Critical Shift: Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Art 9780271062471

Citation preview

C ri ti c al Shift

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Critical Shift Rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the Narratives of Nineteenth-Century American Art

Karen L. Georgi

the pennsylvania state university press university park, pennsylvania

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A version of chapter 1 was previously published as Karen L. Georgi, “James Jackson Jarves’s Art Criticism: Aesthetic Classification and Historiographical Consequences,” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 2 (2008): 215–35. Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Georgi, Karen, 1966– Critical shift : rereading Jarves, Cook, Stillman, and the narratives of nineteenth-century American art / Karen Georgi. p. cm. Summary: “A reassessment of the writings of the mid-nineteenthcentury American art critics James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Clarence Cook (1828–1900), and William J. Stillman (1828–1901), and their role in the historiography of American art”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-271-06066-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Art criticism—United States—History—19th century. 2. Jarves, James Jackson, 1818–1888—Criticism and interpretation. 3. Cook, Clarence, 1828–1900—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Stillman, William James, 1828–1901—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Art, American—Historiography. I. Title. N7485.U6G46 2013 701'.180973—dc23 2013003234 Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802-1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ANSI Z39.48-1992. This book is printed on paper that contains 30% post-consumer waste.

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction

1

1

Rereading James Jackson Jarves’s Art-Idea 21

2

Clarence Cook and Jarves: Fact, Feeling, and the Discourse of Truthfulness in Art 43

3

A Further Look at Clarence Cook and the “Revolution” in Art 58

4

William J. Stillman’s Ruskinian Criticism: Metaphor and Essential Meaning 76

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Art Discourse After Ruskin: Time and History in Art 92 Notes

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Bibliography 123 Index 131

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Illustrations

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Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851 33

2

Emanuel Leutze, The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops, 1848 34

3

Thomas Charles Farrer, Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River, 1865 48

4

John La Farge, October, Hillside, Noonday, Glen Cove, Long Island, 1860 51

5

Elihu Vedder, Questioner of the Sphinx, 1863 69

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John La Farge, Paradise Valley, 1866–68 97

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Elihu Vedder, Cumaean Sibyl, 1876 100

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Frederick A. Bridgman, Funeral of a Mummy, 1876–77 102

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Acknowledgments

I wish to acknowledge most gratefully Berklee College of Music for a yearlong leave of absence in which to concentrate on this book before my allotted sabbatical year arrived. In particular, I thank former department chair Charles Combs and former division dean Lawrence McClellan, who very kindly facilitated this leave, lending personal as well as institutional encouragement to the endeavor. In Rome, I owe many thanks to Cristina Giorcelli, director of the doctoral program in American studies at the Università degli Studi di Roma, Roma Tre; to Sara Antonelli, university researcher at Roma Tre; to John Cabot University for faculty development funds; and to the librarians of the Centro Studi Americani, particularly to Annalisa Capristo and Silvia Cellitti. In the latter stages of this project, Leo Mazow and Jochen Wierich attentively read and commented on the manuscript, giving me pertinent advice for improving it. I thank them for their participation and thoughtful readings. For the actual publication of the book, I am certainly indebted to Eleanor Goodman, executive editor at the Pennsylvania State University Press, who steered the manuscript (and its author) through the long process with a steady hand and much good will. My sincere thanks also to the wonderfully efficient, helpful, and friendly members of the editorial and production departments: Patty Mitchell, production coordinator; Jennifer Norton, assistant director and design and production manager; Charlee Redman, editorial assistant; Laura Reed-Morrisson, managing editor; and Julie Schoelles, manuscript editor. It is a pleasure to have the chance here to thank my teachers Alan Draper, the late Betsy Rezelman, Patricia Hills, and Eric Rosenberg, who, directly or indirectly, have been fundamental to my thinking on this and ever so many other topics. I am particularly grateful to Eric Rosenberg for his encouragement, mentoring, and friendship, not to mention his ongoing engagement with this book. And, finally, to four Georgis and one Puglisi, my deepest gratitude for their love and support.

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introduction

Everything in a picture, it must be added, depends on the composition; if it be the subject that makes the interest, it is the composition that makes, or that at any rate expresses, the subject. By that law, accordingly, our boxful of ghosts [the correspondence of W. W. Story] “compose,” hang together, consent to a mutual relation, confess, in fact, to a mutual dependence. If it is a question of living again, they can live but by each other’s help, so that they close in, join hands, press together for warmth and contact. The picture, before it can be denied, is therefore so made; the sitters are all in their places, and the group fills the frame. We see thereby what has operated, we both recognise, so to speak, the principle of composition and are enabled to name the subject. The subject is the period—it is the period that holds the elements together, rounds them off, makes them right. They partake of it, they preserve it, in return; they justify it, and it justifies the fond chronicler. Periods really need no excuses. —Henry James, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)

This book is an interpretation of the art writing of James Jackson Jarves (1818–1888), Clarence Chatham Cook (1828–1900), and William James Stillman (1828–1901). As significant critics from the mid-nineteenth-century art world, they have much to say about art’s definition and aesthetic requirements in a moment of supposed transition—the era of the Civil War, whose upheavals left no aspect of American society untouched. These three writers are the central figures of this study not because they are the only important

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critics from the era; they are not. Rather, they figure here because they are, each in his own way, closely associated with key nineteenth-century critical tenets, aesthetic schemata, and classificatory ideas that the book will argue to be central to modern histories of nineteenth-century American art. In comparing these critics’ positions with how we have historicized their words, the book hypothesizes that there exist deep structures in the field: ways of organizing time, style, and meaning in histories of nineteenth-century American art, which are not necessarily reducible to one methodological approach or another. The goal might also be explained by recourse to Henry James’s fanciful “composition” from the epigraph. This composition is nothing less than the form that calls into being the picture of history—that which gives the outline, substance, and collectivity to disparate objects that might well remain invisible without this ordering principle. The “confession of mutual dependence” allows fragments from the past to exist again, not simply to be meaningful. Transparent and insubstantial, they are otherwise ghosts, James says, but they take on solidity and firm contours when they are juxtaposed in the “right” way. The reembodied ghosts then constitute a subject, the historical period. But James admits that the subject and the composition are actually one and the same. The subject of this book is also a group of figures and the composition that has helped form their present outlines. The period that draws them into relief is the Civil War era, or roughly the 1860s and 1870s. It is a sociopolitical moment that, perhaps not surprisingly, has often been conflated with an art historical period. The war has been perceived as the bold line, the profound rupture, the trauma that drove America forward—to putative freedom, to international stature, to economic expansion, to aesthetic modernism, and so forth. It is the supposedly defining event that runs between and even creates distinct art historical periods. This book looks closely at the rhetorical structures and the critical language employed by the three critics to consider the ways in which their words have helped modern scholars constitute an era by means of classificatory, rhetorical, and linguistic mechanisms. It seeks to analyze how such mechanisms give structure and coherence to the individual components existing in the chronological moment, which we then take to form a meaningful picture that allows us to define as history the art of the nineteenth century. With this condensed and stratified statement of the overall goals, we need to back up several paces and situate the study within the larger discussions to

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which it aims to contribute: How has nineteenth-century art criticism figured in the history of American art? The broadest of such discussions consists of studies devoted to nineteenth-century American art criticism and art histories. Until recently, nineteenth-century art critics and their writing did not get much attention from modern scholars. John Peter Simoni’s Ph.D. dissertation “Art Critics and Criticism in Nineteenth-Century America” is among the first of such studies. Roger Stein’s pioneering book John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 analyzes the ways in which the ideas of Ruskin, an English critic, were incorporated and transformed in the American context. It is an indispensible study of nineteenth-century art criticism in the United States, particularly since versions of Ruskin’s thought were indeed pervasive in antebellum America. Additional work on American criticism includes a few articles from the 1980s written by influential Americanists William Gerdts and Elizabeth Johns, respectively, outlining early critical commentary and art histories. Two lesser-known scholars, Earl and Ellen Harbert, have contributed a dated but worthwhile essay constructing a nineteenth-century critical lineage for a “dissenting” tradition prior to the Armory Show of 1913, and covering the early part of the century is an article by Anne Farmer Meservey.1 Recently, however, David Dearinger’s Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925 has done a great deal to fill the gap. It provides a very thorough guide to the major critics, their writing, the journals for which they wrote, and the exhibitions they reviewed.2 And Maura Lyons’s monograph dedicated to William Dunlap’s History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States offers the first full-length study of this first history of American art, examining how the style and narrative of the text express nationalist and other agendas of its author.3 Nineteenth-century American art criticism has also played a relatively minor role as an interpretive tool in the study of any given artist or school, though that is beginning to change. It is safe to say that the odd quote here or there has always turned up. In such cases, language is taken as a transparent vehicle, stable and securely linked to its ostensible referent. But where criticism has been more integral to the interpretation, conceptions of language have also been more analytical. Examples of the latter include Elizabeth Johns’s seminal work on American genre painting, Angela Miller’s work on landscape painting, and Margaret Conrads’s study of Winslow Homer.4 Displaying theoretical interests uncommon in American art history, there are additional exemplary interpretations that read critical language within complex and

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overlapping linguistic, pictorial, and psychological practices, where history is questioned even as it is grasped and whose possible meanings emerge at times from silences as much as words. Bryan Wolf is a key pioneer in this regard, though with literature more than critical reception.5 Other examples include David Bjelajac’s work on Washington Allston; Eric Rosenberg’s work on Thomas Eakins, Albert Ryder, and the so-called colorists; and Rachel Ziady DeLue’s book on George Inness.6 The present study works with an understanding of critical language that is closest to this last group. By approaching critical writing in such a manner, my analysis of the three nineteenth-century critics makes extensive use of rhetorical patterns and metaphorical structures in the period art discourse. As the following chapters will show, the critics’ words taken alone are too easily subject to unrecognized narrative desires on the part of modern writers. A further note on methodology might be useful here. My approach responds to a range of theoretical studies whose common point of departure is to question positivist models of history and language. I share with them a fundamental skepticism with regard to perceiving the past as having an objective meaning that can be recuperated and retold as such, and to the idea that language can represent a referent in a fixed manner. Narrative theories in particular strongly influence my understanding of historiography; linguistic analyses that might generically be labeled semiotic condition what I take to be or not to be possible in reading any text. Analyzing historical representation, for instance, Hayden White conceives of history in ways that are not dissimilar to what the epigraph from Henry James implied and that are central to this book. For White, history is a type of composition, without which the past can neither be told nor represent the historical. Ordering principles and language construct narratives that mold disparate events with rhetorical patterns, from which the meaning, coherence, and significance—which we call history—are derived.7 Language, as noted above, is taken here as contingent; it is considered a form inextricably wedded both to history and to thought. Language bears, in other words, a relationship to its object that is deeply historical as well as deeply subjective; it is necessarily interpreted. Interpretation nevertheless does not imply arbitrary or self-involved relativism. By contrast, interpretation means that we must continually exert pressure on the language in question and respond to the pressure it exerts on us, sounding its repetitions and silences, its relationship to period discourses, and its role in tropic and rhe-

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torical structures of the moment in order to represent as fully as possible the historicity that it asserts.8 With this grounding in the methodology and with a broad overview of the general field, we can now get back to the book’s primary arguments. The three writers of the study will be introduced further on. At hand are the more complex overall propositions. They will be presented one at a time, though conceptually (and in the rest of this book) they collapse a bit more fully into one another. The first proposition is that the historiography of nineteenth-century American art relies to a great extent on the apparent existence of aesthetic and conceptual contrasts in art on either side of the Civil War. These contrasts also provide the periodizing framework that helps order the field overall; they are contrasts that aid us in plotting trends, grouping thematically, and giving coherent order to the art of the nineteenth century. This framework makes certain formal features, certain ideas, and certain personalities stand out more than others, regardless of whether the high relief accords with the original shadow they may or may not have cast. What are these contrasts? They are quite familiar to students of American art. There is a good deal of consensus, regardless of other methodological or ideological interests, that American art can be understood as undergoing substantial change in the aftermath of the Civil War with regard to its interest in “reality” or putatively objective representations of the material world. Classic texts in the field recount a progressive development for American art in which there is an increasing distaste for anecdotal pictures, diminished emphasis on literal, detail-oriented finish, and greater interest in more freely painted and expressive styles after the war.9 We traditionally register, in other words, an apparent change in attitude toward painting in which the postbellum art world gave precedence to form over content and subjective feeling over objective fact. These contrasts shape an explanation in which American art advances formally and critically along the path later drawn by the paradigm of modernism: antebellum nativism gave way to postwar cosmopolitanism and the ostensibly more subjective and individualist concerns of an emergent modernism. Newer methodological interventions have, of course, made us skeptical of any “master narrative” in American art. Indeed, we see more thematic studies and essay collections than surveys, almost automatically limiting the chronological arrangement of art. This newer tendency is employed to overtly eschew unified narrative and its repressive connotations, its predisposition

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toward hierarchy and canon formation. It consists frequently of socially attuned scholarship that desires to pluralize, aided by theories developed in areas such as gender studies, material culture, and identity politics. Thus, American identities, American cultures, competing discourses, competing regions, external influences, and so forth have become our new standard.10 Nonetheless, the idea of divergent pictorial practices on either side of the Civil War continues to give structure to the other questions we then bring to the art in question. Similarly, the perception that new critical voices spoke out after midcentury in defense of ideas such as beauty or individual creativity remains, and such ideas continue to suggest to us that objective vision and “reality” as representational goals were replaced by new idealist goals and individual vision.11 Thus, some underlying assumptions persist. Running deeply through the field of American art history is a sense of social commitment, for which many art historians, myself included, have been drawn to the field. This commitment is manifested in the field’s strong tradition of social history, its interest in material culture, its resistance to the implicit hierarchical order of connoisseurship, and its Emersonian faith in the social utility of intellectual activity.12 It is a tendency to be proud of, yet it is one that leads us to conceive of the historical in certain ways and to perceive some narratives as being more historical than others. And, finally, it begs the question of what is really the subject of American art history. The question at hand is thus not whether painting changed; there is no doubt that it did. There is no doubt that, say, a landscape painting by Asher B. Durand from the 1850s and one by George Inness from the 1880s are notably different, with pictorial strategies and formal concerns that are widely divergent. Likewise, it is the case that critics speaking out in favor of a “new” art denigrated what they called reproduction and slandered sentimentality. It remains to my mind, however, important to question whether these aesthetic and critical differences are accurately represented by plotting an opposition of reproduction versus individual vision, of real versus ideal definitions of art, and whether the former is rejected in favor of the latter in conjunction with the century’s most clamorous events. And while there are many indications of new priorities, they coexisted with strong indications of continuity that are equally valid. (For instance, the new art and the “younger men,” according to some critics, referred to artists rejecting academic conventions in favor of more attention to factual detail.) Thus, the book seeks to question why rupture has been privileged over continuity, how and why it

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has been read in a critical discourse that also expresses rather different ideas, and the ways in which fundamental art historical constructions are implicated in this process. This brings us to the next proposition: the periodization of American art described here relies to a large extent, as hinted above, on the rhetorical pillars of the real and ideal and the objective and subjective. With deep roots in Western culture, these pairs were particularly prominent in definitions and judgments of nineteenth-century American painting—thanks in part to the art criticism of Jarves, Cook, and the Crayon (Stillman). They remain central to our modern narratives of transformation. How we approach these fundamental philosophic cornerstones is deeply ideological. The book argues that we use them in a manner somewhat different from that of Jarves, Cook, and Stillman, and that in these differences we can find traces of the “deep structures” that order our art histories. The term “deep structure” is borrowed from Hayden White, and it plays a substantial role in my argument. White explains that deep structure refers to his conception of the “precritically accepted paradigm of what a distinctively ‘historical’ explanation should be.” He further explains the necessary differentiation between such structures and methodological approach: Unlike other analysts of historical writing, I do not consider the “metahistorical” understructure of the historical work to consist of the theoretical concepts explicitly used by the historian to give to his narratives the aspect of an “explanation.” . . . [The metahistorical level instead] postulate[s] a deep level of consciousness on which a historical thinker chooses conceptual strategies by which to explain or represent his data. On this level, I believe, the historian performs an essentially poetic act, in which he prefigures the historical field and constitutes it as a domain upon which to bring to bear the specific theories he will use.13 Thus, overt methodological differences may assert different explanations for the history of American art, but there remain additional precritical structures that operate at a deeper level regardless of the chosen theoretical approach. Following White’s overall conception (if not arriving at the same poetic modes he finds), I believe we can identify some prefiguring operations in the historiography of American art—structures that we employ to make American art historical. Though the focus of the argument throughout the book is on reading the critical rhetoric more than on elaborating an

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art historical unconscious, these deep structures nonetheless repeatedly leave traces closer to the surface of the criticism and historiography under consideration and thus call for a bit of speculation. Such speculation will appear primarily in the form of hypotheses proposed at the ends of the various in-depth readings of Jarves, Cook, and Stillman. Some tentative description, however, of these so-called deep structures can, at this time, be attempted. The first precritical structure emerges from the differences between modern and nineteenth-century applications of the rhetorical poles discussed above. My interpretation of the three critics suggests that we have inserted time into their classifications. Linear movement, chronologically speaking, characterizes modern assumptions about these dyads—as if our nineteenth-century predecessors automatically used them in this manner. We assume, that is to say, that the real (as distinct from Realism) contrasts the ideal and the objective opposes the subjective in time. The latter replaces the former.14 Chapters 1 and 2 in particular will highlight this issue. There it will be argued that Jarves’s and Cook’s use of the schema was, in fact, different from ours. Modern divergence with regard to the insertion of chronological development thus leaves a trace of an unconscious desire for, or confidence in, time—a belief that it perhaps not only brings change but perforce unites historical events and artworks. The last chapters will also suggest that “past” and “present” are likewise taken by modern art histories to mark time consistently, as if they always signify in the same manner. The other prefiguring assumption is closely related: art is a representation with a primarily textual/discursive referent that is the historical one. In other words, art’s historicity is not primarily pictorial or formal. Perhaps this might be characterized as an American version of the age-old tension between words and images, which the concluding section of chapter 3 will ultimately identify as a fundamental privileging of the former over the latter, a kind of mistrust of images or pictorial form to signify history or to have historical meaning on their own.15 Let us now turn to the individual chapters to further refine the ideas at hand. Each contributes a piece to the overall argument, but each is also an essay, an attempt to rethink the writing of these three critics by rereading their words within the larger patterns and tropes in the critical rhetoric that emerge from their fully examined oeuvre. Unavoidably, there is a certain repetition of the key terms, but the ideas they are employed to illuminate differ or grow as the chapters unfold. It is not the same story being told and retold with the words of three different critics.

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Chapter 1 proposes to reread the art theory of James Jackson Jarves, focusing on his often cited 1864 book The Art-Idea. The book and the author have a high profile in the historiography of American art, and Jarves is an important character in the narrative of a progressive development from objective or putatively factual imagery to the more subjective and expressive mode. Jarves’s art writing forms one of the two principal pillars of his present reputation and is the primary concern of the chapter. While not cited at length in recent American art histories, Jarves is invoked frequently as an authority whose words are used to represent our post–Civil War shifts toward international aesthetic trends, toward the ideal in art, toward the rejection of verisimilitude and anecdote.16 The fact of reference itself, the idea that a quotation bearing Jarves’s name will carry weight, suggests that authority is believed to reside therein. And, indeed, Jarves worked hard to cultivate such a persona, as his writing will demonstrate. Dogmatic insistence characterizes his style, meant in part to show that the principles he espoused could be found over and over again in the history of art. “True” art, he repeated tirelessly, expresses an ideal or spiritual conception, not a material one, and such a conception can be shown to bear a relationship to certain sociocultural characteristics. Jarves so thoroughly hammered at his pet concepts that a sense of conviction asserts itself. That conviction, or rather the assertion, speaks of his desire for authority. In fact, Jarves’s career as a writer has a close relationship to his aspirations to be a cultivated gentleman connoisseur, to figure in elite artistic (largely expatriate) circles. Extensive biographical information and epistolary evidence from Jarves’s life are presented in Francis Steegmuller’s fine biography The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves, John Simoni’s indispensable study of nineteenth-century art critics and criticism, and Theodore Sizer’s early recontructions of Jarves’s life.17 Raised in Boston and on Cape Cod, Jarves attended school until the age of fifteen. He lacked all further formal education, supposedly due to ill health and poor eyesight. It was a deficiency he felt strongly, having desired to attend Harvard College and to pursue a career as a historian or even as a doctor.18 Falling short of these intellectual aspirations, Jarves spent his life trying to cultivate a learned career and image for himself; significantly, he did so in those fields that he felt were, with less study, open to him. His immediate substitute was travel and travel writing, first in California and then in the Hawaiian Islands, where he also took up newspaper editing. By 1848, Jarves was settled more or less indefinitely in Florence and there began his career in art collecting and art writing.

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Jarves was determined (or perhaps obsessed) to possess an art collection and desirous of satisfying (or perhaps demonstrating) a sensibility too refined for the mercantile character of the United States and of his father’s glassmaking business. He was the son of an affluent New England manufacturer,19 but he seems to have wanted to be a young aristocrat whose fortune and taste permitted him an art collection and who did not need to work for his living. While his motives for collecting art are not my concern, it is the case that his actual means were not those of a collector and his writing activity helped bridge the gap, not just in his finances but also in his lack of historical and philosophical study. We will get back to this idea; here a note on his collection is useful. His collection of early Italian art, owned by Yale University since 1871, constitutes the other pillar of his present reputation. It is thought to represent the precocious taste of a collector who saw value in works that his compatriots were still too provincial to appreciate. Consisting largely of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century religious panel paintings purchased in Italy in the 1850s, many of the images do not employ linear perspective and are populated with stiff and hieratic figures. The coloring, at the time of Jarves’s purchase, was frequently incomprehensible for its darkness and/or the visible green underpainting. The collection thus comes to represent the sophisticated eye of a connoisseur, a collector able to see value in pre-Renaissance forms during a moment when the contemporary American art scene (however imbued it may have been with the writing of Ruskin) was steeped in the dramatic tableaux of Leutze and Bierstadt, the meticulous detail of Church (and the Pre-Raphaelites), and the stagey domesticity of the postbellum genre painters.20 In short, Jarves’s reputation is derived from both his collection and his writing. The chapter will suggest that the art theory expounded in his texts was fundamentally related to Jarves’s financial and critical goals for his collection, yet the focus of the chapter is the definitions for art and the aesthetic positions that Jarves enunciated and for which he is frequently cited. In other words, I am concerned with interpreting Jarves’s meaning by way of his texts. So the characteristics of the man or the motivations that drove him, which may surface, will arise from his style and from the relationship between his stated priorities and the actual structure of his rhetorical forms. Concentrating on Jarves’s best-selling and most frequently cited book, The Art-Idea, published in 1864, the chapter proposes to identify and analyze the methodological principles Jarves employed and the primary rhetorical

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structures that shape his theory. Important among the latter are our poles of the real and ideal. Yet Jarves’s method is also intentionally historicist; he sought to create an objective classificatory scheme based on the idea that art should be understood in its “historical relations.” Thus, while he repeatedly classified art under the categories of the real and ideal, he sought to bind his categories to ostensible historical conditions. He thereby constructed a rationale that validated his aesthetic preferences—as if they carried the status of factual knowledge, like a science of sorts. The real and ideal—or Jarves’s preferred equivalents, the material and spiritual—become terms of evaluation that are represented as objective classifications. With this system, the relative worth of realist versus idealist art was identifiable or even quantifiable not only because it was bound to ostensibly factual cultural characteristics (as opposed to aesthetic opinion), but because it could also be affirmed by historical example. Comparing key aspects of this text with his earlier Art-Hints, published in 1855, the chapter argues that Jarves’s most essential project was not, in fact, that of demonstrating “the historical relations” of art, as he claimed. His founding interest was instead to secure the classificatory schema that would prove the superiority of the art he championed and simultaneously demonstrate that certain facts of American society actively worked against this correct understanding of art. While Art-Hints receives less attention in the historiography (understandably since it gives very scant attention to American art), it appears here because the juxtaposition with his apparently more sophisticated Art-Idea highlights the author’s obsessive attachment to his pet ideas, regardless of the theme he claimed to be addressing. The significant difference between the two texts is their level of fluency. The earlier and clumsier manuscript exposes more overtly the actual priority behind the rhetoric that persists throughout all his writing. We are thereby enabled to read in both texts an underlying desire to build a system that would authorize his judgment and instill the aesthetic preferences he hoped to foster among Americans. The chapter concludes with speculations about the gap that opens between the Jarves who emerges from his texts and the reputed Jarves of our historiography. The latter represents authority; the former will show relative inexperience and compulsion coming through vociferous and self-promotional rhetorical strategies. How does the reputed Jarves come to stand? I hypothesize that he helps fulfill unrecognized desires in the subdiscipline—desires to perceive signs of ostensible critical development in art that apparently fits

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the paradigm of emerging modernism and that corresponds in time to significant ruptures and transformations in American society. Jarves not only provides us with copious references to the superiority of the expression of feeling in art but also represents art’s history as a phenomenon of sociohistorical context. He helps plot the overall narrative of development in the American art world all the more because he appears to have done so precisely at the moment of the American Civil War. That is to say, he comes to represent the aesthetic/critical shift of the normative periodization not only because his words superficially lend themselves to such meanings but also because they coincide in time with the upheavals of history. The hypothesis concerning our modern insertion of time into the real/ ideal binary remains, at this point, largely in the background. It requires the analyses in chapter 2 to bring it more clearly into view. Chapter 2 concentrates on the criticism of Clarence Chatham Cook from the mid-1860s. Like Jarves, he is important to the periodization of American art, but from the other side of the spectrum. Cook represents the American equation of nature with art, brought to its most emphatic critical heights. One of the country’s first examples of the professional art critic, the young Cook, a Harvard graduate in architecture, served as art critic for the New-York Daily Tribune beginning in 1864. His debut might be considered to be his editorship from 1863 to 1865 of the New Path, voice of the so-called American Pre-Raphaelites,21 or perhaps even his years with the Independent from 1854 to 1856, but it was the Tribune reviews that brought him the widest audience in his early career. This work is characterized by a tone as strident as that of Jarves. But Cook insists that true art is mimetically faithful to the minutest of nature’s details, and he is overtly deferential to the dictates of Ruskin. As such, Cook stands as an antebellum contrast to Jarves.22 Then, in the latter part of the century, he seems to change his mind. His later work will be the subject of chapter 3. For now, suffice it to note that his postwar journalistic output appears to reject his earlier Pre-Raphaelite definition of art, overtly critiquing some of his own clamorous Ruskinianism. Thus, he figures conspicuously in the prevailing periodization both for his supposed change of heart and for the antebellum positions for which he is known. Nonetheless, a close look at his early criticism, in particular the manner in which he too deployed the real/ideal dyad, will show that his definition of art had little to do with straightforward mimesis. By juxtaposing his use of the schema with that of Jarves, the chapter will argue that these rhetorical poles did not, in fact, represent opposing definitions of art. Rather, they

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formed a structure inside of which one central, shared definition was contained. The real and ideal, that is to say, formed the outer boundary, the brackets within which a single definition for art was reinforced. The poles represented contrasting formal strategies, the pictorial options for reaching the same end—the expression of what they believed to be moral truths. For those who thought like Cook, sensibility and reverence toward the seen was the only right way. On the other hand, for those who believed as Jarves did, the goal was served by deviating from the visible world in order to demonstrate a spiritual vision. Thus, while new formal concerns and aesthetic preferences can definitely be identified, much of what art was understood to be—its role in culture and the rhetorical structures of its definition—did not undergo the transformation that we have tended to read in the real/ideal contrast. There are, paradoxically, significant elements of continuity in the critical terms that are generally thought to demonstrate transformation. Here, then, the temporal question becomes more apparent: Cook and Jarves were not spokesmen for the real versus the ideal in a chronological sequence. The concepts were not used in a manner that unfolded in time. The real and ideal constituted a synchronic rhetorical structure of competing forms, which actually reinforced the same goal for art and the same inflexible dogma of truth. Yet our periodization assumes that competing definitions were bound to time, resulting in an automatic apprehension of these terms in the critical discourse as temporal and sequential. Chapter 3 is devoted to a more expanded view of Cook’s post–New Path career, since chapter 2 limits the examples of his writing to his first years at the New-York Daily Tribune and to his term as editor for the New Path. This larger sample of Cook’s writing is necessary in order to represent his ideas more fully. This will show the consistency that remained as well as the new elements that appeared in his critical writing in the postwar decades. The New Path had come to an end by 1865, but Cook continued to write for the Tribune, which sent him overseas as its Paris correspondent in 1869. He remained only until the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, at which time he repaired to Italy, spent time in Florence, where he met Jarves, and stayed in Rome until 1871.23 Back in New York, after a stint as art editor for the Atlantic Monthly from 1872 to 1875, Cook produced his most popular work, a series in Scribner’s Monthly called “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks.” These articles were collected and reprinted in 1878 as The House Beautiful.24 In short, after the demise of the New Path,

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Cook worked as a writer or editor for some of the country’s most important periodicals, which additionally included Putnam’s Monthly and the Art Amateur. Toward the end of his career in 1883, he acquired the Studio magazine, but, as the Pre-Raphaelite chronicler David Dickason notes, “his taste for fine illustrations left that journal insolvent” and it ceased to appear in 1892.25 The opening section of chapter 3 focuses on Cook’s House Beautiful and the American section of his opus Art and Artists of Our Time, published in 1888. Both were widely read books reprinted from serialized journal articles. Comparing the style and rhetoric of these later works with that of his early output, the chapter argues that the aesthetic tenets in both Cook’s early and later texts were social critiques. Whereas the tone was openly controversial and antiacademic in his youthful Pre-Raphaelite phase,26 the later writing adopted the pose of the mature and more catholic authority figure. In both phases, however, he sought to counter what he considered the era’s prevailing conformism and, more specifically, its consumerist materialism. Looking at this longer span of Cook’s career, the chapter finds that the art he championed enacted with its form a challenge to mainstream industrialized consumption and a call for individual reliance over and against conformity to the tastes of others. This was his goal throughout, whether as the invective of a young rebel on a tirade or in the more conciliatory guise of the established journalist. The later writing admits of a wider range of styles and formal modes; he even defended the painterly. But he maintained a consistent idea of art, which at bottom for him—and as we already saw in the comparison with Jarves—was a kind of truth, a collective social ideal that was objective and yet never without “individuality.” With this reading of Cook, the final part of the chapter returns to the issue of modern historiography—in particular the treatment of stylistic change. It is the issue that comes to the fore in the readings thus far presented. To recap, the preceding chapters hypothesized that classifications for formal types have been read as competing and sequential notions of how art was understood and defined vis-à-vis its role in society (whether art was about collective truth or about individual representation, we might say, for short). I suggested that assumptions about time have been fundamental to reading the critical rhetoric in this manner. Then chapter 3 argues that Cook’s apparent rejection of his antebellum, moralizing, Pre-Raphaelite conception of art was, in fact, a refutation of the strictest construction of the pictorial strategy that he formerly believed to be the only one suited to “true” art,

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while true art nonetheless continued to be identified and valued in the same manner. Thus, emerging from these arguments is the hypothesis of the second deep structure: there is an unconscious substitution of art’s definition in place of its formal appearance, a kind of privileging of the textual over the visual, or a desire to locate the historical in the discursive aspects of art. It is an issue of formal, stylistic debate being represented in modern historiography as something rather different; it is represented as competing discursive priorities for art with regard to its goals and its fundamental role in society. At stake is an unintentional repression of stylistic explanation, where in its place are inserted those elements of the critical discourse that are more fundamentally bound to historical discourses—particularly discourses of social and economic change or transformation. The final section of the chapter is therefore devoted to considering the role that social change and the notion of transformation or “revolution” play in modern historiography of American art, and the consequent implications for style. Here the larger issue needs to be more fully contextualized. We can frame it by looking first at the level of overt considerations and methodological strategies in the field, working downward from there. At that overt level, the issue at hand was succinctly described by Wanda Corn a few decades ago: the “context is often dramatized at the expense of the work of art,” and American art histories therefore tend to use art primarily as illustration.27 This names the most general surface level only, which, in response to Corn’s warning, has received more nuanced attention since that enunciation. Yet across the spectrum of nineteenth-century American art history, however various the methodological approach may be, there is a common desire to situate the explanation of a given artwork in contextual factors of change and transforming events and how these relate to constructions of national identity and/or subjectivity (and, as before, their pluralities and representational politics).28 This is part of the widespread social commitment among historians of American art, noted at the outset. Certainly “Americanness” was long ago rejected in its most programmatic and triumphalist senses—and in any form as a test for judging an artwork as worthy of attention. But the subject of art historical inquiry remains largely wedded to that which represents (various constructions of) American selfhood and its putative development within the singular conditions of American democracy and economic life.29 The subject more precisely is a representation of American history in which change is a key narrative motor:

