear. The land from the eastern seaboard into Kentucky and beyond is rendered in these maps as one flat expanse. (See Seymour I. Schwartz and Ralph E. Greenberg, The Mapping of America [New York: Abrams, 1980]; and Walter W. Ristow, American Maps and Mapmakers: Commercial Cartography in the Nineteenth Century [Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1985].) For Lewis as a writing master, and for an intriguing relation between Lewis and Raphaelle Peale unrelated to my own argument, see William Gerdts, “A Deception Unmasked; an Artist Uncovered,” American Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1986): 5–23. For American landscape taste prior to 1830, see Edward Nygren et al., Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986). 39. Horace Hayden, quoted in Haltman, “The Poetics of Geologic Reverie,” 329.

Chapter Eleven 1. Dorinda Evans, “Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea: Further Support for a Change in Interpretation,” American Art Journal 14 (summer 1982): 63. 2. Charles Willson Peale, letter to Benjamin Henry Latrobe, May 13, 1805, in Peale Papers, 2:834. 3. For one of many accounts of this painting, see Susan Stewart, “Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Willson Peale,” in Visual Display: Culture beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 38–42. 4. Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland; or, The Transformation [1798] (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1926), 175. 5. John Adams, letter to Francis Van Der Kemp, November 5, 1804, transcript in Raphaelle Peale file, Peale Family Papers, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.

Notes to Pages 186–192 :: 235

6. Raphaelle and Patty McGlathery Peale had seven children: Eliza (1799–1876); Sophonisba (1801–1878); Charles Willson (1802–1829); Edmund (1805–1851); St. George (1807–?); Rubens (1808–?); and Margaret (1810–?). (See Charles L. Peale to “Dear Cousin,” May 13, 1880, American Philosophical Society.) 7. For a reading of “the phallic mother” figure, including Medusa, see Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in The Dread of Di¤erence: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 59–63. 8. Washington Irving, “Adventure of the German Student” [1824], in Washington Irving: Selected Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 236–242. 9. In November 1794, for example, an exhibition of automata featuring the guillotining of Louis XVI was featured at the corner of Second and Callowhill Streets. The exhibition featured two scenes of moving figures: the king saying good-bye to Marie Antoinette and the king being executed. The figures operated from nine in the morning until nine at night. The polemically conservative British writer William Cobbett noted: “The queen of France, the calumniated Antoinette, was the first foreigner, except some generous Englishmen, that advanced a shilling in the American cause. Have I ever abused her memory? It was not I—though I was an Englishman—that cut o¤ her head, and besprinkled her garments with blood, on a sign hung over the public road. It was not I that guillotined her husband, in an automaton, every day, from nine in the morning till nine at night, for the diversion of the citizens of Philadelphia” (quoted in J. Thomas Scharf and Thompson Westcott, History of Philadelphia, 1609–1884 [L. H. Everts, 1884], 2:950). It is worth noting that the exhibition took place at Second and Callowhill Streets “at the sign of the Black Bear.” The Black Bear, according to George Escol Sellers, was the tavern at which Raphaelle performed his ventriloquism acts. (See “Memoirs of G[eorge] E[scol] Sellers” [1897], manuscript, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, bk. 8, p. 2.) One cannot know, of course, if Raphaelle saw the figures; nor would it much matter if he did. His imagery of decapitation or near-decapitation—think of Still Life with Dried Fish—implies his familiarity with the iconography of revolutionary violence from one source or another. It is interesting to see, though, how near this automata exhibit was to the scene of Raphaelle’s own strange performances. Together, automata and ventriloquist acts indicate the routine oddness of Philadelphia in these years. 10. History of Philadelphia, 2:951. Room No. 7, according to a Washington Museum advertisement in 1816, featured not just ten anatomical preparations and the copy of Wertmüller’s Venus but also “Otis’s Bathing Figures,” “Wertmuller’s Wood Fawn,” “Bodet’s Bathing Figures,” “The Handsome Danae,” and “about fifty statues from France.” 11. John Ferriar, An Essay Towards a Theory of Apparitions (London: J. and J. Haddock, 1813), 26–28, for the complete passage. 12. “Memoirs of G. E. Sellers,” bk. 8, p. 4. 13. Ric Northrup [Caric], “Decomposition and Reconstitution: A Theoretical and Historical Study of Philadelphia Artisans, 1785–1820,” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1989, 238, 169.

236 :: Notes to Pages 192–196

14. David Meredith, letter to Jonathon Meredith, July 8, 1795; in Caric, “Decomposition and Reconstitution,” 169. 15. Annabel Newton, Wordsworth in Early American Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928), 81, gives the date of publication for Scott’s story. 16. Sir Walter Scott, “The Tapestried Chamber” [1829], in The Supernatural Short Stories of Sir Walter Scott (London: John Calder, 1977), 15–31. 17. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 109. 18. Alan Wallach, “Thomas Cole: Landscape and the Course of American Empire,” in Thomas Cole: Landscape into History, ed. William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 26. Huntington noted the “anthropomorphism” of Cole’s trees at greater length. Comparing two Cole drawings—Gnarled Tree Trunk and Illisus (from the Elgin Marbles)—Huntington wrote, “The translation from human to non-human is vividly illustrated in the juxtaposition. . . . The implicit anthropomorphism of the tree immediately becomes explicit. The contours and the movements of the two objects are essentially of the same order. . . . It comes as no surprise that the painter in his journal compared trees to men” (David C. Huntington, Art and the Excited Spirit: America in the Romantic Period [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Museum of Art, 1972], 18). For the changing uses of the pathetic fallacy from roughly 1740 to 1840, see Josephine Miles, Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of a Changing Relation Between Object and Emotion [1942] (New York: Octagon, 1976). 19. Thomas Cole, “Emma Moreton, A West Indian Tale” [1825], in Thomas Cole: The Collected Essays and Prose Sketches, ed. Marshall Tymn (Saint Paul, Minn.: John Colet Press, 1980), 78, 79. 20. See Ellwood C. Parry, “Thomas Cole’s Early Career, 1818–1829,” in Edward J. Nygren et al., Views and Visions: American Landscape before 1830 (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1986), 163–167. 21. Huntington, Art and the Excited Spirit, 18. Howard Merritt notes that the drawing is signed and dated at lower left “Thomas Cole, May 20th, 1823,” meaning that he made the image in Pittsburgh. (See Merritt, To Walk with Nature: The Drawings of Thomas Cole [Yonkers, N.Y.: Hudson River Museum, 1982], 10.) 22. Merritt, To Walk with Nature, 10. 23. My phrase “to surprise us out of our propriety” is from Emerson: “The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is to forget ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how or why; in short, to draw a new circle.” Published in 1841, Emerson’s essay “Circles,” in which this quotation appears, calls the reader to see beyond conventional understandings, to draw new circles of understanding around the ones that already exist. Although Emerson’s model is centrifugal—one must expand ever outward to see the world anew—and although he praises ideas more than sensuous experience, his essay nonetheless repeats some of Raphaelle’s comparably romantic aims. (Emerson, “Circles,” in Essays: First Series [1841], in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte [New York: Library of America, 1983], 414.)

Notes to Pages 197–201 :: 237

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. abjection, 143–44, 145, 146–47, 152–53, 196– 97, 200–201, 229n.7 Abrams, Anne Uhry, 73 Abrams, M. H., 21 Adams, John, 192 Addison, Joseph, 227n.27 Adoration of the Golden Calf (Poussin), 232n.9 Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill (William Rush), 172, 175 Allston, Washington: Belshazzar’s Feast, 176; Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 11, 12, 13–15, 25–26, 62, 87– 88, 176, 192; Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem to Baruch the Scribe, 62–64, 63, 87–88, 176, 177–78, 213n.12 American Museum, 98, 211n.12 Anatomical Investigations (Godman), 108–9, 111–12, 118 Anatomical Museum (Chovet’s Museum, Philadelphia), 108 Anatomical Museum of the University of Pennsylvania, 104, 107, 112, plate 10

Anatomical Torso (Barton), 116, 117 anatomy: and botany, 116, 118–20; criticism of, 128, 132–33; models, 109; Philadelphia’s era of, 104–7, 114. See also dissection; medical illustration/exhibition “Anatomy” (Hopkinson), 127 Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (Hunter), 154 animate nature, 15–20, 206n.11, 206n.15, 206n.19, 207n.20 Anne Arundel County (Maryland), 155, 230n.24 The Anomalous Muscle (Rembrandt Peale), 108–9, 118, 118–19, 129 Apollo Belvedere, 147 Apollodorian Gallery, 161 Appleby, Joyce, 2, 204n.8 Apples and Fox Grapes (Raphaelle Peale), 157–58, 161–63, 164, 176, 182, 185, plate 16 The Architect’s Dream (Cole), 22 Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos (Vanderlyn), 190 Arthur Mervyn (Brown), 67–69, 158–59, 160–61, 214n.20, 214n.28

249

The Artist in His Museum (Charles Willson Peale), 3; attention in, 45–48, 50–52, 51; curtain vs. figure in, 72; expansion represented in, 183– 84; ideal type in, 33, 34; natural judgment in, 37; as self-commemoration, 136; size of, 176, 177–78; socializing view in, 113; sources for, 177; space/perspective in, 48, 56, 177, 181; vs. Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, 71 attention. See vision autobiography. See biographies/autobiographies Baatz, Simon, 103, 106, 107 Balsam Pear or African Cucumber (Momordica Charantia) (William Bartram), 17, 17, 18, 20, 119, 206n.13 Barry, James: Venus Rising from the Sea, 70, 71, 74, 191, 193, 215n.33 Barthes, Roland, 65–66, 69 Barton, Benjamin Smith: Anatomical Torso, 116, 117; on animate nature, 18, 20; death of, 117; The Elements of Botany, 116; Root, 116, 117 Bartram, John, 18, 207n.20 Bartram, William: on animate nature, 17–18, 19, 20, 206n.11, 206n.15; Balsam Pear or African Cucumber (Momordica Charantia), 17, 17, 18, 20, 119, 206n.13 Bedell, Rebecca, 22 Beef and Game (Mount), 90–91, 91, 96, 218n.19 Bell, John. See Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints Bellmer, Hans, 197 Belshazzar’s Feast (Allston), 176 Benjamin, Walter, 49 Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky (West), 150–52, 151, 175, 229n.18 Bermingham, Ann, 61 bewilderment and vastness, 178–82 biographies/autobiographies, 3–4, 73, 204n.14, 216n.46 birth-death paintings, 147–52 Bjelajac, David, 13, 62, 64 Black Bear tavern, 236n.9 Blackberries (Raphaelle Peale), 11–57, plate 1; ani-

250 :: Index

mation of, 15–16, 16, 20; and the artist’s body, 27–30; centripetal energy of, 53; criticism of, 212n.15; doubling body with a di¤erence in, 79; exhibition of, 11; fixed attention/vision in, 43–45, 52–53; horizons in, 56; and individualism, 11; indulgence vs. restraint in, 13–14, 16; infantile perception in, 40–41, 79; maternal body in, 157; and phenomenology, 31–32; romanticism/projective imagination of, 21–23, 32; sense of being looked back at, 39, 210n.22; size of, 176; solitude of, 26; specificity of, 37, 38; subject/object connection in, 95; touching objects in, 166; vs. Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha, 11, 12, 13–15 blacks, dissection of corpses of, 126–27 bleeding, as medical remedy, 103 bodily threat/violence, rhetoric of, 98–99, 219n.31 body, as contemporary subject, 7–8 Böhlke, Eugenia B., 211n.6 Born, Wolfgang, 123–24 Brackenridge, Hugh Henry: Modern Chivalry, 88–89 breast, eroticization of, 157–63, 159 breastfeeding, 158 Brewer, Rachel. See Peale, Rachel Brewer Brigham, David, 107 Brown, Charles Brockden, 5–6, 182; Arthur Mervyn, 67–69, 158–59, 160–61, 214n.20, 214n.28; on curiosity, 60; on doubling body with a di¤erence, 79; on rhapsodic imagination, 21, 23, 26, 61; Wieland, 191–92 Brückner, Martin, 234n.36 Bruliman (a soldier), 112–13 Brunson, Alfred, 126 Bryson, Norman, 144 Burke, Edmund, 136, 177 Burke, Russell, 218n.19 butchery trade, 92–95, 218n.22 Cadwalader, Dr., 113 capitalism, 3, 98, 204n.11 The Capture of Major Andre (Durand), 233n.13