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America as locus of identity formation, of changing subjectivity, of expansion. Expansion refers to territorial conquest, to expanding enfranchisement, and very frequently to economic growth—all of which are generally treated with healthy skepticism and critical insight. Thus, the issue is not that the field lacks perspectives or that it seeks to cover its ideological tracks. Formation, change, and expansion are instead the issue: we perceive history where we find such. Formation, change, and expansion are what make American art historical. Does this also relate to a latent suspicion that style and form are not in themselves meaningful? Is there an elision of the verbal with the visual in American art discourse? In making this substitution that the chapter suggests to be the case, do we not also swap historical targets? That is, do we not unintentionally historicize social change instead of art or even stylistic change? Even if style represents the social, it (the style or the art) cannot automatically, ahead of time, be replaced by the social. Art is rendered historical, but its form is suppressed. These issues will come up again at the end of the book. Chapter 4 turns to the writing of the book’s third protagonist, William James Stillman. Born in the same year as Cook, Stillman graduated from Union College in 1848, one year before Cook graduated from Harvard. Unlike Cook and Jarves, however, Stillman forged early, firsthand relationships with both art and Ruskin. He began his postgraduate life as a landscape painter, studying briefly with Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900) and producing a few well-received studies of nature.30 Like his contemporaries, he felt that nature was deeply meaningful in all the ways familiar to students of American art. However, Stillman was a bit more inspired than most of his peers who extolled the virtues of nature, pursuing his contact with nature by living for long stretches in the woods. He organized and guided the outings of the informal club (dubbed the “Adirondack Club”) that consisted of such Cambridge lights as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louis Agassiz, and James Russell Lowell.31 One of Stillman’s few extant paintings, The Philospher’s Camp (1858), depicts the group in their camp in the woods.32 With regard to artists and writers overseas, Stillman had, by 1850, also met Ruskin himself. The famous critic took up the young artist, bringing him along to Switzerland with an eye toward molding his work.33 As a name in the American critical constellation, Stillman is less known than the other two critics. His early writing is nonetheless familiar and frequently discussed since he served as the editor and (often anonymous) main

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contributor to the Crayon. This was the country’s first serious journal dedicated to art, and it demonstrated a level of knowledge and dedication considered to be absent from previous American art writing. Founded in 1855 by Stillman and John Durand, son of the landscape painter Asher B. Durand, the Crayon ran until 1861.34 The first two years of publication set the tone and standard. They were also the years that Stillman was the editor. He rationed over as many issues as possible the contributions he secured from some of his distinguished Adirondack companions. He filled in the rest with his own unsigned matter and whatever else he could muster from among acquaintances and colleagues.35 In these years of Stillman’s editorship, the Crayon was clearly Ruskinian, revealing what Stillman later described as the stimulus that Ruskin’s first volume of Modern Painters (1843) had given to his own “nature worship, to which [he] was already too much inclined.”36 After his brief but intense engagement with the Crayon and his consequent nervous collapse, Stillman continued to find himself amid his era’s most prominent people, places, and events.37 The chapter will expand on those most pertinent to his critical writing, but a brief outline here will point to the range of his commitments and interests. He held two consular posts in the 1860s: in the first half of the decade, he served in Rome during the tumultuous final years of the unification of Italy, just before the pope lost temporal authority and the city became the capital of the new republic; then, from 1865 to 1869, he was stationed in Crete at the moment of uprising against Turkish rule. More activist than was seen to be fitting, Stillman found himself in trouble on a few occasions for his open sympathy with the struggle for liberty. Throughout much of his life—which he summarized as that of a journalist—he wrote not about art but about the revolutions of his day, in which he was a firsthand observer if not a direct participant. These writings include numerous letters from the various fronts and subsequent books such as The Cretan Insurrection of 1866–7–8 (1874), Herzegovina and the Late Uprising (1877), and The Union of Italy, 1815–1895 (1909). Most of his life from 1860 onward was spent overseas, largely in England and Italy. After his work at the Crayon, his next regular journalistic appearance was in the pages of the Nation, though he was apparently an occasional correspondent, sending many articles from Crete from 1866 to 1869. He regularly submitted editorials and other signed reviews for decades afterward. He was an official reporter for the London Times beginning in 1886, though he had already been publishing with the paper and receiving payment for his contributions for many years. His writings on art and archeology

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(the latter had become a kind of specialty from his years in Crete) were also published in the Century magazine, among other periodicals.38 Stillman’s writing perhaps comes closer to the shift in critical definitions of art than does that of the other two figures. Ironically, however, he remains largely understood as an antebellum follower of Ruskin. The last two chapters are consequently dedicated to Stillman’s writing with the goal of bringing his work into sharper focus. Chapter 4 concentrates on his earliest and best-known criticism—the essays and other contributions he wrote for the Crayon. It centers on certain conspicuous aspects of the language Stillman used at this moment. His style was densely figurative with a riot of metaphors, and the chapter proposes that this language was intimately related to the definition for art that he championed at the time. Stillman’s early art theory demanded a certain type of critical writing that relied heavily on forms of figurative language. His tropes helped establish the substance of the philosophy, not just the tone of evangelizing zeal. The chapter then contemplates the less discussed but significant rejection of Ruskin that actually characterized Stillman’s art criticism for the majority of his long life. In the late 1860s, Stillman openly rejected his earlier Ruskinian understanding of art. From this time onward, he returned on various occasions to the subject of Ruskin and to his quarrel with the art theory of his former mentor. These instances are analyzed together, with the premise that the articles on Ruskin form a sequence in Stillman’s thinking that helps us plot the primary points of contention in play. These key points of Stillman’s refutation of Ruskin show us that it was not Ruskin’s morality per se that he rejected, but its insertion into art discourse. He refuted the assignment of ostensibly timeless non-art meaning to art; he refuted a metaphorical definition of art. Chapter 5 then takes up Stillman’s later writing and, in particular, the linguistic changes that accompanied his rejection of Ruskin. His language became much less metaphorical, and new forms replaced the earlier tropes. The chapter argues that the substantive criteria for Stillman’s post-Crayon definition for, and assessment of, art required a new critical language. As his Ruskinian definition had relied on those tropes discussed in the previous chapter, the later art theory was embodied in a less overtly figurative style. The new language helped theorize art on the basis of apparently factual and not metaphysical comparison. New metonymic figures appeared, creating a discourse of art filled with self-referentiality, an art criticism more about art—and specifically by way of its own materials and supposed history. This

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later, ostensibly more art-centered art theory needed a form of critical language that built into itself a referential mode of explanation. Apparently fitting our periodization, Stillman’s later texts set up a definition for art in which it is no longer about morality, but rather about communicating by way of art’s particular properties, about expressing an artistic insight into the subject, which is made meaningful precisely by art. The elevated value of the subject is that which is added by art. Beauty, art’s materials, and art’s traditions became Stillman’s new critical cornerstones. The history of art in particular became an important and often repeated factor in his critical discourse. Many references were made to past art, to older styles, to the characteristics associated with various schools of art, to sociohistorical factors associated with the production of art. The chapter argues that these more overtly material and art-related sources for art’s meaning were an intentional contrast to those earlier bases for critical evaluation— the metaphorical imposition of God and religious morality—which had come to seem external to art. Indeed, the invocation of history appears to have been one of Stillman’s primary means for giving art discourse a new, materialist grounding. It was a theme widely shared by his peers in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Looking closely at the role of past art and history in Stillman’s art discourse, however, the chapter finds that his various uses of history are not really historical. They might better be called a discourse of history inasmuch as history, the past, and ideas of historical change appear as rhetoric in the writing. They became integral to Stillman’s critical judgments as terms of value. Indeed, history offered him a comparative standard against which to judge the art of his own time. The term “history” reveals its rhetorical character even further by its frequent contraposition to the label “science.” So whereas history helped define the ideal in art, those contemporary paintings that did not live up to Stillman’s notion of art were, by contrast, often categorized as science. Science named what art was not. The chapter thus analyzes these new key terms, finding that science stood for the present, for what Stillman perceived as its misguided modes of apprehension, its insistence on change, its deference to “fact” at the expense of beauty. These were features of Stillman’s era that he lamented bitterly. This was the modern world according to Stillman, the society on the other side of the many revolutions, social upheavals, and movements for self-determination for which he himself had fought. It had ushered in, above all, time and flux, growth and change—all of which seem to have destroyed

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for Stillman the coherence and beauty, the traditions and training, that had formerly (“historically”) belonged to art and life. What was good in contemporary art was that which did not represent the tendencies of the day, but which in some way demonstrated formal strengths rooted in art’s past. History was a way to refer to what was lost in the modern world; it was a metaphor. Thus, while Stillman most closely resembles the critical picture drawn by our modern periodization, he nonetheless located his ideal of art in the notpresent, in a timeless world of art’s traditions and best past masters and styles. “Good art”—which, it is important to note, possessed many of the same features that we too consider to be the salient and “good” characteristics of the art from the moment—was for Stillman precisely that which eschewed overt engagement with its time. Is it not remarkable, then, that we interpret those same features, even some of the same paintings, as representing modernity’s success, as coming from the change, “revolution,” and expansion of that era? For Stillman, change, expansion, and linear time were among art’s chief obstacles. They produced contemporary art that needed the label “science” or “archeology.” In our modern periodization, these same features of change and expansion constitute not only history but also art’s historical meaning. Is it not then possible that we too have failed to differentiate between history and metaphor—that formation, expansion, and change are themselves metaphors for American art’s particularly American meaning?

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1 rereading james jackson jarves’s ART-IDEA

It could be argued that James Jackson Jarves entered modern art history in the 1930s, or perhaps it was at that moment when he assumed the dignified and conspicuous place he now occupies in the historiography of American art and art criticism. In 1933, Theodore Sizer, then director of the Yale University Art Gallery, reintroduced this “forgotten New Englander” with a paper read at various venues, including the annual meeting of the College Art Association. It was published in the New England Quarterly, and an entry for Jarves appeared in the Dictionary of American Biography.1 A few articles by other scholars followed in the 1940s, with the most extensive critical biographies appearing in 1951 and 1952.2 Those studies, noted in the introduction, were Francis Steegmuller’s The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves and John Peter Simoni’s Ph.D. dissertation “Art Critics and Criticism in NineteenthCentury America.” Beginning with Sizer, Jarves was resuscitated as a heroic idealist, struggling against the provincial American preference for naturalism in art and tirelessly expending his resources to teach that American public about art’s development and about the morals it expressed. Such a narrative is not surprising for the 1930s and 1940s, as many scholars sought to find lineages and/or explanations for contemporary painting that rejected naturalism in favor of expressiveness or abstraction. Regardless, Jarves had not, in fact, been totally neglected previously, as his collection of early Italian paintings at Yale had drawn consistent, though not voluminous, critical attention from the late nineteenth century onward.

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That attention, however, cast Jarves in a different light, as it focused on questions of faulty attribution, often downgrading the value of individual works or questioning their aptness as examples of the historical lesson the collection claimed to demonstrate.3 There would seem, therefore, to be more than one image of Jarves. His reputation, like that of many historical figures, has been subject to change over time. This, too, is not surprising, and in Jarves’s case there is evidence to back up both images. Indeed, even in the studies that tend toward the heroic Jarves, there are references to the ill-informed or even manipulative Jarves.4 Zeal and inaccuracy might easily go hand in hand. Of course, the character of Jarves is not the issue here; the substance of his art theory is. This chapter is concerned with understanding the ideas about art that he hoped to foster among Americans in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and it seeks answers by analyzing his texts. The premise is that we can reread his writing—focusing on the structures of his critical rhetoric, the aesthetic schema he employed, and the methodological principles he invoked—in order to comprehend his positions. Issues of Jarves’s character may emerge, but they arise from his words, not vice versa. In fact, in analyzing Jarves’s writing, questions about the suitability of his current reputation do develop from disjunctions between what he represents in the historiography and what we can learn from the manner in which he constructed his arguments. Jarves figures prominently in modern periodization of nineteenth-century American art, largely in the heroic mode that began with Sizer. This Jarves is associated with the post–Civil War cosmopolitanism that increased American openness toward international aesthetic trends and promoted a new critical attitude toward the longstanding native bias in favor of verisimilitude. He supposedly brought a more historical, sociocultural approach to the evaluation of art. Similar to the distaste for naturalism, Jarves is also frequently credited—or blamed— for the decline in popularity of landscape painting as the foremost genre of an American school.5 Thus, he is linked to the incipiently modern taste that we associate with the postwar decades. He stands as a figure who helps periodize American art, forming part of the narrative of change, dislocation, renewal, and modernity that is generally employed to characterize the state of art production and reception after the Civil War. This image of Jarves only partially fits what we read in his texts, however. The incipient modernism cannot readily be reconciled with the positions formed by his critical discourse. Or, some elements of it can be found to correspond, but only superficially. Other aspects of his criticism seem to

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contradict the uses to which it has been put in modern historiography. How does this situation come about? The task at hand, to repeat, is to consider this question by means of Jarves’s writing, and with the premise that modern historiographic desires are not so straightforward as those that perhaps motivated Sizer and his peers to disinter a Jarves somewhat more brilliant than the one his predecessors buried. Jarves’s third book on art, The Art-Idea, published in 1864, is the most significant of his works in the historiography of American art and the one we take up here. As the book that devoted six chapters to American art, it is his most frequently cited work.6 His opinions about American art come across quite clearly in that text; he did not hide his antipathy to the work of many painters, several of whom were then favorites. He sneered, for instance, at those who demonstrated a Düsseldorf manner, comparing their work to “furniture paintings, being mechanical and imitative in feature, seldom rising above illustrative art” (Art-Idea, 177).7 (He seems to have mistaken the source of the Düsseldorf influence as a New York gallery opened by “an enterprising German,” later referring to it as “an accidental importation” [177, 181].) By contrast, the influence of France and Italy produced much better results. For example, French-trained William Morris Hunt (1824–1879)8—like John La Farge (1835–1910), whom we will encounter further on—was perhaps a bit weak in drawing according to Jarves, but he demonstrated a “feeling for great qualities,” primarily in his “subtilties of expression and color . . . so deliciously done, and with so tender or fascinating sentiment” (184). Of the “indigenous” school of “academic” art—represented by esteemed artists such as Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) and Daniel Huntington (1816–1906)9—he had little to say that was complementary. “Artists educated after this manner,” he claimed, “will never wholly free themselves from the bondage of an imposed style and outside dictation” (188). And landscape painting, which he acknowledged as the most “thoroughly American branch of painting, based upon the facts and tastes of the country and the people,” was flawed for being so “literal” and as a consequence was “quite divested of human association” (189). It was American to its core in its “realism, vigor, enterprise, and freshness . . . viewing nature rarely in other than external and picturesque aspects, and little given to poetry or ideas. . . . Partaking of the enterprise of commerce, it sends its sons to Brazil, to the Amazon, to the Andes. . . . It pauses at no difficulties, distance, expense. . . . The speculating blood infuses itself into art . . . [and] it will reduce art to the level of trade” (194–95).

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Thus, Jarves’s preferences were clearly asserted, and they appear modern for their frankness, for the denigration of the literal and the academic, and for the preference for those Continental influences that were evocative of the “poetical” and the “ideal.” Jarves’s freshness is also thought to emerge from his correlation of national cultural characteristics with tendencies in art and taste. His discussion of American landscape painting as an enterprise fueled by “speculating blood” is a case in point. In other words, there are reasons to read Jarves in the manner ascribed to him in the modern historiography. However, if we look closely at his discourse as a whole, there is an almost obsessive return to the real-versus-ideal schema. Both this preoccupation and its conflict with his own stated goal of examining art within its “historical relations” show important inconsistencies, pointing toward a rather different reading of Jarves’s theory.10 At the superficial level of Jarves’s modern role in the historiography, there are at least two assumptions that bear reconsideration right away. First, there is the supposition of novelty—that Jarves’s ideas noted above were, if not entirely unique, at least unfamiliar to his American audience. Yet Jarves’s fundamental understanding of art and its history was largely conventional and also relied on the real/ideal structure of aesthetic classification that had long been central to American art criticism. And his call for Americans to look abroad for artistic models perhaps ought to be distinguished for its tone and motivation rather than for its uniqueness. The second assumption is related: that is, the implicit dismissal of Jarves’s earlier published art books, Art-Hints (1855) and Art Studies: The “Old Masters” of Italy; Painting (1861).11 The former consists mainly of the paraphrased positions of then-celebrated authorities, extracted and disordered into a clumsily written manuscript. The latter was written as a primer meant to guide American audiences through (his notion of) the history and principles of Italian art, just as his own collection of European pictures was about to make its U.S. debut in New York City.12 It was dedicated to discussing the development of Italian art from the twelfth to the seventeenth century, based on the “evolution” demonstrated by his collection.13 Both texts are superficially unlike The Art-Idea, whose more sophisticated and assured arguments demonstrate a stylistic facility that was absent in the earlier works. Both can also be seen in direct relationship to Jarves’s ambitions for his private collection; they construct the rationale that would prove the pictures’ merits. It is therefore reasonable that these earlier writings have received less attention in the literature on Jarves’s contributions to American art criticism.

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Unlike the later Art-Idea, with its broader scope and more polished style, these earlier books might be construed as representing the immature and underdeveloped phase of Jarves’s career. Or, as works devoted primarily to European art and its prospects in the United States, they might simply appear irrelevant. The earlier texts nonetheless ought to be reinserted into Jarves’s legacy. As will be discussed, these publications (particularly ArtHints) do not differ from the later book with regard to the author’s fundamental aesthetic schema and the rhetorical role it served for his American readers. Indeed, the less facile nature of the earlier writing helps demonstrate or clarify the structure Jarves employed for objectifying his opinions—a structure used more subtly, but substantially unchanged, in 1864. Jarves’s art collection, as noted, was very central to these writing projects. The collection has been highly esteemed since the early twentieth century and viewed as an indication of the collector’s advanced taste. It consists primarily of Italian paintings from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries that Jarves acquired in Italy during the decade of the 1850s while living in Florence. The imagery was neither familiar nor readily legible to his untraveled compatriots. While the paintings may have been to Jarves’s taste, it is evident from even a small sample of his private correspondence that he amassed these particular works out of desires that were socioeconomic as well as aesthetic.14 He purchased what he could afford—works that were then readily available.15 Struggling constantly with inadequate funds, Jarves wrote to supplement both his income and the value of his economical selections. The collection was first shown in the United States in 1861, and while it has rightly come to be valued, its foreignness to mid-nineteenth-century Americans, with regard to the styles and techniques it represented, failed entirely to impress East Coast audiences. As is clear from Jarves’s inability to sell the paintings in Boston, New York, and Washington, as well as the negative press surrounding their exhibition, the apparent strangeness of the paintings served only to reinforce a type of nativism and feed a suspicion toward their owner and apologist.16 Part of what Jarves’s texts express is a desire to counteract this reception. The methodological principles that structure Jarves’s arguments, primarily in The Art-Idea of 1864 but also in his Art-Hints of 1855, have a direct relationship to the aesthetic preferences he hoped to foster among Americans—about European as well as American art. These principles take shape in the two fundamental structural forms noted already. First, there is Jarves’s ostensibly overarching theory that art must be understood within its larger

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social milieu, inside its context of cultural factors. Jarves himself asserted that such an idea structured his approach to art criticism and cited it as his particular contribution to the field. Second, within this larger framework, we can find Jarves recurring to the same rhetorical device time and again in his writing. Specifically, he utilized the binary structure of idealism versus realism, or spirituality versus materiality, as a formula for identifying and defining art. This paradigm for art writing pervaded the discourse and was crucial to the definitions and expectations Jarves and his peers had for art, forming an important basis for their critical opinions. Jarves’s opinions about art and his use of this familiar model were novel to the degree that, at this specific historical moment, the terms of the discourse were becoming more pronounced, pressured, and debated. Thus, he is in step with his contemporaries, but his strident language may indicate that a private agenda—to rationalize and elevate the aesthetic type represented by the paintings in his own collection—animated his writing as much as the debates of the others. In fact, I will question in what follows whether this classificatory model was not even more fundamental to his thinking than his self-styled interest in “social relations.”17 Looking first at the larger cultural foundation that Jarves considered basic to the understanding of art, we can find several key ideas introduced toward the end of his first chapter devoted to specific American artists in The ArtIdea. Many of them correspond to the terms and general ideas seen above. The chapter is entitled “Painting and the Early Painters of America.—Benjamin West; Copley; Leslie; Trumbull; Sully; Peale, Stuart; Mount; Vanderlyn; Cole; Washington Allston.” In the concluding paragraph, Jarves sought to establish the grounds for commenting on contemporary American art in the chapter to follow. He counseled his audience, We shall turn in the next chapter to the more copious topic of contemporary art, first asking the reader to keep in mind the high qualities of the artists we now take leave of. Note well their gentlemanly repose, quiet dignity, idealization, appreciation of thought and study, and absence in general of the sensational, exaggerated, vulgar, and superficial. They had qualities which ought to have endeared their style to us and made it take root and grow. But there were powerful causes of a political nature at work to strangle its life in its youth. It is gratifying to know that the American school of painting began its career with refined feeling and taste and an elevated ambition, basing

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its claims to success upon high aims in portraiture and historical and imaginative art. It evinced not much love for genre or common subjects, and indulged in landscape only in an ideal sense. This was indeed a lofty inauguration of the art-element, and, considering the limited number of artists and inauspicious condition of the country, one fruitful in fine art. Under similar circumstances no other people can show a better record, certainly not a brighter beginning. Why it failed of making a permanent impression will appear as we go on. (175) Again Jarves’s preference is evident: a certain manner of art was far more commendable than the form that was to follow it. He does not name or give precise outlines to the artistic form he extols, but the reader is expected to agree with Jarves on the basis of the values listed. A quality that he variously names “idealization,” “thought and study,” “refined feeling,” and “elevated ambition” is invoked repeatedly as the great merit of the early painters. It is opposed just as clearly to what he denominates “sensational, exaggerated, vulgar, and superficial.” He also favors “historical and imaginative art” and even portraiture, which were undertaken with “high aims.” By contrast, he classes genre paintings as “common” and puts landscape painting in this same sentence, as a thing to be “indulged in” and then only in its “ideal sense.” Note here his preferred terms. They are ambiguously or interchangeably references both to a pictorial form and to social class and character. “Gentlemanly repose” and “quiet dignity” describe the status of the men as well as their pictures. So too does Jarves’s use of “idealization” and “absence in general of the sensational, exaggerated” refer to and conflate the characteristics of art and artist. The same goes for the obviously disparaged characteristics of the “vulgar” and “superficial,” which are also (but as yet elusively) tied to their “causes of a political nature.” In short, for Jarves, the art and its form are bound to the larger conditions of art’s producers. Jarves, however, related art to particular aspects of its milieu; a few factors only constituted the pertinent influences for him. Thus, he tells his readers in The Art-Idea repeatedly and in various contexts that the art of any period will respond to the prevailing religious authority and manner of political organization. A very overt and condensed statement of this principle opens his introductory chapter on American art. The chapter consists of his general meditations on the subject. The title alone alerts us to his concerns: “An Inquiry into the Art-Conditions and Prospects of America.—ArtCriticism.—Press, People, and Clergy.—Needs of Artists and Public.—

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American Knownothingism in Art.—Eclecticism.—The True Path.” The chapter begins with the following summary: We have now succinctly traced the art-idea in its historical progress and aesthetic development in the civilizations of the Old World to the period of its advent in the New, showing, as we proceeded, that, though the love of beauty is a fundamental quality of the human mind, yet its manifestations in the form of art are checked, stimulated, or modified by the influences of climate, habits, and traditions of race, relative pressure of utilitarian or aesthetic ideas, the character of creeds and tone of religious feeling, and above all by the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments. (148) Jarves’s idea of historical progress apparently eschews the idea of a single linear tradition in art history. He attributed to art changeable and historically determined stylistic traits, endemic to particular places and peoples. Each culture has its own habits, traditions, “tone of religious feeling,” or relative utilitarianism, and this determines the nature of the art it produces. He thus constructed a historicist art history, a notion of art as bound to relative conditions prevailing in a given culture. Such notions of history and art were indeed common at the time, though Jarves repeatedly claimed that this was the novel contribution that set his book apart.18 One important and widely read exponent of the historicist approach to art was the French thinker Hippolyte Taine, whose philosophy was translated into English by John Durand in 1864 as Philosophy of Art. Jarves would have heard its echoes, even if he did not read it himself—which he must have done at least by 1875, when he wrote briefly about it.19 To refine his approach a bit further, Jarves relied on an idea of absolute truth with universal quests for beauty, and of fixed poles of spirit and matter between which such beauty is expressed. But the nearness to one or the other of these poles is relative, based on the varying cultural characteristics. Jarves’s overall approach to art criticism thus gave structure to the criteria he used for evaluating American art, and it systematized his judgments and opinions about it. Though his approach consisted of an assertion that art was fundamentally an expression of the indigenous conditions particular to a time and place, he routinely emphasized that art responded “above all” to

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“the opposite degrees of freedom of choice and qualities of inspiration permitted to the artist by Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments.” For Jarves, the prevailing religion established the aesthetic tone and expressive intent of any epoch’s artwork. Government itself, as he implied here with the formula “Pagan, Papal, and Protestant governments,” is likewise central, but it is hardly distinct from (literally modified by) these broad religious types. To this basic armature are added corresponding attitudes and tastes of the people in given times and places. These ideas, too, are rather broad and reductive and conform to thenprevalent notions of types.20 In particular, Jarves repeatedly linked sensual excess and despotism to papal religion and rule, while crediting the Catholic countries where such rule dominated—and he referred predominantly to Italy and Spain—with a true passion for art and beauty. Correspondingly, he summarized Protestant people and art as possessing an inherent distaste for all that is not democratic. Such people, however, were hampered by an overly pragmatic and abstemious attitude toward art, with a preference for the mundane in content and form. Here is one example of many: Catholicism, first in its ignorance, and afterward by selfish policy, aimed at its restriction to a defined, dogmatic, religious expression. But while itself under the impetus of growth and expansion, its art partook of the same partial freedom and noble energy, and to the extent of its liberty strove to be true and spiritual. Unfortunately for its final perfection in this direction, that art, whose varied progress and lofty genius were represented by Giotto, Niccola Pisano, Orgagna . . . , was degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury. (135) By contrast, as soon as Protestant art freed itself from the control of rulers sensual and papal at heart, like the English Stuarts, it identified itself by degrees with the people, assuming their level of thought, and their liking for the homely and common. . . . Aesthetic feeling [does not] assume the dignity of a passion. . . . Yet it is slowly making its way to the heart of the multitude . . . without any need of church or state to interpret or dictate. Catholicism exalted the art-motive, but Protestantism gave it liberty. (137)

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Jarves has thus also borrowed heavily from Ruskinian notions of periodizing and classifying Italian art. This is not our main concern, however. Rather, Jarves coupled Catholicism and Protestantism with respective tendencies in aesthetic taste and disparate levels of popular will—qualities, it ought to be stressed, that he discusses as inevitably or automatically bound to each other, to the exclusion of myriad others that might equally be used to explain or define a religion’s (or an aesthetic’s) constellation of attitudes, characteristics, and manifestations. Catholicism is linked with “selfish policy” and dogma, under which art was eventually “degraded into an instrument of state pomp and aristocratic luxury.” Its moment of being “true and spiritual” coincided with a brief time of “partial freedom.” On the other hand, liberty is the great contribution of Protestantism. Its art, while “homely and common,” has “freed itself,” and it communicates without “church or state to interpret or dictate.” However loose, generic, and current his links may have been, they represent a desire to explain artistic differences by means of cultural factors. Or, were these supposed cultural influences a set of predetermined ideas that Jarves sought to solidify with the putative objectivity of his historicist method? In particular, we should wonder whether his oppositions between generalized religious and political structures, so rigidly reduced and systematized, were employed foremost as value-laden types meant to classify aesthetic form. This question might alternately be posed as which of these came first: Did his aesthetic opinions follow from the conclusions of his theory of cultural influence, or did this theory rationalize his preformed artistic judgments? I suggest that the latter might be the more accurate reading. Indeed, it seems that his historicist method rationalized both the predetermined ideas about political and religious systems and even more fundamentally the formal types he sought to associate with them. Here the other essential element of Jarves’s art theory, the classificatory scheme of the real versus the ideal, becomes integral. This structure forms Jarves’s bridge between broad cultural character and individual formal assessments and provides him with ostensibly objective grounds on which to criticize American art and American taste. It is perhaps closest to his actual agenda, to the primary set of opinions that he sought to propagate and justify and to which the rest of his historicist approach was subsequently adapted. The following is a very representative instance of this method of classification. It also demonstrates those opinions that the structure helped stabilize as the most salient for the evaluation of art. In the chapter “Art-

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Conditions and Prospects of America,” Jarves directs his readers by stating, “Certain works of man are a perpetual joy,—the same yesterday, to-day, and forever,—because they are a revelation from the unseen, and an assertion of the eternal supremacy of spirit over matter. Genius creates, talent constructs. The power of the one is instinctive, a gift from above; of the other, receptive, accumulating by example and training. Hence genius alone gives birth to great, new, or noble work; while simple talent, however clever in execution, often fails from want of intuitive discernment and original thought” (161). Whatever manifests spirit, according to Jarves, will necessarily be superior to that which he defines as material. (And note that such manifestations are outside, or maybe prior, to history.) The categories have many synonyms in this passage that likewise recur throughout his and his peers’ writing, as seen already in the first quotation about the early American painters. “Genius” and “original thought” make “great,” “noble work,” as opposed to “talent” and “training” that may produce something that is “clever in execution” but inherently faulty because it is based solely on external examples and not on some manner of “revelation.” Jarves precisely spells out this fundamental opposition of matter to spirit for his readers, proffering the correct definition of art. He suggests that his American audience should bear it in mind when confronted with a work of art and thus avoid erroneous conclusions—particularly about unfamiliar and foreign paintings—that that audience’s limited native experience inclines it to develop. This principle was dear to Jarves. In this same chapter supposedly dedicated to American art, he reverted to this pet project. The recourse to Italian examples, and to “heavenly beings,” likely suggests the degree to which his pronouncements on American art always remained close to his underlying aesthetic bias. He stated, “Supernal beings can only be suggested by art, just as they are to our imagination. That artist is most successful in this who best impresses the spectator with the idea of a spiritual being, avoiding all intrusion of technical artifice, or display of anatomical dexterity. Fra Angelico is excelled by many a school-boy now in the science of design, yet no artist of any age equals him in the spirituality of his angels and Madonnas, or gives more elevated types of heavenly beings” (163). Thus, the material aspect of painting is more than simply a secondary consideration; it actively hinders the representation of the spiritual (and spirit might consist of secular as well as religious ideals). Consequently, a painting’s value as art depended,

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for Jarves, on the palpable presence of an unseeable ideal, made visible by the “genius” or “elevated ambition” of the painter. All formal considerations or indulgence had to be subordinate to the apt expression of the ideal. The relationship between technique and expression is like that between matter and spirit; it is antagonistic, or rather it will be antagonistic when a painter shows too much concern for the former. Demonstrations of training, efforts to captivate the viewer with dramatic compositions or bold color, and flourishes of the brush all came under the heading of a materialist tendency that is inimical to art. Art, by this definition, must be evaluated primarily on the basis of its immaterial qualities, its spiritual and imaginative character. The outward form, most particularly the artist’s facility with regard to verisimilitude or dramatic visual appeal, is rendered a secondary consideration. Or, worse, such form has the potential to mislead the viewer. The implications for American art become clearer in another typical example. Using Emanuel Leutze as representative of popular taste,21 Jarves places the painter’s characteristic style in opposition to the (elusive) qualities of true art. Leutze “manifests some originality of thought, much vigor,” Jarves allows, but he shows overmuch dramatic force, and [he] has abundance of executive skill, but is spasmodic and unequal. Tours de force delight him. He has the vicious coloring of the Dusseldorf school in its fullest extent. The Rotunda painting in the Capitol of the Star of Empire is his most ambitious work. This, the well-known Washington crossing the Delaware, the Storming of the Teocalli at Mexico, and the portrait of General Burnside, are striking examples of his epic style. Bad taste in composition overpowers much that is meritorious in design and execution. Leutze is the Forrest of our painters. Both men are popular from their bias to the exaggerated and sensational, cultivating the forcible, common, and striking, at the expense of the higher qualities of art. (177–78) Leutze’s work is dramatic, vicious, exaggerated, and common, among other faults, and popular because of them. Evidently, Jarves found much to criticize in both Leutze and a public who liked such paintings. The “higher qualities of art” are missing from these paintings. But note that so, too, are they absent from Jarves’s sentences. In part, the (regrettably overpowered)

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“meritorious . . . design” and the “originality of thought” constitute these so-called higher qualities, but beyond that, specific attributes are not named. Looking briefly at the paintings and, inasmuch as is possible, through Jarves’s terms, we find in Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851; fig. 1) a composition that stresses drama by pressing the overloaded boat up to the foreground plane, completely parallel to the surface. The figures form a rigorous pyramidal form in the forward half of the boat, with Washington at its apex in a pose boldly echoed by the backward slant of the foremost oar, which is in turn repeated in the line of the flagpole behind the hero. These devices exaggerate the sense of the onward-rushing general, as does the mass of insufficiently differentiated and over-numerous bodies crouching behind the leader in the back half of the boat. This foreground action sits starkly forward and is sharply delineated in a pictorial space that then recedes incomprehensibly to the second boat in the picture. This second boat is reduced in tone to an undifferentiated gray and to a small scale that together suggest a much greater distance than is accounted for in the treatment of the receding space. These compositional and coloristic elements, along with the vividly contrasting burst of light breaking through the clouds above and behind Washington’s head and his half of the boat, are likely what Jarves meant in calling the composition overpowering and sensation-

Fig. 1 Emanuel Leutze (1816–1868), Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851. Oil on canvas, 378.5 ⫻ 647.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Gift of John Stewart Kennedy, 1897, 97.34. Image copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Art Resource, New York.