Carey, Mathew, 98, 126, 204n.14, 211n.12 Caric, Ric Northrup, 98–99, 126, 171–72, 196, 200 Casper, Scott, 204n.14 Catacombs of Santa Maria della Vita (Italy), 131 Catostomus duquesnii, 35–36, 36, 52 Ceracchi, Giuseppe, 178 Cézanne, Paul, 230n.1 Chardin, Jean Baptiste Siméon, 29 Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord Baltimore (van der Myn), 177 Cherubim Encircled by a Glory (William Rush), 232n.3 Chovet, Abraham, 108 Christ Healing the Sick (West), 87; attention in, 217n.10; and dissection, 108; Jesus as softer leader in, 178; and moral improvement, 86, 87–89, 129; and power politics, 133; size of, 176 Christophersen, Bill, 69, 214n.28 Cikovsky, Nicolai, Jr., 4, 205n.4 “Circles” (Emerson), 237n.23 The City Seal of Philadelphia (Sully), 173–74, 174, 193 The City Seal of Philadelphia (Woodside), 173–74, 174, 193 civic identity and maternal allegory, 171–76 Cli¤ord, James, 113, 162 Cobbett, William, 236n.9 Cole, Thomas: The Architect’s Dream, 22; background of, 200; “Emma Moreton, a West Indian Tale,” 200; Gnarled Tree Trunk, 237n.18; Illisus, 237n.18; Tree from Nature, 197, 199, 200–201, 237n.18, 237n.21 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor: “The Gentleman,” 21 College of Philadelphia, 104 Columbianum exhibition (1795), 111 concealment, Gothic, 191–92 Constable, John, 61–62 Corn and Cantaloupe (Raphaelle Peale), 154–55, 193, 226n.24, 230n.24, plate 14 correspondence doctrine, 161 Cosway, Maria, 139

Courbet, Gustave, 209n.1 The Court of Death (Rembrandt Peale): exhibition of, 231n.11; and the intelligibility of reality, 69; sequestered space in, 231n.11; size of, 176; sources for, 109, 221n.38; visual language of, 64, 65, 65–66, 74 Crary, Jonathan, 21, 29, 30, 49 Creed, Barbara, 153, 229n.7, 230n.21 curiosity, culture of, 59–60, 67–70 curtains, for concealing, 191–92 Cutlet and Vegetables (Raphaelle Peale), plate 9; anatomical representation in, 101, 102, 111, 116, 120–22, 121; butchering technique in, 92, 218n.18; composite support structure of, 95, 96; dark strip in, 95; dissection context of, 107; embodied nonidentity of, 83; vs. Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints, 101, 102, 111, 122; horizon in, 120; morbid humor of, 111; sensuous identification in, 89–92, 96; subject/object distance in, 92, 95 Danaë and the Shower of Gold (Wertmüller), 190 Darwin, Erasmus, 116; Zoonomia, 161–62 Daston, Lorraine, 33, 105 Dead Man Restored to Life by Touching the Bones of the Prophet Elisha (Allston), 11, 12, 13–15, 25–26, 62, 87–88, 176, 192 “Death” (Porteus), 65 Death of Virginia (Rembrandt Peale), 221n.38 Decapitation (Titian Peale), 137, 137, 140, 193, 226n.26 decapitation images, 193, 195, 236n.9 Delaplaine, Joseph: Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans, 134; National Panzographia prospectus, 134– 35, 150 Delaplaine’s Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished Americans (Delaplaine), 134 de Man, Paul, 73, 216n.46 Dennie, Joseph, 208n.33 depersonalization, 40, 76 A Dessert (Raphaelle Peale), 165, plate 18 Dine, Sarah Blank, 144

Index :: 251

dissection, 125–40; and butchery, 110–11; corpses acquired for, 126–27, 224n.7; the dissected face, 133–36; dissecting schools, 107; Godman’s use of, 106, 131; head and heart, 137– 40; identifications with the dissected body, 125–27; interest in, 108, 133; personalized images of, 122–24; and production of selfhood, 127–33, 225n.17; and social status, 127–29, 133, 224n.12; and split-open objects, 113–14; table for, 129–31, 130. See also Cutlet and Vegetables; Still Life with Steak Ditz, Toby, 219n.31 divine creation/will, 20, 206n.19 Dunlap, William, 179, 233n.17 Durand, Asher B.: The Capture of Major Andre, 233n.13 Eagleton, Terry, 7–8 Eakins, Thomas: The Gross Clinic, 201 Eccentric Excursions (Woodward), 24 Edinburgh, as medical center, 107 Edwards, George, 18 The E¤ect of Imagination!! (Woodward), 23, 23–25, 79, 80 The Elements of Botany (Barton), 116 Embargo Act (1807), 204n.11 Emerson, Ralph Waldo: “Circles,” 237n.23 Emile (Rousseau), 20, 40–41, 91, 158, 166, 206n.19 “Emma Moreton, a West Indian Tale” (Cole), 200 Engravings of the Bones, Muscles and Joints (Bell): carved-heads illustration, 124, 124, 127, 129, 228n.33; vs. Cutlet and Vegetables, 101, 102, 111, 122; extended-arm illustration, 101, 102, 129; flayed-back illustration, 127, 128, 129; use in teaching, 107; on vision and choice of illustrations, 111–12 Enlightenment thought, 32, 37–38, 209n.9 Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions (Ferriar), 79, 195 Evans, Dorinda, 190, 191, 215n.33 Exhortation (William Rush), 160, 160, 172, 232n.3 The Exhumation of the Mastodon (Charles Willson Peale), 147–50, 148–49, 174–75, 192, 195, 229n.15

252 :: Index

expansionism, 182–84 The Experienced Butcher, 94 Federalism, 127–28, 129 Fehl, Philipp, 178 Ferriar, John: Essay towards a Theory of Apparitions, 79, 195 Finley, Anthony, 101, 107 Fitch, John, 126; “The Song of the Brown Jug,” 98 Fliegelman, Jay, 67 Fortune, Brandon, 4, 13, 14, 88 Foster, Hal, 197 Foulke, John: Ribs of Raw Beef, 111 Fourth of July in Centre Square (Krimmel), 172–73, 173, 174–76 Fox Grapes and Peaches (Raphaelle Peale), 157–58, 161–63, 164–66, 176, plate 15 Frankenstein (Shelley), 152 Franklin, Benjamin, 87, 151, 151 French history painting, 217n.10 Freud, Sigmund: on child-breast relation, 162; on doubling, 79; on the infant’s primal stare, 43; on male feelings about female genitalia, 144 Fried, Michael, 209n.1 Fruit in a Silver Basket (Raphaelle Peale), 59, 113– 14, 114 Galison, Peter, 33, 105 Galt, John, 73; The Life of Benjamin West, 152 Gelpi, Barbara Charlesworth, 158, 161 genre painting, 176, 233n.13 “The Gentleman” (Coleridge), 21 geology, 185–87, 235n.37 Gerdts, William, 218n.19 Géricault, Théodore: Study of Two Severed Heads, 228n.33 The Giant Claw, 230n.21 Gijsbrechts, Cornelis Norbertus: Vanitas Still Life, 138, 139 Gilmor, Robert, Jr., 184 Glueck, Grace, 226n.24 Gnarled Tree Trunk (Cole), 237n.18 Godman, John, 116, 220n.17; Anatomical Investiga-

tions, 108–9, 111–12, 118; anatomical table used by, 129–31, 130; background of, 128; dissection by, 106, 131; financial difficulties of, 226n.21; on goals of anatomy, 131; grave robbing by, 127; illness/death of, 226n.21; on Lesueur, 119; marriage to Angelica, 131–32; on medical practice, 226n.21; and Charles Willson Peale, 106, 220n.17, 223n.63 government, classical model of, 2 Gra¤, Charles, 44, 76, 115, 184 Griffin, Randall, 22 Gros, Baron Antoine-Jean: Napoleon Visiting the Battlefield of Eylau, 217n.10 The Gross Clinic (Eakins), 201 Halpert, Edith, 215n.33 Haltman, Kenneth, 185–86, 226n.26, 235n.37 Hamilton, William, 212n.15 Harding, Anneliese, 175 Hart, Sidney: on The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 229n.15; on making sense of Raphaelle’s paintings, 1; objects in Raphaelle’s paintings as disconnected from outside world, 212n.16; on Charles Willson Peale’s lecture, 223n.63; on Charles Willson Peale’s self-portraits, 73; on Raphaelle’s hermeticism, 26; on Raphaelle’s romanticism, 21; on Raphaelle’s sense of the art market, 211n.12; on Raphaelle’s “short talk”/ codes, 70; on Raphaelle’s silence, 59, 61; on Raphaelle’s still lifes vs. Charles Willson’s portraits, 136, 226n.24; on restraint vs. indulgence, 13–14; on Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, 77; on Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, 8, 215n.33 Hartman, Geo¤rey, 41 Hayden, Horace, 186–87 head and heart, 139, 228n.30 hermits, stories about, 67 Hevner, Carol Eaton, 19 Hewson, Thomas T., 106 history painting, 176, 217n.10 Hobbes, Thomas, 2–3, 204n.8 Hopkinson, Francis: “Anatomy,” 127; “An Oration,

Which Might Have Been Delivered to the Students in Anatomy,” 110, 147 horizons, 56–57 Horner, William, 107, 112 Hosack, David, 104 Humphrey, David, 126–27 Hunter, John, 104, 144 Hunter, William, 104, 144; Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, 154 Huntington, David, 200, 237n.18 Hymen (Lesueur), 144, 145 identity: and di¤erence from inert objects, 95–96; virtuous republican vs. possessive individual, 2–3. See also selfhood Illisus (Cole), 237n.18 imagination, 21–26, 208n.35 The Incredible Shrinking Man, 230n.21 individualism, 2–3, 204n.8 infancy, perpetual, 163–64, 164 infants, perception by, 40–41 “Influence of Death,” 126, 129 Irving, Washington, 26; “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” 24; Tales of a Traveller, 138, 193, 197 isolation, 25–26, 208n.40 Jackson, Andrew, 184 James, Henry, 2 James, Thomas Chalkley, 148 Jaws, 230n.21 Je¤erson, Thomas, 3, 59, 139, 204n.11 Je¤ersonian Republicans, 3, 183–84, 192 Jeremiah Dictating His Prophecy of the Destruction of Jerusalem to Baruch the Scribe (Allston), 62–64, 63, 87–88, 176, 177–78, 213n.12 Johnson, Galen, 38, 78, 216n.52 Johnston, John, 4, 39; Still Life, 30, plate 4 Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences, 35 Keats, John, 161 King, Charles Bird: The Poor Artist’s Cupboard, 75, 75–76, 150, 216n.48 kitchen still lifes, 144