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alized. The description “meritorious in design” refers to Leutze’s skillful drawing of the bodies. Many of the same exaggerations are evident in the composition The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops (1848; fig. 2). The whole picture is taken up by the crushingly close crowd of skirmishing bodies, whose pyramidal arrangement is this time justified by the form of the indigenous pyramid on which the sharply differentiated groups of black-clad Spaniards and half-nude Mexicans strike poses of great dramatic vigor. With upstretched arms and outthrust legs, the two groups face each other in predominantly opposing diagonal groupings, in which the individual bodies reinforce the mayhem with their variously twisting limbs and torsos. The slick surface of the shiny black armor contrasts sharply with the texture of the white marble structure of the teocalli and the skin of the Mexicans. This

Fig. 2 Emanuel Leutze (1816–1868), The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops, 1848. Oil on canvas, 215.3 ⫻ 250.8 cm. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1985.7. Photo: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York.

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sharpness is not sufficiently lessened in the distance, where the figures are nonetheless quite small by comparison. The heavy, claustrophobic foreground slants strangely backward and upward to the brightly lit, relatively empty, and sunset-pinkened upper portion of the pyramid, emphasizing the foreground chaos all the more. These features allow us to imagine what Jarves considered the cultivation of the “striking” and “common,” which made Leutze and the Düsseldorf school antithetical to the “higher qualities” he wanted to see. While Jarves found the negative features easy to name, his criticism, like so much art writing by mid-nineteenth-century Americans, left unnamed those qualities that made art Art. They are immaterial, spiritual, ideal. The faults, by the very nature of this dyadic definition of art, are material. They are doubly material, even. The detractions can be seen and named; the faults are visible, audible almost, and they correspond to the materialist character of the people who find them attractive. The catalogued elements of a material style are then linked directly, by means of Jarves’s cultural explanation, to America’s overemphasis on “the knowledge which makes her rich and strong, [rather than on] the art that implies cultivation. . . . Americans calculate, interrogate, accumulate, debate. They yet find their chief success in getting, rather than enjoying; in having, rather than being: hence, material wealth is the great prize of life” (150). A populace so inclined, according to Jarves, will have an aesthetic taste for showy display, for “the sensational” and “striking” in painting. Correspondingly, they will have little sympathy for the “elevated” and “spiritual” in art. In fact, such a people will not be able to recognize these qualities and instead will see only an absence of those material attributes that their culture inclines them to recognize as superior. It is important to observe here that Jarves was not alone at this moment in his identification of a surplus materialism in art. From at least as early as 1855, we can read a comparable preoccupation in the work of many art writers. The reception of artists such as Asher Durand and Frederic Church, among others at that time, shows a heightened critical awareness of, or skepticism toward, formal practice that seemed overtly to appeal to the eye alone. Critics were touchy about that which captivated the gaze of the viewer with technical displays of the minutia of the visible world or with bold effects of color. Increasingly in this decade, critics who had long used the poles of realism and idealism as a fundamental critical tool voiced concerns about the dominance of the real and material side. Now, moreover,

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they drew a rhetorical relationship between these formal traits and economic meanings of the term “materialism.”22 For Jarves, materialism was particularly detrimental, and not simply because it seemed to signal a growing habit among the American audience of conflating value with external appearance. His greater concern was that the public in the grip of materialism was unwilling to recognize that the “best artist” is the one who “avoid[s] all intrusion of technical artifice.” Nor would such an audience see, as Jarves had it, the superiority of Fra Angelico, since that audience would be more captivated by superficial virtuosity of drawing or bold color. Jarves’s opposition of matter to spirit thus posits the preeminence of paintings whose technical merits will necessarily be misunderstood by those judging according to their culture’s materialist standard. He highlights such misapprehension in order to demonstrate the degree to which an American must remove himself from his native traditions and search for alternative standards in order to understand “true” art. Jarves’s dyadic scheme also freed him from any need to be overly consistent about his likes and dislikes with regard to form within this system. Since it is the unseeable qualities that determine a work’s status, Jarves could and did criticize or praise the formal execution of his contemporaries’ painting without recourse to a consistent set of stylistic principles or technical guidelines, arguing instead for the presence or absence of the spiritual. The technical and formal were then evaluated for their relative success in the expression of that character that is immaterial. Certainly this gives enormous authority to the critic. And Jarves used it to persuade his American audience to consider materialism (or, more precisely, those forms he termed as such) as distinct, by itself, from true art. It will by now be evident that Jarves’s dualist rhetoric forged a system out of which an apparently objective definition of art could be built, and that such a definition was exemplified by his own collection of early Italian paintings. Moreover, it demonstrated the weakness of American aesthetic standards. This structural dyad was the most fundamental aspect and the driving force that determined much of the rest of his art theory. A few other observations, separate from the imputation of motives—however present those may be understood to be23—are appropriate at this point, and they bring us to the final section of the chapter. If we turn now to Jarves’s earlier book Art-Hints, we can see that in many ways all of Jarves’s writing works and reworks the same set of ideas. He indicates as much himself in The Art-Idea. Art-Hints, he claimed, “was writ-

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ten in fervor of a fresh intellectual enjoyment. . . . The feeling that pervades Art-Idea is identical with that of the former work. Divergencies [sic] of conclusions are owing to deeper investigation and riper judgment” (Art-Idea, 8). Given this, it might seem appropriate to skip his earlier and inferior attempts and to concentrate instead on the most developed expression. However, it is the continuity or the similarity of purpose that makes the earlier work useful. The shrill and unpracticed tone of the writing more clearly reveals Jarves’s priorities and makes more obvious the disjunction between his declared project and his actual focus. That “identical feeling” that Jarves claimed animated his writing was the desire to construct an art theory based on what Art-Hints repeatedly called the “twofold nature” of man, his “material and spiritual” makeup. Unlike the text of 1864, these categorizations provide the overt organizational scheme to the study from 1855. Two of the first five chapters are entitled accordingly, and throughout the other chapters, whose titles might indicate a focus on some other aspect of art, he repeated these divisions with near manic frequency. For instance, in one of the chapters specifically dedicated to “art in its relation to history” (the concept, remember, that Jarves considered to be his contribution to the field), he offers very little in the way of history and, in fact, restates with only the addition of generic regions—not even place names—his dualist exposition. The chapter opens with reference to the historical era dated by Jarves as that “era [in] which . . . Michael Angelo [sic] fell after much sullen resistance; Raphael was seduced from his primitive sincerity; Leonardo da Vinci wasted his genius on barren scientific and mechanical experiments.” Jarves elaborates vaguely on the time period, noting that the “great distinction . . . between this age and the preceding, was the centralization of power into the hands of princes. Democratic communities were absorbed into kingdoms; free cities became provincial towns; in fine, the people from citizens became subjects. Whatever of civil and political liberty had existed in Italy, Spain, and France, especially in those countries in which Art had arisen and thrived in the bosom of the people, was now wholly extinguished” (ArtHints, 43).24 I will return to the mention of democracy, but for now note the very loose and imprecise invocation of (again opposing) concepts as history. Note that this vague chronology remains the only manner of dating that Jarves employed to preface a discussion nominally dedicated to history. In this case, he wanted to turn to examples beyond Italy. Thus, he defines the “northern nations” as those societies where “reason was more powerful

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than imagination. [Such people] sought its action rather in matter or science than in Art. Imagination was indeed vigorous, but manifested itself in ruder forms. Beauty partook of a sterner character. If the passions were violent, reason also was active, and the balance was better preserved” (45). Jarves might certainly exasperate the modern reader, continually revisiting the same point, but it is important here as it shows Jarves’s obsessive attachment to this dualist scheme. He seemed unable to prevent himself from returning to it over and over, even when he had stated that he was going to demonstrate art’s relationship to history. Further examples would only belabor this idea. As for his reference above to democracy, this too is a recurring theme, and one that seems to give at least some substance to his claims about presenting the social conditions of art. Political systems are also discussed with reductive and oppositional distinctions. “Democratic communities” contrast kingdoms; citizens contrast subjects. The former in each contrast refers to the greatest moment of Italian art—that era just before “Michael Angelo fell” and the decline in art set in. Most significant, though, is Jarves’s inconsistency with regard to the influence on art that the “people,” as free citizens in “democratic communities,” exert. It is very unlike his never-changing stance on the relation of spirit and matter to art. In the context of distinguishing between art’s greatest age and its fall, democracy is brought in to define the former, and absolutism the latter. This is one instance of several where Jarves insists that the superior qualities of feeling and truth “had arisen and thrived in the bosom of the people. . . . To whatever end the people bent their energies, they wrought with soul-aroused vigor” (43–44). Similarly, Jarves frequently complained about the charges of antipopulism, or of despotism, that he claimed were “mistaken notion[s] widely disseminated” about Italian medieval art. In a very detailed rebuttal included in The Art-Idea, he quoted from a lecture that was, to his mind, particularly guilty of this error. It was delivered by “the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, at heart a true champion of liberty, but who nevertheless has been inadvertently led into publishing some singular conclusions in regard to Italian medieval art” (156). Jarves included in his text an excerpt, from which I extract a few sentences. Beecher was quoted as saying, “In all the Italian schools, not a picture had ever probably been painted that carried a welcome to the common people. . . . In this prodigious wealth of pictures, statues, canvas, and fresco,—I know of nothing that served the common people. In art, as in literature, government, government, GOVERNMENT, was all, and people

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nothing!” (156).25 Jarves included this passage in order to demonstrate the wrongheadedness of the ideas generally held about the art he championed. His argument with Beecher’s understanding was premised precisely on the democratic nature of the moment in question. Jarves asserted, Democratic institutions had the upper hand in Italy, especially in Tuscany, at the epoch which Mr. Beecher denounces. Art decayed as soon as its patronage fell into aristocratic keeping. To be a noble in Florence in the days of the Giotteschi was as uncomfortable as to be a Secessionist at the North now. The art of Italy, from its revival in the twelfth century to its prime in the sixteenth, was emphatically the offspring of the feeling and taste of all classes of the people. They created the demand for it, and paid for it most liberally out of their profits in trade. (157) It was evidently important for both the critic and apologist of this art to stake their claims on the relative democracy of the pictures and their patronage. It is consequently not surprising that Jarves would frequently employ (as yet another oppositional structure) the poles of populism and despotism in his references to the social relations of art. Nor is it surprising that art he defended would be defined as democratic. What is telling, however, is that he was unable to maintain a consistent position with regard to democracy’s supposed effects. As we see here, democratic influence is at the core of the superior soul-infused quality of the art of the Italian middle ages. But recall that Jarves was quite skeptical about the impact that too much popular will had on the art of his contemporaries in America (and on that of the variously denominated “Northern peoples” or “Germanic schools”). In the quotations given in the opening pages of this chapter, there was an indication that the “quiet dignity” and “gentlemanly repose” of America’s early— and finer, according to Jarves—art gave way to something “sensational” and “exaggerated,” and this art was “common.” Indeed, the “causes of a political nature” that he invoked to explain the demise of this finer art turned out to be the popular will—the preference for Leutze among a people left to its own materialist proclivities. Jarves cannot fully reconcile his conflicting desires. He wants to justify true art by locating the origin of genuine spirit among the people and by condemning all manner of despotism, from princely courts and aristocratic patronage to academic method and training. Yet he repeatedly conflates the

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popular with the disparaged material side of art, with an adherence to base senses: “The failures of America . . . arise chiefly from commencing at the wrong end. . . . Artists too commonly are led by their blind impulses” (ArtHints, 310; my emphasis). And the wrong end, as much as Jarves might aver to the contrary, refers not only to the outward aspects of art but to the bottom of the class structure. In the 1864 text, this ambivalence, though still present, was somewhat reconciled by the rhetoric of American exceptionalism then steeped in the passions of the Civil War.26 Jarves could remind his audience, as his previously outlined historical evidence had demonstrated, that democratic cultures tended in aesthetic taste toward “common” and “striking” verisimilitude. But in America a larger destiny for democracy was at hand that might— with the proper cultivation and exposure—point them in a more fitting direction artistically. He predicted, “The future of the art of the intermingling races of a new world, fused into a democracy which is now passing through its gravest struggle for existence, [will] reissue, as we believe, the most powerful because the most enlightened, the most peaceful because the most free, and the most influential people of the globe, because having sacrificed the most for justice and liberty” (Art-Idea, 149). Thus, while Jarves had insinuated that American taste suffered from its popular and democratic roots, the exceptional character of American democracy, fundamentally built on both the “conquest of ideas” and the fusion of “intermingling races,” gave Americans reason to rise above such weakness in taste. The solution, not just the problem, was at hand. The spirit of openness in the people “most enlightened” and “most free,” combined with their acquisitive impulses, would teach them to utilize all that was good from other cultures. In a passage that shows the facility he had achieved by 1864 in The Art-Idea, Jarves quite directly states this idea: We are a composite people. Our knowledge is eclectic. The progress we make is due rather to our free choice and action than to any innate superiority of mind over other nations. We buy, borrow, adopt, and adapt. With a seven-league boot on each leg, our pace is too rapid for profound study and creative thought. For some time to come, Europe must do for us all that we are in too much of a hurry to do for ourselves. It remains, then, for us to be as eclectic in our art as in the rest of our civilization. (166)

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This sentiment has long been associated with Jarves. The point is not to take away his authorship of this bold appeal to Americans to look abroad for artistic models, but rather to demonstrate its relationship to the underlying structure of his art theory. I submit that first and foremost Jarves constructed a fundamental definition of art that relied on the opposition of matter to spirit, where spirit was the determining yet immaterial value, giving considerable authority to Jarves himself to pronounce upon the presence or absence of this elusive quality. His sociopolitical explanation, which he overtly claimed as the substance and core of his method, lacked consistency and was used with conflicting conclusions to validate aesthetic judgments and verdicts on taste that had already been determined. Regardless of democracy’s influence, in other words, at heart for Jarves there was an absolute standard of aesthetic taste that was either present or absent among a people. Finally, this reading of Jarves proposes a revision of his role among modern historians of American art. As noted at the outset, his current reputation defines him as an agent of change, a critic whose ostensible internationalism, exemplified by the final quotation above, has been thought to mark a shift between antebellum nativist art and post–Civil War interests in transatlantic cosmopolitanism with modernist aesthetic tendencies. His art theory and critical interests, however, do not readily fit this model. His classificatory schema is fundamentally traditional, his opinions about European art are frankly derivative, and the majority of his guiding biases were then current. The paintings he collected, frequently not by the masters to whom he attributed them, were those that he could afford. His writing, above all, demonstrates that he was fundamentally driven to authorize a critical schema that would rationalize his aesthetic preferences, regardless of the schema’s incompatibility with his own stated methodological principles. Why, then, does Jarves occupy the art historical position that he does? His place has to do with current art historical priorities, recognized and unrecognized. Jarves’s reputation points on one hand to a desire in the subdiscipline of American art history for a certain kind of definition of innovation, and a search for the innovative itself. Second and more importantly, the reputed Jarves constructs a figure to whom a narrative of change and disruption can be attached, and who helps explain or create a trajectory of an incipient modernism in America. His status indicates a desire to plot a coherent trajectory and give shape and relation to events within a model of linear progress, where time is unconsciously asserted, automatically producing a

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narrative glue between concurrent events and ideas. Marshalling Jarves, who was writing precisely at the moment of the Civil War, as a way to demonstrate a putatively new attitude toward art proves somewhat circularly that art did indeed begin to shift, to move toward modernism. And that it did so precisely at this moment. A relationship is thus secured between art and the larger society. The transformation of one means the transformation of the other.

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2 clarence cook and jarves Fact, Feeling, and the Discourse of Truthfulness in Art

The previous chapter concluded that the current historiographic role of writer and collector James Jackson Jarves might be reassessed on the basis of his texts. Looking closely at the patterns of his rhetorical structures and putative methodological principles in his work as a whole, we saw that his apparently modern rejection of verisimilitude in art—the literal, external, and material, in Jarves’s words—formed part of a system that sought to rationalize and historicize his aesthetic priorities. Rather than a critique of art’s antebellum role as the embodiment of truth, Jarves’s castigation of “repellent realism” set up the negative side of a rigid and obsessively repeated dualist schema, whose opposite was thereby represented as true art—the ideal or the spiritual. The ideal was much less easy to define formally, however. It was that which did not demonstrate formal similarity to the naturalism, eye-catching composition, color, bold use of space, and sharp details then popular in the United States. In addition, the chapter demonstrated that inconsistency dogged Jarves’s use of the theory he explicitly claimed as his purpose. In conclusion I hypothesized that the disjunction between his writing and his reputation points to our own assumptions about time and about art’s relationship to society. These hypotheses will become clearer with the present chapter’s examination of the early criticism of Clarence Cook. Cook’s definition of art seems to have rested at the other end of the continuum from Jarves’s, on the side of the real, with the objectivity of natural facts. The writing of Cook that we are about to encounter is less obsessive

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in its use of the dyadic structure, but it is present and integral nonetheless. Though he called for a “new” art, vociferously challenging that which currently dominated the scene, he was entirely wedded to the antebellum American conflation of art with nature. Cook wanted to see “pains-taking fidelity to nature.” For him, this was the only way to remain faithful to art’s goal, from which he claimed “our artists are strayed so far.” They had strayed, he lamented, “from the pursuit of truth as an end of Art; they have so universally accepted the dogma that something called Beauty is the end, and not Truth; they are unanimously agreed that nature is to be idealised, generalised, bettered.”1 This is Cook’s well-known insistence on extreme adherence to nature, associated with his early criticism from the mid-1860s, when he was a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art—the so-called American Pre-Raphaelites-and the editor of its journal, the New Path. His doctrine rested on a belief that art has a moral responsibility to eschew convention, taste, “arrangement,” and all such impermanent and aesthetic ends. Strict adherence to verisimilitude was his solution for avoiding these pitfalls, and it guaranteed, to his mind, “earnestness” and seriousness on the part of artists. This was the only way to discover the preexisting and universal, the so-called truths of nature. He disliked beauty as a goal because it posited the artist’s desires (to follow the accepted convention, to paint what was popular, to experiment with pleasing compositions or colors) in place of the universal. Since Cook repeatedly insisted on nature and on painting “literally,” with details finely and minutely described and with all extraneous sentiment left out, he championed that which Jarves rejected. The two critics appear to stand at the opposite poles of the paradigm in which realism and idealism are opposed, each using the terms to define his version of true and false art. Consequently, these writers have given us cause to perceive the trends often identified in the periodization. This is not in dispute. Furthermore, as with Jarves, Cook is a figure whose career spans the historical moment of the Civil War and postwar decades—years of great significance to constructions of the American past and its development. Chronological proximity to the war suggests almost automatically that rupture would likewise characterize art discourse. Given disruptions and dislocations of such magnitude, we are tempted to assume that art, too, must have undergone a transformation in this period. Thus, the continuity that may have existed in the art world and in its debates and priorities is more difficult to perceive.

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Continuity, moreover, runs counter to deeply engrained beliefs that change and transformation govern American history and American art. These assumptions consequently determine the emphases we read in the words of the critics, influencing how we narrate the whole. Prefiguring operations, as described in the introduction, weigh on the manner in which the key critical terms are read and how they are presumed to function. However, when we juxtapose Cook’s and Jarves’s use of the realversus-ideal dyad and consider their respective intentions, two significant questions come up with regard to our modern emphases: Did this rhetorical structure represent antithetical definitions of art, and did the real and the ideal oppose one another in time? The task at hand is to pursue these questions. Turning, then, to Cook’s early writing, we focus on his very public forays into art criticism at the New-York Daily Tribune in 1864. He agitated the art world with a series of outspoken reviews of the picture galleries at the Metropolitan Sanitary Fair.2 He belittled the public’s taste as well as the objects of its favor, positing his own superior knowledge and disdain for the established “masters” and their principles. His words sparked a public exchange of letters, including pieces in Harper’s Weekly written by its editor George W. Curtis and rejoinders from Cook, as well as angry messages to Curtis in the Tribune from the artist W. H. Beard, with replies again by Curtis.3 This public discussion frames one of the earliest open debates about the role of the art critic in America, bringing Cook and some of his positions into prominence. He—along with Jarves—is generally considered one of the loudest voices among American art critics at this moment. Possibly because of this volubility, they have both earned their significant places in the historiography. Cook’s comments on the pictures at the Sanitary Fair give an initial impression of the writer as indiscriminately and peevishly critical of nearly everyone and all but a few paintings. Yet, by the second installment of his reviews, his opinions became more clear and consistent. He opened his commentary with the obligatory platitudes, expressing his “doubt if there have ever been so many good pictures and so few poor ones brought together into one room in this country.” He nonetheless turned immediately afterward to censure Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (fig. 1). Prominently placed in the gallery, and likewise heading his list of complaints, Leutze’s painting typified for Cook, as it did for Jarves, what was wrong with the state of art in America. He postulated,

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We presume that a desire to have some striking picture with a subject that should appeal to our patriotism, in the most conspicuous place in the gallery, prompted the Art Committee to hang Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” in the commanding position it occupies. . . . On several grounds, we should have been glad to see it differently placed. We dislike, exceedingly, the spirit in which the subject is treated, the arrangement of the figures and the style of the painting; and we should rejoice if the popular verdict, on seeing the picture again, after its long seclusion, should prove that the day is passing away when a production so essentially commonplace, not to say vulgar, can be elevated to the rank of a masterpiece.4 Cook protested unequivocally against the painting, leaving no aspect unchallenged; he disliked “exceedingly” the spirit, the content, and the style of the work. (Note that he, too, made an evident connection between the painting’s offending appearance and the public.) The picture was, “in truth, a striking representative of the school that is dying out, but we submit that such a splendid manifestation of national vigor and buoyant life and spirit as this Fair of ours, ought to have put in its place of highest honor, not a drop scene with the mythical Washington striking an attitude, but something more real and smacking of the time.” And that ought to have been, according to Cook, “some work, or set of works . . . which would have given us, instead of falsehood, simple truth—instead of theatrical attitudenizing, the charm of individual manners—instead of the cold formalities or the [?] extravagances of the academy, the manliness and grace and careless ease of nature.”5 Thus, Leutze’s manner aroused the ire of both Cook and Jarves. And it gave each a necessary point of contrast for differentiating their own taste from that of the public, for demonstrating what “true” art was not, and for exemplifying the features of the spectacular and exaggerated art that they claimed held sway in their moment. However clear Cook’s dislikes were, though, his rather strident passages do not at this point mandate many more specific formal rules for art than Jarves’s had. Instead, Cook opens his series of articles with general ideas. The inflexible edict for minute transcription of the outdoors that we ascribe to him and to the so-called American Pre-Raphaelites will turn up, but not until the later reviews.6 Here there are yet only the broader concepts, and they are not new ones. In fact, Cook repeated many early and mid-nineteenth-century attitudes about art, phrasing them in the period’s

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standard slogans as well. He wanted art to be “real and smacking of the time,” implicitly defining the values he championed as new and those he criticized as old. He also opposed true and false, genuine and showy, individuality and mannerism in order to demarcate the boundaries for defining and evaluating art, identifying nature as the source for the positive poles in his value system. He likewise associated the negative qualities with the “school that is dying out.” Again, the structure of oppositions and the particular terms mobilized within it were long-standing cornerstones in American discourse. We will come back to an analysis of the rhetorical system itself. First, an example of its distinguished lineage. In 1855, the popular landscape painter and then president of the National Academy of Design Asher B. Durand spelled out the principles and practice of his art in the often cited “Letters on Landscape Painting.”7 A decade prior to Cook’s review, we find Durand enunciating something very similar. Like his own antebellum contemporaries, Durand believed that devoted study of nature would produce true individual skill and give real beauty to one’s paintings (and to one’s soul). His essays also demonstrate the belief in nature’s vast ability to redeem artists from formula and teach them to distinguish the virtues of patience and skill from the vagaries of false effects and showiness.8 Individuality was equated with truth, while formula was named false; skill and showiness were likewise brought into opposition under the rubric of truth versus falsehood. And nature was invoked to authorize the distinction. That is to say that truth and nature were likened to each other, and falsehood was invoked to discredit anything that neither nature nor art was supposed to stand for. This is the familiar rhetoric of nature so central to American landscape painting, but note, too, that even at this early date truth also refers to individuality. Returning to Cook, in the next Tribune installments reviewing the Sanitary Fair and also the National Academy’s annual exhibition, he set down more precise aesthetic requirements. Here we read a great deal of consistency with Durand’s writing and his stated priorities from the previous decade.9 Ironically, though, Cook specifically cited Durand as an artist whose work was utterly out of touch with his (Cook’s) principles, which consequently relegated him to the “old school.” While I am not suggesting that the form Cook had in mind was not, in fact, different from Durand’s style (more on this later), we must pay attention to the strong similarity of the critical terms for art and its definition. Since Cook is today most frequently identified as a disciple of Ruskin and champion of a Pre-Raphealite manner, it bears noting that the oppositional

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terms he employed were common currency. That is to say, they were also summoned to describe a rather different aesthetic. It is a mistake to read the words “truth” and even “nature” as automatically standing for minute mimetic detail of the material stuff of the world in the critical writing of this moment. Cook did indeed refer to this manner of verisimilitude, as the following examples will show. But he staked out his position precisely by inserting his stylistic preferences into the established structure, which had for decades defined the parameters for art classification and evaluation. Two passages will follow a brief description of the work Cook championed; the first comes from installment number two on the Sanitary Fair, and the second comes from a review one week later of the National Academy’s thirty-ninth annual exhibition. Together they voice more precisely—though still a bit more concretely in the negative than the positive—what Cook wanted to see. They are passages that represent the type of commentary he repeatedly articulated. Again insisting that “truthfulness” is the foremost requirement of art, here he attached a specific formal practice to it. Cook’s exemplary artist was Thomas Charles Farrer.10 We can take Farrer’s Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River (1865; fig. 3) as very similar to if not the same painting Cook described, which he left unnamed in this review.

Fig. 3 Thomas Charles Farrer (1839–1891), Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River, 1865. Oil on canvas, 66.04 ⫻ 85.56 cm. Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts. Purchase with the Elizabeth Peirce Allyn (class of 1951) Fund and the Warbeke Art Museum Fund, MH 2002.6.

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In 1865, Mount Holyoke would have stood out immediately for its highkeyed palette. Instead of soft, muted brownish greens and golden light that blended tonally with one another (or pinks and oranges, if the subject were a sunset), this landscape is depicted with sharp and strongly contrasting colors. Indeed, Cook sarcastically noted the public’s incomprehension of such a “yellow painting.” The mass of the mountain, and its reflection even more so, creates a large central patch of yellow-ochre-tinted sepia that refuses to fade softly where it meets the harshly defined blue of the sky above and water below. There is a noonday glare in the whiteness of the light and in the general brightness of the palette. The picture presents a landscape that does not offer much apparent visual interest in the way of differentiated terrain, recessional patterns of light and shade, or devices for the gradual movement into depth. Instead of a conventional repoussoir at the foreground edges, there is an uninviting triangular band of foliage taking up the entire lower-right corner of the canvas. Adding to the jarring nature of this relatively straight band of foliage, the colors here, too, contribute to the lack of overall harmony. The blue tones of the river again make a sharp contrast with the high-keyed green-yellow of the grass. In all, the unremarkable character of this slice of the earth seems to stand out, its plainness emphasized by the sharpness of the color that fails to soften its edges, or give greater relief to the hillsides, or lend more interest to the sky. For Cook, this “little picture, by T. C. Farrer” demonstrated the “painstaking fidelity” that art required. He continued, “Few pictures have been painted in America more true, more solemn, or more earnest. In spite of all the fault-findings so freely lavished upon it, we are bold to assert that it is the simple truth of nature, the simple truth of a very common aspect of the heavens and the earth, painted with a serious purpose, and without exaggeration.”11 Compare this with the work that Cook presented as the antithesis to Farrer’s painting. He maintained that John La Farge’s Benton’s Cove, Newport, Fog Blowing In “furnishes a complete illustration of the principles on which many of our best-known artists are working, reduced to absurdity.” We will see below how Cook defined those principles, but a look at La Farge’s painting shows immediately how different it is from Farrer’s. Representative of La Farge’s early work, and standing in for the unlocated Benton’s Cove, the landscape October, Hillside, Noonday, Glen Cove, Long Island (1860; fig. 4)12 presents a fragment of ground and sky even less remarkable than that in Farrer’s Mount Holyoke. It is cropped at the sides, cutting off the left edge of the only tree in the picture. The canvas has an upright vertical

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shape, but the landscape is emphatically horizontal, with the only major differentiation in form or color being the horizon itself, located in the top quarter of the picture and defined by the vaguely sloping line of the brownish ground meeting the bluish sky. With so little incident in the land itself combined with the loose, brushy handling, it is the color that predominates. It is harmonious and tonal, defined by subtle reddish-brown and pinkishblue colors whose delicate lightness is further softened by their meeting at the horizon in the lightest of their common pink-yellow tones. Very pale, practically nonexistent shadows barely give relief to the ground. Subtle lines of lighter or darker grasses create equally indistinct serpentine lines from the foreground to the background. If they can be said to lead the eye, they lead to the horizon and fade into a pool of pale shadow next to the only other object on the horizon, a diminutive cottage on the right side. Such landscapes prompted Cook to write a lengthy exposition of La Farge’s “theory,” congratulating the artist for his consistent adherence to his “system,” which he then utterly condemned by analogy. He compared La Farge’s position to “a thorough-going old-fashioned argument in favor of Slavery, which, starting from the premise that negro slavery is right, walked squarely up to the foundation principle on which that belief is based, viz: that the negro is not a man but a wholly different species.” For Cook, La Farge’s aesthetic system may represent a “following out of principles . . . to these legitimate conclusions,” but the outcome will still be entirely unacceptable when the fundamental point of departure is “wholly wrong.”13 Certainly Cook meant to hammer home the morality of his position by using a strikingly immediate comparison that carried the weightiest consequences in human, not simply aesthetic, terms. La Farge’s disparaged system was one of “resting satisfied with what are called general effects, produced by an utter ignoring of all facts, and an entire omission of all detail . . . leaving out every fact of form, and substituting for the infinite variety of nature’s color and the infinite delicacy of her gradation a conventional arrangement of color.”14 Cook wanted to see the minute details of the common landscape—the meticulous depiction of individual branches, rocks, and grasses. He wanted clear evidence that nature had not been composed or adapted to suit conventional or aesthetic ends. Moreover, as his heavy moralizing indicates, art had or embodied absolute principles, the violation of which constituted a very grave error. Conversely, when practiced properly, art making demonstrated not just right thinking but also the virtuous character of the artist. Thus, the artist’s interest in “rear-

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Fig. 4 John La Farge (1835–1910), October, Hillside, Noonday, Glen Cove, Long Island, 1860. Oil on panel, 31.75 ⫻ 24.13 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Henry Lee Higginson, 35.1166. Photo © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

rangement” or in an “expressive chord” of color (relatively minor offenses, even if they were to add up to “exaggeration”) drew dire language from Cook. What he could not countenance was the suggestion that art might be anything less absolute or other than an embodiment of changeless and objective value. La Farge, to Cook’s way of thinking, dared to imply that it

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was the province of art to manipulate the visible world, to appeal, perhaps first and foremost, to an aesthetic expression. This example might be taken to demonstrate precisely why we commonly historicize an opposition of, and transition between, fact and feeling or real and ideal as such. But the point is that we ought not limit our understanding of this moment to any tidy equation between the minute depiction of the material world and a rejection of a putatively newer interest in the artist’s individuality or expressive faculties. The situation is considerably more complex. La Farge himself, for instance, described his landscape painting as a “programme to paint from nature a portrait . . . which was both novel and ‘everydayish.’” La Farge sought to represent “nature, meaning in this case the landscape we look at, . . . as if it had done itself and had not been done by the artist.”15 This naturalism was nonetheless to be combined with theory—certain ideas La Farge wanted to employ with regard to the relationship between horizontal and perpendicular elements and between colors. Thus, according to the painter, the painting represented an attitude toward natural representation that was not drastically different from what Cook appreciated about Farrer’s refusal to add interest to the seen world. Yet he also wanted to very subtly employ abstract aesthetic considerations— which were nonetheless unlike conventional ones. Cook, however, saw only manipulation and aestheticization. With regard to our critical terms, it is significant to note that while Cook felt that art could only be true by close association with the tangible world, he also held to the fundamental role of individual artistic feeling, personal vision, and sensibility. Profound feeling was at the core of Cook’s definition of art, and it did not automatically imply the formal language we now associate with the ostensibly subjective and individual: looser brushwork, greater emphasis on color, and so forth. Feeling and individuality were, without question, Cook’s priorities. For him, they resided in the formal language of verisimilitude that he championed. This integral aspect has generally failed to register with (or be registered by) both the contemporary and later writers unsympathetic to the so-called realists. Cook does not repeatedly stress the emotive sensibility component precisely because it was an uncontested conviction. Instead, what he had to stress so stridently was his opinion about the manner in which such authenticity and meaning would be conveyed. That part of art’s definition was open to question—that is, whether art’s transcendent value, including the artist’s demonstration of his unique contribution, was to be manifested by the signs of “pains-taking” study and

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sensibility deep enough to see beauty in the mundane, or conversely by painterly demonstrations of individual reinterpretation of the visible world. And this had been a main point of contention for years. To repeat, then, the debate over how best to manifest the true values of art had been ongoing for decades in the critical writing. The question of more or less “fact” or “feeling” had perhaps always been bandied about as the formal options to demonstrate that which was not contested—the status of art as purveyor of putatively objective truth, guaranteed by the authenticity of the individual artist’s singular sensibility. Furthermore, Cook’s views here continued to express one side of that dilemma, even while he asserted a complete disavowal of those painters of the “school that is dying out,” who had championed the same cause in an earlier moment. Ironically, Cook specifically claimed to represent the “new” men, positioning himself as a maverick resisting both popular taste for spectacle and academic formula, which included the art of painters such as Durand, who had enunciated similar commitments previously. We need now to look again at the other side of this debate. We turn back to Jarves for our example. Recall that his Art-Idea was published in 1864, the same year as Cook’s first Tribune reviews. We have seen that both critics insisted that true art is not merely display and that this disparaged spectacular tendency in art might be represented by Leutze—whose work embodied for them the popular, “vulgar” notion of art. Both argued that this was the antithesis of “true” art. However, for Jarves, the genuine was conveyed by the painting’s signs of distance from the reproduction of the visible component of the object represented. This is the point where the two critics represent divergent uses of the same larger rhetorical structure. Indeed, in this regard they differ almost to the letter. For example, in a chapter entitled “The New School of American Painting Contrasted with the Old,” Jarves expounded his opinions on the subject of contemporary artists with characteristic bombast. Of La Farge he had this to say: “La Farge goes to art with earnest devotion and an ambition for its highest walks, bringing to the American school depth of feeling, subtility of perception, and a magnificent tone of coloring, united to a fervid imagination which bestows upon the humblest object a portion of his inmost life. . . . He evokes the essences of things, draws out their soul-life.”16 The reader will easily perceive the strong difference from Cook’s attitude with regard to La Farge’s work and its value as a contribution to art. The role of color and imagination as the keys to this value will also be clear enough to require no further comment.

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Thus, Jarves, strident critic of what he called “narrow, external treatment of nature,” was as insistent as Cook that “earnest devotion” is somehow necessarily indexed by art worthy of the name. Only, for Jarves, such dedication and sincerity do not—and perhaps cannot—come from a form that is too realist.17 Like Cook, Jarves demonstrates a conflation of “true” art and something very like religious reverence, with a belief in an absolute mode for its expression. Whereas Cook found it in Farrer’s minute interest in individual grasses, Jarves found it in La Farge’s “magnificent tone of coloring.” Both considered themselves exponents of the proper system, each one believing his mode to be in contrast to the prevailing art of the day. As we saw earlier, Jarves explained art, its history, American taste, and virtually every aspect he undertook to write about by recourse to the rhetorical opposition of matter to spirit, realism to idealism—to a much greater extent than did Cook. Jarves argued repeatedly that it was precisely the formal traits rooted in matter and literalness that hindered the expression of the spiritual, ideal, and imaginative that constituted true art. Both critics insisted without compromise that art itself had a true nature, and any given work was or was not art depending upon its ability to convey that particular exalted, and fundamentally absolute, quality. There was no room in either critic’s position for divergent opinions on the essential nature of art. One more point about Jarves is relevant to stress again here: while he did indeed judge the art of mid-nineteenth-century American artists inadequate, he did so because, to his mind, it had strayed from the true and timehonored principles of art. Moreover, he insisted that the American artists of the era preceding his own were not guilty of the same. They had been full of “gentlemanly repose, quiet dignity, idealization, appreciation of thought and study, and absence in general of the sensational, exaggerated, vulgar, and superficial.”18 American art, he said, had at one time been based on the ideal. Thus, his apparent call for feeling over fact had little to do with a new concept of art. Thus, both critics share a fundamental idea about what art must be, but they take opposite sides in the dualist scheme for formal alternatives. Furthermore, Jarves’s preferences have allowed him to seem to represent a more modern aesthetic tendency, yet he aligned himself quite overtly with atavistic traditions. Cook, by contrast, claimed to be a partisan of the new, yet his aesthetic program makes him seem to be aligned with the art of antebellum America. The situation is evidently much less clear than our histories have generally made it out to be.

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However, because we can identify clear differences in the formal practice that each writer championed, and perhaps because of the clarity and nearly partisan character of their divergent opinions, there has been a tendency to look back and periodize art production and reception according to a schematic opposition. That is to say, the two aesthetic camps in this discursive scheme were debated so vociferously as opposite poles of a fact/ feeling (or matter/spirit, real/idea) dichotomy that we have come to represent as history these sides as single and separate positions, each with its own fundamentally distinct definition of its object, art. We have tended to see them as representing not only conflict but also time and development. Such a perception, however, does not take into account the structure of the critical rhetoric itself and the underlying definition of art that it put in place. Instead of defining opposite conceptions of art, and instead of describing a more or less chronological sequence in which matter is later supplanted by spirit, this dualist structure insists on and reinforces a shared understanding of art. It is better conceptualized as a tool for critical writing, a mode that characterized and facilitated criticism itself. The dualist logic not only established the priorities and standards but also demarcated and limited the types of questions asked and the range of values or meanings that would be found, or even looked for, in paintings. The two poles, in other words, centered between themselves a shared conception of art; the structure stabilized a persistent definition of art, fencing off with the brackets of a bipolar system other possible options. Centered there was an authoritative status for art as a cultural category in which it stood as an absolute with objective and irrefutable value. Art was fundamentally didactic, public, and bound to the dominant culture’s values and quite strongly to its ideas of morality. As such, its apologists were necessarily inflexible in their claims about its meaning and the form with which it could be conveyed. Rhetorically indivisible from each other by this definition, art’s substance was truth and truth was revealed in art. In addition, the precise meaning of the ideal in art was never explicitly defined because its persistent link to absolute value caused it to seem generally understood and because transcendent authority defied, by definition, cultural terminology. This is a thoroughly premodernist concept of representation—or this construction of art might even be said to resist being representation per se. It possesses a quasi-magical kind of presence or being, in which the concept of representation has very little place. In fact, we find art within this rhetoric

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transubstantially and literally embodying truths that are again elusively demonstrated, but stridently and positively averred. To give an overt example, take Cook’s critique of La Farge discussed previously. Here he shows himself to have been fully prepared to make this leap to magical presence. Cook claimed in a manifestly ironic tone that with “careful examination, and spurred by a cordial desire to get at the artist’s intention,” he was “enabled to make out something, in the lower left-hand corner, which we accept for water; the blue patch, we feel pretty sure, is meant for sky; the green patch, we conclude stands for grass; and by making believe very hard, like Mr. Swiveller’s Marchioness, we can see that a dark, cone-shaped body, near the center, is a tree.”19 What Cook registers is not simply his distaste for pronounced painterly treatment: he says that art must do more than “stand for” its subject. Making believe and accepting were not legitimate cognitive (or discursive) operations for art. How he thought that any painting might do anything but stand for its object is unclear, but certainly he implies that there was a form that was outside of such questioning. That form was true art, and it contained, or was, objective substance in and of itself. While Jarves would not have said it in these same terms, largely because he wanted a form whose material outlines alone did not add up to the immaterial spirit of art, he was nonetheless no different in defining art as that which was or embodied an immutable and objective presence. And for neither critic was a picture an exercise in subjective thinking or in “feeling,” as we have come to define those terms on the other side of modernism. Feeling and individuality simply did not signify a state of mind, or manifestation thereof, whose meaning was constituted by the renunciation of the collectively held and objective in favor of the autonomous and subjective. Yet individuality, as both Jarves and Cook saw it, was a quality that true art could not do without. To summarize, I am not arguing that there was no change in the way paintings were made and received or that there was not a body of imagery that emphasized looser form and less narrative content, or that Farrer’s painting was not different from La Farge’s. But if we approach the critical structure that delineated these differences as a dyadic framework whose users were conscious, in a manner more or less lost on us, of the rhetorical meaning of the contrast, our impression of this era might then change a bit. Above all, we see that their use of the critical structure in question was an expression of formal dictates, of divergent but synchronic pictorial strategies

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for a shared definition of art. Where our periodization implies linear time and the chronological replacement of the real with the ideal, their discourse referred to contemporaneous options that demarcated the boundaries of criticism. The real and the ideal marked the edges of a single discourse within which “true” art was discussed and reinforced.

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3 a further look at clarence cook and the “revolution” in art

The study of Clarence Cook in the preceding chapter was limited to his early writing. The New-York Daily Tribune reviews discussed there represented his thinking from roughly 1863 to 1865. They expressed his opinions to the broad readership of that paper. His philosophy and his tone were also integral to his other main publication at this time: Cook, as noted, was the principal spokesman for the so-called American Pre-Raphaelites—that is, the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art—and editor of their journal, the New Path.1 Though Cook’s career was not limited to this period, his texts from that time in comparison with those of Jarves exemplify the structure of the critical writing that the chapter was designed to explain. As argued there, the critical discourse employed by Cook and Jarves (and their peers) reinforced a single and inflexible definition for art—however much each writer championed a formal language apparently contrary to the other’s. This was the manner in which the rhetoric of the dyad functioned; it ought not be understood as representing two distinct definitions of art. Cook’s career was long, however, so an expanded look at his writing is relevant. This chapter considers other central aspects of his early PreRaphaelitism not yet addressed and then compares them with his later work, in which he toned down his strident youthful posturing. From that later phase, the chapter will concentrate on Cook’s two most widely read works. These are, first, his popular series on furnishings and the aesthetics of the home written for Scribner’s Monthly and, second, the American section of his

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six-volume work Art and Artists of Our Time, published in 1888.2 These texts are relevant not just because they offer pertinent examples of Cook’s most visible critical writing over time, but also because they show that his opinions and aesthetic prescriptions unfolded in a manner somewhat contrary to the easy classification that his words have often seemed to imply. The last part of the chapter follows the pattern of the others by concluding with speculations on the nature of current tendencies in present-day historiography of this mid-nineteenth-century art world. In this case questions arise about our modern insistence on the idea of rupture, conflict, turmoil, and transformation in the history and definition of American art. Cook’s work raises the issue since at least part of his career was erected upon a platform of rebellion, of overtly rejecting establishment and convention and even using terms like “revolution” in the context of art criticism. With such concrete references, it is very easy to then historicize Cook or Cook’s moment as having been revolutionary. Nonetheless, a closer look at his writing and the continuity of the principles he expounded immediately raises questions about our modern sense of the term “revolution” and what it has come to stand for with regard to art production and reception—particularly in light of what we have already seen with Cook’s and Jarves’s shared antebellum definition of art. Might the term or its past connotation have signified something different from current notions of transformation in art? Indeed, there is reason to wonder whether “revolution” did not have its own logic in nineteenth-century American art history, prior to any specific instances in which the term may have been used. The chapter seeks to ponder this question and its implications for fundamental aspects of American art history, such as the treatment of form and style. Again, the texts themselves are the guide. Returning to Clarence Cook where we last left him, we see an uncompromising critic, a somewhat righteous young Ruskinian who carelessly dismissed all that he found conventional and at odds with his system. As George W. Curtis, the articulate and level-headed editor of Harper’s Weekly, described him in 1864, Cook laid “an imperative hand” on the reputation of painters and critics alike. Curtis also perceived clear influences behind the attitude and judgments of this new arrival to the critical scene, and they were those of the Pre-Raphaelites. He noted, “It was impossible that we should not feel in this country, sooner or later, the influence of the spirit of Pre-Raphaelitism, of the originality of Ruskin’s criticisms, of the curious fidelity and detailed care of the modern French and Belgian schools.” However foreign and inevitable, the influence

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was a salutary one, Curtis insisted, because Cook “has so positive a conviction, and so clear an understanding of what . . . he likes and dislikes,” that he couldn’t fail to enrich the general interest. And Curtis admitted that “whether our art be mannered, conventional, and false, or not, certainly our criticism has often enough been weak, unintelligent, and flat, and as little independent or sincere as an ordinary book-notice.”3 Thus, Cook’s identity was readily recognized and defined by his most astute peers. Not surprisingly, he was received somewhat differently by artists who claimed to have been the victims of his barbed pen.4 His outspokenness nonetheless was associated with his fidelity to the Pre-Raphaelites, to Ruskin, and to a particular dogma. This association is generally made today,5 and it is not amiss because it was precisely Cook’s zeal for Pre-Raphaelite principles that led him to criticize vociferously. Yet it was also his youth and newness that led him to propagate the doctrine so righteously, accepting it wholeheartedly. His later, post–New Path writing has a self-consciously less strident tone. It is still opinionated, and it shows that his central philosophy of art remained consistent with that which underlay his early criticism. However, he distanced himself from many of the particular positions of the American Pre-Raphaelites and from their dogmatic nature. Though this Pre-Raphaelite character is not the main focus of the present chapter, a brief discussion will help frame its relationship to his later writing. It is important to remember that Cook and his associates in the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, like their English Pre-Raphaelite counterparts, were a kind of avant-garde in their own moment.6 The preceding chapter argued that Cook’s rhetoric had a long history in American art criticism and that its fundamental object was an unchanged definition of art, but his use of the discourse did not prevent him from uttering sharp critiques. Indeed, his stipulations for how such art would be made stood in distinction to existing modes, and his tone was querulous enough that his criticism presented an overt rejection of tradition. Cook’s point of departure was an attack—an intentionally irreverent one—on convention, tradition, and popular taste.7 This intent—his progressive antiacademicism—needs to be borne in mind alongside the seemingly opposite claim that his conception of art and its role and meaning in society was fundamentally consistent with that of his antebellum peers. They are not contradictory, as we will see. To better understand the avant-garde aspects of Cook, recall that he was at pains to deride senior and beloved representatives of American art such as

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Asher Durand and Daniel Huntington, as well as sensational favorites such as Emanuel Leutze and Frederic Church. He openly sneered at the former in a manner that was shocking for his day. “Shall we turn to the works of Durand, or Huntington?” he wrote, asking rhetorically, “Is it much to say that the Art which these distinguished men represent belongs to a past age, and a dead system; an age whose spirit will never return; a system that can never be revivified? How vapid, how utterly without life, or energy, or spirit of any kind seem, to-day, the landscapes of Durand. Can it be possible that they ever excited enthusiasm?”8 Given that this pronouncement was delivered while these two artists were yet working and presiding over the National Academy of Design, Cook’s words were iconoclastic to be sure. They were an intentional critique of the representatives of tradition. Cook meant to oppose himself to the most established artists on the premise that they were nothing other than conventional. The counterpart to Cook’s anticonventionalism was his continual derision of the popular. As we saw with his critique of Leutze, he felt the need to assert his opinion in opposition to that of the mainstream. This was the case with such quips as that directed toward another Hudson River school favorite, Sanford Gifford: he was a painter whose “conventional exaggerations and misstatements” were readily accepted, and who was “a gentleman whose reputation stands very high with the general public.” Cook frequently belittled the judgment of this “general public,” sometimes driving home its putatively inept character by suggesting that it was dominated by “school-girls” and “pretty girls by the dozen.”9 Such sexist deprecation was not reserved for the American art public alone. He employed a similar description in his discussion of a particular work by Millais at the English Royal Academy exhibition of 1870. “For me, Mr. Millais might have kept all his pictures in his studio this year,” Cook complained. “The most popular of his pictures this year is ‘A Flood;’ there is no getting at it after 2 o’clock, for the cordon of solid English mothers who stand delighted and pitiful about this wee washed-away baby.”10 Work thus esteemed was implicitly sentimentalized, saccharin, and above all lacking in the dignity of “true art.” The feminization of the audience was a mode for further criticizing the nature of the popular, for suggesting that a form of sensationalized pictorial entertainment had come to supplant true (and “manly”) art in the academies and exhibition halls.11 Taking aim, therefore, at all that he constructed as conventional, popular, spectacular, or

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sentimental, Cook positioned himself as an outspoken opponent of the mainstream. He championed instead art whose unpopularity he never failed to notice and whose value resulted in large part from its resistance to those facile avenues for success. While unconventionality and unpopularity were not the primary ends, they were essential to the position he staked out for himself and for the art he defended. This is the avant-garde element of Cook’s criticism. It constituted an intentional affront to the mainstream, denigrating the values and the character of that majority. The Cook of the New Path thus paradoxically advocated, with an avantgarde stance, a fundamentally unchanged definition of art as a didactic form, equated with truth and with social value. Art as such was for the “people,” yet it was not “popular” in a commercial sense. Like the Pre-Raphaelites generally, his definition of art implied that art and beauty must extend (instructionally) into life. In order to do so, art must criticize convention and attack formula. Convention, for Cook, also implied mass production and not just academic style. Formula likewise included conforming to fashion and current habits of material excess. Decoration and architecture thus naturally came under the purview of Cook and his associates. It is useful to recall that of the original five founders of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, two were architects.12 In fact, the June 1864 issue of the New Path was dedicated to one of the key Pre-Raphaelite positions—the morality in ornamentation. This issue of the journal focused on the recently finished National Academy of Design building at Fourth Avenue and Twenty-Third Street in New York, designed by Peter B. Wight, a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art. He was also likely the author of the article cited below.13 This essay offers the building as an example of the society’s principles. The structure was “designed in entire accordance with the views . . . set forth in this journal,” the writer stated.14 Elements of design were employed with regard to their motivation and not just their stylistic outcome. The building was intentionally Gothic and so called not simply because its ornament revived certain medieval forms but because it was an overt rejection of the prevailing classical ornament. This form, described as “pompous and luxurious,” was cast aside in favor of sculptural decoration that represented, for the Pre-Raphaelites, a long-gone (and doubtless idealized) age of highly skilled craftsmanship, collective commitment to the outcome of labor, and sense of devotion to the (religious) purpose the ornament expressed. Thus,

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an important aspect of Wight’s National Academy of Design building was that its sculptural decoration was designed by the workmen who cut it and planned entirely to express support and function. It was meant “to deny nothing, to deceive in nothing, to add nothing for composition’s sake.”15 It was, in other words, an aesthetic meant not simply to resist one style (that of the Renaissance) in favor of another (the Gothic); rather, it was a mode of insisting on skilled craft and respect for materials, of positioning “honest,” organic, and unpretentious forms in opposition to “deceptive,” contrived, and “pompous” ones. Reviving Gothic forms in this manner was a critique of stylishness—and the stylishness of convention in general—in which ornament was perceived by Wight and his friends as literally superficial, having nothing intrinsic to do with the structure. It was therefore frivolous, false, and misleading. Wight indicated that his prescribed style was an exercise in subverting the massproduced character of art and of the larger society. He elevated that which displayed both the manual component of art and the active engagement of the manual laborers, insisting that art’s spiritual character and its imaginative element resided there. Thus, Wight’s version of medievalism, like Cook’s, calls for minute transcription of nature—the formal demands of which implied the dignity of labor, the close relationship between the craftsman and his production, and individual attention to the materials themselves. The mature Cook of The House Beautiful and Art and Artists of Our Time distanced himself from both the naive stridency of the Pre-Raphaelites and, at times, even from some of their formal strictures. But his essential dogma did not change. This later Cook explained the rationale for his Scribner’s Monthly furniture essays in terms similar to those we have already encountered. Entitled “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks,” the series appeared from 1875 to 1876 and was subsequently published as the book The House Beautiful.16 These essays demonstrate the writing and principles of the post– New Path Cook. He stated that his purpose was to assist his readers in aesthetic choices for the home, which to his mind were of great significance in the education and development of the inhabitants. With his accustomed directness, he delimited his audience: “These chapters are not written for rich people’s reading.” Yet he adopted a pose of comparative circumspection, noting that “after much tribulation, I have reached a point where simplicity seems to me a great part of beauty, and utility only beauty in a mask; and I have no prouder nor pretending aim than to suggest how this truth may be expressed in the furniture and decoration of our homes.”17

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The topic itself, however, had no such limited scope, being the locus of connection between art and life and representing a key place for Cook’s readers to return to their own common sense and personal preference. He repeatedly advised them to leave behind the conventions and tastes of others that were for sale at a high cost, both financially and aesthetically. He continued, “I look upon this ideal living room of mine as an important agent in the education of life; it will make a great difference to the children who grow up in it. . . . It has a real, vital relation to life, and plays an important part in education, and deserves to be thought about much more than it is. It is therefore not a trifling matter whether we hang poor pictures on our walls or good ones, whether we select a fine cast or a second-rate one.”18 A few samples of Cook’s specific advice will make his main themes evident. Written in installments that focused quite narrowly on individual rooms, sometimes addressing issues as mundane as the preference for rugs over carpets, his essays often included a little parable. Cook repeated the essential value, moral and aesthetic, of eschewing convention, fashion, and expense per se. He concluded the installments with particular examples of the furnishings that fit his prescription, repeatedly recommending the designs of Cottier & Co., of William Morris, of Russell Sturgis, and of other representatives of what had been the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Over and above any particular designer or artist, however, Cook sought to stress that the best guide to a beautiful, comfortable, happy home was “to consult our own desires and needs, and refuse to be governed by those of other people.” Cook objected, he told his readers, to “the measuring of beautiful things by a money standard, or a standard of fashion.”19 Elaborating, for instance, on the value of following one’s needs and practical structural exigencies, Cook cited an example of a bookshelf constructed to answer its fundamental functions of being adjustable, solid, accessible, and not overly expensive. The design, once executed, had an unexpected additional value. He reported, at the end of his description of the shelf construction, “I have found this way of supporting the shelves a very good one, and it is an additional point in its favor, when once its practicalness has been admitted, that it looks well, the front ends of the slots, in which no shelves rest, showing black, and alternating with the uncut portion of the wood,— an effect which was not sought for in the design, but which, when the work came to be executed, rewarded the designer for having tried to solve his problem of shelf-support in a straightforward, natural manner.”20 Cook’s commentary on the bookshelf then ends in a lesson about the importance of

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having books accessible in order to form the habit of reading among children. In addition to the value of the habit itself, Cook had a particular reason for wanting to keep books and reading in the foreground. He opined that “knowledge got in a hurry is as poor stuff as leather tanned the new way, or kiln-dried timber, or bread made with baking powders, or any of the modern substitutes for the old time methods of time and patience.”21 The reader will hear clear echoes of the anti-mass-production stance that grounded the Pre-Raphaelites’ aesthetic agenda, not to mention a rather conservative-sounding preference for “old time methods.” Cook’s thoughts on the “house beautiful” follow this pattern throughout his series. Aesthetic choices carried moral weight and represented objective standards for Cook. Choosing well signified nothing less than a happy home, with its human relationships in order and its educational possibilities enhanced. The wrong forms, by contrast, would create a home of discomfort and clashing priorities among the inmates, whose tendency toward superficiality—in everything from manners and taste to education—would be exaggerated rather than discouraged. In sum, we see in these essays, as we saw initially, that Cook adhered to his antebellum definition of art embodying objective and moral value. The forms he originally championed as the mode of resisting the pull toward the mainstream were also forms that intentionally demanded manual labor, craft, and prolonged attention—on the part of the creator and also on the part of the viewer.22 As such, the apparently old mimetic, antebellum form was simultaneously anticonventionalist and even avant-garde in its desire to separate art from mainstream capitalist production techniques and habits of visual consumption. Cook’s other prominent work from his post–New Path career was his Art and Artists of Our Time, published in 1888. Meant to be a popular compendium on current and recently past art, it surveys the art of Europe and America with brief essays on numerous artists, accompanied by illustrations. Volumes 5 and 6 of this extensive undertaking are devoted to American artists. Cook’s discussions of the artists have a much more conciliatory tone than his reviews of twenty-five years earlier. Though Cook still found many faults, he also sought to point out ameliorating virtues. He adopted, as in The House Beautiful, a less severe and single-minded rhetoric, and he exchanged his avant-garde posture for that of the art expert. In these chapters from 1888, Cook employed a specific formula in writing about artists of preceding generations whose work he did not value: he

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maintained, over and over again, in the context of numerous different artists that their contribution was not their art per se. Rather, “history takes note of small things as well as large, and in trying to account for the growth of art in our country, we want all the facts we can get hold of. Every artist who came here or who was born here was a seed of influence. Some other artist owed his being, as an artist, to him, either directly, by his teaching or example, or indirectly, by the sight of his works.”23 Not only did Cook repeat this formula for many artists, but it represents the purpose of his essays and his idea of art in America. Though very little of it may have “intrinsic importance,” as he claimed, American art has a history. This history consists of struggles due to the lack of opportunities, attempts to build the most basic foundations, and disadvantages of dependency on Europe. Cook explained to his readers that American art could hardly have avoided an apparently second-rate level of aesthetic ability or formal fluency, since the obstacles in a new country were so numerous. As familiar as this narrative is—in recent decades it has received healthy reexamination—we find Cook employing it as the mechanism that justifies the mediocrity he perceived in art; it binds the diverse artists together and serves as the motor that occasionally propels the individual artist beyond his bland peers. He wrote, in the end, a relatively redemptive, optimistic narrative meant to make a coherent and respectable history for American art. Cook was still opinionated, but he was no longer a young rebel rejecting tradition. Indeed, he was creating one, or at least giving a lineage and a rationale to an existing one. Much of what Cook wrote in Art and Artists of Our Time were biographical sketches of artists, relying heavily on William Dunlap’s account for all the early artists. Where he was more expansive, his judgments and examples remained, nonetheless, rather generalized. This was the nature of the project, however. It was a survey. Still, we can read some of his priorities in the instances where his commentary breaks away from his own formula of biography and his recourse to “contribution.” There is also a good deal of reference to an artist’s high esteem with the public, or his recent success. In many cases, it seems at first to suggest Cook’s approbation. For example, he appears to evaluate Winslow Homer with fairly overt terms of praise. He “was an artist predestined in childhood,” Cook claimed. Continuing with the artist’s history, he recounted that when the war broke out he went to Washington, and sent drawings to Harper’s Weekly. The spirit and truthfulness of these drawings were delightful to the public, and Homer gained a name that became a house-

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hold word all over the North. His first paintings too were equally inspiring. No picture has been painted in America in our day that made so deep an appeal to the feelings of the people as his “Prisoners to the Front.” . . . The scene was intensely dramatic without a touch of exaggeration, and the sympathy it excited had no sentimental flavor.24 Evidently, Cook approved of both the drawings and this picture, all of which won Homer a certain fame. Note, though, that Homer made a name for himself; he did not, according to Cook, make art. We must also remember the position of the youthful Cook with regard to popular appeal. At that earlier moment of greater outspokenness, popularity with the public signified a work’s failure to be art. Thus, the numerous references to the “public delight” (which turn up in many entries on different artists) perhaps ought not be taken as Cook’s outright endorsement. Yet Cook also listed some of the characteristics he most valued in art when describing Homer’s work. The drawings had “spirit and truthfulness,” and the painting was “inspiring,” dramatic without being exaggerated, and emotionally powerful without being sentimental. These were among the features he had formerly credited as those necessary for true art. Did Cook perhaps change his mind about the meaning of public opinion? Formerly, he had strongly ridiculed popularity and portrayed the objects of the public’s favor as almost necessarily exaggerated and sentimental. This representative passage from Cook’s later writing shows him, by contrast, to have softened in his attitude toward popularity. Or, at least, popularity was no longer incompatible with artistic virtues. It is nonetheless relevant to wonder whether Cook was simply adopting a kind of camouflage. In many instances, he noted the popular appeal of an artist in place of a more particular judgment, and in place of his own. This argues quite strongly for his rebel avant-garde phase having ended. This is not to say that Cook’s opinions cannot be found, but even where his terms are more specific, he continued to couch judgments in “influence” and esteem among others, preserving a kind of neutrality for his statements. His paragraphs on James Abbot McNeill Whistler, for example, offer some of Cook’s more pondered passages of criticism and show his thoughts a bit less guardedly.25 The entry about Whistler begins with what were surely critiques. Cook made repeated references to the artist’s eccentricity and to his foreignness and lack of “personal influence on our home-art.”26 Yet there follows an apparent change of tone (and of mind) where Cook offered this tangled sentence:

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His “symphonies,” “nocturnes,” and “harmonies,” in white, in blue and silver, in amber and black, his arrangements in black, in brown, have no doubt had a great influence on the younger artists in England, in France, and notably here at home; and indeed the debt due to Whistler as one of the strongest fighters in the war of poetry in art against Philistinism is confessed alike by the admiration felt for him, not only in England and America by the strongest among the younger men, but by the angry protests of others. Only strong men excite such strong feeling.27 Cook appreciated the artist’s ability to ignite opinions both for and against his work, and he likely recognized something of his own earlier reputation therein. Cook also tells us that the issue at hand—that which caused the art world to divide itself, at least to his mind—was the “war of poetry in art against Philistinism.” What did he mean by this contrast? Poetry, for the earlier Cook, might well have qualified as little different from the disparaged tendency among his contemporaries to pursue “Beauty” as the “end of Art.” His siding with poetry seems, therefore, to represent a change of heart. Yet in standing in opposition to—or at war with—philistinism, poetry may still refer most strongly to art’s “truth” element. Philistinism, on the other hand, most likely referred to the exaggerated and sentimental formerly condemned as the popular preference—inimical to art—for its spectacular nature. Perhaps the term “philistinism” also referred to the overly narrative tendency that Cook continued to criticize and to relate to the popular in art. In Art and Artists of Our Time, he criticized Elihu Vedder (1836–1923) for precisely this characteristic.28 Of Vedder, Cook said that he “is fond of grotesque subjects, which easily pass with the public, as with himself, for imagination, but which continually baulk us by the intrusion of commonplace, and a matter-of-fact desire to reduce all mystery to plain statement.”29 If we look for a moment at Whistler and Vedder ourselves, Cook’s terms still show themselves to be ambiguously divergent from his earlier ideas. A painting by Whistler that was reproduced in Cook’s book—Thomas Carlyle, as it is simply entitled there—shows a loosely painted tonal image that demonstrates the artist’s well-known interest in subtle arrangements of color and the balance and counterpoint of form. The sitter, like Whistler’s mother, is placed parallel to the picture plane in a shallow space. The restricted, rectilinear character and abstract geometry of this space are reinforced not only by the placement of the human subject but also by the repetition of hori-