Index :: 253

Koch, Jacob Gerard, 84 Krimmel, John Lewis; Fourth of July in Centre Square, 172–73, 173, 174–76; The Procession of Victuallers, 93, 93–94, 95 Kristeva, Julia, 146 Larkin, Oliver W., 213n.12 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 172, 175 Lawrance, Jason Valentine O’Brien, 106–7 Lee, Benjamin, 230n.24 Left Temporal Bone with Inner Ear Structures (William Rush), 220n.10 “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving), 24 Lemons and Sugar (Raphaelle Peale), 157–58, 161–63, 164, plate 17 Lesueur, Charles-Alexandre: anatomical drawings by, 119–20, 120, 129; on Catostomus duquesnii, 35–36, 36, 52; Hymen, 144, 145; on Muraena rostrata, 35, 36, 45, 46, 211n.6 Leutze, Emanuel, 178, 180, 184 Leventon, Melissa, 215n.33 Lewis, Samuel: A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America, 182–83, 183, 185–87, 186, 235nn.37–38 Lewis and Clark expedition, 182, 184 liberty, 2, 3 Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington (Weems), 204n.14 The Life of Benjamin West (Galt), 152 Lilacs in a Water Glass (Manet), 44 Linnaeus, Carolus, 116 Lippard, George, 201 Liu, Yu, 60–61 “living cloth” convention, 79, 217n.55 Lloyd, Phoebe, 6, 26, 53, 59, 212n.15; on Corn and Cantaloupe, 155, 230n.24; on Decapitation, 226n.26; on Still Life with Steak, 218n.22; on Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, 70 Locke, John, 2–3, 204n.8 Long, Stephen P., 183, 184 Long Room (Pennsylvania State House), 184 Louisiana Purchase, 182

254 :: Index

Louis XVI automata exhibit (Philadelphia), 236n.9 Lyrical Ballads (Woodward), 24, 208n.33 Macpherson, C. B., 204n.8 Madison, James, 3 Manet, Edouard: Lilacs in a Water Glass, 44; Roses in a Champagne Glass, 44 maps, 235n.38. See also A New and Correct Map Marchand, André, 38 Marie Antoinette, 236n.9 market economy, 3, 98, 204n.11 Marrinan, Michael, 217n.10 Masonic Hall (Philadelphia), 172 mastodons, 183–84, 192 Maston, John, 147 maternal allegory and civic identity, 171–76 maternal body, 143–55, 157–69; and abjection, 143–44, 145, 146–47, 152–53, 196–97, 200–201, 229n.7; and birth-death paintings, 147–52; vs. corpse/nonidentity, 146; and the eroticized breast, 157–63, 159; in horror texts, 230n.21; and kitchen still lifes, 144; and obstetrics, 144; and perpetual infancy, 163–64, 164; in Raphaelle’s melon paintings, 152–55, 230n.21; and the touching object, 165–69 Matière à réflection pour les jongleurs couronnées (Villeneuve), 193, 195 McGlathery, Martha. See Peale, Martha McGlathery meat trade, 92–95, 218n.22 medical illustration/exhibition, 101, 106–13, 221n.38, plate 10 medical practice, 103–7, 144. See also anatomy; dissection Melons and Morning Glories (Raphaelle Peale), 153, 230nn.20–21, plate 13 Meredith, David, 189, 196–97 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on attention, 43; on depersonalization, 40; on natural judgment, 37; phenomenology of, 31, 32, 78; on subjectobject reversibility, 78, 209n.9; on viewer/ object, 38–39 Merritt, Howard, 200, 237n.21

Meyers, Amy, 18, 20, 206n.13 Miller, Lillian B., 6–7, 15, 19–20, 223n.63, 229n.15 Mitchell, Samuel Augustus, 235n.38 Modern Chivalry (Brackenridge), 88–89 Monroe, James, 3 moral improvement, 62, 67, 86–87, 88–89 Mordecai, Solomon, 106 Morse, Samuel F. B., 64, 213n.12 mother country, 185–87, 234n.36 motherhood, 158, 171–76 Mount, Henry Smith, 4; Beef and Game, 90–91, 91, 96, 218n.19 Muraena rostrata, 35, 36, 45, 46, 211n.6 Murray, George, 163, 172 Napoleon Visiting the Battlefield of Eylau (Gros), 217n.10 national/personal space, 182–84 National Republicanism, 184 natural judgment, 37–38, 40 nature. See animate nature Neal, John, 180–81, 221n.38; Randolph, 108 “The Negro Steaks,” 110, 127 A New and Correct Map of the United States of North America (Lewis), 182–83, 183, 185–87, 186, 235nn.37–38 Noah and His Ark (Charles Willson Peale), 150 nudes, 189–90 object-subject relation. See subject-object relation obstetrics, 144 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (Wordsworth), 40–41 Oedel, William, 65 On the Education of Youth (Webster), 234n.36 “An Oration, Which Might Have Been Delivered to the Students in Anatomy” (Hopkinson), 110, 147 Palace and Garden of Versailles (Vanderlyn), 176 Paris, as medical center, 107

Parrish, Joseph, 106 The Passage of the Delaware (Sully), 178–82, 179, 184, 233n.17, 233n.24, 234n.26 pathetic fallacy, 200, 237n.18 Pattison, Granville Sharp, 107 Peale, Charles Willson (father of Raphaelle), 1; on acting “the Man”/temperance, 3, 14, 76; anatomical models by, 109; bleeding, use of, 103, 220n.5; concerns about Raphaelle’s health, 115; desire to improve Raphaelle, 86, 88, 89; on divine will, 20; fossil discoveries of, 182; and Godman, 106, 220n.17, 223n.63; on heart/goodness of Raphaelle, 139–40; and Je¤erson, 59; on Lesueur, 35, 45; moralizing of, 113; on nudes, 190; on Raphaelle’s antisocial behavior, 26; and Raphaelle’s death, speculation about, 6–7; on Raphaelle’s genre choice, 6, 85–86, 136; on Raphaelle’s illness, 220n.5; Rousseau’s influence on, 20, 40; selfcommemoration of, 72–73, 134, 136; on speaking pictures, 73–74, 215n.45; water pump designed by, 147. See also Peale Museum Peale, Charles Willson, works of: The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 147–50, 148–49, 174–75, 192, 195, 229n.15; Silence, 66–67; Noah and His Ark, 150; The Peale Family Group, 77, 78, 166–69, 167, 232nn.23–24; Portrait of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, 45–46, 46, 84; Portrait of Raphaelle Peale, 83–86, 85; portrait of Raphaelle’s wife by, 210n.22; Rachel Weeping, 191; Self-Portrait, 134, 135, 135–36, 226n.20; Self-Portrait, for the Multitude, 71, 72, 73, 74. See also The Artist in His Museum Peale, Charles Willson (son of Raphaelle), 192 Peale, Eliza (daughter of Raphaelle), 192 Peale, Elizabeth DePeyster (second wife of Charles Willson), 148, 149 Peale, Hannah Moore (third wife of Charles Willson), 84–85 Peale, James (uncle of Raphaelle), 4, 95, 114; Still Life with Fruit, 39–40, 95, plate 6 Peale, Margaret (sister of Raphaelle), 191