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zontal bands of flat color constituting objects such as the floor, the wainscot, the wall, and the pictures on it. These are all in shades of gray. The sitter himself is a demonstration of vertical and horizontal counterbalance, also composed in shades of dark gray. Details of the material objects that make up the sitter or his surroundings are avoided. Drapery, anatomy, and furniture are all rendered with minimal shadow. Depth and surface delineation are completely subordinated to overall form and color and to their abstract and pictorially harmonious juxtapositions. Such features are very similar to those Cook had derided earlier in La Farge’s work—the “system” that he found so pernicious. Whistler’s portrait is likewise a long way from the glaring “truthfulness” of Farrer’s landscape. Cook seems to have changed his mind. As for Vedder, Cook may have had in mind a picture such as his Questioner of the Sphinx (1863; fig. 5). Here the tonality and boldness of the relatively flattened forms were not of interest to Cook. Vedder seems to have

Fig. 5 Elihu Vedder (1836–1923), Questioner of the Sphinx, 1863. Oil on canvas, 92.07 ⫻ 107.31 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of Mrs. Martin Brimmer, 06.2430. Photo © 2013 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

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recalled Cook to more narrative considerations: the painting highlights the exotic nature of the ancient Egyptian fragment by its very large scale in relation to the human figure, by its foreground placement and domination of the whole left side of the picture, and by the stark landscape that takes up the rest of the frame. A small, dark, bent human form crouches next to the light-colored statue. He puts his ear to the lips of the sphinx to hear the famously sought-after response. Desert heat and topography, Egyptian sculpture, and “exotic orientals” are all convincingly represented in a picture that also exhibits a bold treatment of form overall. Thus, for Cook, the problem was evidently that it was too illustrative, perhaps too bold, suggesting too flatly that which was supposed to be elusive. The example of William H. Beard, the painter of animal scenes, adds a bit more clarity to the meaning of Cook’s designations—or at least to “philistinism.” Beard was one of the painters who had drawn Cook’s very harsh judgment in 1864. He was treated more gently in Art and Artists of Our Time. The essential complaint against his work, however, remained the same. Cook discussed both James and William Beard together in the book, noting that the latter had “a still more original and striking gift for story-telling with caricature and satire . . . and indeed no living artist can be named who has shown half the sense of humor that William Beard has displayed in his caricatures.” He continued, “They tell their story in so clear and logical a style that anybody and everybody can read and understand them. There is no pretension to high art in them, and the painting is of a commonplace type enough: properly speaking, it is not ‘painting’ at all.”30 Thus, “philistinism” seems to be represented here. There is humor and clarity, which are “commonplace.” These features ultimately deny the work the status of painting. In short, we see that art could not be too explicit. If it tended too much toward the illustration of an idea, or even a moral that Cook may have appreciated, it lost its truth status. It became too mundane and too specific to retain the value of a larger, more absolute truth. Philistinism is thus shown as participating, in negative terms, in Cook’s ongoing conception of art’s didactic truth status. But we have yet to clarify “poetry” and what his apparently newfound appreciation for Whistler might have meant. The key is in his own later relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites. Cook situated the early career of Whistler in the period “when the so-called pre-Raphaelite revolution was in full career,” crediting it with having “stimulated and encouraged his [Whistler’s] native vein of individualism. Though he was not really one of the group, yet he was of their kin, and was

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given a place in the public mind rather on the credit of his eccentricities in choice of subject and in execution than from any deeper relation in thought and feeling.”31 Thus, Whistler’s poetry was not, in fact, totally distinct in Cook’s or the public’s mind from that of the Pre-Raphaelites. And rebellion was fundamental to both. More importantly, Cook, by this point, was himself a critic of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, primarily due to its failure to live up to its goals. He felt a distaste for the exaggeration that its members cultivated in order to make their point. Indeed, the post–New Path Cook found “violent advocacy of awkwardness and ugliness” in the pictures, as well as “shrill-screaming advocacy” in the writing of the movement’s most famous defender, Ruskin.32 Note that it is the advocacy that was violent and “shrill-screaming.” This shrill tone was echoed in the awkward ugliness of the formal exaggerations. Such strained attempts to make a point were evidently too extreme for the later Cook. They had begun to appear to him as refutations of the group’s putative goals of sincerity and naturalism. Even the “minuteness of accurate rendering of facts” was carried to an artificial level that violated the earnestness of the Pre-Raphaelites’ stated purpose. Cook’s distaste or reaction likely contributed to his later willingness to see “poetry” in Whistler’s tonal harmonies and painterly nocturnes. Once again, it is the formal prescriptions that have altered. In particular, those that pertained most closely to the extreme side of the Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic were rejected. Perhaps Cook also refuted his own earlier stridency in these comments, and, if so, there is all the more reason to perceive reaction in his appreciation for the painterly canvases of Whistler. Perhaps it was a kind of intentional distancing from the manner that most characterized what he had begun to dislike about his former aesthetic. To summarize, while there is ground for discussing a critical shift in Cook’s thinking, his writing offers at least three relevant challenges to the paradigm. As a critic, he did not fundamentally alter his conception of art; it remained from his early to his late career an embodiment of objective value, a didactic form that contained truth—in large part by resisting convention, superficial stylishness, and overly narrative expression. Also, in both his early writing and that of his later career, Cook’s positions confound straightforward classification according to the conventional definitions. He was avantgarde and anticonventional, yet the definition (and the inflexible nature) of art he expounded is almost indistinguishable from that of his antebellum predecessors. Encompassing nature and morality, art had to be truth. Later he

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began to find value in the overtly painterly, but this seems not to have been accompanied by a notion that art might represent subjectivity or the senses. Art remained bound to a moral standard with a didactic charge to fulfill. Finally, Cook himself offers a refutation of the notion that his “era of revolution” signified a revolution in art. Not only did his own self-styled radicalism fail to amount to anything other than youthful iconoclasm of tone, but he too became a writer of art’s history who repeatedly defined this history by recourse to continuity, to shared struggles, and to slow progress. Quite distinct from the revolutionary or the dramatically changed, art, as Cook saw it when he sat down to write its history on the other side of the supposed watershed, was slowly plodding along. It was still to be comprehended in light of the same disadvantages, the same opportunities, the same range of habits and conventions, only here and there surpassed. He historicized American art by recourse to continuity, not rupture. In modern historiography, we do something quite different. In the periodization that we have been considering throughout the book, sociopolitical and economic transformations of the Civil War, rapid growth and industrialization, the accumulation of wealth, and the rise of consumer culture are all thought to mark tremendous change and rupture with the past and perforce to indicate equally dramatic changes in art production and reception.33 Aside from challenges to this paradigm on the basis of continuity, this means that at the level of methodology art is analyzed through a particular construction of its historical factors. This is extremely relevant. Art is of its time and must be understood to belong to, and in some way participate in, the culture of which it is a part—from the broadest modes of economic organization to the subtlest habits of seeing, from great events to minute references. On the other hand, is the historical what is pursued when the history in question is so very frequently a (variously inflected) narrative of formation, change, and expansion? As suggested in the introduction, the answer is not easily given in the affirmative. Certainly the question is not whether the changes described did not occur in some manner, and certainly there are many carefully nuanced analyses that resist facile basesuperstructure models of interaction or overly simplified distinctions between context and text. Yet it seems that formation, change, and expansion serve as narrative motors to history in American art history. The trajectory itself is assumed to represent the historical in America. It is the underlying moral to American history; it is that which gives American art its history, or even makes American art historical.

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What rests beneath this tendency? Potential answers come readily enough to mind. There is a long-standing imperative among scholars of American art to search for the sociocultural and not the aesthetic significance of the object of their inquiry.34 This is relatively apparent at this point in the development of the subdiscipline, and it is also a point of justifiable pride among scholars, having early on cast the study of American art in the broader molds of material culture and visual culture.35 But another consideration asserts itself in the particular divergences that we have seen in these chapters. What has surfaced throughout is a kind of unintentional swapping of the definitional for the formal in art discourse. This needs a bit of explanation, though the distinction has been implied all along. Let us hypothesize for the sake of clarity two sides to art discourse: the definition of its goals and/or role in society, and its formal language. Of course, we know them to be completely intertwined. However, as we saw with Jarves and Cook, who advocated opposing forms for the same exalted art-as-truth paradigm, there is ground for discussing them separately, as we have done so far. Even more to the point, such separation is precisely what our periodization implies by plotting linear and successive conceptions for art with these critics’ formal discourse of real versus ideal. Therefore, not only must we accept the fiction as a thing to hypothesize for clarity’s sake, but we must take it to point in some way to our own mechanisms for historicizing nineteenth-century American art. Thus, if we pin down more precisely the side being called art’s definition, it is composed of the overtly social side—that which plots a relationship with sociohistorical constructions of objective or subjective models for understanding the world and of the individual’s relationship to society. It is the side most readily connected to history by virtue of the shared textual and narrative character. It consists, in the examples discussed here, in propositions such as the meaning of art as “truth” or conversely expressing “beauty.” The formal side of art discourse, by contrast, refers not to other textual or narrative constructions but to images, to style, to pictorial strategies for reaching these given ends of art. The distinction I am drawing seems to participate in the long tradition in the history of Western culture of comparing and/or contrasting words and images (or poetry and painting). In this tradition, words and images have been conceived as being in competition with each other; frequently the debate has been taken up to assert the superiority of one over the other. Opposing characteristics are assigned and comparisons drawn; for example,

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the muteness of the image is compared with the eloquence of the word, qualities of space are compared with those of time, and the female is compared with the male. More recently, following W. J. T. Mitchell, scholars have begun to consider the politics of the oppositions themselves—the rhetorical and ideological nature of the interactions in which the terms create and define one another.36 However relevant such considerations must be to any separation of verbal and visual practices or modes of communication— and though they are consequently implicated here at some level—it is not our object to take up any of these debates per se. Rather, at issue is the nonequivalence of the verbal and visual and the extent to which our historiography may privilege the former over the latter, at the level of a deep structure. Turning back, then, to the proposition at hand: there is an assumption that historical meaning is to be found on the definition side of art discourse—its more readily verbal side. This assumption leads to the suppression of the formal side of the discourse in question. This, too, relates to the surface-level desire in the discipline to move beyond the traditional interests of connoisseurship on the one hand, and from the relativism of certain strains of poststructuralist formalism on the other. Both might be argued to have a limited capacity for plumbing the role of art in culture—and might also put much nineteenth-century American art at a disadvantage if aesthetic considerations are presented as meaningful in themselves. Yet there is a distinction to be drawn between a formalist method for interpreting art and the use of a discourse of style to identify, apprehend, or discuss changes—historical changes—in the appearance, production, or reception of art. It is the latter that is under consideration—the place that form or stylistic discussion occupies in the literature in the subdiscipline, regardless of what other interpretive mechanisms may be in play in any given account. The question might also be asked: How, in the historiography under consideration, does the idea of social transformation come to be employed as an explanation for differences in art production and reception when, in fact, the period writers express continuity of art’s purpose but dispute its form? That is, the critical discourse demonstrates a persistent, shared conception of art’s definition as objective truth and not subjective representation, while the style, by contrast, was the element open to question and subject to change. In short, Jarves’s and Cook’s texts were not about change to the meaning and definition of art itself, despite our modern desire to read their rhetorical devices as signifying such. How, then, is the formal nature of the

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issue at hand passed over in favor of the more overtly social side, in favor of periodizing trajectories whose logic resides in conceptions of the changing status of the individual in relation to his sociopolitical and economic conditions? The answer is already in part implied in the question. The language of style implies a definition for art and a relationship between art and society that is quite distinct from that constructed by the rhetoric of social transformation. Style is a discourse of form; it constructs comparisons among artists and works, it establishes formal relationships, and it institutes aesthetic hierarchies. (Again, I am not referring to a particular methodological use of stylistic analysis or to formalism per se.) Stylistic inquiry inherently admits of variation and multiplicity as a mode of being in art. Because its purpose is to explain aesthetic difference (historically, among other things), it presupposes an understanding of art in which change is endemic to the activity of art making and to art itself by definition. By contrast, the discussion of formal variation as a sign of, or response to, the revolutionary character of the art or artists in question constructs difference as atypical, as a singular event outside the norm for art. It implies that art has some kind of permanent essence, and any mutations to it constitute an overturning of its fundamental character to date—that is, a revolution. And, moreover, this rhetoric of upheaval suggests that formal change in art requires and/or indexes the influence of non-art factors that are significant enough to provoke the otherwise unusual to happen. Art, in this discourse, is essentially immutable rather than fundamentally fluid. It does not admit, by its own character, of individual permutations. In this sense, it resembles “Art” in our antebellum critical definitions expounded by Jarves and Cook. When the visual aspect of art is thus perceived—as requiring external forces of significant magnitude—the target of art historical investigation subtly and almost imperceptibly shifts: the contextual changes slip in as the primary object of explanation. Form would not have changed otherwise, according to this discursive effect. Thus, art only becomes historical by means of sociocultural upheaval too significant not to drag art along with it. Form becomes meaningful in this paradigm by way of its being made to show those changes without which it (the visual aspect) would not have moved, would not have been historical.

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4 william j. stillman’s ruskinian criticism Metaphor and Essential Meaning

This chapter studies the critical writing of the book’s last central figure, William J. Stillman. Stillman’s writing was well known in the antebellum American art world, though today his name is less familiar than Jarves’s or Cook’s. In addition to his antebellum work, Stillman authored archeological studies and political reports in the latter half of the century that appeared regularly in the era’s most respected journals and daily newspapers.1 From his earliest days as a new graduate of Union College in 1848, Stillman was in the midst of the American art world. He was apparently an avid and persuasive debater, taking up the heavy questions of art and nature with the profound convictions of his time, augmented by his personal experience with landscape painting, wilderness life, and even Ruskin. Convinced by his friends to make his views more public, he undertook the project of cofounding the country’s first journal dedicated solely to art and art criticism. He and John Durand, son of the landscape painter Asher B. Durand, thus initiated the Crayon in 1855 with no real precedent to follow and very meager resources at their disposal.2 It was an evangelizing enterprise, “an apostolate of art,” as Stillman himself subsequently referred to it in his retrospective narrative Autobiography of a Journalist.3 Stillman edited the journal in its first two years; his writing and his ideas about art fill its pages. In fact, aside from the few contributions he obtained from his literary acquaintances, most of the unsigned articles are his work. Consequently, Stillman may be less familiar as a name, but his writing is a key source of antebellum art discourse.

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This chapter focuses on his Crayon writing in order to take a step further into the structure of nineteenth-century American art discourse. It delves deeper into the language itself, examining the tropes that turn up repeatedly in Stillman’s expression of his art theory. His principles were expressed in metaphorical language that his conception of art could not do without. This definition of art was fundamentally similar to that which we have already seen with the other critics. The figurative language thus offers additional means by which to understand how such a definition operated. Stillman’s tropes take on extra significance when we then consider how, in the late 1860s, he rejected his earlier Ruskinian understanding of art and his critical language changed. These two important phases of Stillman’s career are taken up here, in part because they suggest immediately that perhaps his work follows the paradigm described by our periodization in a way that, as we saw, Jarves’s and Cook’s did not. While the general features of Stillman’s life are not unknown,4 two recurring themes turn up in his autobiographical narrative that were repeated less self-consciously in his many published articles. They are particularly relevant here. These are not necessarily the aspects of his life that other modern scholars have used to define him.5 While there is unanimous recognition of Stillman’s important role as editor of the Crayon—and his primary reputation as an American follower of Ruskin—it is less widely recognized that he later adamantly rejected Ruskin’s philosophy. Stillman’s early writing repeated time and again (in a dogmatic fashion that he himself retrospectively identified and critiqued) the widespread belief in an essential identity of art and American nature, as well as with divine and national virtue—concepts that held sway beyond just the Ruskinians. These ideas are well known and much discussed in the literature of American art history. Stillman subsequently rejected this early theory of art, writing in many contexts about the mistaken premise of Ruskin’s philosophy and defining instead the principles of “true art.” This important feature of his career has gone largely unnoticed by modern historians.6 Yet it does indeed fit the shift identified in our periodization, making it a bit ironic that Stillman’s change of heart has generally been overlooked. It is particularly pertinent because, as in all of his writings from the late 1860s onward, Stillman was very articulate and very insistent on the subject. In many ways, this change of philosophy defined his art criticism for the great majority of his long career. Also, in the frankness of his apostasy, he turns a spotlight on those features that constituted, for him, the fundamental tenets of art and theories of art.

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That is to say, because he makes such a strong distinction between what he once believed and what later came to supplant the earlier ideas, Stillman helps us identify which aspects of art’s definition were in play for him and arguably for the larger art world. Herein lies the first theme that makes Stillman central to this study: his writing displays a decisive change of belief in definitions of art—and not just a swing to the other end of a dualist spectrum in style. He repeated time and again a repudiation of once-held Ruskinian principles. When and how this happened, and what it entailed, will occupy us further on. For now, I propose that Stillman embodies with his conversion the critical shift asserted by the historiography in the field. A second main feature of Stillman’s life according to his self-description, backed by his journalistic output and his documented activities, was his deep involvement in some of the major political struggles of his day. Employed in diplomatic service from 1861 to 1869, Stillman took an unusually active role in both of his consular posts at a time when the host countries were engaged in battles for self-determination and republican government. Stationed first in Rome from 1861 to 1865, he was involved enough in the latter phase of Italian unification that he subsequently wrote his own history of it and eventually became a political advisor to Francesco Crispi (prime minister in 1887– 91 and 1893–96), whose biography he also wrote. Stillman held his Roman consular post during the American Civil War, having unsuccessfully sought to enlist in the Union army or to raise a volunteer regiment of his own.7 Once he was removed from the United States, his enthusiasm for the Union cause registered in consular correspondence primarily as a dogged persistence in his duty to obtain oaths of allegiance to the Union from citizens of the rebellious states wanting visas in Rome. Eventually, his intransigence on the issue led to his transferal to Crete.8 Upon removing to Crete, Stillman’s passion for what he identified as the liberty of oppressed peoples became more active. As the consul general of Crete stationed in Canea, he sympathized with the Cretan insurrection against the occupying Turkish Empire. Bending diplomatic protocol as the U.S. representative to the latter governing power, Stillman sought to negotiate with the Turkish pasha on behalf of the Cretans. He spoke openly about their rights, his reasons for supporting their independence, his distrust of the Turks and their mode of governing, and his distaste for Turkish culture. He was an unequivocal critic of American and European policy toward the Cretans. His thoughts on the subject, presented with his proofs of firsthand information, were published as articles in the Nation.9 The articles

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criticize European and American complicity with the Turkish oppressor, presenting passionate defenses of the Cretans and of their right to liberty. A pointed essay in the Nation shows some of Stillman’s fundamental ideas not only about the Cretan struggle but also about liberty and the duty he assumed with regard to fighting for it. The article was meant to contest American public opinion about the Cretan insurrection, which he felt was being misdirected by a combination of selfish American motives and Turkish “lying” and “bribery.” However, it also demonstrates the manner in which he cultivated an objective stance for his arguments, expressing a formula that will turn up again in his other writing. Thus advocating for Cretan rights, he framed his beliefs as having nothing to do with personal affection for the people. Indeed, he listed several aspects of their culture that he found distasteful, thereby asserting the unbiased nature of his advocacy. He championed the Cretan cause, he tells us, simply because the rights of the people must be understood to be inalienable. “I don’t see what my antipathies have to do with [these peoples’] inalienable rights or my duties towards them,” Stillman proclaimed. “I can’t say that I should enjoy being a member of a Cretan community, but I don’t see what that has to do with my obligation to do to them as I would have done to me were I fighting for my inalienable rights against a system of oppression more galling than Southern slavery. We only cease to be responsible for the vices of others, or their woes, when we have done all in our power to help them to get rid of the causes of them.”10 The stance is clear. Partisan loyalty was carefully and intentionally excised from Stillman’s political rhetoric. And he was deeply committed to the selfdetermination of oppressed peoples. Stillman was frequently uncompromising and critical, often opposing the majority opinion, and he remained remarkably consistent in his principles—regardless of whom the oppressor may have been. The range of causes he took up and the manner in which he wrote about them suggests that Stillman perceived throughout these causes a similar struggle for freedom. He consistently fought against injustice wherever he saw it. This sort of idealism is stereotypical of the age, yet rarely was it taken beyond the theoretical stage and into the active. Stillman was therefore an unusual painter and critic whose life was spent in the service of art and in the service of political ideals. In present-day accounts of American art, as discussed in the previous chapter, political turmoil and episodes of social change are key factors for grounding the explanation of art. With Stillman, a case for their mutual influence might rest on rather stable ground. It is not my intention, however, to present such a case,

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but rather to consider how complicated the pairing remains even when the artist/critic was an activist. Again, this is not to say that art and political or social change are not deeply related, nor that art ought to be considered separate from such ideas. On the contrary, the chapter is meant to pursue the complexity of how ideas become attached to art, the density of the interaction, and the manner in which this interaction then figures in the interpretation of art. Because Stillman was a man of art and of political revolution, what he said or did not say about the relationship between the two is arguably quite relevant. His writing can help us understand how abstract ideals came to be associated with the substance and the value of “true” art—and perhaps how they constitute the substance of the “shift” in American art history. Stillman’s writing thus claims our attention, and, to the greatest extent possible, the texts determine the issues that will be analyzed. As noted, a very salient issue, and the one we take up first, is Stillman’s early identification with Ruskinian art theory and his subsequent rejection of the same.11 Starting with the Crayon, Stillman consistently sought to articulate a definition of art that, like that of the other two critics, insisted on truth, didactic moralism (containing a strong element of anticommercialism), and nature. He was equally consistent in his use of highly figurative language. Stillman repeatedly expressed his ideas in a tangle of metaphors that, intentionally or otherwise, were not simply flourishes or attempts at being poetic. His tropes, we will see, helped establish the substance of his philosophy. Stillman filled the pages of the Crayon with essays strongly influenced by both Ruskin’s first volume of Modern Painters and his own religious fervor and “nature-worship.” His desire to evangelize is strongly felt throughout. He repeatedly reminded his readers that reverence for nature was essential to true art, whose character was fundamentally religious with socially and morally redemptive powers. We do not need to delve too far into Stillman’s particular use of Ruskinian ideas in his Crayon articles and editorials; Roger Stein covers this ground thoroughly, and I agree with his finely shaded assessment of how and why Stillman and Americans in general reacted to, interpreted, and misinterpreted Ruskin as they did.12 Consequently, we will take just a brief look at the key tenets of Stillman’s Ruskinianism before moving on to the chapter’s main argument. Most any editorial that Stillman wrote for the Crayon would offer a good deal of consistency with regard to his ideas, tone, and language. The example below comes from the opening issue of January 1855, in which Stillman seems to have been particularly keen to express the journal’s goals. The first

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paragraphs stated that the purpose of the publication was the “glorious work of art-cultivation.” With an antimaterialist subtheme running throughout, the Crayon’s pages were penned “in the midst of a great commercial crisis . . . when trade has shown its hollowness, and money-pride its brittleness,” in the hope that an opportunity would open for “humility and love, and with these Beauty enters the heart.” Thus, from the beginning, before taking up any aesthetic questions, Stillman voiced the charge to redeem his fellow men by means of art. These men, his hopeful converts, were most frequently referred to as “merchants” and the “world of business.” Stillman suggested that the time was right during that moment of economic depression to impress upon them the “impermanence” of (repeatedly listed) material goals, as opposed to the enduring gratifications of art—which emulate religion. We read various permutations of the promise that, once the merchant has “cultivate[d] his love for art,” he will “feel that his daily routine of duty is gone through with better, . . . that there is something in him better than his computing capacity, and something in life more profitable than cent-per-cent profits.”13 Continuing on to Stillman’s other main focus, nature, I include a longer quote below in order to give a more complete sense of the writing itself and to get to the point at hand. The repetition and the sentimentality of the excerpt may strain the patience of the modern reader, but they show a rhetorical structure whose purpose was to render art discourse as a moral narrative, in which art and nature balance social ills. The passage also draws out the particularity of the language. Stillman analogized that like the liverleaf that springs up “at the first instant of breath the earth gets after its winter-trance,” so Art, which is Beauty’s gospel, lies inert under the cold necessities of a national childhood, . . . but when the winter of discontent is made summer, it bursts out to gladden and beautify life. . . . To us, and to our generation, it is given to determine its future in our country, whether free and healthy, or dwarfed and deformed by pride and conceit. To this glorious work of art-cultivation we have devoted this undertaking. . . . Beauty has an elevation of enjoyment, compared to which, all self-glorification is a hollow show. . . . Beauty is the antidote to those wearing, consuming cares of the material life—that, as trade and money being by their very nature the origin of selfish influences, and bring men for ever into struggle with each other, not for

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mutual advantage, but for selfish appropriation; so Beauty and Art, belonging none the less to one, because given to all, widen our sympathies and unite us by a common delight. He continued anecdotally, Passing through one of our bye-streets late last autumn, we were preceded by a group of boys rollicking through the street, after the fashion of the candidates for Bowery distinction. Just as we reached them their boisterous merriment was checked by the sight of a quantity of flowers—the refuse of a neighboring garden thrown out into the street. . . . The boys made a simultaneous rush for them, not with pushing and squabbling, as they would have done for coppers or “valuables,” but with eagerness. One, keener-eyed than the rest, secured the gems of the collection, . . . and so, locked arm in arm, they strolled slowly down the street, still admiring, but not as before, boisterous, rowdying. Their voices were softened, and their bearing harmonized, and we lost sight of them, bettered we doubt not, if only for the moment.14 On the level of the explicit narrative, the paragraphs commence with the small flower that is willing to make its way upward to beautify an inhospitable environment. It is like art in American culture, struggling in a cold climate. Beauty’s virtues and abilities are then enumerated: its abiding capacity for intellectual improvement counters the transience of monetary gain, its spiritual fullness opposes material emptiness, and it promotes the good of the whole over individual profit. Proper and improper types of behavior are thus delineated, and art is the instrument of that which is preferred. The narrative finally concludes with a parable of living representatives of the various social ills, who are miraculously tamed and harmonized by beauty. The particular beauty that triggers this momentary refinement is, of course, nature—flowers that refer us simultaneously back to the opening liverleaf and to its metaphorical object, art. Art is nature, and vice versa, by virtue of this metaphor and its narrative exposition. Less explicitly, the riot of tropes betrays something a bit burdened or overloaded about the message. To enumerate the various uses of metaphor and synecdoche: Art is like a flower. Beauty is given the status of religious truth, as it is the substance of a gospel. American society, or a phase of it, is

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indicated by the “winter of our discontent,” which will eventually turn to summer. At the same time, American society, or its then-current state, is also likened to childhood, which will eventually become adulthood. Finally, this evolving America is not just like life cycles but also like the body itself, which may turn out healthy or dwarfed. With such a cacophony of symbols, Stillman shows his need to repeatedly fix his ideas by recourse to figurative language—and to certain types of figures, all of which stand for essential phenomena. It expresses the character of the art theory Stillman wanted to teach. This is a theory that required not just moralizing tales but also an emphasis on being or essence. In fact, art by Stillman’s definition was first and foremost this kind of timeless, fundamentally natural entity—more so than it was representation. Or, at least, his was a concept of representation that dealt in essences.15 As Cook implied, art had to do more than “stand for” something. And Stillman’s language gives us a fully metaphorical definition of art: it is like nature, like religion. Indeed, a discourse of art in which the object is so tropically overburdened leaves little room for art to have a style, for instance, to communicate by means of formal choices or allusions. Not only is there little room, but according to these figures art is not like other art; it is not like a story. It is like religion, and its meaning is not to represent but to be. Interestingly, Stillman found something similar to this last dilemma in Ruskin’s writing. In a review from 1860, Stillman examined Ruskin’s fifth and final volume of Modern Painters. Though Stillman was still very definitely a disciple, he wrote with a more clear-headed sense of analytical discipline than was common in the art writing of the day. That is to say, he was a partisan, but he did not suspend critical judgment. He praised Ruskin’s first and most well-known volume as having achieved immense popularity as well as strong disapproval. He said that it overthrew “the received canons of criticism, and defying all the accepted authorities in it, the author excited the liveliest astonishment and the bitterest hostility.”16 Stillman mostly wanted his readers to understand that over time the influence of Ruskin’s “enthusiasm and earnestness” would spread until “it embrace[d] nearly all of the true and living art of our time.” Nonetheless, he went on with the following assessment: “But that volume, professedly treating art with reference to its superficial attributes and for a special purpose, the redemption of a great and revered artist from unjust disparagement and undeserved neglect, touched in scarcely the least degree the vital questions of taste or

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art-production. . . . It dealt with facts, and touched the simple truths of Nature with an enthusiastic fire and lucidness which were proof positive of the knowledge and feeling of the author.”17 Like Stillman’s own discussion of art, Ruskin’s first volume of Modern Painters did not engage the “questions of taste or art-production,” even though it claimed to take up the “superficial attributes” of art. It was instead so full of “enthusiasm” and “earnestness” that those carried the day. And, more related to the point at hand, Stillman, operating fully within the mode of thinking that we saw in his Crayon paragraphs, said that Ruskin’s volume was about “facts” and the “simple truths of Nature.” This description constitutes an overt, though unintentional, formulation of what Stillman’s metaphors had expressed. They had created a linguistic identity of art with essential truths, “facts” of being, divine origins, and meanings of the natural world. His language insisted on a definition for art that placed it in the realm of faith and not of formal (or other social) considerations. According to Stillman, this is what Ruskin’s book did; it discussed art in terms of truth, nature, and conviction instead of in terms of style or art production. We will find later that Stillman’s tentative critique of Ruskin’s inattention to “questions of taste or art-production” eventually became a principal concern. Continuing with the Ruskinian phase of Stillman’s writing, there is another prominent feature of his writing style to note. This is a consistent recourse to syllogistic explanation. Like the overstrained metaphors, the use of syllogisms seems to have been required by an art theory that insisted on assigning to art non-art identities borrowed from religious discourse. The syllogisms, conforming more or less to our accepted notion of them, are a series of propositions. Generally three, sometimes four, propositions are presented to demonstrate by deductive reasoning a relationship between propositions one and two, which might otherwise seem unrelated.18 (Stillman often needed one more step in his structure to help make his deduction come out as he wanted.) Thus, by the formal logic of the written structure alone, Stillman could create a relationship of inherency that his rhetoric of transcendent, religious morals could not do without. Again, most any editorial written for the Crayon would demonstrate his use of this form. A good example comes from the editorial “Beauty and Its Enemies,” which appeared in the eleventh issue of the first volume. Here Stillman bound beauty and morality with the following syllogism. As the passages are lengthy, I extract and reproduce the propositions of the syllo-

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gism, assigning them their number in the sequence. Some of the intervening examples or elaborations are omitted. It would have been better perhaps if we had previously entered into a more thorough investigation of its [Beauty’s] philosophy . . . but we must be content for the present to know that [1] it is the external expression of an inner essence or meaning, in which the mind receives delight. . . . [2] Our perception of the Beautiful is proportioned to our power to sympathise with it, and this we believe to be measured by the beauty and harmony of organization of our own minds. . . . [3] It means briefly this: that the enjoyment of Beauty is dependent on, and in ratio with, the moral excellence of the individual.19 Stillman gives us two and half propositions before getting to his conclusion. The overall formula is that beauty is the expression of an inner essence, beauty is seen only by those whose beautiful minds can perceive it, and therefore beauty requires moral excellence. And mixed in there is the conflation of beauty as an external visible phenomenon with beauty as an internal (and essential) quality of moral character. On “Duty in Art,” to give another example of this structure, Stillman wanted to counter what he considered an all-too-frequent error of his fellow citizens: they had not “thought of Art as a thing to which they owe a duty.” To demonstrate the error, he posited, [1] If we affirm that it is the duty of every man to develop towards perfection every power of mind which he possesses, no one would dissent. . . . [2] There is given to us a class of feelings among the most potential in our organization—those which take cognizance of the beauty and truth of the external world. . . . [3] The perceptions of things beautiful and the things which through their beauty become spiritual, are those which are the basis of Art. . . . [4] Art, and the matter with which it deals, [are] things of serious moment to every human soul.20 This second example will be clear enough without further explanation. What is important to emphasize is that in the Crayon writings Stillman’s language is filled—often overfilled—with syllogism, metaphor, and synecdoche

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whose use and whose objects of likeness were necessitated by the definition of art that he, like many of his peers, was expounding. The formal structure here, as in the previous examples of metaphor, points to a rather fundamental gap. The linguistic forms have to work very hard; they are strained to their limits in order to bring together the essential parts of art’s definition. Truth, nature, and art are the concepts that the language has the burden of unifying. The linguistic forms struggle to equate them, as we have seen, and their dissonance betrays the extent to which such equation was not possible. Art was not fundamentally or essentially any of those things that Stillman so strongly wanted it to be. His language demonstrates that a certain force is required to bind them together. Thus, art, according to this Ruskinian definition, was a metaphor. While it is well known that art was conflated with a certain brand of religious morality and the conception was repeated ad nauseam, it is relevant to understand that the relationship was a linguistic one. The apparent connection between such ideals and art was forged by the tropes of its critical elaboration—rendered necessary for two important reasons. One was precisely the lack of actual correspondence between the ideals and the art; the other was the depth of the desire to believe there was one. But in no way does this detract from the power of that correspondence. Whether metaphorical or actual, the ideal of art as a kind of moral demonstration dominated art discourse in these years. The distinction between language and phenomenon nonetheless should not be overlooked or become conflated in our histories. It goes to the heart of questions about how and where we look for and define historical meaning for art. These questions will be taken up again after the rest of Stillman’s writing has been considered. Turning, therefore, to Stillman’s rejection of his Crayon-era Ruskinianism and his metaphorical style, the first explicit example of his change of heart is expressed in an article published in 1868. During this year, as in the preceding one, Stillman was writing primarily for the Nation but also for a few other well-known magazines, such as Atlantic Monthly and Cornhill. At this time, he concentrated on reporting the events of the Cretan insurrection from his firsthand point of view as consul general stationed in Canea, Crete. The Cretan reporting followed a period of very few publications. In fact, from 1858 through 1865, Stillman wrote only about seven articles, which reviewed books or artists. These years were otherwise quite busy, as he was occupied largely with renewed art study and his first diplomatic assignment in Rome.

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During this time, Stillman also recovered from a nervous collapse after leaving the Crayon, made his second trip to Europe, and, when the Civil War began, fruitlessly sought in various quarters to secure a post with the Union troops. Instead, he obtained a diplomatic assignment, through the agency of his former mentor Dr. Nott of Union College, as consul general in Rome from 1861 to 1865.21 After his contentious tenure there, he was transferred to Crete. His experience in Crete seems to have inspired him to take up his pen again, but in the field of politics. The only exception amid all of his political articles in 1867 and 1868—with almost no counterpart from 1866 to 1869—was one piece of art criticism entitled “Ruskin and His Writings.” As the single article on art from these years, it is already significant, but it is all the more noteworthy as an unequivocal refutation of Ruskin. This 1868 article was a letter to the editor of the Nation, elicited from Stillman by an unnamed review of Modern Painters in a preceding issue of the journal. The review in question, according to Stillman, repeated “so many of the commonly received and utterly erroneous dicta concerning the ideas advanced in that book, and its general theory of art-study and criticism, that I am induced to ask room to controvert it in the interest of art-education.” Unlike in Stillman’s earlier review of Ruskin discussed above, he no longer defended the author of Modern Painters against the “bitterest hostility of the professional critics.” Now Stillman felt the need to dispute the assertion in the Nation that “ ‘the general tendency of Ruskin’s teachings in art is always right.’” This notion, Stillman said, “is just the contrary of what I believe to be the truth. I believe (and I have known him and his book for many years, and regard him as the most unhesitating lover of truth I have ever known) that Mr. Ruskin’s art-teachings are utterly wrong, based on an entirely erroneous estimate of the position of art in the intellectual system.”22 Certainly this is an emphatic reversal of Stillman’s former belief. Ruskin’s overarching mistake, according to Stillman, was the “erroneous estimate of the position of art in the intellectual system.” As evidenced by the rest of his letter to the editor, and by the ideas repeated in other texts, Stillman wrote this phrase with two main complaints in mind. He tells us straightforwardly that Ruskin’s error was having confounded morality with art. As we saw above, this was precisely the element of the Ruskinian philosophy to which Stillman had been so strongly attracted and so intent to propagate. Now, in the 1868 text, he declared that “while no other book can be quoted so full of intense perception and rapturous appreciation of nature and her claims on

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the artist, no other can be found which, with such thorough and conscientious seeking for art, manifests so little attained knowledge of its real character and uses. Ruskin’s nature was over-freighted on the moral side (using that word in its general acceptation with us), and ran too strongly into the devotional-didactic to be able to explore the sister but independent realm of artistic development.”23 Thus, art could not be properly defined, evaluated, and understood if it was placed conceptually inside of moral discourse or taken as a branch of moral explication. Second, for Stillman, “Ruskin’s ends of art are only its means; its most characterisitc and noble revelations of ends are expressive, not representative; what is in the artist, not the language borrowed from nature in which he tells it.”24 Twice Stillman made a distinction between “art” and “pictorial representation.” He used the word “representation” to signify verisimilitude and the detailed depiction of the visible world. He opposed it to “art,” which here signifies the artists’ own expressive conception. Stillman is not generally associated with expressivism in art, but it is, in fact, part of what defines the difference between his early and late criticism. Regardless of whether Stillman is credited with such an appeal for art as an expressive vehicle for the artists’ idea and a corresponding rejection of verisimilitude as art’s goal, that viewpoint certainly conforms to the historiographic constructions in question. But at issue is the relative place of this idea in Stillman’s more multifaceted discourse of art and whether he was indeed using it in the familiar way. That is to say, we need to consider its relationship to other, currently less discussed elements of the critical writing and the definitions of art it constructed. One prominent set of clues in the form as well as in the substance of the argument suggests that Stillman was not so concerned with rejecting Ruskin’s aesthetics or “nature transcription,” or even his moralism. He was instead most concerned with the role that moralism played in Ruskin’s art theory, and with the demands it made on art and art criticism and the ability of art or art criticism to be meaningful within the bounds of actual formal possibility. The rest of the chapter is devoted to elaborating this point. Stillman’s later writing is strongly informed by his sense of Ruskin’s error with regard to the definition of art. At the end of his life, Stillman even discussed in his autobiography (not in his articles) his own personal sense of error and loss as an artist in having originally adhered to Ruskin’s philosophy. His critical rejection of Ruskinian theory beginning in the late 1860s must therefore also be seen as in some way related to his realization that he

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had followed Ruskin too closely, to the detriment of his development as a painter.25 However, Stillman’s personal loss accounts only in part for his argument with Ruskin. It perhaps lurks in what we will see to be Stillman’s overly insistent desire for objectivity—as in his stance toward the Cretans— and for demonstrating impartiality, overtly separating the “facts” from issues of character. Stillman, however, seems also to have been legitimately highminded; he was rarely self-righteous in an egotistical sense but was instead concerned with stating what he had learned through his own means to be the “truth” (of any matter). In this case, the error that he repeatedly needed to discuss was not his personal failure as a painter so much as the idea that an erroneous definition of art had been—and remained—so influential. The dispute with Ruskin was, as noted, an important theme in Stillman’s later art criticism. Ruskin was specifically the subject of at least nine articles (and implicitly the subject of many others) in Stillman’s post-Crayon journalistic career. Only in the first of these nine, from 1860, was Stillman still an adherent to the philosophy of Ruskin. The next was the 1868 article discussed above. In this and the other seven essays, he reiterated his critique of Ruskin. Each of these refutations of Ruskin followed the same pattern. The formula separated Ruskin’s character from his teaching, praising the former and unequivocally disparaging the latter. The topic of Ruskin was always introduced with generous praise of the critic’s exemplary integrity as a moralist, followed by a detailed refutation of his art theory and his numerous shortcomings in perception, understanding, and logic. After Stillman’s first essay critiquing Ruskin’s art criticism in 1868, the next did not appear until 1883. There was one intervening article about Ruskin from 1871, which did not discuss art but reviewed Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workingmen and Labourers of Great Britain. In 1883, Stillman took up the recently published Art of England: Lectures Given in Oxford by John Ruskin. The resulting article demonstrates the pattern to which I refer. Stillman says that Ruskin’s “return to his Oxford professorship furnishes” a mature summing up of his views . . . [and] the expression of his definite conclusions as to the relations of art and nature, to which for nearly or quite forty years he has devoted himself with a sincerity which has no parallel in art literature, and the entire moral energy of a singularly exalted and unselfish nature. But the large tribute due to his noble and profoundly religious character—a tribute irreconcilable

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with a disrespectful regard of his view on any subject he considers worth his study—must not interfere with a critical estimate of views whose widely accepted authority gives them grave importance in aesthetic culture.26 Here is the same division of the characteristics of the man from the theories he expounded in Stillman’s earlier as well as later writings on Ruskin. In the 1868 essay, Stillman reminded the reader that he had known Ruskin and his book for years and he knew the profoundly truth-loving nature of the man, but his “art-teachings are utterly wrong” (emphasis in original). Though his formula for writing about Ruskin was less distilled in this earliest critique, Stillman always sought to compartmentalize and separate Ruskin’s character from his teachings. In fact, Stillman refined this formula to the point that his latest articles place these two principal features in direct opposition. For example, in 1893 he wrote a sharp review of a biography of Ruskin published that year by W. G. Collingwood. Stillman stated, “In point of fact, the man John Ruskin and the reformer John Ruskin are in the nature of a complete antithesis—the former a splendid, pathetic, and noble instance of consistent and logical devotion to the principles he laid down for the guidance of his fellow-men, and the latter as complete a failure in every attempt to guide them, so far as present results can be seen.”27 Thus, Stillman’s final rejection of Ruskin’s doctrines was emphatic and unequivocal. The pattern of dividing the man from his art theory, repeated beyond the dictates of critical neutrality, points to Stillman’s fundamental concern that morality and art could not be taken together. Indeed, they needed to be rigorously separated. Stillman’s careful compartmentalization, employed as a rhetorical device over the course of thirty years in his treatment of Ruskin, was evidently at the heart of his thinking. Its longevity and consistency argue for its centrality. This pattern allows us to see where the emphasis of Stillman’s disagreement lay. He contested the moral aspect of the art theory but not necessarily the moralism per se. He disparaged the consequences for art criticism, aesthetic comprehension, and the general understanding of what “true” art was. Not only did Ruskin’s highly principled and religious temper make him unable to perceive both nature and art rightly, but the dogmatism involved in understanding art as a moral tool was too narrow for the work of criticism and teaching. It could not admit of a broad range of forms and/ or contrasting opinions. And this approach imported meaning from outside

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the sphere of art, pushing out art’s “true” purpose, according to Stillman. It made art a metaphor. It left out the concrete formal expression. Ruskin’s vision of both art and the natural world was entirely conditioned by his desire to attach (or deny) moral significance to the object in question; he was continually impelled to assign to visual material unrelated descriptions and connotations. This forced attribution of meaning is precisely what we saw Stillman’s own Crayon articles doing, in the manner of Ruskin, with their excessively metaphorical style.28 Thus, when Stillman rejected Ruskin and simultaneously moved away from his own earlier, densely figurative language, as we will see in the next chapter, it showed his fundamental concern to limit the assignment to art of what now appeared to him to be external significance. Or, it showed that he began to perceive this attribution as such and to reject it, whereas previously the metaphors had worked for him—that was art.

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5 art discourse after ruskin Time and History in Art

William Stillman’s career from 1855 to 1868 shows that we have good reason to perceive that Ruskinian aesthetics and moralism went out of fashion. Stillman’s change of heart from his Crayon essays in 1855–56 to his numerous critiques of Ruskin beginning in 1868 might stand as proof of such. As argued, however, it was less the moralism that was troublesome to Stillman than the overtly metaphorical understanding of art that the Ruskinian definition demanded—the application of morals to the meaning of art. What did Stillman want in its place? Was he calling for a new definition of art in a way that Jarves and Cook actually were not? This chapter finds answers in Stillman’s critical language. The differences in Stillman’s post-Crayon language are indeed evident, and they correspond to the substantive criteria of his later art theory, just as his earlier language corresponded to the conceptions it delineated. First a word of warning. It is difficult to pursue an analysis of Stillman’s critical shift without being pulled into the logic of his argument. The postCrayon writing will bring us quite directly into forms of historical thinking about art, into comparisons of style based on notions of past and present usage, and into conceptions of historical change, sociocultural factors, and their bearing on subjective expression. Stillman moved both theoretically and linguistically toward more art historical bases for the understanding and assessment of art (as Jarves had only superficially professed to do), thus making this later writing resemble our own thinking to a greater degree. There-

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fore, we gravitate almost automatically to questions of why, of what factors might explain these changes. We feel more compelled to seek out those contextual elements that made him like us. We may be tempted to ask: What “historically” finally produced modern art history? While these are absolutely questions to ponder—and they are not without potentially enlightening correspondence to the events and discourses of Stillman’s day—I will nonetheless keep them at bay where they most forcefully assert themselves. Again, this is not because such questions are not relevant but because the point at hand is to understand how historical thinking moved into art discourse by way of the language and to what extent this language created an effect of history, or a discourse for art that shifted art into the realm of time as opposed to the timeless. Thus, it is important to remain skeptical not only about what “history” was to Stillman but also about applying our own explanation of historical change to Stillman’s art discourse—at least until we have completely dissected the rhetoric to see how it works. Of course, this still begs the questions of why language would change, why “an effect of history” would appear in art discourse, and where, if not in the material and cultural conditions of the moment, the answers would lie. So I repeat that this is not an argument for art and art discourse not being historical, not being bound at every level to their time. But as an investigation of how “history” itself is deployed in art discourse, it remains crucial, if frustrating, to avoid confusing the issue by introducing ostensibly “real” (our) historical questions into the mix. This will become clearer further on. We must first establish what is at stake in the distinction between a linguistically created effect of history and the historical. Turning, then, to the specific analysis of Stillman’s later criticism, we see signs of different priorities, and these correspond to the trajectory of our periodization: art began to be evaluated as a form, as a representation, as a creative process. The bases of discussion and of standards seem to be aesthetic and expressive. These imply a different definition for art than the one we have seen up to now in our critics’ words. Stillman’s post-Crayon writing took art to be a formal expression, a pictorial conceptualization whose aesthetic beauty, or richness, or strength, was its idea. Or, it might be stated that art was a successfully achieved aesthetic formulation whose value was derived from its expressive particularity. As such, artistic insight and artistic means became the cornerstones of “true” art. Yet, to be clear, Stillman was by no means suggesting that art was pure form, existing solely “for art’s sake.” The notion of an elevated subject remained firm. But the elevation

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was derived precisely from the pictorial, from the treatment of the matter at hand. The matter at hand might range considerably, from a landscape to mythological figures, but it must be “serious,” and its value will come from its treatment rather than from its relation to an external religious or moral conception. This too is a moral of sorts, as will become clearer further on. The key distinction for Stillman was that the ideal should reside within the art, in its ability to use its own properties to make a pictorial moral and in the capacity intrinsic to the formal handling to convey the exalted side of the object depicted. A range of forms and styles then also become acceptable and welcome. A closer look at Stillman’s language will help clarify this idea and its relationship to the other cornerstone of his later art theory: the importance of art’s history in both the making and understanding of art. The first example comes from a review of the American exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1878. It demonstrates simultaneously Stillman’s new post-Crayon use of language and his changed critical criteria. Instead of didactic excursions into art’s elevated properties, the Stillman of 1878 focused on aspects of school, comparisons among works of art, and references to styles of the past. He also employed a sharper tone, with none of the evangelizing optimism of his earlier writing. In his critique of American painting at the exposition, Stillman opened with what he admitted to be “a reprobation,” stating, It is not surprising that the responsibility of the American exhibition at Paris is bandied about somewhat, and that it is not easy to say here who is responsible for the very inadequate idea it coveys of even what little good art has been done in America. The prevailing impression one has on entering the room is that one has happened into a salon des refusés, whither a few good pictures had drifted in spite of the hanging committee; then one begins to feel that the pictures in general might be and probably are from Paris, or Munich, or Düsseldorf. One looks for something of the veteran Durand, who is always American and individual, and even, since the retrospective character of the exhibition admits Delacroix and Landseer, we might have had something of Cole, which would have been grateful in the prevailing frivolity of the exhibit.1 The exhibition clearly disappointed Stillman. He recorded a double complaint: “good” American art was infrequent enough, but the exhibition

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omitted what little of it there was. Note that the two painters he mentions by name as the absent worthies are Asher B. Durand and Thomas Cole. This is significant because their art is generally presumed to have fallen out of favor in the postbellum period, particularly among those like Stillman who had begun to incorporate aesthetic comparison and painterly considerations into their judgments. Stillman’s strong rejection of his antebellum art-as-nature conflation did not, however, preclude him from classing both of these artists among the “good” that America had to offer. Note, too, that art’s history and stylistic character were implicitly the basis for his discussion. Not only is this a substantial difference from his earlier writing, but these new criteria for art criticism also relied on a greater level of historical knowledge and connoisseurship for both critic and reader. Stillman made his points almost entirely by references to other schools of art and their attributes. In fact, it is the attributes—the stylistic and historical connotations of his references—that create the substance and the tone of his review. And this is established by means of the language. For instance, while Stillman may have meant literally that certain paintings came from Düsseldorf, or Munich, he was also being allusive. He was referring to the manner taught in the academies and popular ateliers of these cities, the respective stylistic features generally adopted by the American students of these schools, and their relative status as fashionable modes to emulate. These are autoreferential markers for evaluating and comparing art, relying on the (undoubtedly numerous) connotations attached to proper names and places. “Delacroix” and “Düsseldorf” thus became figures of speech. However, they are not metaphors; they are not the same kinds of tropes that Stillman employed in his earlier writing. Instead, the figures are metonymical and very representative of the language Stillman employed in his long postCrayon career.2 The metonymical reference to various schools implies that the discussion of art—indeed the definition of art—required at the level of semantic meaning a knowledge of past art, understanding of form, recognition of stylistic comparisons or references by the invocation of just a name. Art criticism with this type of auto-referentiality would seem to have become more about art—and by means of its history. Thus, Stillman’s later, ostensibly more art-centered art theory needed a form of critical language that built into itself a referential mode of explanation. “Seem” is the key, however. That is to say, while Stillman began to focus on characteristics with a more material basis—style and history—we also see that he deployed these categories figuratively. The tropes and their object

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are more rooted in the world of fact than his earlier metaphors for God, but they are tropic nonetheless. To explore this idea, we need to further consider the role of history in this later writing, starting with another look at the above review. In his assessment of the American pavilion at the Paris Exposition, Stillman singled out two paintings as particularly representative of good art, and as Jarves and Cook had done previously, he showed his cards in this way. It is to our further good fortune that Stillman, too, chose to highlight a painting by John La Farge, making for a rather precise point of comparison with the others. It was Elihu Vedder, though, who received Stillman’s most expansive discussion. His terms of praise for Vedder will give us a key to understanding the role of history in this art discourse. Taking La Farge first, we see Stillman’s emphasis on his anti-Ruskinian conception that art is what gives meaning to a subject and not vice versa. Stillman introduced the two artists together, saying, One is thankful in the interest of true art for the presence of the pictures of Vedder, especially “The Young Marsyas,” and the landscape of La Farge—“Paradise Valley”—both of which in their way should have their places amongst the best work of the Exposition. . . . La Farge’s “Paradise Valley” has but one grave fault—perhaps it carries the poverty of the subject to an excess. . . . But, this granted, the picture is to the landscape of the collection what Vedder’s is to the figures. It is a meagre subject, but like the poorest corner of mother earth it is steeped in sunshine, and melts away into space and light and seamist inch by inch, like a picture of Théodore Rousseau’s. The true secret of landscape painting is not in ranging Alps and Andes and exhausting unknown worlds—curiosity is, no more than archeology, a motive of Art—but in finding for any given scene the treatment which harmonizes best with its character, and brings out what of beauty and interest there is in it.3 With additional instances of metonymy, Stillman shaped art’s meaning in both negative and positive terms. His dismissal of archeology is such an example and will be taken up later on. Similarly, “ranging Alps and Andes” refers to contemporary landscape paintings that sought grandeur in the drama of the subject. The latter reference was certainly to the work of Frederic Church; the former may well have been to his own past misadventure with Ruskin. Stillman emphasized that true landscapes, by contrast, were

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those whose treatment and harmonizing brought out the beauty of a given place. The best modern landscapes were always painted from actual scenes or recollections of scenes, yet they were successful because of the artists’ treatment of the scenes. Art was thus neither purely naturalistic nor purely imaginative and expressive. The power of the “greatest masters”—and what made La Farge’s work stand out—was their ability to take the material and by their art make it meaningful. In fact, Stillman was determined to make this point, repeating it with an almost redundant elaboration of the dullness of the patch of land that La Farge transformed in Paradise Valley (1866–68; fig. 6): Given a green valley, sloping in the gentlest and most unpicturesque monotony away from you, not an object to break the scarcely valleyed surface, not even a mass of rocks to help out the distance by little dodges of light and shade; no trees to break the monotony of the lines, nothing more incidental than a lamb in the sun. . . . This “Paradise Valley” would be to any but a painter of true power and insight a

Fig. 6 John La Farge (1835–1910), Paradise Valley, 1866–68. Oil on canvas, 82.9 ⫻ 106.7 cm. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1996.92. Photo: Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago/Art Resource, New York.

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Paradise lost; but La Farge has caught its type and tone, and built on them. Barren, bleak, nude it was; he will not even make up a foreground; it shall remain nude as he found it. Not a tree shall be lent to its distances, and the kindly sea that offers its surges is warned away to its distant vapors; not even the trooping kine shall humanize by reflection the solitude. . . . I said “perhaps” it carried poverty of the subject too far; I don’t feel sure that, as an exception, a lesson, a show of his hand to his brother artists, it may not be better than if it had been richer, as Giotto’s “O” was; for this very poverty shows the triumph of the art more luminously.4 The priority comes through clearly: art makes meaning, creating beauty out of what is there, by means of pictorial form. This is different from both Jarves and Cook, for whom La Farge’s painting represented the presence or absence of the external ideal. For Jarves, recall that it was the “magnificent tone of coloring” that represented the painter’s spiritual vision. For Cook, the painterly form of La Farge’s work could in no way convey “truth.” Stillman, however, expressed in his praise of La Farge that the painting’s form itself was the locus of value, the meaning of the subject. In addition, having been a landscape painter, Stillman recognized in La Farge’s painting not simply a manner that appealed to him for its distance from his own former Pre-Raphaelite mode, but he was aware of the specific pictorial challenges that La Farge had intentionally taken up. It was indeed meant as an experiment for the creation of pictorial space and meaningful composition without the use of standard devices. According to La Farge scholar Henry Adams, the painter sought in this early work—completed after his Newport training with William Morris Hunt—to paint a site with no inherent interest, in conditions of light that would disallow the convenient device of shadow.5 In sum, Stillman wanted art’s meaning to come only from within the sphere of art—not to ignore the material world but to make it meaningful with the properties available to art and the insight of the artist. (Note that the latter, the artist’s individuality, is not overplayed either.) Such means, moreover, were to be derived from and compared with art’s history. Stillman made much of the idea of past masters and schools, stating in another review of the Paris Exposition that “the true relations of art to nature” are learned only from art training, from the “good teaching of the great masters in art,” which could give a man of talent in a year what he would otherwise

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not obtain in a lifetime.6 Stillman here refuted the “study nature” dictum, but he also explicitly rejected what he called the “self-taught.” Even individual genius, he argued, will get lost without the training, example, and experience that can be provided only by “scholastic method” and by the “sound methods of drawing and color” from the great schools. Stillman named some of these at the beginning of the review, indicating what he had in mind by “great school” but also, interestingly, defining the allusive referentiality of the term itself. Stillman stated that even though there is no “precise definition of art or school of art[,] [i]f one uses the historical title School of Siena, School of Venice, or of Bologna, we get a distinct idea of what is meant to be conveyed. . . . Any given picture . . . can be readily assigned to its proper place from possession of certain definite qualities, which show the training and traditions of the school.”7 This leads back to the example of Vedder and to Stillman’s tendency to invoke the art of the past by allusion, to draw distinctions between pasts and presents, old art and new art. He frequently employed the “art of antiquity,” “classical” art, and the art of “those masters whom we call ‘old’” as points of comparison and standards against which to measure the art under consideration. He singled out the work of Vedder, along with that of La Farge, as representing “true art.” What he said of Vedder suggests that part of history’s role in art was that it, too, offered a material means for making art about art. Of Vedder’s paintings The Young Marysas and Cumaean Sibyl he listed qualities such as “severe and correct” drawing and “subdued and harmonious, warm, luminous” color.8 The Cumaean Sibyl (1876; fig. 7) depicts the ancient prophetess trudging through the Italian landscape. She dominates the canvas, rising above the distant horizon and filling the left side of the picture. She grips a walking stick in her forward-thrust left hand while cradling the prophetic scrolls in her right, pressing them close to her body. Bent forward in a weary but determined gait, the figure seems also to crouch a bit under the pressure of the wind that blows strongly from behind, agitating her drapery and causing it to swirl out in front of her in energetic folds. The anatomy is well drawn, with clear attention to Renaissance prototypes for proportion, modeling, and drapery. The posture and the drapery of the sibyl are key elements of mood, expressing an almost tactile sense of the prophetess’s urgency in their outlines and in the strong contrasts of light and shade. The surrounding landscape participates in the mood with the undulating lines of middle-ground terrain, foliage, smoke, and shadow all echoing the agitated drapery. The distant mountains and cloud-filled sky add

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Fig. 7 Elihu Vedder (1836–1923), Cumaean Sibyl, 1876. Oil on canvas, 96.5 ⫻ 149.9 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit. Founders Society Purchase, Merrill Fund, 57.235. Photo: The Bridgeman Art Library, New York.

drama, as sharp, highlighted peaks touch a blustery sky that is likewise brightly lit and darkly shadowed by turns. The whole is yet tonal, and the colors that define the sibyl are those that predominate in the landscape. These formal qualities are rather distinct from what made La Farge’s painting so exemplary. Unlike the other two critics, Stillman was actually delineating a conception of art and not seeking to advocate for a preferred formal type as art. Getting to the point at hand, Stillman identified the ideal qualities of Vedder’s paintings as coming from past art. He made a point of saying that Vedder’s work defied precise identification of a local school. Instead he noted that the artist “wisely profited by those masters whom we call ‘old,’ but who are the only masters of true art work, and who are the basis of all schools which have produced work of the finest type.” Further on, Stillman claimed, “I can perceive the influence of the early Italian Renaissance in his thought, and of the best French painters in the color of the ‘Marsyas.’” And he remarked that the figure of the title was as “real a satyr as ever a Greek sculptured.”9 The historical in art turns up repeatedly as a term of value: the old masters, the early Renaissance, the best of the French painters, the Greek sculp-

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tors. These terms, however, do not invoke the aesthetic specificity of the past; rather, they allude to types that do not create a coherent formal prescription. They refer to an ideal of formal strength, of technical and pictorial sophistication, that Stillman can only describe by way of comparison to the art of the past. His recurring rhetorical preference for the art of the “past” was (metonymically, as before) a reference to and an idealization of a manner that helped him locate value within art—in its traditions and autoreferentiality on the part of both the painter and the critic who uses art’s terms to discuss art. History thus participates in Stillman’s art discourse as a material and aesthetic basis for the discussion and evaluation of art. It locates value in art’s history. However, history was an idea more than a particular series of events, dates, or narratives. Its role ought not be understood as that of bringing historical evidence to bear on criticism. It is better described as the use of the idea of history in art history: art’s past, or perhaps even the pastness of good art, was its meaning and value. Stillman invoked the historical in art to suggest that the ideal he described had no local or modern counterpart. The ideal—“true” art—was rhetorically located in the past, and the pastness of his references was very much their purpose. Indeed, I believe that the past was brought in to oppose what Stillman perceived as the modern alternatives. It was a gauge of the art—and ultimately the society—of his present. Another example will help make this point. Stillman contrasted his notion of the past with an example of a tendency he found to prevail in his moment. Ironically, this was a historical genre painting. Its creator was Frederick A. Bridgman (1847–1928).10 Bridgman’s Funeral of a Mummy (1876–77; fig. 8) fits perfectly into the category of imagery that Linda Nochlin so persuasively defined in relation to the concept of “Orientalism.”11 Filled with details cataloguing the exotic nature of the place and its people, Bridgman’s painting depicts two funeral boats laden with Egyptian funerary trappings, floating listlessly through the river in line with the lights and shadows defining the current. The glassy surface of the water, like the polished nature of the whole picture, seems to assure the factual character of the scene while imbuing it with sensual tactile value. The atmosphere is hazy, and golden light suffuses the whole riverscape while placing the funeral boats in dusky shadow. Stillman directly contrasted this picture with Vedder’s work. He stated that the art that “emulates archeology in attempts to restore antiquity . . . [like] restorations of such painters as Bridgman in his ‘Funeral of a Mummy

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Fig. 8 Frederick A. Bridgman (1847–1928), Funeral of a Mummy, 1876–77. Oil on canvas, 114.3 ⫻ 232.1 cm. Collection of the Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky. Gift of Mr. Wendell Cherry, 1990.8.

on the Nile’ . . . [which] may be full of archeological knowledge . . . [even if] true in every detail, would not be art, but science.”12 Stillman’s sense that all these “archeological” details did not add up to the real thing was undoubtedly accurate. However, his complaint with this manner—and he repeated it in many contexts—was that such an abundance of archeological details, so much description of the supposed facts, was neither history nor art. It failed to be historical, to be like the past. Worse still, it fell into a different category altogether: it was “science.” Stillman’s terms tell us that he was not making a straightforward complaint about too much attention to the anecdotal or the overly detailed. There would have been other names and allusions available to him with equally clear connotations for his readers, like those he employed elsewhere. He might, for instance, have compared Bridgman to Gérôme had he been interested in referring to the painter’s training and influences, or had he meant to criticize the slick surfaces, the antiquarian details, or the genre side of history painting. Likewise, had he been less open to diverse formal strategies, his terms could have been more clearly prescriptive in a formal sense. Thus, Stillman was criticizing something else, for which he needed the label “science.” What was this something else? Surely Bridgman’s “archeological” style was really not “science” any more than Vedder’s style was “history.” The labels were meant to contrast each other and the paintings to which they

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were applied. The historical in art, as suggested, was nothing so simple as a manifest interest in history. Rather, it was art’s source, a constituent of its materials, and it represented value that the present lacked. Science—history’s antagonist in Stillman’s discourse—embodied that present, a present that was contrary to both art and history. Here is one of the instances in which it is difficult to resist the pull toward a contextual explanation that would center on the notion that Stillman and many of his peers thought of their age as “scientific,” dominated by a materialist, fact-oriented approach to life. In that case, the terms above might best be explained by looking into this particular cultural circumstance and tracing its path into art criticism. But I want to insist on what we might be able to understand from the discursive use of “history” in art historical writing. Thus, in sum, the argument is that Stilllman, here and in many other instances, referred to the character of his times as materialist, bent on scientific modes of comprehension. (Though, as a man of his era, he too could no longer locate art’s value in timeless abstractions, seeking the more “factual” and concrete or “material” bases we have been considering.) He employed the term “science” to describe and disparage his age. “Ranging” among exotic places and distant mountains—to repeat an earlier example— in order to pique botanical or topographic “curiosity” was equally illegitimate for art, and Stillman mentioned it in the same breath as archeology. This was science. To invoke it as a critical term for art and to set it against the term “history” therefore constituted a comparison of present and past. What was good in art was located in the past; the negative side of this same equation was defined by science. Science stood for the present and those tendencies that were unartistic and detrimental to art—and perhaps to life, too. The present was inimical to art. Stillman’s distaste for the present was indeed at the heart of his rhetoric of history. In his “The Decay of Art,” an essay originally published in 1887 in the New Princeton Review, Stillman undertook an analysis of the present state of art and art education, which he believed to be profoundly in decline. His investigation turned on the principle of art’s relationship to the prevailing social and political conditions of the society in which it appeared. He did not accept the idea uncritically, and he did not, like Jarves, claim to employ the method while actually being unable to adhere to it. The treatment of art’s decline was thus set against the analysis of certain testable, or at least comparable, features in the history of societies. As with the other elements of Stillman’s later art theory, these isolated features of art’s social

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context appeared to be more directly about art or the conditions of its production, and not about God or morals or nature. “We have the unquestionable fact,” Stillman submitted, “that every nation which has progressed beyond the most primitive barbarism, has, before beginning that phase of civilisation which is characterised mainly by the accumulation of superfluities, been most intensely interested in and largely influenced by not only poetry and music, but that process of beautifying one’s self and surroundings which is the vital principle of art.”13 Thus art, he tells us, was a fundamental element of social development, and he goes on to offer numerous particular instances of ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy to make his point. Yet was Stillman discussing primarily a set of testable factors, laying out a positivist rationale for art criticism, or is this another instance of marshalling a rhetorical history in order to comment on the relative value of his moment? In fact, having stated this hypothesis about social development, Stillman gave voice to his main unanswered concern: “Has modern life become so differentiated from that of the early stages of human existence that the influence of beauty and the dependent influence of art become no longer essential to the healthful progress of the human intellect?”14 Stillman posed the question rhetorically; his mind was made up. Modern life, as he saw it, had mutated irreparably from “those stages of human existence” that had been susceptible to and dependent upon beauty and art, rendering the age incapable of and insensitive to art. One final representative passage will clarify what is at stake in Stillman’s sociohistorical interests and their employment in art discourse (and differentiate them from Jarves’s putative use of the same). The quote comes from Stillman’s retrospective collection of essays The Old Rome and the New. This book, published in London in 1897, brought together ten previously published essays that spanned the course of his long and diversified career. While it was already evident in the project of assembling a sample of earlier essays, Stillman stated overtly in his preface that it was “the natural and harmless vanity of a man who has earned his bread by literature . . . to hope that something may survive him.”15 The book was thus a kind of meditation on his career, a rewriting of his life story through his critical contributions, and a preliminary to the more fully narrativized version that would follow a few years afterward in his Autobiography of a Journalist. Significantly, the collection took its title—and arguably its broader thematic concerns—from the opening essay, which contrasts a past Rome with a present one. While Rome cannot be considered Stillman’s preferred diplo-

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matic post, favorite residence, or the subject of the majority of his writings, it lent thematic coherence to the essays he chose to highlight in his backward glance over his career. Indeed, Rome emblematized the concerns that occupied Stillman’s later art criticism. The Rome he remembered from his first time there had been replaced by a new one. He wrote of the vanished Rome in 1897, saying, In those days the Pope was king; life was cast in the mediaeval mould; all progress was an offence, not only to the custom of the place, but to the fitness of it, and the new-comer had hardly ceased to be new when he became conservative and citizen of this imperial Lotophagitis. Existence was a dream, and almost as cheap as one; there was no morning paper to harry our serenity, or thrust the daily disaster of a distant and indifferent community on our tranquility; we learned of most events when they had ceased to be startling. After the church, art was the theme of most thought, and the artist was the most important being after the priest. Roman life had its tides . . . but there was never any bustle or fever of business; there was no growth; there were no new houses; there was no blocking the streets with building material, no laying of drains or disturbance of the soil, no enterprise, and no new trades. . . . Every innovation was resisted as of the devil, and the possible horse of Troy for stealthy invasion. Rome had so maintained its position for the centuries of the papal rule; why change?16 This old Rome was not just a romantic survival of ancient and medieval architecture or of picturesque rituals; it was also a state of timelessness, the lotus-eaters’ fantasyland of oblivion. Of course, the value of this society relied heavily on the tangible presence of historical objects and the persistence of tradition. But, as a place, it also represented loss—a lost condition of innocence in which there had reigned a state of being without change, without linear time, a dream. The old Rome was also presented as the sociocultural context in which art flourished and “the artist was the most important being after the priest”—a condition that had lasted up until the upheavals of Italian unification and the pope’s displacement from temporal authority. It had been a society free of that which modernity brought materially (new houses and construction) and ideally (news of the world, innovation, and the awareness of the passage of time). Though something like an opiate, this past was a vision of plenitude now lost.