Index :: 255

Peale, Martha McGlathery (“Patty”; wife of Raphaelle), 6 Peale, Rachel Brewer (mother of Raphaelle), 77, 78, 230n.24 Peale, Raphaelle: advertisements in Poulson’s, 211n.12; children of, 6; financial difficulties of, 6; identification with dead meat, 96–97, 98, 114–15; illnesses/death of, 6–7, 103, 115, 220n.5; on isolation, 26; marriage to Martha, 6; on mastodons, 192; poetry of, 138, 139, 227n.27; relationship with his father, 6 (see also under Peale, Charles Willson); “short talk”/ codes of, 69–70; suicidal thoughts of, 115; travels on eastern seaboard, 212n.18; as ventriloquist, 6, 96–97, 98, 236n.9 Peale, Raphaelle, works of: anatomical imagery in, 113–16, 120–22; Apples and Fox Grapes, 157–58, 161–63, 164, 176, 182, 185, plate 16; brain model, 138; centripetal energy of, 53–54, 56–57, 212n.16; Columbianum exhibition of, 111; Corn and Cantaloupe, 154–55, 193, 226n.24, 230n.24, plate 14; A Dessert, 165, plate 18; and doubling body with a di¤erence, 78–80; Fox Grapes and Peaches, 157–58, 161–63, 164–66, 176, plate 15; Fruit in a Silver Basket, 59, 113–14, 114; indulgence in, 13; Lemons and Sugar, 157–58, 161–63, 164, plate 17; Melons and Morning Glories, 152–53, 230nn.20–21, plate 13; morbid humor of, 109, 111; and phenomenology, 31–32; Raphaelle’s body as object of dissection in, 122–24; romanticism of, 6; sense of being looked back at, 39; silence of, 59, 61–62, 67, 97–98; size of, 176–77, 181– 82, 212n.14; Still Life—Strawberries, Nuts, &c., 54, 55, 56–57, 182, 212n.17; still lifes vs. Charles Willson’s portraits, 136, 226n.24; Still Life with Apples, Sherry, and Tea Cake, 28, 28–29, 165; Still Life with Celery and Wine, 122–23, 122–23, 127, plate 11; Still Life with Dried Fish, 97, 97–98, 236n.9; Still Life with Liqueur and Fruit, 165, 166, plate 19; Still Life with Watermelon, 123–24, 127, 133–36, 134, 146, 153, plate 12; uncanny embodiment in, 1–2, 4–5,

256 :: Index

7–8. See also Blackberries; Cutlet and Vegetables; Still Life with Cake; Still Life with Steak; Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup; Strawberries and Cream; Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception Peale, Rembrandt (brother of Raphaelle): on allegory’s personifications, 175–76; anatomy used by, 109, 221n.38; The Anomalous Muscle, 108–9, 118, 118–19, 129; Death of Virginia, 221n.38; on head and heart, 139, 228n.30; Portrait of Dr. John Davidson Godman, 131–33, 132; The Roman Daughter, 159, 159–61, 163– 64, 164, 172, 176, 192–93; silence in works of, 64–65; visits Catacombs of Santa Maria della Vita, 131. See also The Court of Death; Rubens Peale with a Geranium Peale, Rubens (brother of Raphaelle): on Raphaelle’s “short talk”/codes, 70 Peale, Sophonisba (daughter of Raphaelle), 147, 148, 192 Peale, Titian Ramsay, II (brother of Raphaelle), 33, 108, 148–49, 149, 183, 225n.17; Decapitation, 137, 137, 140, 193, 226n.26 The Peale Family: Creation of a Legacy, 1770–1870, 212n.15 The Peale Family Group (Charles Willson Peale), 77, 78, 166–69, 167, 232nn.23–24 Peale Museum (Philadelphia), 47, 48, 107, 112– 13, 191 Peckover, Edmund, 152 Pennsylvania Academy, annual show of, 159–60, 172, 212n.14 Pennsylvania Hospital, 86–87, 103, 151 phenomenology, 31–32, 38–41 Philadelphia, 172, 175, 216n.48 Philadelphia Victuallers procession, 93–94, 218n.22 pity/sympathy, 91–92 Poe, Edgar Allan, 201 Poetical Works (Wordsworth), 22 Poltergeist, 230n.21 The Poor Artist’s Cupboard (King), 75, 75–76, 150, 216n.48 poor people: dissection of corpses of, 126–27;