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But vision is the key. More than a historical context for art or art production, this was an image of it—both a hallucination and a picture. Stillman’s “old” Rome was literally illusory. For Stillman, history and the past thus find their way into art criticism as absences. They are what we have lost or what we can have only by means of imagining it creatively. The past gave him a way to write about art, to assign relative merit based on criteria that he specifically wanted to distance from the modes of his day, which were represented by “archeology” and “science.” His discourse of history allowed him to attribute to art the meanings, the absent factors, that he wanted attached to it. In a word—literally a word, and a key one in this argument— it was a metaphor. In sum, Stillman’s use of history or those various elements that might be called his discourse of history, including his contextual analysis and historicist approach, constituted a new metaphor for art. His early writing was overtly metaphorical in its noisy reliance on tropes and in the manner in which such language constructed art as religious morality. His post-Crayon writing still contained a powerful element of the metaphorical, but in a way that called far less attention to it. The writing employed fewer figures, and those that were used were more frequently metonymical, embodying a definition of art that was about art. The metonymical figures constituted a form of auto-referentiality to art’s own pictorial means, to its past, and to social aspects with evident links to art. Nonetheless, the discourse of history overall functioned in Stillman’s art criticism as a new metaphor that replaced his earlier and very essential meanings. Art still stood for things outside itself—not as before, when morality was imposed as meaning, but negatively, we might say, since it stood for that which the present lacked. Note, too, that art became associated with precisely those entities that the former metaphors prohibited: time, society, man’s culture. When God and timelessness were expelled from art’s definition, man and time moved in, or vice versa. There was an exchange of metaphors in a sense. The exchange perhaps refers to or enacts the larger loss Stillman contemplated in his later mode of critical writing. The use of history in art discourse, that is to say, gave form to Stillman’s doubts about the present, its lack of unity as experience (lived and visible), and its break with the continuum of time. Finally, reading Stillman’s writing in this manner, I return once more to questions about our modern desires for periodizing this era. Our periodization of this moment divides the past from the present in order to attach value

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to the post–Civil War society and its art. By contrast, Stillman’s metaphorical history (indeed, the exchange itself of the metaphors he employed) had a decidedly pessimistic cast to it. He saw loss all around him in the present; the decline in art was a metaphor for social decline and vice versa in his era. The terms of history and social context moved into art discourse and were there employed as comparative terms of value. They were terms that, in their very use, disparaged Stillman’s present moment. Far from the notions of formation, change, and expansion that drive our explanations of art, Stillman, having actually lived through revolutions and struggles for selfdetermination, did not find that the social and economic changes they provoked actually represented artistic progress. Stillman expressed deep doubts about the arrival of time and history into the realm of art, though he can hardly be called reactionary in actual politics or in his attitudes toward art. Modern life, Stillman tells us, most surely affected art, but in no way could he plot those modern artistic characteristics—which we too see as modern—as being positively related to those changes brought by modernity. In other words, our periodization recognizes the modern in those same aspects by which Stillman repeatedly defined art—the significance of art’s means and aesthetic conceptions, the expressive, the rejection of morality as a definition for art. Yet, whereas we plot them against conceptions of progress in time, and in positive relationship to social change, Stillman perceived them as almost the opposite. For Stillman, those characteristics he valued were valuable because they did not belong to the present but were instead derived from the world of art that referred to itself and its history. Stillman’s loss, then, would seem to have become our gain. In his discussion of his own historical moment, the terms of past and present, and the corresponding idea of art as a culturally constituted product of time and place, became part of art discourse and were used to discuss the arrival of continual flux, partiality, and the loss of a more complete, fully lived time. By contrast, we presently employ the past/present scenario in discussions of Stillman’s era to signify a leap into a better present (or future). How has this reversal come about? How do art’s historicity, its entrance into time, and its vulnerability to social change go from expressing loss for Stillman to expressing art’s most significant meaning for us? This question cannot be answered here. It is raised in order to suggest that if Stillman’s ideas of the past and art’s history were, in fact, only metaphors for an absent fullness or unity of experience, we must ask whether our construction of art’s history as bound to instances of formation, change, and expansion is fundamentally different.

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Is it not, in other words, equally metaphorical to represent the historical in art as change and expansion, time and “progress”? I have suggested throughout this study that critical and aesthetic classifications are used to frame a periodization for American art and that they help narrate a certain relationship between art and society, between artistic change and social transformation, between past and present. As the chapters have argued, the texts of the era’s critics (as well as the actual heterogeneity of the art produced) cast doubt over the principal outlines of such a narrative and over many of the particular examples generally assumed to substantiate it. Further, the division of past from present has had an agency in constituting a moral meaning for the art in question, despite how that division was perceived in the moment itself. Thus, the classification of American art history into periods is a form of organizing and ordering both art and history that seems to be first and foremost a narrative, but one with positivist presumptions (and positivist origins) that automatically help reinforce the factual feel of the schema. It is not fundamentally distinct from the historicism out of which it seems to have been born and which we have seen to be metaphorical. I have not argued, however, that art ought not be understood as intimately and essentially of its time, nor have I recommended a method that neglects to analyze it as such. Rather, the point has been to consider how periodizing gives a false sense of having situated art historically. Recall the words of Henry James in the epigraph to the introduction. Analogizing the project of assembling a biography from a “box of letters” to the composition of a group portrait, James said, “The sitters are all in their places, and the group fills the frame. We see thereby what has operated, we both recognise, so to speak, the principle of composition and are enabled to name the subject. The subject is the period—it is the period that holds the elements together, rounds them off, makes them right. They partake of it, they preserve it, in return; they justify it, and it justifies the fond chronicler. Periods really need no excuses.”17 James’s task in his commissioned biography of William Wetmore Story was to construct a book out of the disparate bits of evidence that remained of his life: Story’s correspondence with a great variety of peers from the worlds of art, politics, and fashionable foreign society. The material was abundant and surely filled with numerous similarities or potential themes, yet still disparate and lacking an inherent narrative. The composition of the events and characters thus rested on their ability to represent a period, which then rationalized but also constituted the project:

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“Periods really need no excuses.” What we might take from James is his skeptical attitude and the coaxing that he knew was needed for such a composition. The period itself—the period so determined by the pressing contact of the sitters drawn together to guarantee their existence by mutual connection—was the subject, despite the picture’s assertion that the sitters themselves constitute the subjects. Our sitters—the heterogenous works of art, the critical texts, the contextual events—are likewise drawn together and reciprocally sustain one another in a composition whose subject, still the period, is thus justified and rationalized, figuratively speaking. Literally speaking, it is rationalized as well by the materiality of time, the putatively objective quality that history and its events offer to the composition. In this book, I have wanted, above all, to pull our sitters out of their comfortable places and deprive them of their warmth and contact to see what the picture might then look like.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism”; Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought; Gerdts, “American ‘Discourses’”; Gerdts, “American Landscape Painting”; Johns, “Histories of American Art”; Harbert and Harbert, “Art Criticism in America”; Meservey, “Role of Art.” 2. Dearinger, Rave Reviews. His bibliography is also extensive, including several dissertations and master’s theses on the topic. Pam Meecham and Julie Sheldon have contributed a much more modest addition in the book Making American Art that is relevant nonetheless since, in proposing a thematic alternative to the conventional survey, the text includes “writing about American art” as one of the lenses through which to look at the conditions of art production in the United States. See their essay “Writing About American Art” in Meecham and Sheldon, Making American Art, 165–84. 3. M. Lyons, William Dunlap. 4. Johns, American Genre Painting; A. Miller, Empire of the Eye; Conrads, Winslow Homer. See also Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist. 5. Wolf, Romantic Revision. 6. See, for example, Bjelajac, “Boston Elite’s Resistance”; Rosenberg, “A Horrible, Powerful, yet Fascinating Picture”; Rosenberg, “Preponderance of Practical Problems”; and DeLue, George Inness. 7. See, for example, White’s Content of the Form and Metahistory. 8. The work of Paul de Man has been particularly influential to my reading. See, for example, his essay “The Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” in de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1–17, and de Man, Resistance to Theory. 9. Influential examples include texts such as Barbara Novak’s seminal American Painting of the Nineteenth Century. She noted the “struggle between eye and idea that was to engage the American painter from the late 1860s on; for after the Civil War, the growing domination of painterly perception (augmented by the theories if not the practices of Impressionism) changed the character of the picture” (173). Similarly, William Gerdts, in his and Bruce Weber’s In Nature’s Ways, states that “it is universally accepted that the radical metamorphosis in landscape painting is intricately related to the shift from conceptual to perceptual creation” (25). A similar ordering structures Joshua Taylor’s survey text The Fine Arts in America. His brief but insightful work pays more attention to the critical climate of the day. Wayne Craven, a couple of decades later, also summarized the shift in the book American Art: “Whereas mid-century painters saw their primary obligation to be a faithful if romanticized representation of nature, later artists were more concerned with art than nature. In the late nineteenth century, subject matter broadened beyond an empirical experience of the American scene to include subjective themes” (330). Studies of artists whose careers span these decades rely on similar formations. See, for example, Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt. On George Inness, see Cikovsky, George Inness, and Cikovsky and Quick, George Inness. On John La Farge, see Adams et al., John La Farge.

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notes to pages 6–9

10. For a more expanded summing up of methodological approaches in the field of American art history, see Wanda Corn’s important essay on the topic from the 1980s, entitled “Coming of Age.” For more recent contributions, see Davis, “End of the American Century,” and Mills, “Emerging Themes.” 11. For instance, Frances K. Pohl’s Framing America is a very good example of the manner in which social and theoretical commitments have appeared in recent American art histories. Like so many historians of American art, past and present, Pohl wishes to “examine how the meaning of a work is a function not only of its content, but also of where it is produced, where it is displayed, the identity of the artist, and how this identity is affected by race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. I am concerned with the place of art within struggles for power in both the public and private realms, and with rethinking the category ‘art’ itself” (11). The book still retains some traditional structures, such as the one in question here. Postbellum art is “redefined” in the standard ways, but under the rubric “work and art redefined” (chapter 5) by factors such as (though not limited to) new patrons and the new influence of women. Margaret Conrads’s fine Winslow Homer and the Critics, cited above for its close attention to critical writing, also periodizes by way of these conventional contrasts. See also Webster, William Morris Hunt, and Banta, “Raw, Ripe, Rot.” Barbara Groseclose, in her excellent introductory text Nineteenth-Century American Art, gives a critical overview of the field, referring constantly to the historiography and thus presenting many of the received ideas as ideas, attached to particular moments and agendas. She indicates a skeptical approach to the standard periodization, noting, for example, the classification of the landscape painter George Inness “as though he belongs to a post-war generation” (137). Thus, while the supposed opposition of techniques and conceptions of pre- and postwar generations are allowed to stand (Church’s style versus Inness’s), we are alerted to at least one possible fiction in the classificatory schema. 12. In my own case, Patricia Hills, Elizabeth Johns, and Alan Wallach are scholars whose work exemplifies this tradition, grounding my belief in the social meaning of American art history—not just American art. 13. White, Metahistory, ix–x. 14. Here, too, the issue spans methodologies. While it may be overt and reified as meaning in some of the classic texts noted and only one aspect of more critical accounts employing current methodological strategies, the assumption remains that subjectivity replaced objectivity. DeLue’s nuanced and sophisticated reading of Inness, for example, relies on this chronological basis in relating the two ostensible poles. See DeLue, George Inness. 15. In recent decades, the relationship between words and images has received renewed attention, most prominently in the work of W. J. T. Mitchell. In his Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Mitchell theorized the verbal and the visual as mutually dependent and constantly defining and redefining each other in ways that indicate ideology. David Miller’s volume American Iconology seeks to bring Mitchell’s insights to bear on the study of American art. And an important example of foregrounding the visual and its role in representation is Michael Leja’s Looking Askance, on nineteenth-century visual habits and notions of seeing, and Jonathan Crary’s influential work on historical practices of seeing and discourses of vision. See, for example, his Techniques of the Observer. 16. See, for example, Taylor, Fine Arts in America, 95–96. Taylor recognizes Jarves as an important influence bearing on the midcentury “crisis” in art. See also Novak, Nature and Culture, 31; Bjelajac, American Art, 227–30; and Craven, American Art, 329–36. The newer introductory texts by Barbara Groseclose and Frances Pohl cite Jarves as well, fragmentarily and in passing, but as one whose taste was indicative or whose opinion was telling. See Groseclose, Nineteenth-Century American Art, 119, 123; Pohl, Framing America, 153; and Conrads, Winslow Homer, 26–27. Charles Colbert has focused more extensively on Jarves, as seen through the lens of nineteenth-century “spiritism.” Colbert, “Critical Medium.”

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17. Steegmuller’s Two Lives is an excellent source of biographical information, with ample reference to or excerpts from Jarves’s correspondence, largely held by Yale University. See also Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism,” and Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves.” 18. Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves,” 332. See also Steegmuller, Two Lives, 8–9. 19. According to Jarves’s description, his father, “Deming Jarves of Boston, who died in 1869, was the first man in America to establish the manufacture of [Venetian-inspired glass].” This was the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, founded in 1825. Cited in Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves,” 330. 20. See David Lubin’s essay “Guys and Dolls: Picturing Femininity in Post–Civil War America” in his Picturing a Nation for a reading of the artist’s postbellum popularity as it related to current discourses of childhood and the “massive post–Civil War cultural rejection of all residual Calvinist beliefs” (215). See also Jochen Wierich’s “ ‘War Spirit at Home’ ” on Lilly Martin Spencer’s mixed fortunes within a changing market. On Bierstadt and his entrepreneurial success and audiences, see Anderson and Ferber, Albert Bierstadt. 21. Cook’s role as a founding member of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art and editor of its journal, the New Path, is studied at length in Ferber and Gerdts, New Path. See also Dickason, Daring Young Men, and Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought. 22. Jarves was also a follower of Ruskin, but it did not lead him to prefer the PreRaphaelite aesthetic, for reasons that chapter 1 tries to illuminate. 23. Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism,” 133–54. 24. It is David Dickason who identifies this book as Cook’s most popular work. Dickason, Daring Young Men, 89–91. 25. Ibid., 91. 26. As Linda Ferber notes, the American Pre-Raphaelites “should be understood as a radical manifestation, among a small group of artists, architects, and critics, of the pervasive influence of Ruskin’s ideas in this country.” Ferber and Gerdts, New Path, 15. 27. Corn, “Coming of Age,” 201. 28. See Davis, “End of the American Century,” for a clear picture of the most prominent tendencies and what he refers to as the “core” of American art history. 29. Meecham and Sheldon’s Making American Art takes its point of departure from the idea that “what is American” remains a fundamental lens through which to see the art and art history of the United States (1–13). On the opposite end of the methodological spectrum— and still one of the most overtly theoretical and form-driven accounts—Lubin’s Picturing a Nation is also premised on a certain kind of equation between art and social change. Lubin states that the book “examines how various groups of nineteenth-century Americans pictured themselves in their art. In so doing they pictured their nation—either as they thought it was or thought it should be. Artistic representation, as such, indirectly amounted to a form of political representation” (x). Examples of art historical accounts premised on the idea that significant social change characterizes the moment in question are too numerous to list. A few important examples, drawn from studies particularly relevant to this book, are Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist; Myers, “Public Display”; Conrads, “ ‘In the Midst’ ”; and Banta, “Raw, Ripe, Rot.” 30. Stillman, Autobiography, 1:114, 140. 31. On Stillman’s friendship with these famous Cantabrigians and their wilderness excursions, see Everson, “William Stillman.” On Stillman’s recollections of the “Adirondack Club,” see his article “Philosophers’ Camp.” See also F. Miller and Rotundo, Catalogue, xi–xv. 32. The Philosopher’s Camp currently hangs in the Concord Free Public Library in Concord, Massachusetts. According to Barbara Rotundo, it is the only one of Stillman’s paintings still on exhibition; F. Miller and Rotundo, Catalogue, xiii. This very competent Hudson River–type painting situates the ten philosophers and their guides in the midst of a carefully

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delineated woods that dominates the canvas. And yet the woods opens in balanced alcoves that frame the various members of the club, who are divided into smaller groups representing the range of their different interactions with nature, from biological investigation to hunting to contemplation. Like Asher Durand’s In the Woods of three years earlier, Stillman’s painting does not offer a panoramic view into the distance but instead presents a dense wooded interior. There are bright spots of light here and there that show Stillman’s commitment to studying and representing outdoor effects rather than relying on conventional Hudson River school arrangements of light and shade. 33. Stillman, Autobiography, 1:130, 298, 308–26. See also Dickason, Daring Young Men, 33–46. 34. For a monographic study of the journal, see Simon, “ ‘The Crayon.’ ” See also Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 1–31; Dickason, Daring Young Men, 47–64. 35. Stillman recounted his labors in his Autobiography, 1:221–31. 36. Ibid., 1:116. 37. Dickason supplies a condensed list of Stillman’s adventures and friendships in Daring Young Men, 33–46; Stillman’s Autobiography discusses them all at length. The Autobiography refers to his mental and physical illness as a result of overwork (231). 38. For a summary of his journalistic output, see F. Miller and Rotundo, Catalogue, xvi–xxi.

Chapter 1 1. Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves.” The reference to the biographical dictionary comes from Boas, “Critical Practice.” 2. In addition to Boas, “Critical Practice,” see Comstock, “Yale Collection,” and Gardner, “History of a Collection.” 3. The first rewritten collection list, the Manual of the Jarves Collection, was published in 1868 by the architect Russell Sturgis. It maintains Jarves’s opinions but represents a smaller collection—down to 119 pictures from the original 145—due to the removal of some controversial pictures and the sale of others. In 1895, William Rankin severely critiqued a great many attributions of individual works and questioned the value of numerous others. His reassessments, demonstrating a high degree of informed connoisseurship and study, led him to conclude that “estimated as exhaustively representative on the historical side, even the greatest collections are misleading; over-estimation of single works is likewise to be guarded against. . . . It would be profitable for us to care less about proving our Gothic altar-pieces Giottos and more about their interpretation as records of medieval sentiment and thought.” Rankin, “Some Early Italian Pictures,” 150. Additional reassessments followed in the early twentieth century; see Sirèn, Descriptive Catalogue. Osvald Sirèn was very critical of Jarves’s attributions. Though he suggests that misattributions were par for the course at that time, he made it plain that the actual errors were quite substantial: “He sees Giotto’s hand in Taddeo Gaddi’s work,” “he freely mixes Florentine and Sienese schools,” and he “presents a fabrication of the XIX century as a masterpiece by the youthful Raphael” (xxiii). Richard Offner suggests additional revisions in Italian Primitives. 4. George Boas, for instance, looks quite analytically at Jarves’s writing and gives specific examples of how his “practice has little to do with his theory”; Boas, “Critical Practice,” 298–300. Sizer admits that Jarves wrote a book about Japanese art without ever having been to Japan, even though the Boston paper at the time suggested otherwise; Sizer, “James Jackson Jarves,” 335. And Steegmuller does not hide the examples of Jarves’s correspondence that show the extent to which he continually redefined the nature of his collection as attributions were shown to be false and the value could consequently no longer be based on masterpieces; Steegmuller, Two Lives, 189–95, 206–9.

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5. For Jarves’s role in the demise of the so-called Hudson River school, see, for example, Ferber, “Albert Bierstadt,” 27–30; Kelly, Frederic Edwin Church, 126; and Conrads, Winslow Homer, 26–27. Barbara Novak, from a slightly different perspective, calls Jarves “the only important critic [of that time] who was not beguiled by the rhetoric of the operatic landscapes.” Novak, Nature and Culture, 31. 6. The book also sold well during Jarves’s lifetime. According to Steegmuller, it appeared in “at least four American editions, of which the fourth bears the date 1877.” Steegmuller, Two Lives, 217. 7. The 1864 publication was entitled The Art-Idea: Part Second of Confessions of an Inquirer. The available and authoritative edition of The Art-Idea was edited by Benjamin Rowland Jr. and published in 1960. Citations to the latter will be given parenthetically in the text. 8. Hunt studied briefly at Düsseldorf after leaving Harvard to pursue art. Unsatisfied, however, he turned to France, where he eventually ended up at Barbizon, finding the training and principles most sympathetic to his own ideas. He had a successful career in Newport and Boston from the mid-1850s until his death in 1879. 9. Both served as president of the National Academy of Design. Durand’s landscapes enjoyed wide popularity during his long lifetime and are considered one of the founding models for the Hudson River school type. Huntington was a successful portrait painter with aspirations toward history painting in the Italianate manner. 10. In one of the only other recent studies of Jarves, Charles Colbert notes another important inconsistency: Jarves was very Ruskinian in his conception of art, yet he absolutely rejected Pre-Raphaelite painting in both England and America. Colbert suggests that this and other facets of Jarves’s art theory must be understood within the context of his spiritualist beliefs. See Colbert, “Critical Medium.” 11. In addition to numerous articles published over decades, drawn from his Hawaiian experiences and European travel, Jarves published at least six essays between 1860 and 1864, when The Art-Idea came out. These articles are largely extracts from that text and from Art Studies of 1861. For instance, two articles published in the Christian Examiner in March and July 1862, respectively, contain long passages that reappear in The Art-Idea. In the March essay, entitled “Can We Have an Art-Gallery?,” pages 207–11 correspond to pages 263–66 in The Art-Idea, with some interesting changes. A few generally more critical sentences are removed from the book, and some European gallery statistics seem to be padded a bit. In the July article, entitled “The Art of America and the ‘Old Masters,’” pages 73–81 correspond, without alteration, to pages 156–64 in The Art-Idea. With regard to modern inattention to Art-Hints, Roger Stein is an important exception, offering one of the few lengthy discussions of that text. He does not exaggerate Jarves’s role, noting that the book was neither original nor well received. See Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 124–46. 12. Steegmuller quotes a letter from Jarves to Charles Eliot Norton in which Jarves stated, “The Gallery without the book or the book without the Gallery in America would be failures.” Steegmuller, Two Lives, 187. 13. Sirèn, Descriptive Catalogue, xxiii. 14. For example, Jarves’s correspondence with Margherita Mignaty, held in the collection of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Florence, Italy, evokes a picture of a man struggling to stay afloat financially, coping with family problems, and very eager for praise among the literary set in Florence. Mignaty Papers, Biblioteca Nazionale, Florence, C.V. 196, docs. 85–94. See also Steegmuller, Two Lives, 167–68, 199–201, 206–9. 15. Though I cannot prove it, it is probable that many of Jarves’s panels were things recently on the market, being sold off as churches and other ecclesiastical establishments were embattled (or already suppressed) in the wake of the republican successes in the unification of Italy. Votive panels and church furnishings of all sorts were frequently, though

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illicitly, available for purchase at low cost. I thank Cesare Landrini for discussions on this topic. 16. In each city, beginning with Boston in 1859, Jarves proposed that his paintings, taken as a lot, might form the nucleus of a public museum. He claimed that he preferred to sell the pictures together in order to preserve the historical sequence they demonstrated. For a complete narrative of the failed attempts, ending with the sale of the pictures by auction to Yale College in 1871, see Steegmuller, Two Lives, 164–265. Steegmuller includes extensive documentation from Jarves’s private correspondence and public reviews, which indicate the difficulties, disfavor, and distrust that followed Jarves’s enterprise. See also “Private View at the Institute of Fine Arts” and “Opening of the Institute of Fine Arts.” 17. In the preface to Art-Hints, Jarves claimed that his contribution was to write a book “in a popular form” that presented the “abstract principles and rules of Art” alongside “an outline of its historic progress and social relations.” The “facts and ideas” themselves, he acknowledged, were already known and discussed by John Ruskin, Francis Rio, Lord Lindsay, and Anna Jameson. Jarves, Art-Hints, vii. 18. I also agree with Boas, who states that Jarves “was with Ruskin in England and with Hegel on the Continent in his conception of art.” He further notes that regardless of the overtly Hegelian terminology that Jarves sometimes employed, when he actually analyzes the individual artist in his writing, we loose all sight of the individual as “but the agency through whom the Idea manifests itself.” Boas, “Critical Practice,” 298–99. 19. For a good introduction to these philosophies and their relationship to art history, see Hamilton, Historicism. For the 1875 article, see Jarves, “Pen-and-Ink Likenesses.” 20. Strident anti-Catholic positions were common at this time. Charles Eliot Norton, a future supporter of Jarves’s bid to sell his collection in Boston, routinely exhibited this bias. See also William Vance, Catholic and Contemporary Rome, 23–65. 21. Emanuel Leutze (1816–1868) was born in Germany and raised in the United States. He returned to Germany in 1841 to study at the Düsseldorf academy, thereafter living in both the United States and Germany. His large-scale history paintings dramatizing events from U.S. history were very popular with his American audience. 22. For an analysis of the coincidence of “materialism” as an economic and critical term in mid-nineteenth-century art writing, see Georgi, “Defining Landscape Painting.” 23. In his introduction to The Art-Idea, instead of introducing the topic of the book, Jarves recounted—in the character of a patient martyr—his struggles with his collection and the public’s misunderstanding of it. Indeed, it seems that this was the topic for him. His reasons for writing the book are inextricable, by his own acknowledgment, from his trouble in America with regard to his collection. “I have been under no illusion as to popular sympathy,” he stated. “No one more practically knows the obstacles to be removed before the goal is reached” (12; my italics). 24. Citations to Art-Hints refer to its 1855 printing and will be given parenthetically in the text. 25. Henry Ward Beecher is quoted without citation in The Art-Idea. 26. Jarves expressed an enthusiastic change of heart about his country at this time. He recounted to his friend Margherita Mignaty in Florence in 1857 that he saw “more to value here with each visit” and that his son had become “fanatically patriotic.” Later he himself poured forth, “Our war becomes more bloody as it progresses. This must be because it is the issue of freedom vs. slavery—this latter from being our master is now struggling in its death gasp. . . . Emancipation is nigh at hand. . . . The accursed institution that has brought this present trouble on our people and has made us always an anomaly as a republic, in the eyes of civilized nations [is falling]. . . . We mean . . . very soon to present to the world an unsullied

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escutcheon, as the symbol of true liberty. The war begun here will eventually extend over Europe.” Jarves, Boston, to Margherita Mignaty, Florence, June 22, 1862, Mignaty Papers.

Chapter 2 1. Cook, “National Academy of Design,” 4. 2. The reviews, entitled “Exhibition of Pictures at the Sanitary Fair,” appeared in the New-York Daily Tribune on April 9, 1864, and April 16, 1864. 3. Following Cook’s initial reviews, cited above, responses and counterresponses appeared in Curtis, “Art Criticism,” April 30, 1864, May 7, 1864, and June 4, 1864; Cook, “Art Criticism”; and Beard, “Art Criticism.” 4. Cook, “Exhibition of Pictures,” April 9, 1864, 12. 5. Ibid. 6. Cook also expressed his ideas in the New Path. The journal’s twenty-four issues were published from May 1863 to December 1865. This will be discussed in the next chapter. See also Ferber, “‘Determined Realists,’” 19–20, and Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 124–46. 7. The letters constituted an important contribution to the Crayon in its first year of publication. This journal will be discussed in chapter 4. 8. The first two letters of the series are particularly good examples. See Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting: Letter I,” 2, and “Letters on Landscape Painting: Letter II,” 34. 9. One might argue that both of these men were adherents of Ruskin and were consequently similar. However, Durand’s letters express ideas that were widely held in his time, and I use his writing to exemplify the moment that Cook defined as “passing away.” Also, as Roger Stein argued decades ago, Ruskinian thought prospered in America because it suited existing American tendencies, beliefs, and tastes that persisted across these decades. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, vii–xi. 10. Thomas Charles Farrer (1839–1891) was an English painter who spent time in the United States after 1860, painting and exhibiting with the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art. Like the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the American group was very interested in minute copying from nature. 11. Cook, “Metropolitan Fair,” 12. 12. As with fig. 3, this example is highly representative of the style under discussion, and the two works were painted within a few years of each other. John La Farge (1835–1910), an American painter strongly influenced by his travels in France, studied with fellow Francophile William Morris Hunt in Newport in the late 1850s. He experimented widely with a variety of media and was very successful in decorative work-most importantly, Trinity Church in Boston—and stained glass. 13. Cook, “National Academy of Design,” 4. 14. Ibid. 15. John La Farge, “Notes, Memoranda, and Other Material by and About John La Farge: Recorded to Aid Royal Cortissoz in Writing His Biography,” cited in Yarnall, “Nature and Art,” 89. 16. Jarves, Art-Idea, 185. 17. Ibid., 178. In her study of George Inness, Rachel Ziady DeLue analyzes Inness’s focus on a similar concept of an empirical view of nature actively hampering the “true” vision and spiritual essence that needed to be expressed. She approaches the question by way of contemporaneous discourses of vision, making an important contribution to our understanding of this complex issue. See DeLue, George Inness.

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18. Jarves, Art-Idea, 175. 19. Cook, “National Academy of Design,” 3.