patronage/moral improvement of, 86–87, 88– 89, 129 Pope, Alexander, 227n.27 Porteus, Beilby: “Death,” 65 Portrait of Charles-Alexandre Lesueur (Charles Willson Peale), 45–46, 46, 84 Portrait of Dr. John Davidson Godman (Rembrandt Peale), 131–33, 132 Portrait of Raphaelle Peale (Charles Willson Peale), 83–86, 85 portraiture, 3–4 Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, 49–52, 50, 54, 56, 182, 211n.12, 234n.36 Poussin, Nicolas: Adoration of the Golden Calf, 232n.9 poverty. See poor people Praise (William Rush), 160, 160, 172, 232n.3 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 21, 60–61, 158 The Procession of Victuallers (Krimmel), 93, 93–94, 95 prosopopoeia, 70, 72–74, 215n.45, 216n.46 Prown, Jules, 59 Rachel Weeping (Charles Willson Peale), 191 Randolph (Neal), 108 Ranney, William, 184 reality, intelligibility of, 69 republicanism, 3, 184 Reynolds, Joshua, 48, 67 Ribs of Raw Beef (Foulke), 111 Rigal, Laura, 148, 183–84 Right Maxilla (William Rush), 104, 105, 105, 112, 220n.10 Roberts, Kenneth B., 107, 127 The Roman Daughter (Rembrandt Peale), 159, 159– 61, 163–64, 164, 172, 176, 192–93 romanticism, 21–23 Root (Barton), 116, 117 Rosenberg, Charles, 103 Roses in a Champagne Glass (Manet), 44 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 91–92; Emile, 20, 40–41, 91, 158, 166, 206n.19 Royall, Anne, 94–95 Rubens Peale with a Geranium (Rembrandt Peale):

anatomical representation in, 118–19, 119; vs. The Anomalous Muscle, 118–19, 119; characteristic type in, 19, 33, 35; human-plant doubling in, 18–20, 24; vision in, 29, 29, 209n.3 Rush, Benjamin, 103, 104, 144 Rush, William, 99; Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill, 172, 175; anatomical models by, 104, 105, 105–6, 109, 220n.10; on biblical miracles, 25; Cherubim Encircled by a Glory, 232n.3; Exhortation, 160, 160, 172, 232n.3; on isolation, 26; Left Temporal Bone with Inner Ear Structures, 220n.10; Praise, 160, 160, 172, 232n.3; Right Maxilla, 104, 105, 105, 112, 220n.10; Silence, 66, 66–67, 172; on temperance, 14–15 Saint Anthony, temptation of, 88 Saint Paul’s Church (Philadelphia), 172, 232n.3 Saint Peter’s Episcopal Church (Philadelphia), 172, 232n.3 Saint Veronica’s veil, 70 Sappol, Michael, 86–87, 106, 109–10, 126, 128– 29, 224n.12 Say, Thomas, 225n.17 Scarry, Elaine, 37, 44, 45, 90, 166 Schapiro, Meyer, 157–58, 230n.1 science, 33, 35–38, 119–20. See also anatomy Scott, Sir Walter: “The Tapestried Chamber,” 197 Second Annual Pennsylvania Academy Exhibition (1812), 159–60, 172 secrecy, intolerance of, 59, 67, 69 selfhood: dissection, and production of, 127–33, 225n.17; and expansion, 182–84; rational/ commercial models of, 176–82; and size of paintings, 171, 176–80. See also identity Self-Portrait (Charles Willson Peale), 134, 135, 135–36, 226n.20 Self-Portrait, for the Multitude (Charles Willson Peale), 71, 72, 73, 74 Sellers, Charles, 3, 235n.38 Sellers, Charles Coleman, 96–97 Sellers, Coleman, 129–30, 130, 147, 148 Sellers, George Escol, 73, 113, 196, 204n.11, 227n.27, 236n.9

Index :: 257

Sharpless, Jesse, 48. See also Washington Museum and Gallery of Paintings Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 152 Shippen, William, Jr., 103–4, 144, 148 Shippen, William, Sr., 104 silence, 59–80; absorptive, 60–62; the art of saying nothing, 62–67; and defacement, 70, 72–74; faceless vs. embodied, 77–80; and the living death of social nullity, 74–77; vs. public curiosity, 59–60, 67–70; and self-annihilation, 61 Silence (William Rush), 66, 66–67, 172 Simpson, David, 208n.33 size of paintings, 171, 176–80 Slaughter, Thomas P., 207n.20 Smith, Adam: The Theory of Moral Sentiment, 125 social failure, 99, 126, 196–97, 200 Solkin, David, 172–73 “The Song of the Brown Jug” (Fitch), 98 Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar (Trumbull), 233n.24 Stein, Roger, 48, 72, 74, 177, 183 Steinberg, David, 167–68, 177, 215n.45, 232nn.23–24 Stewart, Dugald, 15, 24–25, 208n.35 Stewart, Susan, 73, 150 Still Life (Johnston), 30, plate 4 still-life paintings, 67, 176 Still Life—Strawberries, Nuts, &c. (Raphaelle Peale), 54, 55, 56–57, 182, 212n.17 Still Life with Apples, Sherry, and Tea Cake (Raphaelle Peale), 28, 28–29, 165 Still Life with Cake (Raphaelle Peale), 14, plate 2; and the artist’s body, 27–28; horizons in, 57; moral will in, 15; size of, 176; touching objects in, 165, 166, 168–69 Still Life with Celery and Wine (Raphaelle Peale), 122–23, 122–23, 127, plate 11 Still Life with Dried Fish (Raphaelle Peale), 97, 97– 98, 236n.9 Still Life with Fruit (James Peale), 39–40, 95, plate 6 Still Life with Liqueur and Fruit (Raphaelle Peale), 165, 166, plate 19