Chapter 3 1. The New Path ran from May 1863 to December 1865, and Clarence Cook was its first editor. On the New Path and the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, see Dickason, Daring Young Men, 71–82; Wodehouse, “New Path”; Ferber, “ ‘Determined Realists’ ”; and Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism. 2. Cook’s House Beautiful of 1877 compiled the essays from his Scribner’s series entitled “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks,” which ran from 1875 to 1877. David Dickason calls this Cook’s most popular work; Dickason, Daring Young Men, 91. The section on American art in Art and Artists of Our Time began at the end of volume 5 and continued through much of volume 6. 3. Curtis, “Art-Criticism,” April 30, 1864, 274. 4. See, for instance, Beard, “Art Criticism.” 5. See, for example, Gerdts, “Through a Glass Brightly.” 6. See Dickason, Daring Young Men. For background on the English Pre-Raphaelites, see Staley, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape, and Werner, Pre-Raphaelite Painting. 7. As the New Path stated, “Stirring up strife; . . . breeding discontent . . . pulling down unsound reputations . . . making the public dissatisfied with the work of most of the artists was the purpose of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art.” “Letter to a Subscriber,” New Path 1, no. 9 (1864): 114, cited in Ferber and Gerdts, New Path, 14. 8. Cook, “Exhibition of Pictures,” April 16, 1864, 12. 9. Ibid. 10. Cook, “Royal Academy II,” 2. 11. Indeed, Cook and many of his peers routinely praised a given picture by claiming that it was “manly.” 12. Dickason, Daring Young Men, 83–124, gives biographical background for each of them. 13. Dickason suggests that Wight is the probable author of the essay; ibid., 100. 14. Quoted in ibid. 15. Quoted in ibid., 100–101. On the relationship between labor and the British Victorians, see Barringer, Men at Work. 16. On popular treatises about household aesthetics, see McClaugherty, “Household Art,” and Jones, “Distance from Home.” 17. Cook, “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks: Some Chapters on HouseFurnishing,” 172. 18. Ibid., 174. 19. Cook, “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks: More About the Living-Room,” 346. 20. Cook, “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks: Still More About the LivingRoom,” 488. 21. Ibid., 490. 22. See Lears’s No Place of Grace for an elaboration of what he identified as the antimodernist tendencies in postbellum America that developed in opposition to the social and cultural forms of tumultuous capitalist expansion. 23. Cook, Art and Artists, 5:148–49. 24. Ibid., 6:257. 25. Whistler left the United States to study art in Paris in 1855, and he remained permanently abroad. Included among the painters at the famous 1863 Salon des Refusés, Whistler

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was the preeminent expatriate modernist. He lived much of his life in England and famously clashed with Ruskin in 1879. 26. Cook, Art and Artists, 6:258. 27. Ibid., 6:260. 28. Vedder left the United States in 1856, staying briefly in Paris before settling in Italy for the rest of his life. He was known for imaginative subjects and fantastic imagery. He produced some highly successful book illustrations as well. 29. Cook, Art and Artists, 6:254. 30. Ibid., 6:265. 31. Ibid., 6:259. 32. Ibid., 5:130–31. 33. I refer the reader to the discussion of historiography in the introduction. 34. Wanda Corn discusses this and other tendencies in the scholarship on American art in her essay “Coming of Age.” See also John Davis’s extensive review of the literature of American art history in “End of the American Century.” 35. Jules Prown succinctly summarized this idea in his “Editor’s Statement” in a 1984 issue of the Art Journal. In the same issue, see also Elizabeth Johns’s essay devoted to American art, entitled “Histories of American Art.” 36. For background on this tradition and its recent discussions, see Heffernan, “Ekphrasis and Representation”; Krieger, “Ekphrastic Principle,” 105–28; Mitchell, Iconology; and D. C. Miller, introduction and afterword to American Iconology, 1–17 and 276–96.

Chapter 4 1. See F. Miller and Rotundo, Catalogue. 2. The Crayon was published from 1855 to 1861, though Stillman left after 1856. The journal was intended as an American vehicle for Ruskinian thought, as Stillman himself repeatedly indicated (see, for example, his Autobiography, 1:221–31). However, its ideas were a more synthetic blend of current notions, as Roger Stein has argued in his John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 101–23. For a monographic study of the journal, see Simon, “ ‘The Crayon.’” See also Ferber, “‘Determined Realists.’” 3. Stillman, Autobiography, 1:223. 4. Stillman’s Autobiography is the source of much of our knowledge about his activities. The Stillman archival collection is held by Union College, his alma mater. The contents are thoroughly cataloged and accompanied by a brief biographical essay in F. Miller and Rotundo, Catalogue. See also Simoni, “Art Critics and Criticism,” 64–118; Dickason, Daring Young Men, 33–64; and Szegedy-Maszak, “American on the Acropolis.” Additionally, William Vance devotes occasional paragraphs to Stillman in his monumental study Catholic and Contemporary Rome, 202–4; earlier sources include Everson, “William Stillman.” 5. In the small body of writing on Stillman, I find a mistaken notion of Stillman’s position with regard to Ruskin. Generally, Stillman is represented only by his youthful years as a landscape hopeful and self-styled “apostle of Ruskin,” or he appears in the context of photography. In both cases, his career is narrated to fit the respective scope. Elizabeth LindquistCock, for example, notes correctly enough that Stillman both did and did not adhere to Ruskin’s ideas about the role of nature in art but fails to see that he did not vacillate between these positions throughout his life; instead, he changed his mind. His art theory and his ideas about photography are consequently misunderstood. More recently, Andrew SzegedyMaszak has studied Stillman in greater depth, again in the context of photography. However, he too, in my opinion, misreads Stillman by taking the photographer’s work as representative of the artist’s work. That is to say, he assumes, as did Lindquist-Cook, that photography was

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art for Stillman. Certainly his photographs were composed aesthetically and were deeply informed by conventions of various kinds, and they are accomplished and more than typically intelligent. They are manifestations of a man creatively engaged with, and devoted to, both art and nature. But Stillman was clear about photography’s status: it was not art. He even employed photography as art’s antithesis in his writing to support his ideas of what art was. In part, this is why it was both a hobby and an entrepreneurial activity for him. Thus, while his photographs certainly do express some of his aesthetic training, they ought not to be used as representative of his definitions of art and his relationship to Ruskinian philosophies. See Lindquist-Cock, “Stillman, Ruskin, and Rossetti,” and Szegedy-Maszak, “American on the Acropolis.” 6. Stein is an exception. He includes Stillman among the many who began to reject Ruskinian moralizing ideals and art definitions in the 1860s. For a thorough discussion, see the essay “The Attack on Ruskin” in Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 186–223. 7. Stillman, Autobiography, 1:97, 331–32. 8. The consular dispatches that record his reports of this business are included in Stock’s Consular Relations, 214–95. 9. These include Stillman’s “War in Candia”; “Crete”; “Cretan Chances of Success”; “Cretan Affairs”; “Cretan Correspondence”; “Turkey and Greece”; and “Farce in the Levant.” 10. Stillman, “Turkey and Greece,” 366–67. Emphasis in the original. 11. Other members of Stillman’s generation with Ruskinian beginnings also seem to have rejected Ruskin later in life—though not necessarily in the fundamental sense that I will discuss here. David Dickason notes in Daring Young Men, for instance, that Russell Sturgis, a founder of the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, wrote very critically of Ruskin toward the turn of the century (110–12). See also Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 186–223. 12. Stein, John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought, 101–23. 13. Stillman, “Introductory,” 1. 14. Ibid. This passage is a very characteristic one and is cited by Janice Simon as well. She notes the unmistakably redemptive role assigned to “beauty as embodied in nature.” Simon, “‘The Crayon,’” 84–85. My interest in this passage, though, lies in the rhetorical construction of the terms, the manner in which the language itself helps beauty come to be “embodied in nature,” and how both are made to stand for particular cultural dictates. 15. Paul de Man analyzes the frequent coincidence of themes of nature with those of imagination and (artistic) creation in romanticism, arguing that this is fundamental to the period—a feint that artistic creation originates like nature. Stillman would seem to fit this pattern. De Man’s point, however, is that this rhetoric is fundamentally paradoxical. His particular articulation of the paradox may not be directly implicated in the troubled sound of Stillman’s prose, but his identification of a core tension in the pairing of nature with artistic creation certainly is. See his essay “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image” in de Man, Rhetoric of Romanticism, 1–17. 16. Stillman, “Review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters,” 239. 17. Ibid., 239–40. 18. The Standard Dictionary of Philosophy terms syllogism a type of “formal logic” that structures propositions of deductive reasoning “by a method which abstracts from the content of propositions which come under consideration and deals only with their logical form. The distinction between form and content can be made definite with the aid of a particular language or symbolism in which propositions are expressed, and the formal method can then be characterized by the fact that it deals with the objective form of sentences which express propositions and provides in these concrete terms criteria of meaningfulness and validity of inference.” Church, “Formal Logic,” 186. 19. Stillman, “Beauty and Its Enemies,” 161.

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20. Stillman, “Duty in Art,” 59. 21. Stillman, Autobiography, 97, 1:331–32. 22. Stillman, “Ruskin and His Writings,” 437. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. In his Autobiography, Stillman alluded simultaneously to personal and artistic differences with Ruskin—though here, too, displaying his desire to be impartial, he discussed his relationship with Ruskin and his ideas with circumspection. He noted, for instance, that early on he occasionally had reason to doubt the “accuracy of Ruskin’s perceptions of nature” and that their friendship “lasted with varying degrees of intimacy, and some interruptions due to his sympathy with the South . . . until 1870, when it was terminated by a trivial personal incident.” He lamented that they had “separated more and more widely in our opinions on art in later years. . . . The differences came to me reluctantly, for my reverence for the man was never to be shaken.” Stillman, Autobiography, 1:129–30. 26. Stillman, “Art of England,” 297–98. 27. Stillman, “Ruskin as Expounded by a Ruskinian,” 159–60. 28. On the idea of metaphor as forced attribution, see de Man, “Intentional Structure of the Romantic Image.”

Chapter 5 1. Stillman, “Paris Exposition: American Painting,” 210. 2. Hayden White has argued that we might fruitfully speak of metaphorical modes being replaced by metonymical modes of writing over the course of the nineteenth century. He relates this to a changed conception of what constituted reality and how it manifested itself in the deep structure of writing. I find this a very apt explanation of what occurs in the body of Stillman’s critical writing. See White, Metahistory, 29–42. 3. Stillman, “Paris Exposition: American Painting,” 210–11. 4. Ibid., 211. 5. Adams, “Mind of John La Farge.” 6. Stillman, “Paris Exposition: English Painting,” 299. 7. Ibid. 8. Stillman, “Paris Exposition: American Painting,” 210. 9. Ibid., 210–11. 10. Bridgman, a Southerner, studied with J. L. Gérôme starting in 1867, remaining in Paris afterward. He traveled extensively in North Africa and was known for his “oriental” subjects. He is called the “American Gérôme.” 11. Nochlin, “Imaginary Orient.” 12. Stillman, “Paris Exposition: American Painting,” 211. 13. Stillman, “The Decay of Art,” in The Old Rome and the New, 168. 14. Ibid., 170. 15. Stillman, The Old Rome and the New, n.p. He nonetheless assured his readers that the project was something of an exception for him. “Of my own ambition,” he said in the preface, “I have sent out nothing between book-covers except from a sense of the obligation to make known things which I thought the world ought to know, like the history of the Cretan insurrection of 1866, and the heroic revolt of the Slavs of Herzegovina in 1876.” 16. Stillman, “The Old Rome and the New,” in The Old Rome and the New, 10–11. 17. James, William Wetmore Story, 1:16.

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Index

Page references in italics refer to figures; those followed by n. refer to notes, with note number. academic art, Jarves on, 23–24 Adams, Henry, 98 Adirondack Club, 16 Agassiz, Louis, 16 American Art (Craven), 111 n. 9 American Iconology (Miller), 112 n. 15 American Painting of the Nineteenth Century (Novak), 111 n. 9 archeology and art, Stillman on, 96, 101–2, 103, 106 art, definition of in Ruskin, 88–89, 90–91, 92 in Stillman: early theory, 85–86, 120 n. 15; later theory, 88–91, 106 Art Amateur (periodical), 14 Art and Artists of Our Time (Cook) Cook’s critical opinions in, 14, 58–59, 65–72 Cook’s emphasis on continuous tradition of American art in, 65–66, 72 as example of Cook’s later work, 14 “poetry” vs. “philistinism” opposition in, 68–72 art as truth. See also nature vs. artifice opposition Cook on necessity of truth in art, 44 and individual feeling, role of, 47, 50–51, 52–53, 54, 56 as premodern concept, 55–56 Stillman’s early art theory on, 77, 80–82, 83 truth/nature vs. beauty/artifice opposition in Cook, 44, 46–53, 56, 64–65 art criticism, language in, positivist models, 3–5, 8, 15, 72–75, 107–9 art criticism of 19th century. See Cook, Clarence Chatham; Jarves, James Jackson; Stillman, William James “Art Critics and Criticism in NineteenthCentury America” (Simoni), 3, 21 Art-Hints (Jarves), 11, 24–26, 36–39, 116 n. 17 art history, American. See also periodization of American art

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and art analysis, methodology of, 44–45, 65–66, 72, 74–75, 107–9 influence of, 15–16, 20, 113 n. 29 Jarves’ reputation as product of, 11–12, 21, 23, 41–42 19th-century, overview of field, 2–3, 111 n. 2 social commitment in, impact on conception of art historiography, 6, 15, 73, 74–75, 112 n. 11 socially-attuned scholarship, and skepticism about master narrative, 6, 112 n. 11 The Art-Idea (Jarves), 8, 10–11, 23–30, 30–37, 40–41, 53, 115 n. 11 Art of England (Ruskin), 89 Art Studies: The “Old Masters” of Italy; Painting (Jarves), 24–25 Atlantic Monthly, 13, 86 Autobiography of a Journalist (Stillman), 76–77, 104, 119 n. 4, 121 n. 25 Beard, W. H., 45 Beard, William H., 70 beauty, Stillman on moral power of, 81–82, 84–85 “Beauty and Its Enemies” (Stillman), 84–85 “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks” (Cook), 13, 63 Beecher, Henry Ward, 38–39 Benton’s Cove, Newport, Fog Blowing In (La Farge), 49 Bjelajac, David, 4 Boas, George, 114 n. 4, 116 n. 18 Bridgman, Frederick A., 101–3, 102 Century (magazine), 18 Church, Frederic Edwin Cook on, 61 reception of, 35 Stillman on, 96 Stillman’s study under, 16

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Civil War as turning point in American art, 2, 5–7. See also periodization of American art continuities between periods, 6, 44–45, 65–66, 72, 74 Cook’s role in establishing, 12 Jarves’ role in establishing, 11–12 as ordering principle in art history, 5, 111 n. 9 Colbert, Charles, 115 n. 10 Cole, Thomas, 94–95 Collingwood, W. G., 90 composition and subject, interplay of James on, 1, 2, 108–9 in periodization of art history, 108–9 Conrads, Margaret, 3, 112 n. 11 Cook, Clarence Chatham. See also Art and Artists of Our Time (Cook); “Beds and Tables, Stools and Candlesticks” (Cook); The House Beautiful (Cook) anti-conformism in, 14, 64, 65 anti-consumerism in, 14, 64, 65 career of, 1, 2, 12, 13, 46–48, 543, 58–62, 71, 97, 113 n. 21 as champion of realism, 12, 43–44, 48, 50, 52, 54 on Church, 61 on convention, 47, 53, 60–62, 71–72 on Durand, 53, 60 on Farrer, 48–49 on home decoration, principles of, 63–65 on Homer, 66–67 on Huntington, 61 and individual feeling, role of, 47, 50–51, 52–53, 56 and Jarves, acquaintance with, 13 and Jarves’ real/ideal opposition, single conception of art underlying, 12–13, 52–57 on La Farge, 49–52, 56, 69, 98 on Leutze, 45–46, 53, 61 “poetry” vs. “philistinism” opposition in, 68–72 Pre-Raphaelites and, 12, 14–15, 44, 47–48, 58, 59–60, 62, 63, 64–65, 70–71 principles underlying art criticism of, 7, 45–53, 63–72 prominence of as critic, 45 on public’s taste, 45, 49, 61–62, 67, 68 on Ruskin, 71 Ruskin’s influence on, 12, 47–48, 59–60 on Whistler, 67–68, 68–69, 70–71 Corn, Wanda, 15 Cornhill (periodical), 86

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index Crary, Jonathan, 112 n. 15 Craven, Wayne, 111 n. 9 Crayon (periodical) mission of, 76, 119 n. 2 Stillman’s editorials in, 80–81, 84–86, 91 Stillman’s work at, 16–17, 18, 76–77, 86 The Cretan Insurrection of 1866–7–8 (Stillman), 17 Crete, Stillman on Turkish occupation of, 78–79, 86 Cumaean Sibyl (Vedder), 99–100, 100 Curtis, George W., 45, 59–60 Dearinger, David, 3 “The Decay of Art” (Stillman), 103–4 deep structures definition, 7–8 American art history, 7–8 and art analysis, methodology of, 8. 13, 15, 41–42, 72–75, 107–9, 112 n. 14 continuities masked by, 44–45, 65–66, 72, 74 factors in creation of, 73, 74–75 influence of, 15–16, 20, 113 n. 29 Jarves’ reputation as product of, 11–12, 21, 23, 41–42 DeLue, Rachel Ziady, 4, 117 n. 17 de Man, Paul, 120 n. 15 democracy, Jarves on, 38–40 Dickason, David, 14, 120 n. 11 Dictionary of American Biography, 21 Dunlap, William, 3, 66 Durand, Asher B. art theory of, 47 Cook on, 47, 53, 60 as father of John Durand, 17, 76 Jarves on, 23 reception of, 35, 115 n. 9 Ruskin and, 117 n. 9 Stillman on, 94–95 style of, 6, 114 n. 32 Durand, John and Crayon, 17, 76 Taine and, 28 Düsseldorf school Jarves on, 23, 32, 35 Leutze and, 116 n. 21 Stillman on, 95 “Duty in Art” (Stillman), 85 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 16 expressivism. See individual feeling, role of in art

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index “fact” vs. “feeling.” See objective vs. subjective Farrer, Thomas Charles, 48, 117 n. 10 Cook on, 48–49 “feeling” vs. “fact.” See objective vs. subjective The Fine Arts in America (Taylor), 111 n. 9 formal analysis in American art history, 8, 13, 15, 52–57, 72–75, 107–9 in Stillman’s art criticism: and art as expressive representation through style, 93–94; formal, style-based arguments in, 88–89, 90–91, 92, 93, 95, 96–101; history as metaphor for style-based arguments in, 101, 106; representation and, 83–84 Fors Clavigera (Ruskin), 89 Fra Angelico, Jarves on, 31, 36 Framing America (Pohl), 112 n. 11 Funeral of a Mummy (Bridgman), 101–3, 102 “genius” vs. “talent.” Jarves on, 31 Gerdts, William, 3, 111 n. 9 Gifford, Sanford, Cook on, 61 Groseclose, Barbara, 112 n. 11 Harbert, Earl and Ellen, 3 Harper’s Weekly (periodical), 45, 59 Herzegovina and the Late Uprising (Stillman), 17 historical genre painting, Stillman on, 101–3 history. See also art history, American; periodization of American art “effect of history” vs. history per se, 93 opposition to science, in Stillman, 19–20 positivist models, critique of, 4 replacement of formal discourse with in American art history, 8, 15, 72–75; implications of for interpretation, 72, 74–75, 107–9; motives for, 73, 74–75 History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (Dunlap), 3 Homer, Winslow, Cook on, 66–67 The House Beautiful (Cook), 13, 58–59, 63–65 Hunt, William Morris, 23, 98, 115 n. 8, 117 n. 12 Huntington, Daniel, 23, 61, 115 n. 9 Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Mitchell), 112 n. 15 “ideal” vs. “real.” See also truth in art Cook as champion of realism, 12, 43–44, 48, 50, 52, 54 in Jarves: as basis of critical opinions, 26, 28, 30–36, 41; as conventional opposition, 24, 26, 35–36; as compared to Cook, 12–13,

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52–57; historicization of, 11; obsessive return to, 24, 26, 37–38 Jarves as champion of idealism, 9, 22, 41–42 as structuring opposition in American art history, 5–6, 7, 8, 52; post–19th-century historiography of, 8, 13, 41–42, 55, 112 n. 14 Independent (periodical), 12 individual feeling, role of in art art-as-truth concept and, 47, 50–51, 52–53, 54, 56 Cook on, 47, 50–51, 52–53, 56 modernist conception of, 56 Stillman on, 88, 93–94, 98 In Nature’s Ways (Gerdts and Weber), 111 n. 9 Inness, George, 6, 112 n. 11, 117 n. 17 In the Woods (Durand), 114 n. 32 James, Henry, on the period, 1, 2, 108–9 Jarves, James Jackson. See also Art-Hints (Jarves); The Art-Idea (Jarves); Art Studies: The “Old Masters” of Italy; Painting (Jarves) art collection of, 10, 25; critical writings as justification of, 24–25, 26, 36, 41, 116 n. 23; critiques of, 21–22, 114 n. 3; failure of contemporaries to appreciate, 25, 116 n. 16, 116 n. 23; Manual of the Jarves Collection, 114 n. 3; questionable attributions in, 41, 114 n. 4 background and career, 9–10 as champion of post-Civil War idealism, 9, 22, 41–42 on Civil War, 116–17 n. 26 as Civil War-era critic, 1, 2 conventionality of art criticism of, 24, 26, 28, 29, 35–36, 41 Cook and, 13, 53 on democracy, conflicting views on, 38–40 dogmatism of, 9 on early American painters, as model, 26–27, 54 Hegel and, 116 n. 18 on individual feeling, role of, 54, 56 influence of, 9, 11 on Italian medieval art, political milieu of, 38–39 on La Farge, 23, 53, 98 on Leutze, 32–35, 39, 53 periodical publications by, 115 n. 11 and periodization of American art, 2, 9, 22 principles underlying art criticism of, 7, 25–36 prominence of as critic, 45

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“real/material” vs. “ideal/spiritual” opposition in: as basis of critical opinions, 26, 28, 30–36, 41; in comparison to Cook, 12–13, 52–57; obsessive return to, 24, 26, 37–38 reputation of: Jarves’ art collection and, 21–22; in the historiography, 1–2, 11–12, 21–23, 41–42, 114 n. 4 Ruskin and, 30, 115 n. 10, 116 n. 18 on social milieu, influence on art, 25–26, 26–30, 38–39, 41 John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Stein), 3 Johns, Elizabeth, 3 La Farge, John career of, 117 n. 12 Cook on, 49–52, 56, 69, 98 Jarves on, 23, 53, 98 Stillman on, 96–98, 99 landscape painting Jarves’ critique of, 22, 23 Stillman on, 96–97 Leja, Michael, 112 n. 15 “Letters on Landscape Painting” (Durand), 47 Leutze, Emanuel career of, 116 n. 21 Cook on, 45–46, 53, 61 Jarves on, 32–35, 39, 53 Lindquist-Cock, Elizabeth, 119–20 n. 5 London Times (newspaper), 17 Looking Askance (Leja), 112 n. 15 Lowell, James Russell, 16 Lubin, David, 113 n. 20, 113 n. 29 Lyons, Maura, 3 Making American Art (Meecham and Sheldon), 111 n. 2, 113 n. 29 master narrative of art history, contemporary skepticism about, 5–6, 112 n. 11 Meecham, Pam, 111 n. 2, 113 n. 29 Meservey, Anne Farmer, 3 metonymy in later art theory of Stillman, 95–96, 101 replacement of metaphorical modes with, in 19th century, 121 n. 1 Metropolitan Sanitary Fair galleries, Cook’s review of, 45, 47, 48 Millais, John, 61 Miller, Angela, 3 Miller, David, 112 n. 15 Mitchell, W. J. T., 74, 112 n. 15 Modern Painters (Ruskin), 17, 80, 83–84, 87

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index Morris, William, 64 Mount Holyoke and the Connecticut River (Ferrer), 48 Cook on, 48–49 Nation (periodical), 17, 78–79, 86, 87 National Academy of Design, 47, 48, 61 building, design of, 62–63 national identity, American, growth-andchange paradigm in, 15–16, 19–20, 113 n. 29 naturalism, Jarves’ rejection of, 22 nature vs. artifice opposition in Cook, 44, 46–53, 56, 64–65 in Inness, 117 n. 17 in Stillman, 77, 80–82, 83 New England Quarterly (periodical), 21 New Path (periodical) and architecture, Pre-Raphaelite interest in, 62 Cook at, 12, 13, 44, 58, 61, 117 n. 6 on Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 118 n. 7 New Princeton Review (periodical), 103 New-York Daily Tribune, 12, 13, 45, 47, 58 Nineteenth-Century American Art (Groseclose), 112 n. 11 Nochlin, Linda, 101 Novak, Barbara, 111 n. 9 objective vs. subjective, as structuring opposition in American art history, 5, 6, 7, 8. See also ideal vs. real; truth in art; individual feeling, role of in art October, Hillside, Noonday, Glen Cove, Long Island (La Farge), 49–52, 51 The Old Rome and the New (Stillman), 104–5, 121 n. 15 Orientalism, in historical genre painting, 101 ornamentation, Pre-Raphaelite views on, 62–63 Paradise Valley (La Farge), 96, 97, 97 Paris Exposition of 1878, Stillman’s review of, 94–95, 96–100 periodization of American art. See also Civil War as turning point in American art and art analysis, methodology of, 7–8, 15–16, 20, 44–45, 65–66, 72–75, 107–9, 113 n. 29 Jarves’ reputation as product of, 11–12, 21, 23, 41–42 meaning created by, 108–9

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index “real” vs. “ideal” as structuring opposition in, 5–6, 7, 8, 13, 41–42, 52–57, 112 n. 14 The Philosopher’s Camp (Stillman), 16, 113–14 n. 32 Philosophy of Art (Taine), 28 Picturing a Nation (Lubin), 113 n. 20, 113 n. 29 Pohl, Frances K., 112 n. 11 Pre-Raphaelites. See also Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art on art, function of, 62–63 Cook and, 12, 14–15, 44, 47–48, 58, 59–60, 62, 63, 64–65, 70–71 and National Academy of Design building, 62–63 Prisoners from the Front (Homer), 67 Putnam’s Monthly (periodical), 14 Questioner of the Sphinx (Vedder), 69, 69–70 Rankin, William, 114 n. 3 Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1926– 1925 (Dearinger), 3 “real” vs. “idea.” See also truth in art Cook as champion of realism, 12, 43–44, 54 as structuring opposition in American art history, 5–6, 7, 8, 52; as oversimplification, 54–55; post–19thcentury temporalization of, 8, 13, 41–42, 55, 112 n. 14; single conception of art underlying both poles of, 52–57 religion, impact on art, Jarves on, 27–28, 28–30 representation art-as-truth concept and, 55–56 Stillman’s on, 83–84, 88 revolution, 19th century definition of term, 59 Rosenberg, Eric, 4 Ruskin, John Cook on, 71 influence in America, 3, 59–60, 117 n. 9, 120 n. 11 influence on Cook, 12, 47–48, 59–60, 117 n. 9 influence on Jarves, 30, 115 n. 10, 116 n. 18 and Stillman: critics’ misunderstanding of relationship between, 119 n. 5; critiques of Ruskin by, 83–84, 87–91, 121 n. 25; early influence of Ruskin on, 16, 17, 18, 76, 80–82; later rejection of Ruskin by, 77–78, 86–91, 92 “Ruskin and His Writings” (Stillman), 86 Scribner’s Monthly (periodical), 13, 58, 63 Sheldon, Julie, 111 n. 2, 113 n. 29

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Simoni, John Peter, 3, 9, 21 Sirèn, Osvald, 114 n. 3 Sizer, Theodore, 9, 21, 22, 23, 114 n. 4 social commitment in American art history, impact on conception of art historiography, 6, 15, 73, 74–75, 112 n. 11 socially-attuned scholarship, and master narrative of art history, skepticism about, 6, 112 n. 11 social milieu, influence on art, Jarves on, 25–26, 26–30, 38–39, 41 Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art, 44, 58, 60, 62, 117 n. 10, 118 n. 7 “spiritual” vs. “material.” See ideal vs. real; truth in art Steegmuller, Francis, 9, 21, 114 n. 4, 116 n. 16 Stein, Roger, 3, 80, 119 n. 2, 120 n. 6 Stillman, William James on Bridgman, 101–3 career of, 16–18, 76, 78, 86–87, 88–89 and Civil War as turning point in American art, 2, 18, 77–78, 79–80, 93 as Civil War-era critic, 1, 2 on Cole, 94–95 on Crete, Turkish occupation of, 78–79, 86 deep structures underlying criticism of, 7 on Durand, 94–95 early art theory: antimaterialism as theme in, 80, 81–82; on art as ideal essence consonant with truth, nature, and moral virtue, 77, 80–82, 83; on beauty, moral power of, 81–82, 84–85; definition of art, as linguistic unification of incompatible concepts, 85–86, 120 n. 15; on duty owed to art, 84–85; figurative style of, 18, 77, 82–83, 85–86; representation and style in, 83–84; Ruskin’s influence on, 16, 17, 18, 76, 80–82; similarity to Jarves’ and Cooks’, 77; syllogistic reasoning in, 84–86 frankness about principles underlying art theory, 77–78 on historical genre painting, 101–3 importance of, 76–77 on La Farge, 96–98, 99 on landscape painting, 96–97 later art theory: on art vs. representation, 88; definition of art in, 88–91, 106; “effect of history” in, 93; expressivism in, 88, 93–94, 98; formal, style-based arguments in, 88–89, 90–91, 92, 93, 95, 96–101; history as metaphor for lost artistic sensitivity, 105–6, 107; history as metaphor for

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style-based arguments, 101, 106; historybased arguments in, 92, 93, 94–96, 98–101; history-science opposition in, 19–20, 101–6; metonymy in, 95–96, 101; and modernity, 20; moral component of, 94; periodization of American art in, as opposite of modern schema, 106–7; reading of in modern terms, necessity of avoiding, 92–93; rejection of Ruskin in, 77–78, 86–91, 92; and Ruskin, critiques of, 83–84, 87–91, 121 n. 25; style of, as less overtly figurative, 18, 92, 94–95, 106; transition from morality-based to artistically-based criteria in, 19 and liberty of oppressed peoples, support for, 78–79, 86 objective stance cultivated by, 79, 89 paintings by, 16 Paris Exposition of 1878, review of, 94–95, 96–100 photography and, 119–20 n. 5 political writings of, 17 on present, lack of unity as experience, 106 and Ruskin: critics’ misunderstanding of relationship between, 119 n. 5; critiques of, 83–84, 87–91, 121 n. 25; early influence of, 16, 17, 18, 76, 80–82; later rejection of, 77–78, 86–91, 92 significance of, 1–2 on Vedder, 96–97, 99–100, 101–2 Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops (Leutze), 34, 34–35 Story, William Wetmore, 108 Studio (periodical), 14 Sturgis, Russell, 64 style. See formal elements of work subjective vs. objective, as structuring opposition in American art history, 5, 6, 7, 8 and time, different conceptions of, 8 Szegedy-Maszak, Andrew, 119–20 n. 5 Taine, Hippolyte, 28 talent vs. genius, Jarves on, 31 Taylor, Joshua, 111 n. 9 textual analytic structure, replacement of image-based structure with, 8, 15, 72–75 implications of for interpretation, 72, 74–75, 107–9 motives for, 73, 74–75 Thomas Carlyle (Whistler), 68–69

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index time. See also periodization of American art modern confidence in as organizing principle, 8 the past, meaning of, as contingent, 4 Stillman’s location of true art beyond, 20 and structuring oppositions in art history, post–19th-century temporalization of, 8, 13, 41–42, 55, 112 n. 14 truth in art. See also nature vs. artifice opposition Cook on necessity of, 44 and individual feeling, role of, 47, 50–51, 52–53, 54, 56 in pre– and post–Civil War theory, 13, 52–57 as premodern concept, 55–56 and quasi-magical status of art, 55–56 representation and, 55–56 Stillman’s early art theory on, 77, 80–82, 83 truth/nature vs. beauty/artifice opposition in Cook, 44, 46–53, 56, 64–65 The Two Lives of James Jackson Jarves (Steegmuller), 9, 21 The Union of Italy (Stillman), 17 Vedder, Elihu, 69, 100 Cook on, 68, 69–70 Stillman on, 96–97, 99–100, 101–2 Washington Crossing the Delaware (Leutze), 33 Cook on, 45–46 Jarves on, 32, 33–34 Weber, Bruce, 111 n. 9 Whistler, James Abbot McNeill career of, 118–19 n. 25 Cook on, 67–68, 68–69, 70–71 White, Hayden, 4, 7, 121 n. 25 Wight, Peter B., 62–63 William Wetmore Story and His Friends (James), 1 Winslow Homer and the Critics (Conrads), 112 n. 11 Wolf, Bryan, 4 words vs. images replacement of image-based with text-based analytic structure, 8, 15, 72–75 implications of for interpretation, 72, 74–75, 107–9 Yale University Art Gallery, Jarves’ reputation and, 21 The Young Marsyas (Vedder), 96, 99

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