258 :: Index

Still Life with Steak (Raphaelle Peale), plate 8; anatomical representation in, 101, 111, 122, 137–39, 140, 201; anatomization of Charles Willson in, 137–38, 140, 228n.33; butchering technique in, 92; dark strip in, 95; dissection context of, 107; embodied nonidentity of, 83; and identification with dissected body, 127; maternal body/abjection in, 143–44, 145, 146–47, 152–53; and Raphaelle’s poetry, 138, 227n.27; sensuous identification in, 89–92, 96; subject/object distance in, 92, 95–96, 218n.22; vs. Vanitas Still Life, 138 Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup (Raphaelle Peale), plate 3; and the artist’s body, 28; doubling body with a di¤erence in, 79; infantile perception in, 79; maternal body in, 146; nonidentity in, 77–78, 78, 146; as primal/ morbid, 77, 78; and “short talk”/codes, 69–70; silence in, 61–62, 67; touching objects in, 165; uncanniness of, 79 Still Life with Watermelon (Raphaelle Peale), 123–24, 127, 133–36, 134, 146, 153, plate 12 Storr, Annie, 1 Strawberries and Cream (Raphaelle Peale), plate 5; centripetal energy in, 53–54, 54, 56; dark strip in, 219n.28; maternal body in, 157; sense of being looked back at, 39 Struble, Mitch, 229n.18 Study of Two Severed Heads (Géricault), 228n.33 subject-object relation, 32, 78, 209n.9, 216n.52 Sully, Thomas: The City Seal of Philadelphia, 173–74, 174, 193; The Passage of the Delaware, 178–82, 179, 184, 233n.17, 233n.24, 234n.26; studio of, 178, 233n.17 superstition, 24 sympathetic projection, 125–26 sympathy/pity, 91–92 Tales of a Traveller (Irving), 138, 193, 197 “The Tapestried Chamber” (Scott), 197 The Theory of Moral Sentiment (Smith), 125 “Thimble’s Wife,” 138 The Thing, 230n.21

Thistlethwaite, Mark, 233n.13 Tickler, 99 Tilghman, William, 105 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 61 Town, Ithiel, 22 transportation revolution, 235n.38 Tree from Nature (Cole), 197, 199, 200–201, 237n.18, 237n.21 Trumbull, John, 176; Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, 233n.24 types, ideal vs. characteristic, 33, 35–38, 45 University of Pennsylvania Medical School, 104, 106 Vanderlyn, John: Ariadne Asleep on the Isle of Naxos, 190; Palace and Garden of Versailles, 176 van der Myn, Herman: Charles Calvert, Fifth Lord Baltimore, 177 Vanitas Still Life (Gijsbrechts), 138, 139 van Riemsdyck, Jan, 154 vastness and bewilderment, 178–82 The Veil of Saint Veronica (Zurbarán), 70, 71 Venus Rising from the Sea (Barry), 70, 71, 74, 191, 193, 215n.33 Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (Raphaelle Peale), 8, 189–201, plate 7; abjection/male nonidentity in, 196–97, 200–201; anatomical representation in, 115–16; behind the cloth of, 197, 198, 200–201; doubling body with a di¤erence in, 79, 80; living death of social nullity in, 74–75, 76–77; maternal body in, 143, 146; vs. Poor Artist’s Cupboard, 75–76; prosopopoeia/defacement of, 70, 72, 74, 216n.46; self-e¤acement/nonidentity in, 77, 124, 146; sensuous/spectral cloth in, 77, 80, 189, 190, 194, 196; size of, 135–36, 200; source of, 215n.33; uncanniness of, 79, 80; Venus as goddess in, 189, 190–91; Venus as monster in, 189–90, 191–95; Venus’s hair in, 154, 192–93 Villeneuve: Matière à réflection pour les jongleurs couronnées, 193, 195

violence, rhetoric of, 98–99, 219n.31 virtue, 2, 3 vision: attenuated, 49–53, 50; fixed vs. attenuated, 44–48, 112; immediate, 111–12; phenomenology of, 31; scanning, 49, 52; subjectivity in, 21; and touch/sight, 29–30; and transience, 49 Wallach, Alan, 200 Ward, David: on The Exhumation of the Mastodon, 229n.15; on making sense of Raphaelle’s paintings, 1; objects in Raphaelle’s paintings as disconnected from outside world, 212n.16; on Charles Willson Peale’s lecture, 223n.63; on Charles Willson Peale’s self-portraits, 73, 226n.20; on Raphaelle’s hermeticism, 26; on Raphaelle’s romanticism, 21; on Raphaelle’s sense of the art market, 211n.12; on Raphaelle’s “short talk”/codes, 70; on Raphaelle’s silence, 59, 61; on Raphaelle’s still lifes vs. Charles Willson’s portraits, 136, 226n.24; on restraint vs. indulgence, 13–14; on Self-Portrait, 226n.20; on Still Life with Strawberries and Ostrich Egg Cup, 77; on Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception, 8, 215n.33 Washington, George, 178, 179 Washington Museum and Gallery of Paintings (Philadelphia), 48, 52–53, 108, 112–13, 193, 236n.10 Watts, Steven, 15, 88–89 Weaver, William Woys, 83, 218n.18 Webster, Noah: On the Education of Youth, 234n.36 Weems, Mason Locke: Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington, 204n.14 Wertmüller, Adolf: Danaë and the Shower of Gold, 190 West, Benjamin, 73; Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky, 150–52, 151, 175, 229n.18. See also Christ Healing the Sick White, William, 93 Wieland (Brown), 191–92 Wiley, N. P., 110 Williams, William, 86 Wilmerding, John, 29, 33, 209n.3

Index :: 259

Wistar, Caspar, 73–74, 103–5, 107, 109, 144, 148 witch figures, 196–97 Wolf, Bryan, 26 Woodside, John: The City Seal of Philadelphia, 173–74, 174, 193 Woodward, George: Eccentric Excursions, 24; The E¤ect of Imagination!! 23, 23–25, 79, 80; Lyrical Ballads, 24, 208n.33 Wordsworth, William, 6; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” 40–41; Poetical Works, 22; The

260 :: Index

Prelude, 21, 60–61, 158; on quiet vision, 62; silence/self-annihilation in works of, 59–61; “Tintern Abbey,” 61 wrestling, 65–66 Yalom, Marilyn, 158, 160 Young, John, 128 Zimmerman, Johann Georg, 26, 208n.40 Zoonomia (Darwin), 161–62 Zurbarán, Francisco de: The Veil of Saint Veronica, 70, 71

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